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Troca-troca # 3: Workshop

workshop
workshop
workshop

A fundamental part of Troca-trocas is to ‘exchange knowledge’ and to make this happen a series of workshops have been organized by Capacete Entretenimentos (http://www.capacete.net), who out of an open call selected a small group of local curators as participants. The group includes: Daniela Labra from Artesquema (http://www.artesquema.com), Marcia Ferran (Architect & Urbanist), Ivana Monteiro from A Gentil Carioca (http://www.agentilcarioca.com.br), Kristofer Paetau (Artist), Alerxandre Sa (Artist), Daniella Mattos and Guilherme Bueno. For the first workshop, discussion on the subject of gender and sexuality was introduced by screening 'You can walk too' a video by Cristina Lucas and reading beforehand three texts: - Pierre Bourdieu, La Dominación Masculina p17-70 - Adrienne Rich. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence p177-202 - Jill Conway. Bourque, Susan. Scott, Joan. El concepto de género p21-33 Some of the participant’s comments during the workshop will be uploaded in Portuguese. Following is a text on Cristina Luca’s work. […] Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” […] The previous sentence is the entry line of Cristina Lucas’ video 'You can walk too' (2006), it’s taken originally from Virginia Woolf’s 'A room of one’s own' (1928) where the writer constructs a genealogy on how the aforesaid metaphor has been used throughout centuries by men to portray women in the arts. In the video, in a remote Spanish village, a group of house dogs suddenly start walking on their hind legs, they individually emancipate themselves from their female masters as they take off, leaving their ‘homes’ and joining together to finally forsake the village. By enacting a metaphor that has denigrated the roles of women in the minimal utterance of knowledge (artistic) production, the video humorously challenges sexism through the literal representation of its degrading language.

In You can walk too, there’s an ambiguity in the meaning of ‘standing-up’; on one hand it may refer to shared feminist resistance, represented in the union of these independent dogs. On the other hand, however, to literally ‘stand-up’ may be referring here to the cultural, dialectical construct of masculinity as an active, vertical institution (contrasting femininity in the passive, horizontal position); when a dog’s walking on its hind legs is the representation used to portray female intellectuals, it reaffirms the notion that women who think are those who are closer to being a man: to those who have always walked, or ruled throughout history. In that sense, all of those other women who do not belong to the lines of enlightened mobility are just plain dogs, beasts doomed to be subordinated to their horizontal condition. Cultural historian Peter Burke has pointed out that the cruelest stereotypes within subject construction in colonial history have been those based on the presumption that “there is a <> which is human and civilized, while there’s a <> which is wild, uncivilized and constantly referred and represented as animals like dogs and pigs.” The physical action of verticality can then be understood as the symbolic standpoint from where human beings look towards the ‘wilderness’ towards what they conceive savage. Nevertheless, the fact that the animals in this video have been trained to hold themselves vertically means that their nature does not ‘lead them to rebel’, but they were taught to do so. In this case, following Virgina Woolf’s passage, women in the arts would have to be actually animated for them to perform. Animation then becomes a tool of power, but as “power is always “power over…” (the application of an external force that moulds matter) and “power to…” (the work of shaping a provisional self as a response to external forces), and its operations are always connected to a certain knowledge that is formed of the self” , those who are trained to be subordinate also learn how to emancipate themselves from their masters. Like Lucky in Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, like Caliban in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, or like all the dogs in Cristina Lucas’, You can walk too. Inti Guerrero ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing; The uses of Images as Historical Evidence p. 159 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,2001)

2. Sven-olov Wallenstein, Foucault and the Geneology of Modern Architecture in Essays Lectures. P. 363 (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007)