ALONSO & MARFUL
Artists y Curators
To describe the origin of RE-ACTION, at least two implosion points in the history of the project must be mentioned. One is critical in nature, associated with our attitude to the stream of discourse on gender that has highlighted women’s exclusion from established artistic genealogies through to the present day and, by extension, from western canons. The other is more personal, related to our poetics and to the different demands that they have made on us over the course of time. These dual aspects –an ideological unwillingness, on the one hand, and ethical and aesthetic reluctance, on the other, to tread the pathways traditionally reserved for art and to accept its commercialization and institutionalization– are an underlying thread that runs through virtually all our work, like an underground river.
Indeed, they explain why we have long worked in “highly personal” creative latitudes or in “lyrical fields of dissent”, leading to a certain solipsistic display of rebellion against the art world’s prevailing canons through projects based on the use of a camera shown just to a handful of people or else entrusted to a slow and patient process of word-of-mouth communication. It was our way of passing on the torch of a meaning in a constant state of evolution, making it journey along short pathways through interpersonal dialogue -Emmanuel Lévinas’ much loved philosophy– in a manner far removed from our work’s autophagic dissipation into Buadrillard’s “total screen”.
In fact, for a while we believed that “if repeated history turns into farce, and repeated farces turn into history”, then what did it matter if we were excluded from history provided that, in the process, we avoided the lure of farce. We thus composed works of growing complexity which aspired to spark off tête à tête conversa(c)tions with a very small audience who we summoned as such to take part in reciprocal performative manoeuvres within the framework of a highly intimate, relational style of poetics.
In time, these relational poetics evolved in such a way that the external agents who were summoned to take part in our personal staged representations gradually acquired a more important role in the procedural development of our work to the extent that, at a certain moment, we came to realize that we had become immersed in a cross-cutting form of aesthetics that had incorporated widely differing co-participants in a choral style of compositional practice. These co-participants were not just human beings but also natural elements like earth, sea, fire, stones and blood which were interwoven into our work in an organic process of integration.
It was just a question of time before the co-participants of polyphonic projects like Oración, Memorial del Agua, In itinere, Lugares comunes, Meditación #193 Cuaderno de piedra and Meditación #752 La quietud became co-contributors in their own right. Readers must excuse us from going into the specifics of the projects that helped bring about this evolution -one which, at a certain point, would lead us to tackle a plastic and conceptual project as clearly polyphonic and jointly produced as RE-ACTION. It is a project (and these are the advantages of all anti-dogmatic stances) inspired by the almost silent desire implicit in a large part of our past works to give voice to our co-collaborators in a shared aesthetic initiative. Indeed, it was this desire to unite our voices that encouraged us to make the move from personal to public domains.
A leap was thus taken from the mobility or multiplicity of discourses implicit in past projects (due to the mere fact that there are two of us) to an extreme form of multiplicity in a deliberately open-ended, non-hierarchical, horizontal work. In this way, we sought to avoid the barren discourse that might occur when left in the hands of two people (Alonso and Marful), given our awareness, right from the very outset, of the unstable fatally trans-individual nature of all discursive work. In short, we decided to devise a project in a perpetual state of motion, based solely on female discourse.
“Why female?” an inquisitive demon like Laplace’s might ask. “Why female?” an epistemologist minimally aware of the fallacies of essentialism might wonder. The answer is very simple: because we are women and, as such, our experience of the world is conditioned by a culture that, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, has turned us into the Other and condemned us to live on the fringes.
When we talk about women in ontological or metaphysical terms, we are openly belligerent, since we are aware that femininity is merely one of the astute ideologemes that have contributed, century after century, to the rhetoric of domination, and because, as Lévi-Strauss pointed out, there is nothing pre-cultural about culture: gender (like anything else really) is simply a construct. At this point, nonetheless, we would like to insert one of those counterfactual conditionals that sometimes help bring us down to earth: if there were no women, the construct -the eternal female and that swarm of semes that has, step by step, colonized women’s lives- would not exist. We therefore exist as the hostages of a construct or totally dichotomous genderizing power game… and also as women. We might not be able to define the essence of “femininity”, just as Plato wondered about “tableness” in Sophist jokes, but we tend not to get it wrong when we sit down at a table. Not to confuse the issue more than necessary, we accept, at least in principle, that we were born as women. Let us not, then, confuse noumena with phenomena.
In other contexts, we have referred to femininity and masculinity and, in reality, to any other thing as tropologies that have gradually become entrenched through the use of force, whether obvious or subliminal. Just consider that ominous long list of classificatory dilemmas that have differentiated male from female century after century. Reason and intuition, spirit and matter, intelligence and sensitivity, art and craftwork to name but a few. They are not inherent attributes but isotropies that run the whole symbolic spectrum in such a way that unless we quite legitimately question them, they might be taken as something natural, even though they are not. However, having said that, we wonder: since women are merely the outcome of a long entrenched tropology, should we reject a gynaecologically, ideologically, politically, aesthetically and philosophically non-conformist genealogy as an object of study and project? The answer is a categorical “no” and even a “quite the contrary”. However much we might find it hard to know what the essence of femininity is, if there is one, whenever we feel tempted to define ourselves as women or men and whether or not we are in the company of someone intent on dynamiting the docks and letting the sea of meaning’s waves break just as they wish, there is one thing that we cannot deny: when we talk about women, we must be aware that we are talking about an overlooked, relegated, silenced, denied, excluded historical subject. That is, we are talking about our own history.
Discussing women as the objects of a historical structural violence gives us the ethical and aesthetic right (which, as Wittgenstein noted, are one and the same) to propose a re-action which in some way helps to redress the wrongs. As activists who uphold the right to create a scale counter-history in the form of a RE-ACTION, it was never a problem for us that only women were involved, because although we know that, like a fly trapped in a bottle, we cannot escape our symbolic condition and related female imagery and hence the urge to do away, once and for all, with male/female antinomies, neither can we repudiate the tales in which they are concocted. There is no transcendental femininity. For over a century, with the successful assistance of Nietzsche’s hammer, blow by blow we have witnessed the joyful eradication of all or almost all truths and meanings. However, there is a history of women. Our counter-canon –that of each and every female artist and essayist involved in this open-ended shared project– forms a counter-history, and this counterbalancing gesture comforts and inspires us when it comes to recognizing ourselves in the injustice of other oppressions.
Dealing with our history gives us a first-class reason to uphold the conquest of fields from which we have been tenaciously excluded, not just in art but in all fields of representation, thought, decision making and power. Male genealogies have succeeded one another in an uninterrupted dance, referring back to one another, and weaving networks and ties that form such an inextricably dense mesh that it is hard for the needle –that supremely female utensil so beloved by some of our fellow collaborators– to pierce its surface and stamp a female name on it.
Having clarified why we paved the way for a genealogy of female artists –or a gynaecology-, at least two issues must still be settled. The first is why we chose key examples of male photography as our starting point? The answer is simple: by using photographic matrices taken by men, through our shared re-action, we could suggest a “re-writing” and symbolic “erasure”, as Clélia Barbut puts it, of male territories and topologies of control. Likewise, it was a psychoanalytical way of putting the “fathers” of history to death (many of whom should only be seen as being responsible insofar as they were the acquiescent sons of their time) and of thus neutralizing guardian powers. It also gave us the chance to set in motion rhyzomatic (rather than vertical, as you will see) “tactics of displacement”, to use a term coined by Katy Deepwell: that is, the deconstruction and denaturalization of the original photographs, aimed at revealing and counter-arresting the canonization of the male artist and his work through, as Lucia Corrain puts it, “a perpetual semantic dialogue”. In this way, we could highlight and re-compose concealed aspects of the photographs’ underlying ideologies despite their assumed documental innocence. It also allowed us to conduct a provocative review of the paradigms of the past, which entailed, in the words of Maria Antonietta Trasforini, “not just a historical and artistic methodology but a genuine political intervention on the present”.
We are convinced that RE-ACTION is here to stay and that we will be able to witness the ongoing dynamics of a project that has become an incredible catalyst for interconnecting aesthetic messages. This almost unending initiative will allow us to revive the memory of so many dead women and to give those who live today and those who are yet to be born a reason for reflection.
My thanks go to all the female authors, essayists and artists who add their voices to this shared project: one that not only aspires to become a symbol of female art but also, and perhaps primarily, to defend the need to revisit the past so as not to repeat it and to uphold bestowed shared authorship, slow conscious contemplation and attention, generous collaboration, symmetry, dialogue and freedom.
Artists y Curators
To describe the origin of RE-ACTION, at least two implosion points in the history of the project must be mentioned. One is critical in nature, associated with our attitude to the stream of discourse on gender that has highlighted women’s exclusion from established artistic genealogies through to the present day and, by extension, from western canons. The other is more personal, related to our poetics and to the different demands that they have made on us over the course of time. These dual aspects –an ideological unwillingness, on the one hand, and ethical and aesthetic reluctance, on the other, to tread the pathways traditionally reserved for art and to accept its commercialization and institutionalization– are an underlying thread that runs through virtually all our work, like an underground river.
Indeed, they explain why we have long worked in “highly personal” creative latitudes or in “lyrical fields of dissent”, leading to a certain solipsistic display of rebellion against the art world’s prevailing canons through projects based on the use of a camera shown just to a handful of people or else entrusted to a slow and patient process of word-of-mouth communication. It was our way of passing on the torch of a meaning in a constant state of evolution, making it journey along short pathways through interpersonal dialogue -Emmanuel Lévinas’ much loved philosophy– in a manner far removed from our work’s autophagic dissipation into Buadrillard’s “total screen”.
In fact, for a while we believed that “if repeated history turns into farce, and repeated farces turn into history”, then what did it matter if we were excluded from history provided that, in the process, we avoided the lure of farce. We thus composed works of growing complexity which aspired to spark off tête à tête conversa(c)tions with a very small audience who we summoned as such to take part in reciprocal performative manoeuvres within the framework of a highly intimate, relational style of poetics.
In time, these relational poetics evolved in such a way that the external agents who were summoned to take part in our personal staged representations gradually acquired a more important role in the procedural development of our work to the extent that, at a certain moment, we came to realize that we had become immersed in a cross-cutting form of aesthetics that had incorporated widely differing co-participants in a choral style of compositional practice. These co-participants were not just human beings but also natural elements like earth, sea, fire, stones and blood which were interwoven into our work in an organic process of integration.
It was just a question of time before the co-participants of polyphonic projects like Oración, Memorial del Agua, In itinere, Lugares comunes, Meditación #193 Cuaderno de piedra and Meditación #752 La quietud became co-contributors in their own right. Readers must excuse us from going into the specifics of the projects that helped bring about this evolution -one which, at a certain point, would lead us to tackle a plastic and conceptual project as clearly polyphonic and jointly produced as RE-ACTION. It is a project (and these are the advantages of all anti-dogmatic stances) inspired by the almost silent desire implicit in a large part of our past works to give voice to our co-collaborators in a shared aesthetic initiative. Indeed, it was this desire to unite our voices that encouraged us to make the move from personal to public domains.
A leap was thus taken from the mobility or multiplicity of discourses implicit in past projects (due to the mere fact that there are two of us) to an extreme form of multiplicity in a deliberately open-ended, non-hierarchical, horizontal work. In this way, we sought to avoid the barren discourse that might occur when left in the hands of two people (Alonso and Marful), given our awareness, right from the very outset, of the unstable fatally trans-individual nature of all discursive work. In short, we decided to devise a project in a perpetual state of motion, based solely on female discourse.
“Why female?” an inquisitive demon like Laplace’s might ask. “Why female?” an epistemologist minimally aware of the fallacies of essentialism might wonder. The answer is very simple: because we are women and, as such, our experience of the world is conditioned by a culture that, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, has turned us into the Other and condemned us to live on the fringes.
When we talk about women in ontological or metaphysical terms, we are openly belligerent, since we are aware that femininity is merely one of the astute ideologemes that have contributed, century after century, to the rhetoric of domination, and because, as Lévi-Strauss pointed out, there is nothing pre-cultural about culture: gender (like anything else really) is simply a construct. At this point, nonetheless, we would like to insert one of those counterfactual conditionals that sometimes help bring us down to earth: if there were no women, the construct -the eternal female and that swarm of semes that has, step by step, colonized women’s lives- would not exist. We therefore exist as the hostages of a construct or totally dichotomous genderizing power game… and also as women. We might not be able to define the essence of “femininity”, just as Plato wondered about “tableness” in Sophist jokes, but we tend not to get it wrong when we sit down at a table. Not to confuse the issue more than necessary, we accept, at least in principle, that we were born as women. Let us not, then, confuse noumena with phenomena.
In other contexts, we have referred to femininity and masculinity and, in reality, to any other thing as tropologies that have gradually become entrenched through the use of force, whether obvious or subliminal. Just consider that ominous long list of classificatory dilemmas that have differentiated male from female century after century. Reason and intuition, spirit and matter, intelligence and sensitivity, art and craftwork to name but a few. They are not inherent attributes but isotropies that run the whole symbolic spectrum in such a way that unless we quite legitimately question them, they might be taken as something natural, even though they are not. However, having said that, we wonder: since women are merely the outcome of a long entrenched tropology, should we reject a gynaecologically, ideologically, politically, aesthetically and philosophically non-conformist genealogy as an object of study and project? The answer is a categorical “no” and even a “quite the contrary”. However much we might find it hard to know what the essence of femininity is, if there is one, whenever we feel tempted to define ourselves as women or men and whether or not we are in the company of someone intent on dynamiting the docks and letting the sea of meaning’s waves break just as they wish, there is one thing that we cannot deny: when we talk about women, we must be aware that we are talking about an overlooked, relegated, silenced, denied, excluded historical subject. That is, we are talking about our own history.
Discussing women as the objects of a historical structural violence gives us the ethical and aesthetic right (which, as Wittgenstein noted, are one and the same) to propose a re-action which in some way helps to redress the wrongs. As activists who uphold the right to create a scale counter-history in the form of a RE-ACTION, it was never a problem for us that only women were involved, because although we know that, like a fly trapped in a bottle, we cannot escape our symbolic condition and related female imagery and hence the urge to do away, once and for all, with male/female antinomies, neither can we repudiate the tales in which they are concocted. There is no transcendental femininity. For over a century, with the successful assistance of Nietzsche’s hammer, blow by blow we have witnessed the joyful eradication of all or almost all truths and meanings. However, there is a history of women. Our counter-canon –that of each and every female artist and essayist involved in this open-ended shared project– forms a counter-history, and this counterbalancing gesture comforts and inspires us when it comes to recognizing ourselves in the injustice of other oppressions.
Dealing with our history gives us a first-class reason to uphold the conquest of fields from which we have been tenaciously excluded, not just in art but in all fields of representation, thought, decision making and power. Male genealogies have succeeded one another in an uninterrupted dance, referring back to one another, and weaving networks and ties that form such an inextricably dense mesh that it is hard for the needle –that supremely female utensil so beloved by some of our fellow collaborators– to pierce its surface and stamp a female name on it.
Having clarified why we paved the way for a genealogy of female artists –or a gynaecology-, at least two issues must still be settled. The first is why we chose key examples of male photography as our starting point? The answer is simple: by using photographic matrices taken by men, through our shared re-action, we could suggest a “re-writing” and symbolic “erasure”, as Clélia Barbut puts it, of male territories and topologies of control. Likewise, it was a psychoanalytical way of putting the “fathers” of history to death (many of whom should only be seen as being responsible insofar as they were the acquiescent sons of their time) and of thus neutralizing guardian powers. It also gave us the chance to set in motion rhyzomatic (rather than vertical, as you will see) “tactics of displacement”, to use a term coined by Katy Deepwell: that is, the deconstruction and denaturalization of the original photographs, aimed at revealing and counter-arresting the canonization of the male artist and his work through, as Lucia Corrain puts it, “a perpetual semantic dialogue”. In this way, we could highlight and re-compose concealed aspects of the photographs’ underlying ideologies despite their assumed documental innocence. It also allowed us to conduct a provocative review of the paradigms of the past, which entailed, in the words of Maria Antonietta Trasforini, “not just a historical and artistic methodology but a genuine political intervention on the present”.
We are convinced that RE-ACTION is here to stay and that we will be able to witness the ongoing dynamics of a project that has become an incredible catalyst for interconnecting aesthetic messages. This almost unending initiative will allow us to revive the memory of so many dead women and to give those who live today and those who are yet to be born a reason for reflection.
My thanks go to all the female authors, essayists and artists who add their voices to this shared project: one that not only aspires to become a symbol of female art but also, and perhaps primarily, to defend the need to revisit the past so as not to repeat it and to uphold bestowed shared authorship, slow conscious contemplation and attention, generous collaboration, symmetry, dialogue and freedom.