There can be no a community without rites. There has never existed. Amid apelike howls, our ancestors performed already funerary offerings. Before worrying about building houses for the living, they already buried their dead. Shared symbolic thinking gives meaning to life, aiming to unite the people, to frighten the fear of emptiness by inventing a social order within natural chaos. It is an order that does not come from the law but from magic, it does not […]
Tag: gender
Raquel Paiewonsky, irreducible hybridity
The island’s geography has been chosen by writers and utopians as the ideal place for the development of horizontal communities, without rich or poor, without envy or competitiveness, such as Aldous Huxley’s Pala. But the history tells us otherwise, locating in the most beautiful islands bloody chronicles of colonial despotism, cultural extermination and natural exploitation, to end up as a cover photo in a tourist brochure. The Dominican Raquel Paiewonsky belongs to a generation of […]
Athletic transgressions
Winckelmann revolutionized the historiography of ancient art by turning to the mystique of erotic contemplation. The artists’ school was in the gyms, he writes as he imagines Fidias going to the stadium to study the harmonious proportions of the athletes, their muscles in tension, the choreographic beauty of the struggles in the arena… Also, he figured Socrates in the arena recruiting young ephebos to whom to instruct in the art of the temperance. The contemplation […]
Check to the macho
Maybe the first artist who broke away from the archetype of virile man was Bas Jan Ader, when in early seventies introduced in a gallery pleas and sentences of melodrama as please do not leave me; when filmed himself crying uncontrollably (I’m too sad to tell you), arranging vases of flowers or delighting in front of a sunset. Although his intention was not to undermine the segregation of roles but to parody the image of […]