Kastanien Projectraum
Ambactia Memoria is an international visual arts group exhibition that offers artists, critics, and activists an open framework to articulate non-normative artistic positions and peripheral perspectives regarding tradition, memory, and identities in relation to “the Hispanic.” By exploring the intersection between feminism, transculturalism, and (post)migrant approaches on the representations, practices, and diverse forms of identity in contemporary society, the selected works deconstruct the idea of Hispanicness and collectively imagine its future transformation.
The myth of the Hispanic image has been violently pierced by a cultural historiography riddled with wounds. In the name of glory, heroism and progress, a homogenizing symbol of colonialism acts as a mass grave mark to level what it is considered to be “the Spanish” and a great part of “the Latin”: the Hispanicness (la Hispanidad). It is, in fact, a prosthetic symbol, full of political devices for the normalization and administration of a selected but still collective memory, which operates in the same way in which abject bodies are confronted across the border in many bureaucratic and institutional levels.
The conflict inserted at the very core of the “Hispanicness” term is an act of administrative and institutional erasure that has not only looked the other way, but also it has burned all the papers inside the filing cabinet. With this exhibition, we propose a critical decolonial cartography that starts (and now it is even much more evident because of the COVID crisis) with the collapse of institutions in the midst of another pandemic that has been with us for a much longer period: the crisis of experience and truth that calls into question the legitimacy of cultural institutions. The international (re)presentation which the so-called “Spanish-speaking cultures” perform outside their frontiers as well as their epistemological and political soil, is falling apart. The impostor veil of culture that used to hide the real face of the political failure has dropped.
The myth of the Hispanic image has been violently pierced by a cultural historiography riddled with wounds. In the name of glory, heroism and progress, a homogenizing symbol of colonialism acts as a mass grave mark to level what it is considered to be “the Spanish” and a great part of “the Latin”: the Hispanicness (la Hispanidad). It is, in fact, a prosthetic symbol, full of political devices for the normalization and administration of a selected but still collective memory, which operates in the same way in which abject bodies are confronted across the border in many bureaucratic and institutional levels.
The conflict inserted at the very core of the “Hispanicness” term is an act of administrative and institutional erasure that has not only looked the other way, but also it has burned all the papers inside the filing cabinet. With this exhibition, we propose a critical decolonial cartography that starts (and now it is even much more evident because of the COVID crisis) with the collapse of institutions in the midst of another pandemic that has been with us for a much longer period: the crisis of experience and truth that calls into question the legitimacy of cultural institutions. The international (re)presentation which the so-called “Spanish-speaking cultures” perform outside their frontiers as well as their epistemological and political soil, is falling apart. The impostor veil of culture that used to hide the real face of the political failure has dropped.
Now we can talk about both politics of the Hispanic image and politics of the Hispanic gaze, composing new visual devices that did not yet exist for certain realities that have been resisting for a long time. Why, then, do these organizations continue, even with greater force than ever, the strategies for promoting the “authentic” culture of Spain and many Latin American countries, while speaking of “hybridization, “multiculturalism” and “brotherhood”? But what does the “Hispanic culture” really mean? Can the “Hispanic” be thought of? Does it even exist?
These fictional foundations of the image of the Hispanic correspond to a precise process of political acculturation, closely coupled with a concrete visual construction, all with the objective of camouflaging itself and eluding its moral problems and duties. In fact, Hispania in Latin, rather than referring to an idea of a nation, was a geographical term used to relate to the entire Iberian Peninsula territory. After its indiscriminate use by all of the imaginable political factions, it is now used to bring together what is considered “a community with common linguistic and cultural characteristics.” Thus, the abstract image of the Hispanic is manipulated against its will, kidnapped by those who champion it and use it as a device to normalize a process of violence and colonization that, even if regenerated, reaches our days. There is something very seductive in this nationalist idea that aims to “unify” Hispanicness by inviting a society plunged into labor precariousness, social loneliness, discrimination, or that failure to comply with the ideal beauty standards, to not be ashamed of their country’s past. The rise of national cultural identities in Spain and perhaps Europe’s writ large is a response to a political crisis that, along with the aesthetics of fascism and necropolitical logics, provides the optimal breeding ground for a lack of a rigorous decolonial reflection in these latitudes of the globe. Society does not need more shame than the one it already feels when it looks in the mirror every morning, but rather pride. If the past were glorious it means the future could also be. And who chooses shame over hope?
Or, on the contrary, blame. There are those who engage in witch-hunts, pointing an accusing finger from the only possible place to do so: the elite. There is a paralyzing guilt, an identity categorization that tightly binds an apparently leftist morality. Revealed in reality as a bourgeois perversion (have not identities also been deformed by the capital?), they lead to a corralling from which the devices of racial, gender, sexual discrimination… are in danger of being deactivated. Identity fields are shut down from class considerations and become part of the market of marginalities and intersectional oppressions in a mise en abyme where all struggle is diluted in favor of an identitarian essentialism.
Within what we can call the “revisiting of historical memory”, international bodies of representation operate as techniques for modifying subjectivities. In this sense, culture is territorialized to turn it into yet another object of patriarchal control that instead of uniting, as it apparently claims, it isolates those inside cages that separate the otherness and discipline and punish. The purpose, in reality, is to create an imagined community of “us versus them”, where only the subaltern is asked ontologically for its being.
Meanwhile, the art institution has always reinforced the sense of belonging in some people and exclusion in others, since that hegemonic subjectivity is still influenced by the inheritance from the ecclesiastical and aristocratic-monarchical modes of the construction of truth, which in turn, it has been crucial for the developing of the artistic modernity story. In this sense, both cultural and representative institutions, in Foucauldian terms, are performative machines (self-presented as constates) that produce the subject they say they represent; and at the same time, they are also apparatuses of verification and legitimation at the service of a racialized, sexualized and minorities excluding hegemonic discourse. It is, therefore, the logic of “exclusionary inclusion” that constitutes such institutions; and the History of Art an attempt to deny the heterogeneous character of what the exhibition space by definition is beyond the categories of Western historiography: a plural, polyphonic and political place.
The proposal here is to reopen history and create a symbolic space for reparation, a way of dealing with the damage in the face of institutional blindness and the silence of others. Within a broken world, in the face of the experiences of harm and the fragility of memory, we propose concern, active listening, and the exhibition space as a possible place of curing through images. Spain works with colonial guilt, or with its opposite, the excuse.
The aim is to establish a provisional and plastic proposal, which neither constitutes nor pretends to constitute a truth. In order to ensure that there is always a process of collective activation through a multiplicity of discourses, an appeal is made to public consciousness in an attempt to avoid a unique language. It is not an act of activism, but of mediation so that others can be activated and transformed, rhizomatically.
Meanwhile, the art institution has always reinforced the sense of belonging in some people and exclusion in others, since that hegemonic subjectivity is still influenced by the inheritance from the ecclesiastical and aristocratic-monarchical modes of the construction of truth, which in turn, it has been crucial for the developing of the artistic modernity story. In this sense, both cultural and representative institutions, in Foucauldian terms, are performative machines (self-presented as constates) that produce the subject they say they represent; and at the same time, they are also apparatuses of verification and legitimation at the service of a racialized, sexualized and minorities excluding hegemonic discourse. It is, therefore, the logic of “exclusionary inclusion” that constitutes such institutions; and the History of Art an attempt to deny the heterogeneous character of what the exhibition space by definition is beyond the categories of Western historiography: a plural, polyphonic and political place.
The proposal here is to reopen history and create a symbolic space for reparation, a way of dealing with the damage in the face of institutional blindness and the silence of others. Within a broken world, in the face of the experiences of harm and the fragility of memory, we propose concern, active listening, and the exhibition space as a possible place of curing through images. Spain works with colonial guilt, or with its opposite, the excuse.
The aim is to establish a provisional and plastic proposal, which neither constitutes nor pretends to constitute a truth. In order to ensure that there is always a process of collective activation through a multiplicity of discourses, an appeal is made to public consciousness in an attempt to avoid a unique language. It is not an act of activism, but of mediation so that others can be activated and transformed, rhizomatically.
What we are addressing as a cornerstone to deconstruct the idea of hispanicness, is the concept of memory, or post-memory, as performative structures of intra-, inter- and trans- generational transmission, where the key concept is trauma. In the words of Marianne Hirsch, trauma leads to the creation of different performative attitudes, usually related to dissociation, the hybrid, creativity, the fictitious, the imagination, the self-reflective, the irony … never ordered, always polyhedral, as it is in- tended to capture in the space for this exhibition. The defense of post-memory as an analytical category means challenging the meta-stories that have always dominated what we have commonly called (Western) History.
There is no uniqueness or truth of the memory, and therefore, there is no single truthful method to represent that past. The only thing we do intend to reflect is the presence (and absence) of a multiplicity of discourses, which are indeed those that guarantee memory, however fragmented they might be. Thus, it is not a matter of remembering or forgetting – well, on the other hand, how do you remember that you have forgotten? – but rather how to remember and how to handle representations of the past, and consequently, those of the present. On the other hand, the gradual death of the survivors and their testimonies becomes the impetus for new generations to assume a collective political-moral responsibility with them, with whom they feel a bond, and even discover, in the words of Paul Ricoeur, themselves as others. The demands of reparation are inextricably intertwined with the subsequent generations, and it must be through their voices from where the possibilities of transitional justice and collective memory must be (re)conducted.
In the pursuit of alternative transnational alliances between the Spanish State and its more contemporary connection with Latin America, it is also necessary to map the transition process in which they continue to be immersed after the dictatorships. Along with countries like Argentina or Chile, Spain went directly from dictatorship to the free market, and they called it democracy. In this process, the large neo-colonial corporations have established new and subversive coalitions of control that were already present in the colonial period: racial, gender, sexual and class oligarchies. In addition, the neoliberal system rapidly phagocytes the “new” identities (re)baptizing them with less uncomfortable pseudo-democratic profiles for their own interest.
Thus, it is proposed to treat coloniality in this sense not as a mere racial classification, but as a mechanism of domination that permeates all aspects of social existence, knowledge production and identities. The relationships between them are more than intersectional, they are mutual. In this way, the gender system of modernity would not exist without coloniality, indeed, it is constitutive of it, and vice versa.
Among the violence of the European colonial expansion, all forms of sexual or gender dissidence were persecuted for being against the Judeo-Christian vision of the body, sexuality or pleasure. The first pathologizations, regulations and prohibitions of homosexuality or the diversity of gender and sex that already existed in pre-Columbian cultures were established with the aim of categorizing colonized subjects. The conquerors considered the indigenous men as savage and effeminate because of their ornamentation, and women as libertines because of the nakedness of a body that was since then fiercely sexualized. That is why we must think of coloniality of gender as a two-way relational base, just as it is unthinkable to “de-colonize without de-patriarchalizing” (no es posible descolonizar sin despatriarcalizar), in the words of María Galindo.
Once the motives that encourage the decolonization of the “Hispanic” (which seem so closely linked to feminisms) have been understood, and in order to invite a counter-genealogy of total resistance, it is necessary to question the position of race within Queer Theories. The concerns about the epistemic limitations of this theory, and its “Westernist” worldview, make us wonder if it is not necessary, in addition to de-colonize and de-patriarchalize, also, in a sense, de-queerize. Is it possible for subaltern communities to express their experiences, their bodies, and their erotic imagination in the same terms that Queer Theory does through Western visual realism? The problem of sexual dissidence approaches from Eurocentric and white theoretical-political frameworks does not fully include the polyhedral reality of the colonial subject and the effects of such coloniality on their bodies and desires. The institutionalization of this theory, and its discreet introduction into the university curricula, is easily digested by the system as an advertising formula and deactivated in its proclamations (even more so in the absence of a translation of the term into other languages). As we can see from protests banners around the world “lo queer no te quita lo racista” (the queerness doesn’t take away your racism).
The decolonial inflection requires finding new scriptural forms that continue challenging the hegemonic methods of enunciation and that recode and reflect these collective interests. By creating new codes through acts of re-existence, decolonial subjects critically appropriate pre-existing concepts.
Therefore, we consider in this text a geopolitical, epistemic, and post-identitarian displacement from queer to cuir in order to weave transnational networks of identification and communication that make visible the vulnerability of “the Hispanic” and the processes of historical subalternization since colonization. Cuir, as the theorist Sayak Valencia argues, is also a critical position that reflects the interest in the migration of ideas and concepts, so that they are always active and the process of (self) questioning continues. It is a decolonial turn based on a rereading of the trans* feminist imaginary and sexual dissidence as peaceful practices of organized civil disobedience, where functional diversity, age, class, race… are intertwined in alliance with ecofeminisms, cyberfeminisms and indigenous feminisms.
Therefore, we consider in this text a geopolitical, epistemic, and post-identitarian displacement from queer to cuir in order to weave transnational networks of identification and communication that make visible the vulnerability of “the Hispanic” and the processes of historical subalternization since colonization. Cuir, as the theorist Sayak Valencia argues, is also a critical position that reflects the interest in the migration of ideas and concepts, so that they are always active and the process of (self) questioning continues. It is a decolonial turn based on a rereading of the trans* feminist imaginary and sexual dissidence as peaceful practices of organized civil disobedience, where functional diversity, age, class, race… are intertwined in alliance with ecofeminisms, cyberfeminisms and indigenous feminisms.
With all these questions in mind, the exhibition space is proposed as a vehicle to articulate new artistic forms that explore non-normative artistic practices around the concept of tradition, memory and identities on/from/with/against/through the “hispanic.” In the words of Paul B. Preciado, it is an invitation to constitute a “parliament of the (hispanicized) bodies.” In this way, it is a call to jointly create alternative epistemologies that confront these forms of oppression through the re-articulation of experience and the work of art. To subvert this Euro-centrism and challenge imperial narratives, artists, critics and activists are invited to explore languages and practices of decolonization and desexualization in order to open a discussion and collectively imagine a transformation of the Hispanic.
Vanesa Peña Alarcón
Vanesa Peña Alarcón
