Mexico City
2022
A project by Maria Isabel Arango and Fabiola Iza
Credits:
Andrea Chirinos
Choreography
Marisol Cal y Mayor
Emiliano Cruz León
Aimé Irasema Sánchez
Dancers
Erin Lang
Sound ambience
faro studio
Lighting
Chavis Mármol - todo woooow producción de arte
Production
Berke Gold
Costume production
Carlos Cárdenas
Video recording
Press:
El Financiero
Regeneración
Gaceta UNAM
This project was made possible thanks to the support of PAC 2021, Coppel Collection, and ESPAC.
Acknowledgments:
Bárbara Hernandez Rosas, Christian Gómez, Magnolia de la Garza, Laura Orozco, and Fernando
Fernández de Córdova Koblizek.
Viendo voces
In the light of our ultra-mediated present age, politics, which can be generically described as the set of actions designed and implemented for the governance of a country and its peoples, can also be defined by its spectacular mise-en-scène. Slim microphones, pedestals, flags, stackable chairs, teleprompters –– these sculptural elements, among many others ever-present in the public delivery of political speeches, contribute to the universe that conforms to the performative aspect of politics. And so do the hand gesturing of the orators, specific clothing items, and even the transformation to which their own voices are subjected.
Viendo voces (Seeing Voices) is a multidisciplinary project that engages with politics as an embodied and lived experience by encompassing performance, installation art, and sound. It takes its cue from the non-verbal signals performed by politicians while addressing their audiences. These gestures, a form of bodily inscription, carry unspoken rules that can be read at a social level (for instance, class, ethnicity, and gender) as they are traversed by collective tensions and can also be transformed into sites of struggle. As the current sanitary crisis provoked a substantial rupture in this repertoire of forms –whose display was forced into unexpected contexts: empty stadiums, offices with nondescript furniture, self-managed broadcasts, or the living room– the project aims at speculating new ways of doing and performing politics, at the crossroads of the public realm and the private sphere –– a condition the pandemic brought about.
Therefore, Viendo voces strives to create a visual language that counters the current spectacular performance of politics, inspired by the unspoken languages of subjects whose political agency is frequently overlooked: Housewives, mainly filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s character Jeanne Dielman, whose rigid choreography of domestic chores is progressively shattered by “incorrect” gestures –such as putting on her coat with her apron underneath or skipping a button while closing her robe– as she is crushed by the patriarchal society she lives in; and the communities of deaf-mute people who, through Sign, have developed a cinematographical concept of language, as its movements are infused with a spatial and temporal logic.
How would embodied politics be? How can it be acted out differently? Disregarding answers, one possible scenario is sketched, danced, and fictionalized in the museum’s gallery.