[-empyre-] Fwd: para empyre

Fri Nov 7 02:43:46 EST 2014

[an important array of inquiries, ana. looking forward.

to earlier question about the position of the performer/re-performer in the art of testimony... the act of re-presenting, including first person, autobiographical accounts, is to make space in which paradox can stir - to move out of the single, reduced space to a plural, public space where differences (of interpretation, experience) can occur. the live experience of the performer is - interesting - but secondary. an impactful play/testimony can be rendered by actors thinking about their laundry. can be.

picking up from yesterday and finishing thread, I think: "Event as description is marketing; plays of description sell specifically what has already passed away. Sell death. Sell us what we’ve already bought and has already been worn down, worn away (trailers for movies that in essence, we’ve already seen)...]

9/11, as an act of terror, was recognizable because it was a cliché – we had already seen it. Looking at the live broadcast: “This must be a movie; this is just like a movie” but really – “This is just like a movie trailer.” Genocide testimonies (of both perpetrators and victims) can quickly fall to cliché – rote chit. It is imperative that we don’t respond to the bad art of terror or art stunted by trauma with louder, counter terroristic or re-traumatizing clichés. This runs the risk of keeping the disaster alive, Frankenstein fashion, as a patchwork of clichés, sanctioned by a fortified culture of the beautiful, important, death-affirming cliché. (Torch makers living luxe; the monster is out.) When policy (as pushed through political rhetoric) holds the form of cliché as the highest measure of expression, we fasten to cascades of clichés out of misdirected love of beauty. 9/11, genocides, disasters at our doorsteps are truly
 awful; we understandably resist holding them by the scruff of the truth or the sleeve of the awful (which are complex, unresolved, and inculpatory) – we would rather love these things, honor them with the government coinage of cliché, bank them, protect and preserve them even at our own expense, horde them and not spend them, pile them to account, so that we may feel as if we are beautiful for recognizing beauty.

These beheading videos are bad art. They are clichéd and static. Someone thinks they’re beautiful We must not be tricked into endorsing their esthetic with equally aggressive tropes which are beheadings in other modes – shooting a western with the same script used for a science fiction film.

Or we may leave our lives and return to a home we don’t own… we may confess to prodigality, we may admit to bankruptcy. We may move to the circumstance that recognizes us rather than collecting our recognitions, that speaks our name rather than invoking it. – all our recognitions, and not how we are recognized. 

Contemplation – pursue light (bear light – torches; do all you can do), wait in light (the light shines on you), the light shines through you. A script is not the equipment for light (not a blueprint – it is its own occasion). It is not a source of light. It is where we go blind in the sun.

Isis is anti-contemplative; it defers contemplation out of unexamined weariness. Let somebody else do the work of opening to God, I will wait in stasis for stasis.

On Wednesday, November 5, 2014 11:40 PM, Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com> wrote:

Hello, I am Alicia Migdal, Uruguayan writer and film critic.

Yesterday night I attended the worldwide premiere of the Italian film by Ermanno Olmi Torneranno i prati (The grass will be back). It was showed at the Italian Cultural Institute in Montevideo. It was showed to remember the hundred years of the First World War. A poetic elegy from the trenches of that war wich was supposed to be unique and not repeatable. 

I want point out an index of topics I aim later to develop further, thinking about this actual universe of annihilated erotization by death and violence:

1: the bare life, the biopolitic and the permanent state of exception, as adressed by Giorgio Agamben.

2: the femicide in Mexico and Argentina

3: the childkillngs (infanticidio) as consequence

4: My life efter: the work with the biographical data of the children and grandchildren of the Argetinian dictatorship set up by the Argentinian playwriter and director Lola Arias. She worked with clothes, objects, images and materials from the concrete past of parents and grandparents. www.lolarias.com.ar/010_bio_ing.swf

Ana Valdés contributed with the experience of former political female political prisoners in the representation of Antigona Oriental directed by Marianella Morena in Montevideo.

5: The "life is worthless" from the suicidal students killing their comrades in the American universities.

6: the war against the drugs in Mexico, to live is an accident (or hazard, or a coincidence, sorry the word casualidad is very tough to translate, too many aceptions :(

Primo Levi already said that in his works about the concentrationary universe.

Hola, soy Alicia Migdal, escritora y crítica de cine uruguaya.

Anoche, en el Instituto Italiano de Cultura de Montevideo pude ver en estreno mundial la película de Ermanno Olmi Torneranno i prati (Volverán los prados). La ocasión era por el centenario dela primera guerra mundial.  Una elegía poética desde las trincheras de aquella guerra que se supuso única e irrepetible.

A manera de índice para ir desarrollando precisiones sobre este actual universo de erotización aniquiladora por muerte y  violencia,  quiero recordar:

 1) la nuda vida, la biopolítica y el estado de excepción permanente sobre  los que ha pensado Giorgio Agamben

 2) el feminicidio en México y Argentina

3) el infanticidio como consecuencia

 4)Mi vida después: el trabajo con los cuerpos biográficos reales que la dramaturga y directora argentina Lola Arias,  ha puesto en escena con los hijos y nietos de desaparecidos de la dictadura:  ropas, objetos, fotos y materiales del pasado concreto de padres y abuelos.  http:/www.lolarias.com.ar/010_bio_ing.swf. Ana Valdés aportaba la experiencia de ex-presas políticas en la representación de  Antígona Oriental dirigida por Marianella Morena en Montevideo.

5) El "la vida no vale nada" de los estudiantes suicidas que arrasan con la vida de sus pares en las universidades estadounidenses

6)La guerra del narco en México: vivir es una casualidad. Ya Primo Levi lo decía en sus obras sobre el universo concentracionario.

-- 

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"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. 
— Leonardo da Vinci
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