Unterstadt Chapter 2_Stereoscopic City: The absent ones
Stereoscopic City: The absent ones. Photographic series, Berlin 2005-2010. Connie Mendoza
[First advertisement after the fall of the Wall in East Berlin]
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LA REVANCHA DEL PUEBLO DE LOS ESPEJOS (El crimen perfecto, Jean Baudrillard)
Aquí comienza la gran revancha de la alteridad, de todas las formas que, sutil o violentamente privadas de su singularidad, plantean ahora al orden social, pero también al orden político y al orden biológico, un problema irresoluble.
«En aquellos tiempos, el mundo de los espejos y el mundo de los hombres no estaban aislados entre sí. Eran, además, muy diferentes: ni los seres, ni las formas, ni los colores coincidían. Los dos reinos, el de los espejos y el humano, vivían en paz. Se entraba y se salía de los espejos.
Una noche, la gente de los espejos invadió la tierra. Su fuerza era grande, pero después de sangrantes batallas, las artes mágicas del Emperador Amarillo prevalecieron. Rechazó a los invasores, los aprisionó en los espejos y les impuso la tarea de repetir, como en una especie de sueño, todas las acciones de los hombres. Les privó de su fuerza y de su figura y los redujo a simples reflejos serviles. Un día, sin embargo, se liberarán de este letargo mágico… Las formas comenzarán a despertarse. Diferirán poco a poco de nosotros, nos imitarán cada vez menos. Romperán las barreras de cristal y de metal y esta vez no serán vencidas.»
Borges, La fauna de los espejos
Ésta es la alegoría de la alteridad vencida y condenada al destino servil de la semejanza. Así que nuestra imagen en el espejo no es inocente. Detrás de cada reflejo, de cada semejanza, de cada representación, se oculta un enemigo vencido. El Otro vencido y condenado a ser sólo el Mismo. Esto ilumina con una luz singular el problema de la representación y de todos esos espejos que nos reflejan «espontáneamente» con una complacencia objetiva. Nada de todo eso es cierto, y cada representación es una imagen servil, fantasma de un ser antes soberano, pero cuya singularidad ha sido aniquilada. Pero que un día se rebelará, y entonces todo nuestro sistema de representación y de valores está destinado a perecer bajo el peso de la revuelta. La actual esclavitud de lo mismo y de la semejanza se romperá un día con la reaparición violenta de la alteridad. Soñábamos con pasar al otro lado de los espejos, pero son los pueblos de los mismos espejos los que irrumpirán en nuestro mundo. Y «esta vez no serán vencidos».
¿Qué ocurrirá con esa victoria? Nadie lo sabe. ¿Una nueva existencia de dos pueblos igualmente soberanos, absolutamente extraños pero absolutamente cómplices el uno del otro? Nada que ver en todo caso con la sujeción y la fatalidad negativa actuales.
Así que, en todas partes, los objetos, los niños, los muertos, las imágenes, las mujeres, todo lo que sirve de reflejo pasivo en un mundo a lo idéntico, está dispuesto a pasar a la contraofensiva. Ya cada vez se nos parecen menos…
I’ll not be your mirror!
Stage for a monkey woman performance
Entrance of a mall center. Dec. 2009. Connie Mendoza
Derrida_The_beast_and_the_Sovereign_I
Derrida_The_beast_and_the_Sovereign_II
Description from The University of Chicago Press:
The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract.
Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.
Human Zoos: Referents for “The Monkey Woman Odyssey” (Prototype)
In 1863 the elder Hagenbeck (1810–1887) began collecting exotic animals that came through the port. By the 1870s, the trade had proved more lucrative than his fish shop, and Hagenbeck had become one of the most prominent exotic animal traders in all of Europe. In 1874, the younger Hagenbeck traveled around the world collecting animals. Among his collections, however, were also human beings which he exhibited in “human zoos”. Hagenbeck decided to exhibit Samoan and Sami people (Laplanders) as “purely natural” populations. The Sami were presented with their tents, weapons, and sleds, beside a group of reindeer.
In 1874, Hagenbeck opened a zoo facility in Hamburg, called Carl Hagenbeck’s Thierpark, while he continued exhibiting humans. In 1876, he began exhibiting Nubians all across Europe. He also dispatched an agent to Labrador to secure a number of “Esquimaux” (Inuit) from the settlement of Hopedale; these Inuit (Abraham Ulrikab) were exhibited in the Hamburg Tierpark. [Wikipedia]
Abraham Ulrikab (c. 1845 – January 13, 1881) was an Inuk from
Hebron, Labrador, in the present day province of Newfoundland and
Labrador, Canada, who — along with his family — was to become a
zoo exhibit in Europe in 1880 as an attraction at the Hamburg,
Germany public zoo. [Wikipedia]
In 2002, Chilean historian Christian Baez found a series of photographs of indians from the southern extreme of America exhibited in Paris [Jardin d'Acclimatation] and other capitals cities of Europe in the, so called, “Human Zoos” in the 1880s. Four years later, Along with the englishman Peter Mason, he published, a book with half a hundred pictures and revelations about the sufferings of these travellers through a, for them, unknown world. In most cases brought against their will, they had to face abuse, imprisonment, sickness and death.
It was about mapuche, tehuelche, selk’nam and kawésqar groups caught and dragged before an European audience that paid to see them in cages. Among them was Calafate, a 9 years old selknam boy.
In Europe they were photographed, their bodies measured and their limbs wanted by scientists. While some of them got sick, others died and others were victims of sexual abuse. Calafate and his group had to bear even jail time in Brussels. ["Calafate" documentary film]
Like animals, eleven indios kawésqar were captured in 1881 in Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) by a german expedition, taken to Europe and exhibited in the Jardin d´Acclimatation of Paris, Hagenbeck’s Thierpark and the Zoo of Berlin. After a tour through Germany they ended in Zurich were they died after a short time.
This Tuesday arrived from Zurich the five skeletons of the kawésqar kidnapped in 1881 by (Hagenbeck?) german expedition.
The Image and the Death
UNTERSTADT _ Preparatory Schema
“The triadic constellation in which body, media, and image are interconnected:The image of the dead, in the place of the missing body, the artificial body of the image (the medium), and the looking body of the living interacted in creating iconic presence as against bodily presence.”
[Hans Belting, Image, Medium, Body]
the image + the body + the death: UNTERGRUND
Chapter 1
the absence of image + the body + the death: CITY PORTRAITS
Chapter 2
the image + the absence of body + the death: STEREOSCOPIC STADT
Chapter 3
the image + the body + the absence of death: TILLER GIRLS
Epilogue
the oblivion: DIE WANDLUNG
Instructions for building a snowman
Step 1: select a quite place and wait
Step 2: continue waiting in the same place
Step 3: when the snow covers you, you are a snowman
Anatomical Theatre: The Promises of Monsters
Anatomisches Theater der Tierarzneischule (The Veterinary School’s Anatomical Theatre). Charité, Berlin November 2009
Anatomishes Theater. Charité, Berlin November 2009
Anatomishes Theater. Berlin 1800
“The Promises of Monsters: A RegenerativePolitics for Inappropiate/d Others”
A Biopolitics of Artifactual Reproduction
“The Promises of Monsters” will be a mapping exercise and travelogue through mind-scapes and landscapes of what may count as nature in certain local/global struggles. These contests are situated in a strange, allochronic time-the time of myself and my readers in the last decade of the second Christian millenium-and in a foreign, allotopic place-the womb of a pregnant monster, here, where we are reading and writing. The purpose of this excursion is to write theory, i.e., to produce a patterned vision of how to move and what to fear in the topography of an impossible but all-too-real present, in order to find an absent, but perhaps possible, other present. I do not seek the address of some full presence; reluctantly, I know better. Like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, however, I am committed to skirting the slough of despond and the parasite-infested swamps of nowhere to reach more salubrious environs.7 The theory is meant to orient, to provide the roughest sketch for travel, by means of moving within and through a relentless artifactualism, which forbids any direct si(gh)tings of nature, to a science fictional, speculative factual, SF place called, simply, elsewhere. At least for those whom this essay addresses, “nature” outside artifactualism is not so much elsewhere as nowhere, a different matter altogether. Indeed, a reflexive artifactualism offers serious political and analytical hope. This essay’s theory is modest. Not a systematic overview, it is a little siting device in a long line of such craft tools. Such sighting devices have been known to reposition worlds for their devotees-and for their opponents. Optical instruments are subject-shifters. Goddess knows, the subject is being changed relentlessly in the late twentieth century.”
Full text: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/monsters.html
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