TRICKSTERS of the Spectatorial the Decolonial
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TRICKSTERS OF THE SPECTATORial The decolonial proposals of performance artivism through the encounters with La Pocha Nostra and Freddie Mercado Marina Barsy Janer A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Philosophy and Art History and Theory University of Essex 2018 ii To the co-creation of other worlds… Por la co-creación de mundos otros… iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To all my relations and to all I have loved… To the animal spirits of the spider, the fox and the wild boar that have accompanied me throughout, and the common yet particular horizon of the ocean. I bear gratitude to the Sun/Moon and the river’s stones, to my ancestors and those to come, to Epping Forest and the mountain-spine of Montserrat. To Isil Sol Vil, in eXtreme and subversive love in-becoming joint levitation and common tissue of our third eyes. I am grateful to the strong women that surround me: to my mother’s warrior-soul that has mentored my spirit, to the community of women that have traced wings of resistance in my back, to the protective spirit of Nagymama, and to the hermagas (wise sisters) that I always find doing/sharing magic: Luzmar Soneira, Christine Brault, Marta Lodola, Sofía Arredondo, Laura Burns, Ainoa Mela, Laura Corcuera, Graciela Contreras, Christina Laskaridis, Nádia Correia, Zuleyka Alejandro, Jimena Lloreda, Caro Ley, and others. I also acknowledge the emotion in my father’s tearing eyes when facing the sunset’s sublimity. I am eternally thankful to recognise that we are a community and re-existence is growing in all of us, in different contexts and times. Among the many I hold profound admiration and love towards, I want to mention the alchemist and/or combatant artists: Aravind Adyanthaya, Alexandra Zierle & Paul Carter, and Awilda Rodriguez Lora. To re-encounter the transformative movement of Freddie Mercado’s art-life and the imagiNation of Guillermo Gómez-Peña has produced my ongoing inspiration and intriguing concern. Gracias por compartirse y sobre todo por el constante cuestionamiento de sus acciones durante todos estos años. Also a very special and warm recognition to the political- affective doings of Dani d’Emilia and Daniel B. Chávez which are weaved into this research. This research was supported by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) and the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA). I thank Dr Joanne Harwood for making this possible. I would also like to thank my supervisor Dr Matt Lodder for always supporting my artistic work, understating its essential nature in my investigation and life. iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT. 7 INTRODUCTION. 8 CHAPTER 1: THE SPECTATOR AS SOMAPOLITIC METAPHOR. .15 1.1 Positioning Body-Geographies. .15 1.1.1 The body does not say ‘I’, but does ‘I’…and who is ‘I’? . 15 1.1.2 To perform (in) the Liminal: The Colony and The Border. .20 1.1.3 Early XXI Century ‘Other’: La Pocha Nostra and Freddie Mercado. .28 1.2 Spectator’s Masquerade. 32 1.2.1 Spectacle: Visions within and beyond the Specular. 32 1.2.2 Liberation and Emancipatory models: Dussel and Rancière in conversation. 37 1.2.3 Intersubjectivity: An-other Approach. .47 1.2.4 Symbolic Sites for Spectatorial Deconstruction. 52 CHAPTER 2: TRICKSTER’S NEW CARNIVAL. .55 2.1 TRICKSTER is not. TRICKSTER does. .55 2.1.1 Coyote: A Smuggler of Ways of Knowing and Sensing. .59 2.2 Border Thought and Affectivity. 63 2.3 The Paradigm of Community: Reverse Anthropology and Radical Tenderness in La Pocha Nostra. 68 2.4 Pateco’s New Tricks: Freddie Mercado vaga-bonds Puerto Rico. .79 2.5 Strategies of the Carnivalesque: Taking off the Face of Otherness. 88 CHAPTER 3: FREDDIE MERCADO. .91 3.1 Presenting Freddie Mercado. 91 3.1.1 An Exercise of Embodied Remembrance. .97 3.2 Trans-localities in the Androgynous Nation. .99 3.2.1 To remain in situ. .100 3.2.2 Animalities, Gendering and the Colonial Wound. .107 3.2.3 Unheimliche Objects? : Disidentifications of Mother Doll. 115 3.3 Experiencing the Encounter on an Equal Ground. .134 3.3.1 Vaga-bonding with the Devil: A Pseudo-Fictional Account. .134 3.3.2 A Two Sided Mirror: The Invitation of Viaje…sé. 137 3.3.3 Gazing from and into Phantasmagoria. 142 3.3.4 Anecdotes of becoming Agency in Spectacle. .150 CHAPTER 4: LA POCHA NOSTRA. 158 4.1 Entering a Pocha Show. .159 v 4.2 Aesth/et(h)ics of Resistance: A Desirable Spectacle for the Spectator. .169 4.3 Zapatismo in La Pocha System: I am We and We are the Others. .182 4.3.1 The Icon: Hologram or Mother Diva. 186 4.3.2 Othering the us. 194 4.4 Decolonial Pedagogy: Border Crossing Methodology in Three Skins. .203 4.4.1 In Pedagogy we Trust. 203 4.4.2 The Hypodermis, Dermis and Epidermis of a Communal Body. 207 4.4.3 Embodiments produced by the Poetics and Politics of the Encounter. .213 CHAPTER 5: TACTICS OF RE-EXISTANCE. .219 5.1 Intersectionality: Weaving through Local and Global Possibilities. 220 5.2 Trans EroticA. 227 5.3 Perversion in the Art World: A Play-full Story. .237 5.4 Vaga-bonds of Radical Tenderness. .245 CONCLUSION. .252 EPILOGUE. .263 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 268 vi ABSTRACT In this research I explore artivist performance proposals that lead to an analysis of the spectator position intrinsic to the spectatorial, as a construction linked to colonial discourses of otherness. This investigation presents the encountering processes of the transnational troupe of La Pocha Nostra and the Puerto Rican persona of Freddie Mercado with their respective spectators, where local-global constructs of coloniality become unveiled, made and unmade spectacle through their re-reproduction of otherness. Side by side with performance art-life, I explore the deconstruction and de-linking possibilities of the spectatorial taking the work of these artists to build and develop the dilemmas and alternatives presented. From these complex hyper-othering performance practices I research the social implications on the spectatorial at a local and global level. The artistic proposals discussed are focused under the decolonial lens and researched as practices that make possible the co-creation of decolonial relationalities. I focus in the trans- possibility these ‘other’ encounters produce and are produced by. This work inserts the issue of the spectator within broader social concerns and it is under this umbrella that the ‘question’ of the Other arises within the mechanisms of the modern spectacle. These artistic practices exert diverse tactics that directly imply the figure of the spectator within this social configuration. 7 INTRODUCTION ‘Can the subaltern speak without the mediation of the intellectual?’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks (2010). From this, another question follows: can the intellectual listen to the cosmovision of the ‘subaltern’ and translate it into another (the dominant) discourse, methodology, and perspective without taking away its force and its essence? As the artist hands over the embodied, descriptive, theoretical, sensorial and analytic complexity of her work to another person (curator, historian, sociologist, critic), a translating process begins, where epistemic supremacy is easily perpetuated between the doer and the thinker, body and mind, flesh and word. It is equally a matter of colonising and colonised ways of being in the World. This investigation has been conceived by the body-subject that writes this research and who takes the form of ‘I’ or ‘we’ depending on the particular moment and matter addressed. I write as an artist, theorist and researcher in the open field of performance art. I act as mediator, bridge, insider-outsider and contradiction, acknowledging the initial failure of translating the untranslatable. Living a transnational reality, I am a body-subject who comes from a colonial background, born and raised in the complexities of a modern colonial reality on the island of Puerto Rico. As a middle-class, white Puerto Rican woman I develop this research within a British Westernised university that is a site of institutionalised epistemic superiority. My female body-geography lives the privilege of my skin, the oppression of my uterus, and the ethos of colonialism and its resistance, in a constant process of decolonising the Self- through all my relations. Although my own body-based practice is only briefly mentioned in this research, this vital aspect of my being in the World has accompanied and nurtured this investigation in its direction and further concerns. The lived proximity with the topics, context and people addressed through art-life encounters has guided this research providing a perspective that allows nuances which hopefully reveal other views, aspects and sensitivities present in the ecology and exchange of knowledges. As artist-academic, colonised-privileged I engage in a third space of negotiation, understanding and experience. 8 In this research I explore artivist performance proposals that lead to an analysis of the spectator position intrinsic to the spectatorial, as a construction linked to colonial discourses of otherness. This investigation presents the encountering processes of the transnational troupe of La Pocha Nostra and the Puerto Rican persona of Freddie Mercado with their respective spectators, where local-global constructs of coloniality become unveiled, made and unmade spectacle through their re-reproduction of otherness. Side by side with performance art-life, I explore the deconstruction and de-linking possibilities of the spectatorial taking the work of these artists to build and develop the dilemmas and alternatives presented. These two cases have been chosen for this research as complex hyper-othering performance practices that contain social implications on the spectatorial at a local and global level. I am considering performance art as a fundamentally social field inasmuch it is nested in the body- subjects who perform.