Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Sanctuary for Indecency

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00685

1537-9477

Maria Jose Contreras Lorenzini,

Cultural and Social Dynamics

Indecencia, exhibition, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, NY, September 16, 2022–January 8, 2023.Indecencia is a provocative exhibition that embraces secular rituals, improper prayers, and indecorous redemptions. Through an heterogenous corpus of works, including videos, scripts, photographs, costumes, textile interventions, and installations, Indecencia builds an idiosyncratic sanctuary for the excesses that disruptively overflow the parameters of the heteronormative and colonial orders.Curated by Nicolás Dumit Estévez, the exhibition brings together twenty-five Latin and Latinx artists from different generations to share their past and present work as a response to Marcella Althaus-Reid’s “indecent theology” that, departing from an improbable marriage between liberation theology and queer theory, problematizes the mythical multiple layers of oppressions in Latin America. Althaus-Reid explains: “Indecent Theology is the opposite to a sexual canonical theology, concerned with the regulation of amatory practices justified as normative by economic infrastructural models where anything outside hegemonic patriarchal heterosexuality is devalued and spiritually alienated.”1 Indecencia is an imagined sanctuary inspired by the tiles, the mosaic windows, and the high vaults of religious temples to project itself far beyond the white walls of the gallery, proposing a rebel ritual for the encounter of queer artists from Latin America and/or of Latin American descent living in the United States. In Dumit Estévez’s words, “performance art is indecent by nature,” and so this sanctuary is built by ephemeral embodied acts, captured by photography, videos and material objects, which provide a respite to re-enact other ways of envisioning the relationship between religion and sexuality, deconstructing the heterosexual morality that organizes sexual, political, and economic interactions.2One of the works specially created for the exhibit is Mi cuerpa (2022) by the Mexican artist Arantxa Araujo. The artist displays their unfertilized ovule in a monstrance, a vessel used by Roman Catholic churches to display saints’ relics. In the Catholic tradition, the vessel, which is also called the ostensorium, usually contains the host that by consecration is transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Araujo exposes their own blood and ovules proposing a reversed relation that seems to reclaim the sacristy of those female germ cells whose fate is not to encounter a sperm cell, but rather to be elevated as a symbol of women’s choice, desire, and the liberation of female bodies from patriarchal and religious norms that subdue sexuality to reproduction. The title warns this is not just any body, as Araujos’s is a cuerpa (“body,” a feminine word in Spanish) that becomes sacred because it is signed both by the sacrifice of female bodies and by inspiring a sense of reverence. Mi cuerpa’s political potency is rendering profane the sacred and by doing so mingling the divine and the human. The unfertilized ovules floating in blood in the minuscule vessel ask us to observe and venerate them—perhaps asking us to conjure a female body secured against violation and abuse.La ultima cena (documented in Casa Particular, a 1989 film directed by Gloria Camiruaga), by the Chilean homosexual collective Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, also addresses the Catholic ritual of consecration by staging a kitsch, marginal, and queer version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in a bordello in downtown Santiago. Pedro Lemebel and Fernando Casas appear in the video along with other nine transsexual sex workers. The video shows the Doctora (queen of the bordello) holding a piece of bread and a glass of wine saying, “This is the last supper, the last supper of this government. This is my body, this is my blood.” The performance brings the dissident, marginalized bodies of transsexual sex workers to the auroral table of Christ’s first consecration, which raises crucial questions: who belongs to the community, who can sit at that table, and, ultimately, which life is important? In La ultima cena, those individuals whom systemic violence and multiple oppressive regimes relegate to being less than human, to the unfigurable, reclaim their locus of enunciation, their right to participate in the political life, and to have a place at the table.Carlos Montiel’s work interrogates the exclusion of Black and First Nations in the political projects of “Latinidad” and “Americanidad.” In Reconocimiento (2019), Montiel is freed from a concrete sarcophagus by two Afro-Americans who laboriously hammer the concrete until it opens up. The sound of the hammering contrasts with the solemn silence of the liberated Montiel’s naked black body that stands before us, asking us to recognize ourselves as the oppressed bodies, the redeemers, or, perhaps, as the cement sarcophagus that systemically conceals, suffocates, and oppresses Black and First Nations in the so-called Americas.Laughter and joy are important ingredients in the mélange of affects that the show articulates. Artists such as Susana Cook, Carmelita Tropicana, Jesusa Rodriguez, and Liliana Felipe create a ludicrous atmosphere that disrupts the canons by exposing the absurd incongruences instituted by the sexual, religious, and social hegemonic orders. A black-and-white video shows Susana Cook’s 2003 performance playing the guitar while singing a hilarious story about her endeavor traveling to the U.S. from Argentina in order to pursue a future as a baseball player with an exceptional talent to score home runs. She plays with the audience, jumping from the literal meaning of “home run” and the slang connotation of home run as sexual intercourse. Her words, at the same time both funny and sharp, brightly expose that as imperialism and colonialism have cannibalized Latin America’s prime materials, it has also infiltrated its desires and dreams.A series of Carmelita Tropicana’s videos (produced between 1987 and 1994) portray the Cuban American performance artist’s humorous reimaginations of the Cuban revolution, the aspirations of a young tropicanette, and the adventures of a fictional “superintendent performance artiste.” Carmelita’s work creates a unique medley of heterogenous genres such as American musical, telenovelas aesthetic, Mexican Ranchera, and pop music references. The campy spectacles raise a deep political critique about the challenges and possibilities of self-determination for Cuban peoples in the context of U.S. imperialism.Marga Gomez’s A Real Mojito (2007) offers a rampant campaign to defend the real Cuban Mojito. In the video documenting a live performance, Marga denounces the American white-washed version of the Mojito done with vodka and infused with strawberries and parsley leaves to please the Americans’ taste. She effusively advocates for a counter operation: instead of the U.S. embargo that has produced unbearable hardship to Cubanos, she proposes an embargo on U.S.-made mojitos. Gomez’s work uses humor as a tool to challenge cultural appropriation while revendicating the right to exist beyond colonial and imperial oppression.Also dealing with Latin American food, but this time as material expiation, Nao Bustamante’s Indigurrito (1992) showcases an indecorous and hilarious redemption. Bustamante invites a group of white men from the audience to participate in a ritual. Participants need to introduce themselves, ask for forgiveness for the sins of colonization and the genocide of the First Nation’s people, and then bite a burrito strapped to Bustamante’s crotch. While the white men seize the burrito with their teeth, Bustamante reacts with lascivious gestures and groans. The audience stridently laughs, perhaps to signal the absurdity of any attempt of exculpation.Many of the works in Indecencia gravitate around the materiality of bodies that resist heteronormativity. A set of photos portray Carlos Leppe’s performance Épreuve d’artiste (1982). The Chilean performance artist radically disrupts the notions of manhood and masculinity by exhibiting a non-normative body executing simple actions such as shaving in the men’s bathroom at the Paris Biennale. Leppe exposes the intimacy of the bathroom while also corrupting the patriarchal typecast of masculinity as a white, fit, all-powerful man propagated by the military discourse during the dictatorship in Chile.On another wall of the museum, director Anna Costa Silva and performer Nina Terra offer two videos, Tremor Tentativa and Experimentos de Retorno, which depict Terra naked in a sound and material continuity with a water cascade. Terra’s movements and moans confound with the raw nature of the cascade carefully captured by Costa Silva’s camera. The female body appears here both reclaiming an intimate relationship with nature and resisting the stereotype of women as nature that has equated female bodies to prime materials to be disposed, exploited, and violated.As a whole, Indecencia builds a sanctuary for a queer-embodied critique of colonial and hegemonic orders that normalize sexuality, spirituality, economy, and culture in the Americas. The show successfully builds a place where marginalized, racialized, and queer bodies can resonate together, providing exquisite inappropriate and perverted takes on a normality that masquerades multiple intersectional oppressions. The political performativity of the exhibit is anchored in the ability to produce a multifaceted encounter among artists and spectators, bodies and materialities, ephemeral actions and the archive. As Nicolas Dumit Estévez informed me, “there’s a genealogy, we are all friends, we know each other.”3 An important thread of this genealogy can be retraced to the NYU Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Many of these artists are veteran “hemisexuals,” a term coined to name those who participated in this lively expansive network of performative artists, scholars, and activists in the Americas. In gathering this group of artists, Indecencia takes the post of the Hemispheric’s Encuentros to renovate a sanctuary for slowly corroding the system act by act, performance by performance, encounter by encounter.A sanctuary for indecency is not a container for indecent things but a transitional space that challenges heteronormativity and colonialism. Augusto Boal conceived his theatre of the oppressed as a rehearsal for revolution. Following Boal’s lead, Indecencia might be well considered a rehearsal for dismantling the religious theologies that, as Marcella Althaus-Reid explains, necessarily imply a sexual and political praxis that results in epistemologies, visions of life, and how humans relate to the sacred.In The Idea of Latin America (2005), Walter Mignolo retraces this notion to the nation-building mentality of nineteenth-century Europe that imagined a homogenous Latin America. It excluded indigenous and black peoples and had a strict unsurmountable border with Anglo-Saxon America. The exhibit selections decolonize the invention of Latin America by enacting a permeable border where identities are fluid and never monolithic. Subjectivities irradiate in the most disparate directions provoking exuberant material acts that overflow any attempt to fixate categories or retain binaries.Unlike a religious temple, in Indecencia there is no silence, no solemnity, no codified behaviors. In the sanctuary for indecency, every excess is allowed as it contributes to embodying a collective queer, decolonial, anti-imperialist present.