A Living Archive of Diaspora: Women’s Bodies as Sites of Resistance

Curatorial Essay by Roya Akbari

“In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures”
– Gloria Anzaldúa

According to Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), the borderland is a site of multiple oppressions, struggle, alienation, and hybrid identity. It is a liminal space, a site of in-between-ness, a perpetual state of non-belonging. Borderlands are geographical but also metaphorical. They are places where women of colour’s embodied experiences, along with their shared struggle toward liberation, become the basis for resistance to and refusal of the multiple systems of power and oppression that intersect with capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and white supremacy (Anzaldúa 1987). Today, as social movements have proliferated, such an intersectional analysis has become commonplace. It has been felt, for instance, in contemporary Chilean feminist movements such as Un violador en tu camino (“A rapist in your path”) which denounced rape culture and patriarchy and found echoes around the world. Already in the 1980s, however, Women, Art & the Periphery (WAP) employed an intersectional framework to deliver anti-fascist and anti-capitalist feminist messages.

In addition to being revolutionarily intersectional, WAP also documented women Chilean artists who explored the potential of yet another revolutionary tool, video, to challenge the male-dominated artworld as well as the traditional archive (Shtromberg and Philips 2023, 8). As Sepúlveda (2023) writes, these artists

“developed an audio-visual language to challenge stereotypical gender representations in media while simultaneously reinscribing the female body as both a site of violence and political articulation as a response to military dictatorships” (111).

In this curatorial essay, I approach Women, Art and the Periphery & Latin American Video Art through the embodied experiences of Chilean artist-activist women in the 1980s during the time of Pinochet’s military dictatorship and those of a new generation of Latin American artists located on Coast Salish territory (Vancouver). A series of underlying related themes runs through the five short videos featured in this guide: women’s bodies as sites of resistance, gendered and military violence imposed on women’s bodies and the toll that Chile’s hostile environment took on these bodies, transgressing the boundaries of normative female desire, and diasporic identities.

El padre mío (My Father) (1985) by Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld is a testament to the deleterious effects of Augusto Pinochet’s oppressive regime on the everyday lives of poor Chileans, and the ways in which the dictatorship curtails women’s access to healthcare, education, and economic opportunities. The video includes televised footage of Pinochet delivering a speech to commemorate the military coup of September 11, 1973, that deposed the democratically elected president Salvador Allende and paved the way for the dictator’s near 17-year rule. These clips are overlaid with various images: crowds on the street, an eight-year-old girl, Marisol Díaz, testifying about her father’s abuse, a group of women talking, an old man in a field, a child spray-painting the contour of a teen leaning against a wall, and a man inhaling a substance from a brown paper bag.

In contrast to the documentary style of El padre mío, Lotty Rosenfeld’s 1979 ephemeral intervention, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A mile of crosses on the pavement), is an experimental response to the coup. In this work, Rosenfeld lays out strips of white fabric perpendicularly across white dotted lines dividing lanes of traffic along Santiago’s Avenida Manquehue; she is then seen applying adhesive to the two ends of the fabric which turns the traffic lines into crosses. This symbol could variously invoke the Christian cross or a plus sign—denoting “more,” which became part of an anti-fascist slogan in Chile, as in “no more torture,” “no more dictatorship.”

Rosenfeld’s body intervenes in public space and rejects the obedience that the sign commands. She states: “a mile of crosses on the pavement is for me a way of presenting our bodies violating the functional inertia of their paths” (Rosenfeld). Rosenfeld documents the intervention on videotape and subsequently projects the documentation on a screen at the same location—an act which is shown in the video itself. “By introducing the screen on the site, Rosenfeld investigates video’s potential as an intervening agent rather than just as a recording device,” notes Gabriela Sepúlveda (2023, 126). Rosenfeld later reenacted this ephemeral intervention in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1987 and used the image of the crosses/plus signs in many of her other videos with an accompanying audio track repeating the single word “no.” Rosenfeld’s act of refusal thus mobilizes a new audio-visual language that disrupts the status quo and centres her body as a site of resistance.

Gloria Camiruaga’s Popsicles (1982-84) also uses the experimental genre to respond to the military regime, this time through the depiction of erotic acts. As Sepúlveda (2023) explains, the video consists of “tight shots of Camiruaga’s daughters licking and enjoying popsicles that encase toy soldiers while they recite the Hail Mary” (127). Female sexuality and desire are used to critique the phallocentric order of the military regime and the oppressive nature of religious institutions. Through this juxtaposition of images, Camiruaga addresses the lack of visibility of a woman who “desires life, light, truth, and solidarity, but who instead sees and receives death and fear” (Sepúlveda 2023, 127). This transgressive artist considered female sexuality and youth eroticism as a refusal of all that is “destruction and death” and as a form of resistance in the face of political repression.

Autocríticas (Self-critics) (1980), by Marcela Serrano, too, encourages female sexual agency through her performative practice of painting a nude female body. In the video, the body itself becomes the canvas on which to paint, as the artist is seen covering her body with white paint. The video ends with the camera zooming out and focusing on the female body fully painted. This refusal of the male-dominated art world, in turn, becomes a liberatory practice as Serrano positions the female body as a site of intervention against patriarchal structures and pushes for a shift in the representation of female iconographies.

Other videos which were showcased during WAP in 1987 and are part of VIVO’s rich archive (although not included in this guide), also centre the female body as a site of potential, transgression, and violence, as Sepúlveda highlights in a statement delivered during the 2023 revisitation of WAP, Latin American Video Art in the VIVO Media Arts Archives:

“In Zona del dolor I (1980; Zone of pain I), for example, Diamela Eltit cuts and burns herself before going to a brothel; there, she videorecords herself reading parts of her novel and washing the floor as images of herself are projected onto the walls. In Yo No Tengo Miedo a Nada (I am not afraid of anything, 1984), artist Tatiana Gaviola videotapes a woman repeating the phrase: “I am not afraid of anything.” In La Gallina Ciega (The Blind Chicken,1987), Patricia Navarro depicts a blindfolded woman haunted by ghosts as she walks, accompanied by laments and cries by someone being tortured. In Topologia I (Topology I, 1983), Soledad Fariña shows tight shots of a woman shaving her armpit as a symbol of the social expectations put on the female body, signaling violence and censorship.” (Sepúlveda, 2023)

Acá Nada: Acá Elsewhere (2013), a more contemporary work, follows the trajectory of Latin American diasporic bodies in the present Canadian context. The video gathers a number of Latin American artists living and working in Coast Salish territory (Vancouver) to discuss their work, as well as their experiences of exile, isolation, and community building. As the title suggests, Acá Nada refers to a name given to the northern part of the American continent by Iberian explorers. This history of the naming of so-called Canada and its subsequent colonization by England and France resonates with the anti-colonial perspective of the Latin American artists featured in the video. Still, the body remains present in this work; the distortion of the map alludes to the relation between bodies and land, and bodies crossing borders. Indigenous peoples across the Americas resist the borders of nation- states and diasporic bodies cross borders to find refuge/asylum.

 

Each of the five videos in this program presents borderlands and bodies as sites of resistance. El padre mío features marginalized people who were most negatively affected by Pinochet’s military violence. Rosenfeld’s Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento is an act of refusal and resistance that crosses borders. Camiruaga’s Popsicles transgresses the border of forbidden female sexual desire while Serrano’s Autocríticas blurs the boundary between subject and object, between artist and artwork, private and public. Acá Nada: Acá Elsewhere presents a geographical, more literal manifestation of the borderlands but is also lyrical in its evocation of the fluidity of the artists’ bodies that travel across time and space and the depiction of their subjectivity in relation to the local cultural landscape of Vancouver.


- Essay by Roya Akbari.