Fourth Disagreement

From insile to exile. Are we all outsiders?

By Arlindo Machado, Curator

During the 1990’s, foreign images started entering the until then familiar scene of video, the frontiers between the familiar and the alien started fading, and there awoke a consciousness of a globalized planet and an internationalized humanity. Producers started migrating to other countries, searching for better opportunities and new points of reference for their work. The concept of “foreign” changed. In the past, foreignness was regarded only in territorial terms, based on the binary opposition between the familiar and the remote. Today we are all foreigners, inside or outside our countries. There surfaced what Nestor Canclini calls native foreigners, people who, because of their differences, are displaced in their own countries. Insile, instead of exile, an internal exile who does not qualify as a citizen. This exhibition seeks to confront the most consistent productions of recent Latin American video within this movement of interpenetration of the global and the local, from the viewpoint of a radical internationalization. The exhibition proposes an innovative discussion about what identifies the late 20th and early 21st centuries in human, social and artistic terms, by concentrating on what Latin American artists are doing outside their native countries, and on how those who stayed at home look at and interpret what is happening outside.

The word “foreign” carries certain connotations related to the fear of the unfamiliar. Foreign is that which I do not understand, that which bothers and frightens me. In Muntadas’s videos for the project On Translation: Fear, people who live near the border between Mexico and the United States (Fear/Miedo, 2005) or on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, between Spain and Morocco (Miedo/ف ض, 2008), refer to those who live on the other side as something threatening, unpredictable, something worth protecting themselves from. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of those in the position of foreigners, the most common feelings are isolation, discrimination and confrontation with alien hostility. The result has been a kind of cinema and video seeking to explain this movement, or moreover, a kind of audiovisual product developed within this movement by people who are living the diasporic experience themselves. Hamid Naficy (2001) classifies the audiovisual works produced within these moving communities as accented cinema or video. Most of these accented videos do not use one main source-language, since they are produced within the gaps of several cultures and languages at the same time. The glossolalia of these videos –the fact that they use different languages at the same time, combined or not– makes subtitling a practically compulsory activity. The subtitling even becomes an intrinsic part of the film’s production.

Insile in Mexico. Border. Boundary of myself.

By Araceli Zúñiga, Curator

The diversity of contemporary thought can no longer be expressed solely by the filtered (inherited) traditional language of the Spanish colonizing, evangelizing tongue … “Our Father who art in Heaven”…
“The language of power, the more articulate the more brutal, has not ceased to negate and punish those who even by screaming and muttering persist to see and name the world with the depth of innocence.”
Vicente Zito Lema

In our new century society, visual enterprises and multiple writings (experimental, of course) are the equivalent of a new printing press and of other books, with their new codes, with their other mediums, naturally Amerindian, Americo-Latin. But, in order to enter the unexplored continent of experimentation –always in search of a visual language of one’s own, in search of our mother tongues (Earth, our mother!)– we must work on the word image, we must decontextualize it from its traditional semiotic reading as means of conferring on it another form and, hence, another meaning. Video art –specifically indigenous, genre video art– represents a radical enterprise of reading and writing, tlacuilas. An emerging writing for today’s art, just as a palimpsest: text upon text, multiple writings upon multiple writings, it has developed and performs as a Mesoamerican codex, in nonlinear, transdisciplinary, multidirectional, multiethnic, countercultural writings: peeved and teasing so as to explore our own feminine voice. Dating a few years back, and to an increasing extent, female indigenous video artists from rural and urban communities in Mexico have articulated through their audiovisual production stances that reflect the diversity of indigenous population in our country, by focusing on specifical problems, but not only so. By crossing linguistic and geographical borders, their work has unclosed new spaces to show the reality of indigenous peoples in Mexico. My personal conclusion on video art and experimental genre video in its indigenous, mestizo status is that it represents another form of speaking, feeling and thinking about the world. It is, therefore, an “impure” art, one displaced, exiled –and self-exiled– from the earthly paradise of official language. It is born, it reproduces and it disturbs because it is not legitimated nor blessed. It is an art of resistance and assertion. A strained rope. A rebel. Resisting. No Mexican video art exhibit can be complete if it misses the indigenous women of my country, the indigenous women of all the countries in the world, the women who have taken the floor through this medium.

VIDEO PROGRAM//INSILIO* IN MEXICO

Exhibition of experimental, independent and alternative videoart, written and produced by indigenous women in Mexico.