[-empyre-] Sustenazo - Part II

Thu Oct 4 02:15:25 EST 2012

The other day I was in a wake. It was a man almost in my age,
Universindo Rodriguez. He died of a bone cancer and in his wake were
almost twothousand persons. He has belonged as young to an anarchist
group. He was in jail, severely tortured and later released. When he
tried to come back to Uruguay through Brasil he was kidnapped,
severely tortured and jailed again in Uruguay.
By the way his kidnapping in Brazil by some Uruguayan officers the
Plan Condor was made visible. The Plan Condor was the Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet's brainchild, a crusade against communism with all
the polices and the armies in the region cooperating, kidnapping and
killing dissenters in the whole region. Kissinger gave the green light
and these uncanny cooperation started.
We are a region in pain, that's because I feel that's right than
Sustenanzo will be exhibited in Chile, in the Museum of the Memory. We
have a similar Museum here in Montevideo and Buenos Aires has another
too. It could be a great idea to have the piece showing in all the
museums in the region.
My pain is still very visceral, I paliated it through writing, now I
meet an analyst each week and the pain shows up sometimes. My own
personal strategy has been the "flight forward", it means to postpone
the depression or the dark moods until later, forward.
But the pain is very present in everything I do and to walk my
homecity and cross or bump my torturers don't help so much. There are
are here sharing the same public space than us and they feel
themselves victors in a fair war, the war against communism.
I still wonder and ask myself all the time: how can someone, in the
name of some ideological reason, maim or kill someone with torture?
Ana

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Monika Weiss <gniewna at monika-weiss.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> After posting some visual materials I think my initial "introduction to the
> work"  is done. I am happy to take it on from there and to form a
> dialogue....
>
> Interesting question below from Alan about the nature of video as a catalyst
> for memory, pain and lament and later I would like to expand that part of
> our discussion towards the performative and the circular in terms of the
> relationships between cinematic mirroring and lament as well as pain. Just
> briefly for now -- about torture. I am more preoccupied with torture
> inflicted by governments, institutions and systems that often hide their
> violence -- as you know only recently in my city of origins, Warsaw, a CIA
> compound was found in which "suspected terrorists" were kept for a number of
> years and tortured by US forces, without any real knowledge amongst the
> civil part of the Polish government. There are thousands of examples of
> course. Massive, systematic pain and torture systems, the ones that are
> pre-designed by others, "enlightened", designed by those who are in power or
> who represent structures of power and hegemony not because of hate, anger or
> any other emotion but because of fulfilling some abstracted and pragmatic
> goal, akin to Zygmunt Baumann's idea of "gardening" .
>
> Finally, I look forward to the post about Pain and other related posts
> expected this week and will hold off with posting major things for now (such
> as the City's memory and pain) until maybe later in the week.
>
> Looking forward to our discussion----
>
> Monika
>
>
> M o n i k a   W e i s s   S t u d i o
> 456 Broome Street, 4
> New York, NY 10013
> Phone: 212-226-6736
> Mobile: 646-660-2809
> www.monika-weiss.com
> gniewna at monika-weiss.com
>
> M o n i k a   W e i s s
> Assistant Professor
> Graduate School of Art & Hybrid Media
> Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
> Washington University in St. Louis
> Campus Box 1031
> One Brookings Drive
> St. Louis, MO 63130
> mweiss at samfox.wustl.edu
> http://samfoxschool.wustl.edu/portfolios/faculty/monika_weiss
>
> On Oct 2, 2012, at 9:35 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote:
>
>
>
> Hi - some questions occasioned by what I've been reading here, and also
> thinking about torture, living through torture. Lamentation seems to imply
> an other, often disappeared or disappearing, that one mourns for, after, or
> almost within; torture applies to the self to the depths that there is no
> other. They are related by suffering, by anguish, and they both seem
> elsewhere than new or other media - they seem unmediated, even though
> lamentation may and often does, follow traditional cultural forms. They also
> seem to involve a pouring out or into; the self is dissolved. Lamentation
> seems to imply, as well, the second (still living or just alive) dissolving
> into the third (the dead), in an uncanny way paralleling the second person,
> 'you,' dissolving into the third, 'he' or 'she' or 'it' as the body might
> be. So how is all this manifest - or is it - through media? Is, for example,
> a video then a catalyst - of affect, memory, mourning? I ask myself these
> questions in the work I do in Second Life or 3d printing as well -
>
> Thanks, Alan, and please everyone, join in -
>
>
>
> ==
> blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/ (main blog)
> email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/
> web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552
> music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/
> current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rp.txt
> ==
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> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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