[-empyre-] The city as a skin -- Sabela de Tezanos, Part 2

[beltezanos at gmail.com]

Thank you very much, Johannes, for your traduction of my text! As soon as is possible I'll write more about that  post. All the best, Sabela
Enviado desde mi BlackBerry® de Claro Uruguay

-----Original Message-----
From: Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>
Sender: <empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:19:44 
To: soft_skinned_space<empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] The city as a skin -- Sabela de Tezanos, Part 2

Part 2 (of Sabela de Tezanos's post, March 15, apologies for this very modest attempt at translation)

>>


Simultaneously, individuals are increasingly owners of their actions, their interactive tools enabling the ability to respond immediately, accept or not those stimuli they receive: change of tune, channel surfing, separating themselves through headphones for hours in crowded places full of ambient sound, and a constant call to be selective (with respect to what, through what); the opinion that measures itself, the camera that records ...

They are able to communicate anywhere and anytime with a TV or radio on the air, express your taste, be locatable as often as necessary in any situation, anytime. Traversing space and time, everyday as an anonymous person "well taken into account," with their technological "extensions", perpetually connected and immersed in social networks, able to replicate the self-image but invited to lose control over the destination thereof; be a target in the Crowd, recordable and reproducible, with so much exposure is not, and so much freedom of expression, that is not there.

Fascinated, fragmented, displayed, machinized, alone.

The act of approving and disapproving is a public gesture–  a gesture to which the subject  is also subjected to with their indifference.

The body is in the battlefield, virtual and real. In the "skin deep" individual the traits of the contemporary time are printed. The skin, that delicate border with the world, moves in the urban transfer. There are hidden reasons for these inflicting marks. You can choose which, inscribe some that are proper and permanent. It is possible to injure, voluntarily, fully and forever one’s appearance.

Let me quote John Berger, who says, referring to contemporary painting , that "today trying to capture what really exists is an act of resistance generating hope."

Display a commitment to something intangible, non-transferable, bear an intimate secret in the middle of the false glamour allowed and paid for in the factory of impossibilities that constrains and controls, the consumer bodies and institutions of the realm, without shelter and in transit.

Some of this I think I have felt in the midst of the celebration of the tattooed skins or "hungry ones," amongst the bodies operated on, some of them hundreds of times, the skin as a canvas, inscribed in it brands as coded messages, intimate and encrypted or even indecipherable to the holder. Not wanting or able to answer why, what sense does it make, the whole being an answer.

The re-claim [reivindicación] of something private in the midst of so much exposure turns the carriers of tattooed  code into something that is not within reach of all.

Those who make the practice of tattooing a way of life, they imprint on the urban transfer a different kind of presence, their bodies usually exhibit another type of intervention.

There is something unexpected in their unique designs, in their choices, something that is out of control, that should read between the lines, requiring a reading without references, and holds as an affirmation of individuality, and belonging to a collective singular .

I hope to have come closer with this to some of the reflections that are circulating here..

Regards,
Sabela

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