Mara Vujić: My Body - My Territory
“I am no longer accepting
the things I cannot change. I’m changing the things I cannot accept.” Angela
Davis
Writing the introductory text for this year’s festival with the theme My Body – My Territory coincided with
events that simply cannot be ignored. Day after day we’re watching, discussing
and facing the waves of refugees that either lost their lives or got stuck at
the ice-cold technocratic and legalistic EU border. We can watch live different
social and political experiences of corporeal embededness – not on stage but in
real life! – in repression, torture and alienation; the bodies exposed to economic,
political, social violence to/beyond the limits of human endurance. The bodies
that are (ab)used for dissemination of radical political and social messages in
the context of the struggle for political domination. The disappointment over the
inability to manage this refugee disaster is increasing on a daily basis, while
the lack of solidarity in Europe and worldwide increasingly aggravates the
polarisation of public opinion, ‘justifies’ the use of repression, promotes xenophobia
and intolerance and causes fear and panic in the face of the Others. It is more
strikingly obvious than ever that the basic human rights and the values of
equality of our so-called democratic society don’t apply for everyone, as is the
fact that we fail to cope with the refugee disaster not only in a humanitarian
but primarily in a political way. For this reason it is crucial at this point
to mobilise the sense of social responsibility and act politically against the illegalisation
of people and the closing of borders, to promote dealing with such crises on the
principles of solidarity, acceptance and humanity, and strive for a radical
change of the dominant political and economic system.
This year, we have also witnessed a number of worrying events on the other side
of the “western(ish) democracy” which demonstrate the consolidation of the
socially dominant hierarchy in relation to minority or non-normative (gender,
race or class defined) bodies. In the USA we witnessed a chain of violence and
even murders of black citizens by law enforcement officers, which originates from
deeply rooted racism that the Black Lives
Matter movement is now battling. We must remember that the discrimination
against the black community in the USA cannot be fully understood without
considering capitalist social relations - i.e. the question of class. Moreover,
there has been an alarming increase in the number of murders of transgender women
in the USA. Anja Koletnik says: “Same as usual, an extraordinarily high number
of victims of discrimination, violence and murders are non-white transgender
women. This is a result of transmisogyny which affects transgender women because
of their position at the cross-section of identities/ discriminations as both women
and transgender which is additionally aggravated by race/ethnicity.”
The reflection of a woman’s body – which has forever been one of the principal topics
of feminist discussions and struggle – as a territory of constant fights by
various dominant positions for dominance and power was encouraged by ongoing attempts
of the society’s retraditionalisation, which, both locally as well as in a
broader region, comes in waves. A glaring example comes from neighbouring
Croatia. It is not only an attempt to limit the right to abortion but it’s a
case of treating women’s bodies as property in the service of the country for
the reproduction of a patriarchal system and its national interests. Asja Hrvatin
reported: “In Croatia, there are currently at least six public hospitals (in
Knin, Našice, Vinkovci, Požega, Zagreb and Split) where women can’t have an
abortion because the doctors in said hospitals exercise their right of
conscientious objection. Consequently, the women are forced to go to other
places or – even worse – to private practices, their decisions in regard to
their own bodies thus become illegal. The right to make decisions about your own
body becomes a privilege that can only be afforded (literally because according
to Jutarnji List, the abortions on the Croatian black market may cost up to a
thousand euros) by higher class women. In this case, patriarchal oppression is
paired with the question of class.” Also in our country, the God’s Children
institute exerted pressure this February in front of the maternity hospital in
Ljubljana by organising a protest wherein the volunteers (carrying the most
telling of banners) prayed for all unborn children, the women who had or intend
to have an abortion, and the health professionals who perform the abortions. Any
comment is superfluous.
The constant need to control our bodies/selves involves many social constructs,
norms and identifications ascribed or inscribed into the body actualising the
interest in body as a territory at the intersection of social and art practice,
with a special focus on body-oriented art practices. That is, the practices
that literally invested their bodies in activism and mobilisation of new forms of
discourses to undermine the previous meaning of their marginalisation and oppression.
The aforesaid examples are only some forms of discrimination and control in
relation to bodies defined by race, religion, class, gender and sexual orientation
that broke out, flooded the media and found their place in the public discourse;
many other existing forms of oppression and marginalisation remain invisible.
The politicality and indirectly the ethics of art is to open a space of
existence between binary oppositions in which the existing politics and ethics
between bodies/ selves are questioned, to redefine and open the feasible future
and simultaneously create a distance from the institutionalised hierarchical social
relations. For this reason the festival talks about feminism based on refusing the
essentialist understanding of identity and opens up a place to underline
discourses that strive to transform social relations based on the subjugation
of women and all non-normative identities. We draw attention to the forms of
mutual cooperation and cooperation with the environment which aspires to
conceive new models and ways of collective co-existence.
In terms of programming, we were interested in the idea of a free flow of a
larger number of the individual’s identities and their legitimations, which means
those art practices that address the body as a territory of social or political
processes and reflections which allow the Others to weave social fabrics of a
non-capitalist market - practices that provide a chance to freely imagine
relationships not based on domination and strive to reform and break social
norms. It is about body and gender as a result of a scientific, an individual, a
collective process; the body emerging from thought, constructed by thought or by
experience. A body with multiple extensions that can have multiple relations
with spaces and other bodies, the de-essentialized and transposed
subjectivities proving that the body is dispersed in a social space. We are
interested in the story of the journey through these bodies and spaces challenging
the notion of the individual identities that take the risk of otherness/ heterogeneity.
We are interested in art practices focused on the body in order to explore
multiplied, dispersed and non-normative subjectivities or intentionally staging
the absence of body which is materialised in the trails of its dematerialisation.
But we won’t be spared having to situate this (social) body in a given
territory because this is also the story of territories and individuals crossed
by flows, communities, colonies and politics of what is private and what
public.
Let me conclude with the quote which sums up much of this year’s festival’s
premises and at the same time let me invite you to join us. In her book Body Art/Performing the Subject, Amelia
Jones cites Allucquére Rosanne “Sandy” Stone, a renowned American transgender
theorist considered the founder of the transgender studies: “We make meaning by
acts of reading. We read the body as a text; we attempt to render it legible,
we develop elaborate location technologies to fix the body’s meaning within a
precise system of cultural beliefs and expectations; but the most interesting
bodies escape this attempt to locate them within a predefined meaning
structure.” (Jones 1998, 226)
References:
Anja Koletnik, torekobpetih.si/ komentar/transspolna-zivljenja-solegitimna, 1.
september 2015.
Asja Hrvatin: Mati, domovina, lastnina: Pravica do splava na Hrvaškem,
www.siol.net
Jones A. (1998), Body Art / Performing the
Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 226.