Special “Collective Action” 2019
“Black Point” by Muu Blanco
MUU explains it: “a
black circle surrounded by white materializes the image of a bullet
piercing through the human body. It is also the vanishing point for blood
and bodily fluids. Blackpoint
recreates the focal
spot that symoolizes the beginning and the end of an object’s track that
breaks unexpectedly
and violently in a body. Entrance and exit, greeting and farewell, and
evident and
indelible seal”. Blackpoint is, precisely, that “black hole” that is able
to absorb and
dissolve –in an
unpredictable instant- the stillness of our everyday and its certainties,
its rituals
and possibilities.
Venezuela is
heterogeneous, not because of its cultural or racial mixture, but because
it is
made of shreds, of
disperse and diverse narratives that overlap, oppose and even obliterate
each other, that
deny and afflict violence upon themselves. In these last years that
fragmentary
condition has been
increased, dividing the social body in fractions that disavow one another,
so the nation –that
text built by and for everyone, from agreements and symbolic practices
became unreachable, splitting and plunging itself between an ungraspable,
nostalgic identity
and an insufficient,
fissured, impossible everyday.
Blackpoint, the
performance in two movements by MUU Blanco, wanders trough the cracks
and wounds of that
unreachable nation that is Venezuela nowadays, amongst-us and for
everyone, and does
it by installing himself precisely in the arduous site of its tensions,
disconnections and
controversies and reflecting on two antagonistic narratives: on the one
hand, the heroic which deals with identity and patriotic values
(allegorized by the beauty of its
landscapes and is
territory) and, on the other, the raw sonic and visual attestation of the
violence -and
repression- that abducts and taints its own social body (documented in the
events that occurred
in Caracas, from February and March 2014). Amongst these two
narrations, one of
them symbolic and aesthetic (the landscapes) and the other being broken
and elusive (the
facts), MUU’s work installs itself as a calling, almost an outcry, to
starkly
acknowledge the
place where one lives and the place each one of us occupies in it, to
reflect
on the both personal
and collective task of fighting against the diffuse ways in which evil is
present, beyond our
own wishes and personal opinions.
In this calling,
this outcry, MUU is accompanied by Rüdiger Safranski who, in his book Evil
or
the drama of
freedom, undertakes a dense historical reflection on the ways in which evil
occurs
in the world and how
man, in the search of its own possibilities of becoming human tries to
counteract it. In
this historical task of facing evil Rüdiger Safranski grants art a
meaningful role,
not because of its
capacity to produce beauty (and with it, good, as Plato would say) but, on
the contrary,
because art is able to gather –or funnel- in present life –and in presence
itself- the
intensities,
potentialities and risks that are necessary to bring into play –that is,
make way tofreedom, that difficult and fragile faculty that allows us to
act being what we are. As a
discourse,
Blackpoint thematizes freedom, its weaknesses, choices and liabilities, and
does
so by facing that
unavoidable –and also irrepressible- reality that situates us as part of a
sociopolitical weave that surpasses us but in which we are not only
participants but responsible.
That is why
Blackpoint is not exactly a performance but a sort of “collective action”
in which all
spectator will be
unavoidably an active participant who will have to deal with the
contradictions
displayed, that will
forcefully answer to sounds as is absorbed by images, its sequences,
overlaps and
inconsistencies. In this sense, Blackpoint proposes itself as an event –as
a
happening- in the
most literal sense of the word: it is a collective –public and political-
space in
which something
common is imposed and agitated; something n common builds stories,
encounters,
citations, clashes and meetings.
As we said,
Blackpoint two different narratives polemicize: at first, beautiful
sequences of
paintings
–landscapes- recover the “heroic deed” of giving birth to a nation on an
Eden-like
land, a land filled
with riches and beauties, a land so generous that has been able to
obliterate
any other form of
civic constitution. The landscape, so, represents in Venezuela not only a
pictorial genre, but
a symbolic formula from which the nation becomes potentiality, heritage
and welfare: the
landscape is at the same time an identity statement and a model for
existence.
This heroic sequence
is accompanied by a musical fusion in which heterogeneity affirms its
own strength, and
where the Latin substrate is at the time founding and fundamental. An
introduction of joy
and recognition, of appearance and festiveness: a commemorative start in
which MUU attends
his possessions, his assets –as a person and as a member of a social
body- with the lucid
irony of the one who knows that there, in the activity of becoming a
territory, danger and impotence are also housed.
This first narrative
is broken, in a demand for assistance –in an emergency- by that in
crescendo testimony,
by real screams and shots there heard, by a swarm of images captured
on the streets, in
which the insurmountable fractures and wounds of a rickety and decomposed
social body are
shown. This testimony, far from being structured as a “narrative” inscribes
itself
precisely as the
place in where there is no longer possible to narrate, where stories are
dismantled and
dissolved, where the amongst-all shows itself as impossible and freedom, in
any of its possible
assumptions, is fractured. Superimposed on the heroic narrative of
landscapes, the
images and sounds of protests come to show how what has been outraged
and violated is life
itself: the life of this social body that we are, more and more, ceasing to
be;
a social body that
faces and cripples itself. In the end, as MUU announces, what remains is
the Blackpoint, that
bottomless absence, that void, that calls on each one for an answer to
rebuild the limits
of what is doable in order to assume strangeness before ourselves and the
others. by Sandra Pinardi, Caracas,
|
No comments:
Post a Comment