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Day 1 : The Voice

The topic of the day was challenging for me today for a whole set of reasons I will try to develop hereafter. Although the group of practitioners was great, I somehow understood all of a sudden how deeply living in Mexico has transformed my practice, may be in an irreversible way. The idea of « voice » as a form, if I acknowledge its aesthetic interest, makes in a way no sense for me if it’s not in relation to the message it’s meant to articulate. I also always had doubts regarding the necessity to « mimic » the efficiency and clarity of voice of the corporate world, as it is increasingly asked to curators, cultural workers and producers in the professional world. Of course, when it’s an artist appropriating it and thus questioning it through a performative act it’s different — and I suppose Angie Keefer’s performance was interesting to this regard, although I am also growingly skeptical of corporate/google like cut-up poetry à la Kenneth Goldsmith :-)

I think the voice is interesting in regard to the performative act of speech itself. I think I don’t believe in an « authentic » voice, may it be the curator’s one or the artist’s one. I think we live in a society that demands too much ubiquity and contradiction of ourselves to be able to define static positions that could be labelled authentic or « true ». I think actually that at the end of the talk I could hear Lynne Tiiman saying « and actually who tells you I am using the truth in my books? » and I thought it was very judicious. I also think of Eyleen Myles or Kathy Acker of course, pretending to be these people they are not, notably in terms of social class, imagining they are from the bourgeoisie when they are not — the contrary of realist french literature of the XIX century where its the bourgeoisie that charges itself to represent the reality of the people.

At some point in the discussion I brought the subject of reaction to voicing out some thoughts or positions, and how the different participants could have had reacted to such answers to the content voiced out. Obviously I was trying to obliquely push the question of the content into the discussion as I am one very pragmatic person when it comes to theory, and if of course the question of methodology of assertion is interesting per se, after a couple hours I was getting a little frustrated to focus so much on the « how » when there are so many « what » in the air. This thought makes me come back to Mexico City. I realize that with age I put a lot in question this idea of voicing out too loud my opinions. I am now in the position of the immigrant there, of the foreigner, and besides, a privileged person in a dramatic context. Since 10 years 120000 people have been killed in Mexico City and 20000 disappeared — mostly women I think for that latest statistic. Mexico has a total of 120 millions inhabitants so it means that 1% of its population was murdered the past 10 years. Before moving there I had no idea of how that situation, although in a quite ungraspable way — as I repeat, living in Mexico as a European or US foreigner is a very confortable position on many aspects — could affect artistic production or discourse by itself. I would like to add that confusedly, I came to Mexico to find that out.

It’s why this idea of intersectionality is so important. The single channeling of white feminism claims only belongs to a very small, privileged group of people. We have to keep in mind that our problems are the ones of a minority. The minority of white, western women that enjoy the exercise of democratic rights. I don’t know how many people on earth it represents but it’s probably not a lot. We have to then exercise the very difficult challenge to keep the culturally located feminism that our mothers fought for in the 60’s as an inspiration, but also understand its provincialism and cultural specificity at the scale of the world. The awareness and euphoria experienced by occidental women in the 70’s/80’s, and notably in the field of art production, that finally recognized them as fully capable artists, need to be celebrated and their achievements appropriated in new ways that use them as examples of self confidence and as pioneer examples of practices. But we also need to understand that we have to resume the fight, because as many other fights, it became global and the problems of others, is now more than ever our problems too. We need to relocate the practice of feminism, its conceptual tools, within the depressing conjoined grids of race, class and culture (may be the religious too, and it’s another vast, deeply complicated aspect of the question).

The voice debate is interesting but I don’t wanna articulate anymore binary logics such as loud=good/low=bad or less valuable. I wish I could shut up more, generally, or at least be able to articulate myself more softly and rely may be less on shoutouts and outbursts. But that’s reality that should make me shut up, not my peers’ taboos and fears of embracing the complex reality of our times. To finish, I’d like to conclude that I am ok for my « voice » to be lost in the « cacophony », an interesting concept I came across in the following article:

« To make the connections across different forms of racism and colonialism, feminists can supplement and reconfigure intersectionality by integrating other concepts and tools. One such complementary and expansive concept is that of “cacophony,” developed by Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd (2011) in Transit of Empire. Byrd (2011) challenges scholars of postcoloniality and racialization to activate Indigeneity as a condition of possibility in ways that implicate disaporic subjects in the colonization of the Americas (xxxix). Byrd (2011) urges those concerned about racialization and colonization to “cacophonously understand that the historical processes that have created our contemporary moment have affected everyone at various points along their transits with and against empire” (xxxix). Byrd’s (2011) use of cacophony is helpful for a feminist approach to decolonizing anti-racism. She evokes cacophony to counter how “U.S. colonialism and imperialism domestically and abroad often coerces struggles for social justice for queers, racial minorities, and immigrants into complicity with settler colonialism” (Byrd 2011, xvii). Cacophony is an analytical interpretative tool for Byrd, one that can reveal the interstices between dynamic differentiations that function within imperialism at the site of indigenous worlds (2011, 54). She states that we need:

an act of interpretation that decenters the horizontal struggles among peoples with competing claims to historical oppressions. These vertical interactions continually foreground the arrival of Europeans as the defining event within settler societies, consistently place horizontal histories of oppressions into zero-sum struggles for hegemony and distract from the complicities of colonialism and the possibilities for anticolonial actions that emerge outside and beyond the Manichean allegories that define oppression. (Byrd 2011, xxxv)

By vertical struggles, Byrd means the interactions between the colonizers and colonized, and by horizontal interactions she means the different minority oppressions that converge and diverge. Cacophony helps us trace “how colonial discourses have functioned in geographies where there are multiple interactions among the different colonialisms, arrivals, and displacements at work” (Byrd 2011, 67). These different voluntary and forced arrivals and departures of nonwhites are intrinsic and systemic to the settlement of different and differential people of colour on Indigenous lands, which should be a concern for feminists of colour. »

(full article here : http://feralfeminisms.com/rita-dhamoon/)

I’d like to add that intersectionality is indeed what can help me embrace and participate to the fights of the feminists of colour, through acknowledging the very fact I am of colour — I am white. A white feminist. It’s not about shame here : just about consciousness.

#intersectionality #feminism #artistsspace #cacophonia #decolonizing