Concepts: Transformation, Embodiment, Migration, Resistance, Responsibility
“Transformation” is a word that has accompanied the texts we have read and our own discussions from week 1, from Rancière’s disturbance of the sensible (63) to Mouffe’s call for an agnostic politics that constructs new “articulations” and “institutions” (11), Taylor’s text which shows us the many ways in which performance “allows us to see” that change is possible (6, 21), and Arendt and Butler’s emphasis on the importance of appearance. For our final endeavor, I would love to collaborate on a project that explores how resilient bodies make themselves present in acts of political spectacle that challenge existing “modes of visibility” that leave certain subjects outside of the frames of recognition. This is evidently a very Butlerian enterprise, however it also traces a line of continuation among our readings as a whole in terms of the acknowledgment of how politics excludes as much as it includes; as Mouffe argues, “every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities” (2), or, as Rancière proposes, recognition is differentially distributed through hierarchies; or frames, according to Butler. But, instead of focusing on collective forms of assembly as a way to contest the hegemonic distribution of recognition, I would like to explore how individual bodies can also assert themselves and their histories through performance.
In my own work, I investigate cross-cultural transmissions between China and Latin America, and Chinese migration to countries like Mexico, migratory patterns that were primarily formed around the need for cheap labor. I would like to frame my contribution to our final project through the work of the Cuban, Chinese, and Nigerian artist María Magdalena Campos Pons, who I very recently discovered, and I believe will allow me to consider some intersections in experience that I had not previously investigated. In her diverse artistic practice, which spans photography, performance, and painting, to only name a few, Campos-Pons draws upon her multicultural background (her Nigerian ancestors were brought to Cuba as slaves in the 19th century, the Chinese side of her family worked as indentured servants in sugar mills) that is cut by intersecting histories of displacement, survival, defiance, and celebration, narratives that she seeks to preserve in her works which engage in the labor of memory.
“When I first started doing public performances in the 1990s, I wanted to express something I couldn’t express in my paintings and sculpture. I wanted to put my body in a particular space in a particular moment.”
-Campos-Pons
In the project, I’d like to specifically explore how we can approach Campos-Pons’ performances through Taylor’s concept of “performance as ontology.” My preliminary thoughts are that this operates on many levels in Campos-Pons’ work. First, the level of the autobiographical: the artist’s oeuvre is shaped by her own experience and the histories of her ancestors, it expands past her personal identity to the collective memory of the communities of the African diaspora. But, as Taylor, following Gómez-Peña, asserts, performance does not merely indicate the act or action; it is an existential condition (3), it is an ontology. In this way, by putting her body forward, Campos-Pons performs a subjectivity-in-flux, she answers the revelatory question “Who are you?” not in Arendtian terms, through speech, but rather using her body.
Campos-Pons aspires to bring us closer, not to the recovery of something pure or essential, but rather to the circumstances and adaptations shaped by the hybrid spaces of the cultures that she brings into her work, which are, in turn, the result of the separation, memory, and fragmentation produced by her upbringing in Cuba and her relocation to and residence in the United States.
-Octavio Zaya, “Becoming FeFa”
I follow this quote to underline how the primary question, “Who are you?”, cannot have one answer. Campos-Pons’ grappling with the question, a process characterized by tension and negotiation in her performances, through which she participates in continual self-transformation, brings me to a note on ambivalence that I draw from Taylor and Gómez-Peña once again, that “For [Gómez-Peña] performance art is a conceptual ‘territory’ with fluctuating weather and borders; a place where contradiction, ambiguity, and paradox are not only tolerated, but also encouraged” (3). Campos-Pons’ work allows us to approach performance as territory in one sense, as process, but also in a spatial sense; the open borders in her performances are often inscribed on her spectacularized body, as she wears traditional Chinese dress while holding a long sugar cane in hand, or her movement between these territories is performed as she physically weaves between performance spaces with a history of racial violence while soliciting personal narratives from her audience.
One of the questions I will seek to address is how Campos-Pons does not merely present her body discursively. Rather, she activates its transformative potential in acts of doing that reconfigure the materiality of hegemonic spaces and relationships between actor and spect-actors. As in Poetformance mentioned above, Campos-Pons regularly adopts the character of FeFa in her performances, a mother figure whose name stands for “familiares en el estranjero” (Fe) and “family abroad” (Fa). I call FeFa’s body transformative not only because of what it represents, a gendered body bearing the legacies of colonialism and global labor, but because of what it does in the performance space, which is “to re-establish a connection—not merely in order to seek a different intellectual commitment, but in order to…encounter a new way of imagining the world” (Zaya). I believe Campos-Pons –and FeFa– illustrate beautifully the responsibility behind political work (of identity, appearance, memory, to name a few), and the relationality inherent in it, that we discussed last class. Having just discussed Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason in another class, the idea of the importance of humanity in the work is on my mind– this is something I’d like to further think with in the project.
Campos-Pons also frames her own body as spectacle in relation to the spaces she installs herself in. In her 2014 intervention “Habla la madre”, performed at The Guggenheim, she dressed herself as the institution itself, donning a white hooped dress and leading a procession through the building while shouting incantations and accompanied by an Afro-Cuban band. I believe that performances such as this do the political work Mouffe calls for; by taking on the institution, Campos-Pons engages in an activism that confronts the “always striated and hegemonically structured” public space (Mouffe 91). This is the video of political spectacle that I’d like to share, in which a “bodily demand” (Butler 11) is being made in relation to its own portrayal (or absence) in the museum space, at the same time that the performing body is creating new relationships through the spiritual and the festive.