During the past two weeks some people apparently have been reading my
diary entries. After some few have approached me, the one unanimous comment is
that I overdid it… Which made me think I might be writing more and
participating less… maybe. I guess I just have this feeling that everything
participatory is somehow meant to disappoint. I’m exaggerating, but I am in a
crappy mood tonight. After Rosalba presented us the Rivers of Representation project [which hoped to bring into a LGBT collective
a valuable space so that its members saw that fighting together was meaningful
making use of metaphor to represent life after HIV+ diagnosis (through drawings
and self-narratives including poetry)] I was reminded of a conversation I had
had the previous night with Soumita. Her anxieties (and mine) over aesthetics
as being pivotal in our lives seemed somehow given an answer with this method.
An odd answer, for I believe neither of us really meant to say, read this kind
of poetry, stare at this kind of painting.
To make the point even clearer, I entered the room happily because I had just opened the Concert Gebouw magazine I had just got from my mailbox as I rushed for class. Our cultivated souls have made our arable tastes elitists. The engagement with the products of such participatory action will be mediated by the aesthetic sensibility of the interpreter (a difficulty also expressed by Larissa in a previous session) in order to make sense out of these materials. But the participatory exercise was yet to begin.
To make the point even clearer, I entered the room happily because I had just opened the Concert Gebouw magazine I had just got from my mailbox as I rushed for class. Our cultivated souls have made our arable tastes elitists. The engagement with the products of such participatory action will be mediated by the aesthetic sensibility of the interpreter (a difficulty also expressed by Larissa in a previous session) in order to make sense out of these materials. But the participatory exercise was yet to begin.
“A diverse, dynamic…” information “means” empowerment… something like
that went the story behind one of the interventions presented. It was an idea
that privileges [certain] accumulation of knowledge as an improvement. But what
if you don’t want to be informed (and I’m not thinking about a masochistic self-tormentor
that privileges suffering over more orthodox conceptions of well-being)? What
if there’s too much information changing too much too many times? Dufflo made
the point (somewhere sometime) that poor people would be better off if they had
a bureaucratic apparatus that took the right
decisions for them all the time, like accessing vaccination programs or other
healthcare decisions. Reinterpreting her, to fight the bureaucracy is easier
once you’re in it, the richer you get the more it is part of your life, the
poorer, then the further away you are from accessing it. Zizek stresses a
similar point [somewhere sometime] when claiming that he is lazy and he prefers
to live in a place where there is a state that takes decisions for him, instead
of having to be involved permanently in participation and engagement. This is
of relevance to me because the double ‘preventive’ mastectomy of Angelina Jolie
that she disclosed here, some days after Peggy Orensteins had
published a more comprehensive and informative article about breast cancer where she gives the feel
that so much is known about the disease without really knowing what to do with
it (how to detect it, how to treat it and what to do after it is treated). This
comes at a time when a close friend of mine has just been detected breast
cancer.
I got torticollis. The round structure of the plenary might not be as
adequate for a lecture as… more a place with more comfortable chairs. About the
power of those who have the technical ability to produce images of
representation, Rosalba commented that if you hold a camera [in Mexico/Peru] you
are immediately thought of as someone who can pay for that image. . Additionally,
on the commodification of images, my first boyfriend got connected with a
project called “Disparando Camaras” or Shooting
Cameras for Peace where [poor, marginalized…] children were taught to build
camera obscura and how to take pictures with them. Their depictions of their environment
were translated into their “identities” that made it to the UN NYC building
after the most posh curatorial process…
But now for our participatory exercise! Joyce and Lenny set the mood
after our chocolate post-break boost citing Speedy Gonzales: “Ándale, ándale,
arriba, arriba”. Talk about the internationally corporate commodification of images, from the
US to Colombia to the Philippines, through the family name of some brothers. We
rose from our seats to take pictures that represented the ISS for the incoming
batch. Although Fungai and Maria had cameras I didn’t understand why or how we
ended up using only the pictures from my phone. Maria was crucial for the
editing, knowing the collage-making website, filtering the images into “warmer”
takes… which brings me again to the aesthetic subjectivities that are lost as
they are rendered into academic research standards.
During the round
table discussion on the exercise, Gina whatsapped me. She asked me if I
believed her comment about color-difference had been inappropriate. I responded
looking at her expressing my awkwardness. “Why would it have been an issue at
all?” I thought. “What are you talking about?” I believed that was the only
justification of the Attrium’s colorfull bird-like kites. But then this was
across the room and Lenny, sitting in the middle of the circle read my face as referring
to what her group was saying. It was only after class that I understood
(because Gina and Marcela explained to me) that the color phrase had a racial
subtext that I had not read. But I overdid it again so I stop.
Some pictures from artsy-farty apps for smartphone pictures:
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