729092 bags of History.

“... I had a clear understanding of the process of returning to an original context, how a
completely autonomous culture was co-opted and re-packaged so that its originators
would consume it, disguised as an imported culture.”
-- Tania Bruguera (about Poetic Justice)--

They weren't even invited to share in the tea, to cut deals with oblivion -- as if that were possible -- at that precise and mythic hour day after day when orgies past were celebrated, the orgies of the Other. The worst thing was that the Others generated so much outrage, claiming the vestiges usurped from their culture so long ago.

She wasn't invited either to cut that deal with oblivion in her homeland, in those years when they were supposedly building utopias. The worst thing was that those utopias weren't really hers, not completely. And to top it off, she didn't want the arrangement: If they'd cut the deal, it would have been with memory, with the one entity that quite possibly wouldn't allow her to forget her real story.

In any case -- she, they -- were doomed to a fatal silence, the kind that comes when the voice that emerges from resistance becomes a fragmented echo, almost undetectable, because nothing can be done to overturn History, what has been and its legacy, especially for those who never had a right to writing any of it. All responsibility rested in a space marked by the impossibility of change, on the precarious margins of a description and a denunciation which worked within the logic established by those in Power. There is one thing that's certain in the postcolonial mindset: re-affirmation and self-representation only make sense when confronting difference.

Now the pristine flavor, its own, is returned to them through the misunderstanding of the Other, who has adopted an image based on modern Western notions, which never quite achieves a sense of life free of rigid taxonomies, because it could not understand these.
Each bag, each measure, each flavor not experienced each day at the same hour, become the gaze of History itself, one which doesn't depend on space or time, because it was always written with the conviction that begets Power, and from the very disruption that always follows. In the end, that gaze will turn to find, even fatigued, those very same images repeated everywhere, mute witnesses to History's outrage.

It's possible that it's History that is the greatest void. It's not a matter of partisan distortion, or of erroneous narratives. Theft, appropriations, manipulations until nothing makes sense -- these are all results already taken for granted by consensus, even that which is practically ephemeral and imperceptible and comes from difference. The myth is usually nourished by the paradox that is History, and so origins become blurry and almost disappear. In the end, we always return to the starting point, in the comfort of that which is reproduced, in that which exists as it's consumed; although with a strange sense that the faith with which we see, hear and feel is itself nothing more than artifice.

Suset Sánchez.
Translation Achy Obejas.

Tania Bruguera: Cabeza abajo.

Un espíritu blanco camina y va clavando bandera rojas sobre cuerpos maniatados y tirados en el suelo. En Cabeza abajo el espectador de la perfornance es convertido en víctima, sobre su cuerpo se reescribe una memoria de guerra y violencia. La performer, Tania Bruguera, camina sobre ellos provocando, en mínimas acciones, el recuerdo inconsciente de opresión y conflicto, la experiencia de muerte colectiva, que puebla la historia de los pueblos. Un acto chamánico de exorcización, a través de la exfoliación de la memoria enquistada, de las zonas vitales y los temores arquetípicos de la conciencia humana.

A través de la objetualización de las víctimas crea un paisaje ritual e ideológico del sacrificio común de los caidos por Algo evocando literalmente la caida y el sacrificio propio y de otros ante ideas, ideales y banderas que pasan por encima de los cuerpos indiferentemente. Nunca se sabe bien porqué ideal superior de la humanidad, pero siempre es un algo con mayúsculas por el que se muere.
Tania Bruguera parece preguntarnos, ¿cuantos cadáveres, propios y ajenos, son necesarios para crear la alfombra roja por la que la Libertad camine para guiar al pueblo?

Carlos Trigueros