In the rites of passage the individual is separated from the community and then regrouped assuming a new status. At the threshold between these two phases, human being becomes transitional, remains in suspense, without social reality, and this invisibility allows him to move on the margins of the consensual structure. The “liminal person” is a creative power, liberated from all taboo. Within the ritual it is represented with asexual or bisexual attributes.
The anthropologist Victor Turner encouraged the study of this limen phase because it is the basis upon a culture is founded, from what is rejected as impure, what is filtered in the interstices, revealing the vulnerable essence of the classifications and beliefs that support a particular society.
In the IVAM, Cabello/Carceller take the liminal space par excellence of all architecture: the staircase that communicates two exhibition halls, interstitial element, transit zone. They put an advertisement to look for people who, in turn, feel that they live in a kind of limen-identity or social storeroom as gender identities that reject the prevailing categories. In Lost in transition, each staircase descending is a staging of conflicts or small gestures, in any case liberating by the mere fact of showing; each descent is a performative stanza and the sum of all, which we see in multiple screens, is a poem composed of free verses, without rhyme, without metric. The result is polymorphous, multiple, undisciplined.
Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller use different formulas to introduce thr reality in the museum: inviting “to act” to people who are positioned in the sexual dissidence, women inmates, migrants … what Judith Butler calls specters of the normative life. But also taking the books out of libraries and making us sweat their texts (rapping philosophy, dancing Gender Trouble …)
This transfer of the text to the body language not only means the departure of classrooms and the assault of the street, but also the death of the author, because the pain of Foucault is different from the rapper who appropriates those words with which the philosopher unmasked the changing face of racism.
When they propose to choreograph or rape subversive writings that deconstruct discriminatory policies, or drag performing Hollywood myths of masculinity … Cabello/Carceller put the liminal bodies in the spotlight. They dramatize the way roles and patterns spread between the heteronormative and the micropolitical tactics, evidencing that there can not exist one without the other, that the subjects and normed territories are defined by contrast of what is excluded, the spectral. It is almost better to take advantage of the fluid status of the spectrum than to believe that you are real and autonomous in a world of surrogates.
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Lost in transition_un poema performativo will be in exhibition in IVAM, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, until 15th January 2017
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