Trama's contribution to next Rain's publication.

The English idiom "Chinese whispers syndrome" is a metaphorical reference to a communication phenomenon that takes place when a message gets distorted before reaching its intended receiver. The distortion may be due to either jamming or misinterpretation, which may or may not be deliberate. This trope has originated in a game played by children all over the world. The players sit in a ring, and one of them whispers a long utterance into the ear of another player beside him/her; this procedure is repeated until the utterance reaches the last player, who voices aloud what he/she believes to have heard. In countries where more than one language is spoken, the game includes an alternation of languages, thus making up a chain of translations and counter-translations that speeds up random changes to the original message, while letting through meanings that are characteristic of the narrative rhetoric pertaining to all the languages involved. Metaphors, body language and other forms of non-verbal communication also find their way into the message. When the common knowledge shared by both sender and receiver has been depleted, the syntax loses accuracy, and body language, together with the physical experience of the act of whispering, becomes the most important feature of communication.

I feel drawn to compare the phenomenon described above to the art exchanges that we experienced in Trama. It might be wrongly thought that such an analogy arises from some negative experience during the exchanges, and that I mistrust the fact that true communication may occur among participants. Far from it, I intend to examine the reasons that lead us to categorize our inclination to misunderstanding as something negative, when it is in fact just the natural expression of what we gather from the first exchange stages in a programme like Rain.
In the closing debate for Trama 2001, Reinaldo Laddaga reached the following conclusion:

"The level of uninterrupted contact that we have been able to preserve (throughout the debate) amid the general misunderstanding strikes me as both thrilling and amazing. I think such a situation is exciting precisely because of the high levels of misunderstanding, which would not be generated in more formal contexts; say, a class, an academic seminar, or a social gathering . No doubt our misunderstandings are related to the fact that each of us is contributing a large number of thought and speculation chains revolving around such terms as institutionalization, institution, or globalization. It stands to reason that every one of us understands these notions in quite different ways, in accordance with our own intellectual background and origins, not only in the long term, but also in these times and, above all, with our different evaluations of local political values related to the use of the words in question".(2)

When tackling our activities in the net, we artists involved in the Rain programme propose an exchange of artists and ideas through several geo-political axes: south-south, south-north, north-south. In brief, it would seem as if we were talking about an attempt at fluent exchanges among dissimilar contexts, taking for granted that these exchanges will, by themselves alone, be equally beneficial to all parties involved.
Nevertheless, if we bear in mind that each activity is suggested by a specific host, who brands the proposals with geo-political, artistic, cultural and intellectual circumstances ruling the host’s own context, we might be able to improve our analysis by trying to descry how these exchanges vary depending on the host, since every exchange will be conditioned by his/her own self-conceiving capacity, the capacity to conceive the other, and the capacity of action and achievement regarding his/her exchange hypothesis.
Going back to Trama, which is the issue I intend to examine: what specific features tinge this exchange when the host, the one that makes the proposal, comes from a context like Argentina, where the processes of attainment of contemporary art ( modernism, post-modernism, and the ensuing globalization) are "processes that appear on our horizon in a traumatic, repressive fashion"?

(Post-modernism and globalization) " appeared after a dictatorship that lasted ten years and that either decimated or sent into exile a large number of our most brilliant brains. It was inevitable, then, that these movements should have appeared as an overriding imposition of such times, whose urgent pressure did not allow for critical thought any more than it fostered the development of an arena where some kind of confrontation was possible. It was sheer ‘take it or leave it’, and leaving it meant excluding oneself from history.
(…) There were no chances to enter a discussion; in fact, there were practically no chances to understand how globalization and post-modernity- both of them foundational phenomena of the era- had managed to develop. Thus, it was also impossible to define, in some way that could be adequately grasped, the kind of conditioning and determining factors that they brought along , thrusting us into a new, irreversible landscape of an epoch that caught us unawares no less than distrustful." (3)

I shall now go on to describe two projects that originated in Trama, where they were also discussed. The first project will enable me to describe certain ways of thinking that pervade young artists’ local practices at the same time as they provide information about some of the strategies of artistic survival that are typical of our region. These practices are related to irregular assimilation processes resulting from post-modernism and globalization; namely, appropriation, narration, contingency and parody(4) might be useful mechanisms to build up thought in a scenario dominated by uncertainty, where artistic practice needs to be negotiated one day at a time.
The second project I will deal with is a proposal of artistic exchange devised for Rain and respecting the exchange features defined by Trama in keeping with the local circumstances.

The body as context

During the Encounter for the Analysis of Works of Art organized by Trama in Buenos Aires in 2000(5).

Tucumán artist Sandro Pereira (1974- …) contributed a work in progress which he entitled Stamps of Life, although he himself calls it "the Marilyns". That year Sandro decided to have his back tattooed with a series of pictures of Marilyn Monroe, based on a reproduction of Andy Warhol’s famous work published in a mass-circulation book about American pop-art. For every landmark in his life, every time Sandro feels that something has become a highlight in his private life, he has a new Marilyn tattooed. The outcomes do not resemble one another, not only because of the unpredictability of the tattoos, which is explained by the fact that the supporting material is organic –human skin, in fact- but also because different tattoo artists perform the different works, thus producing different Marilyns who bear no resemblance at all to the real diva’s features. All in all, it could be said that the figures are likenesses of women from Tucumán in a parody of Marilyn: their bobbed hair dyed blonde ( just like Monroe’s), a mole on the left side of their faces, between the cheek and the upper lip, a half-open mouth, false eyelashes..

When faced with this work in a private encounter(6) that could be compared to a situation where one is presented with the unpalatable display of a wound after the patient has undergone a complicated surgery, I cannot help wondering why Sandro has chosen Warhol’s Marilyns for his tattoos. Why is every significant event in his life represented by a Marilyn on his back? And last but not least: why is he showing this to me?

If a tattoo is generally regarded as an explicit, eloquent mark identifying and celebrating the social group where someone feels he belongs, what kind of identification process does Sandro originate through his Stamps of Life?

In this project, the artist links a long list of transformations into a chain: the image of Norma Jean Mortenson, dyed and disguised into Marilyn Monroe, turned into a serigraph icon by Andy Warhol, appropriated by Sandro through some sort of existentialist sentimentality, transformed once again by the accident that his skin forces on the sign, transfixed by the tattoo artist’s imaginary, and repeated in the serialized images on Sandro’s back. The images are always different, none of them is Marilyn Monroe, but they all are Sandro’s own Marilyns. Each of them stands for an excuse to begin a narration, to reach some private story that needs to be retold and that, every time it is actually retold, strengthens his identity while strengthening the contingency of the operation.

What Sandro seems to be doing through this alchemical attempt that seeks to transform an emblematic character of American pop into a "stamp of life" is to achieve some sort of visual translation, where the unavoidable rhetoric nature of every existing language –a nature that all translation processes tend to obliterate for the sake of accurate syntax- literally becomes embodied in his body. If, according to Spivak, it is true that "translation is the most intimate act of reading" and that " the translator’s job consists in facilitating love between the original text and its shadow" (7) then reader/translator Sandro offers his body not only as an interface but also as a guarantee that the said rhetoric will become explicit.

The context as text

A cooperation-and-exchange project among artists, Context will be taken to several cities where activities following Rain’s guidelines are carried out: San Miguel de Tucumán (Argentina), Jakarta (Indonesia), Bamako (Mali), Durban (South Africa), Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Mumbai (India), and Duala (Cameroon).

Los proyectos planteados por los artistas invitados en cada una de estas ciudades investigarán la relación entre texto y contexto.
The projects presented by guest artists in each of the above mentioned cities will examine the relations between text and context.
The work will be shaped as a collaborative chain between pairs of artists. Every participant will perform two roles: in their own city, they will act as hosts and assistants to guest artists for the development of the latter’s project, whereas they will be assisted by local artists in the completion of their own project in a foreign city.

Context’s activities started in San Miguel de Tucumán in July 2002 when guest artist Germaine Kruip (Holland, 1970- …) performed her Punto de Vista, aided by local artist Jorge Gutiérrez, drama group La Baulera, managing artist Carlota Beltrame and philosopher Jorge Lovisolo(8).
The collaborative chain proposed by Context implies the use of resources that are typical of narration and oral tradition. The narration transferred from one context to another is built up through body, visual, textual and gestural languages.

A proficient reader is able to regain implicit notions and to do what it takes in order to understand a text. Reading could be thought of as a social transaction where the reader’s participation is as active as the writer’s. If we define a text as a set of particular and contingent references acting upon a given context, the narrator of the text as the host artist who encourages the exchange, and the reader as the guest artist, we may start to examine how proficient we artists are when we become readers of our own context, and also find out how much of our context we succeed in translating when confronted with a different context from the one which calls for our work.

When the text available is not only read but also narrated so that the listener may retell it to a third party who, in turn, will become a new narrator/reteller after having read or listened to the text, we are faced with "an interaction between drives that contrive shape and definition, and counter-drives that create and spread disorganization"(9), according to Karl Kroeber’s description of oral narration.

In Rain, what each participant knows about the context he/she is visiting comes from the stories and readings provided by the works and ideas of the participant artists. This may arouse misunderstanding; still, we should not think of it as a failure in communication, leading to non-objective generalizations, but rather as a desirable point of strength and exchange, since it generates so much certainty and intensity.
The possibility of an encounter with guest artists channels a desire to tell stories, in the hope of finding in the other a likeness that we can recognize as something familiar; a likeness that will enable us to weave a net of associations and meanings that may not only shape up and strengthen our individual efforts but also challenge and question them.

This particular text started by describing a phenomenon that accounted for a failure in communication. It seemed then that there was a compelling need to articulate proposals aiming to avoid the consequences resulting from inaccuracy in the course of an exchange of knowledge. However, there seems to be an exception to the syndrome: when it comes to articulating an exchange of thought in the field of art, perhaps gestures, skin, and body, with their particular contingency and special characteristics, will overcome syntactic logic and succeed in communicating the only thing that can be truly communicated. After all, perhaps murmullos chinos are not merely a children’s game.

Claudia Fontes
Brighton, May 2003

Translation: Marta Castillo