My research explores how post – colonialism and globalization moulded Argentina in the imagination of other nations, and how its cultural meanings are produced by the interplay of images and lapses in performative, visual and verbal texts. In particular I am interested in exploring how Argentina understood as Europe‘s uncanny other, allows itself to be a screen onto which others nations project their anxieties and desires, and works as a mirror in which they see themselves reflected. Within the realms of Hispanic Studies and performance I intend to investigate the cultural, political and historical relationship between Argentina and Europe. Touch and the Argentine Tango are introduced as a mode of negotiation and intercultural exchange. Touch connects human bodies but also bodies of thought, it is an instance of reaching out, a touching of an-other in a reciprocal engagement with the unknown, an act of reaching towards something or someone, of creating new paths that occur when bodies move. Tango is not only a dance but also a representation of a nomadic movement of cultural displacement, an encounter and dis-encounter, a complex network of misunderstood directions. REVIEW OF LITERATURE AND RELEVANT PRACTICE: Literary text from the United States, UK, Italy and Argentina itself, as well as internationally recognized films, advertisements and newspaper features, re-circulate the work to form the country meanings. Argentina crystallises in the representations made of it, a representation it invites, but that is not always to its liking. Kaminski (2008) explains that Argentina seems to generate and encourage the other’s imagining of it, since such imagining is a central component of the nation vision itself. Argentina projects the desired vision of itself outward, hoping to recover that vision when is reflected back in the eyes, words and images from elsewhere. Argentina is both familiar and unfamiliar to the West; strangely familiar or familiarly strange, it elicits a particular fascination in the global imaginary, like Borges’ Zahir this phenomenon is something ’ Uncanny’ being at the same time serious and absurd. Freud (1919) defined the uncanny as “the class of the frightening which leads to what is known and familiar” (p.220) For Freud the uncanny is predominantly concerned with the double: “the subject identifies itself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is or substitute the extraneous self for his own” (p.234) In the case of Argentina and Europe, the identification with the double goes both ways.Kaminsky (2008) states that “Argentina quite consciously names Europe as its double, its model. It begins and end with what is known, familiar and desirable about Europe, erasing any possibility of fearfulness”. (p.10) However when Europe takes note of Argentina, the uncanny comes into play. People writing from Europe project onto Argentina the savagery the stagnation, and the penury that the West fears for itself and that it worries, may be insufficiently covered or compensated by the civilization, the promise of wealth that Argentina also represents. The formulation currently in circulation that describe Argentina, is that of a once colonized nation, as either trapped in the web of exoticising dominant representation or that heroically claim its identity, seems to be oversimplified. Nouzeilles and Montaldo (2002) point out that “At the beginning of the twentieth century Argentina was a land of opportunity, luring European immigrants with promises of work and social advancement. However in the last quarter of a century, it became notorious for its state violence, political repression, and the permutation of the word “disappear”, making it a transitive verb.” (p.7). Argentina history and culture take different meaning in different historical periods. Cultural studies have noted Argentina’s history, culture and politics, but to my knowledge there has been no attempt to frame its cultural identity as a tactile, rhythmic and improvisational dance. My research will focus in the articulation of conceptualizations of Touch, between Argentina and Europe. A touch without empirical contact but understood as an expressive vehicle that creates identity and establishes a range of cultural investigation. Manning (2000) states “I reach out to touch you in order to invent a relation that will, in turn, invent me. To touch is to engage in the potential of an individuation. Individuation is understood as the capacity to become beyond identity” (p.34). The notion of touch, invents by drawing the other into a relation, therefore changing the limits of the touched-touching body. A gesture towards an-other is never static. Touch is what orients us toward an-other in a movement, in a direction. Touch evokes a displacement that produces affinities, attractions, divergence, ruptures fissures, and dissociations. Tango is usually introduced as the ultimate signifier of Argentine’s national identity, however I do not intend to approach Tango from this vantage point, preferring instead to locate it as an international crossing of human and cultural boundaries. Ramon Pelinski (1995) writes, “Tango resides neither entirely on its own terrain, nor entirely on the terrain of an-other” (p.18). Through Tango and touch I will attempt to emphasize the similarity between the body in constant movement, travelling through time and space and a Nation’s identity. I will try to disengage from a classic reading of the senses. To write against this notion is to become sensitive, to how a body like an identity can be re-defined and re-composed. This I hope will inspire the imagination of a new way of thinking that challenges the notion that the body like Argentina in the world imaginary is a stable and fixed place of expression. My research will propose that what is called national identity is a negotiable production of both internal and external readings of the nation. I intend to examine what a nation might offer as an idea, how a nationality can became a metaphor, the effects, condensation and simplification of its meanings. The fascination that Argentina (Europe’s other), holds in the imaginary of writers, filmmakers and artists will also be central to my research. What make Argentina such an appealing place, which continuously hold fascination for people who never stepped foot there? Is Argentina’s identity projected on to the world by its cultural elite, out of desire to show what is more appealing to the West? Because films and novels which spread Argentina’s identity around the world, are internationally produced, to what extent and in which way are artists from abroad responsible of this image? Moreover, are the subtle complexity and specificity of Argentina fully comprehended and represented, or are they prefabricated ideas assumed to inhere or cohere around this place called Argentina? These issues and questions will be at the heart of my PHD research. Add Comment PERFORMANCE AND CONFESSIONS 07/14/2011
 Edoardo Pavlosky in 'Potestad My previous finding points out that Sophocles’ Antigone leaves the audience with a sense of hope due to the fact that Creon not only admits he was wrong but also regrets his decisions, which he realizes were mistaken. He proclaims he has learned, even if it is too late. This unfortunately is a dream that relatives of the Desaparecidos haven’t had the luck of experiencing just yet. Eduardo Pavlosky’s Potestad (1985) is a play about the perpetrators of violence, their confession to this violence, and the strategies they develop before and after they confess to come to terms with their role as perpetrators. Eduardo Pavlosky plays the role of a mourning father whose daughter, the audience first deduce, has been kidnapped and disappeared under dictatorship. Alone on stage the father narrates is grief and pantomimes desperately the last moment of a family scene on a Saturday afternoon before his daughter is forcibly taken from the family living room. The play shocking impact comes at the end, when the father undergoes a grotesque identity transformation and reveals to the audience that he is a medical doctor who had forged the death certificates of a couple and had taken their newborn baby and raised her with his wife as their own daughter. Afterward, spectators are left stunned and indignant that they had identified so strongly with a character that revealed himself to be a repressor at the end of the play. In 1995 the vow of silence that the military had taken to defend their discourse of denial was irrevocably broken when the ex-naval officer Adolfo Scilingo confessed publicly on television of his personal involvement in the death flights carried out during the dictatorship, in which drugged prisoners were thrown to their deaths in the Rio the La Plata. His sensational confession marked the beginning of the end of impunity for perpetrators who had benefited from the Final Stop and Due Obedience Law of the mid-eighties. Little did Scilingo know that when he flew to Madrid in 1997 to meet with Judge Baltasar Garzon to offer his horrifying account once again, he would be taken into custody and tried in a Spanish court for crimes against humanity in a defining moment for international human rights. In2005 Scilingo was sentenced to over 1,000 years in prison, a verdict achieved in spite of Scilingo’s performance of fainting spells, disorientation and amnesia. On the stand Scilingo performed his retraction viscerally; he consciously enacted bodily malfunction as his only remaining defence against his previously recorded and published confessional narrative. More than twenty years after the end of the dictatorship, after trials and amnesties, and amid the steady accumulation of evidence and information available to incriminate perpetrators, the interpretative framework has changed and expanded, and spectators are more attentive to the nuances of these performances both on-and offstage. Pavlosky’s Potestad has now become a classic Argentine drama and permanent fixture in the country cultural imaginary. The play has acquired importance as an ongoing reminder of the need for vigilance and monitoring of impunity. ARGENTINIANS AND SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE 04/14/2011
 Antigone from 'Antigone' by Sophocles (oil on canvas), by Marie Spartali Stillman Sophocles’ Antigone has always held a very special place in Argentine theatre. The troublesome history of the country has allowed every audience in turn to make a new association, to connect the play with some new aspect of their present situation. Even if the performance of Antigone follows the version of Sophocles word for word, an Argentine audience is bound to make certain associations that would lose some of their impact if they were alluded to explicitly, as it certainly happens in some modern rewritings of the play. Sometimes, as they say, ‘less is more’. Sophocles’ Antigone The number of connotations that can be activated in the minds of an Argentine audience during a performance of Sophocles’ version is striking. To begin with the corpse, denied a funeral, is deprived of being mourned and buried. Or, on the other side of the coin, the family deprived of mourning and burying the dead, deprived of the possibility to forget and move on: But as for the unhappy corpse of Polynices, they say it has been proclaimed to the citizens that none shall conceal it in a grave or lament for it, but that they should leave it unwept for, unburied, a rich treasure house for birds as they look out for food. (Ant 26–30)11 Secondly, the opposition between women and men. Women are supposed to be submissive, to obey the power embodied by men, but women are in fact those resisting power, those exposing the abuse of power and trying to fight against against it, as did the mothers and grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. Why, we must remember that we are women, who cannot fight against men, and then that we are ruled by those whose power is greater, so that we must consent to this and to other things even more painful. (Ant 61–4)12 Thirdly, Creon, as new ruler of the land, begins his ‘government’by producing a public statement that violates not human but divine laws, and the human right to be mourned, buried and forgotten. This statement is made as a way to establish a new power, to change the manner in which things are done and to ‘settle things down’.13 Later in the play, a very strong connotation is activated by the speech of the guard carrying Antigone. It does not matter to him whether Antigone is right or wrong or what will happen to her; his own safety is far more important: For to have escaped oneself from trouble is most pleasant, but to bring friends into danger is painful. But all this matters less to me than my own safety! (Ant 437–40) 14 Many Argentineans denounced their friends or acquaintances to the armed forces in order tokeep things quiet at home. Needless to say, most of those denounced are now desaparecidos. The feeling of guilt and shame for those who helped the armed forces at the time or who simply carried on with their lives as if nothing was happening is something that will remain in Argentina’s collective conscience for generations to come. Compliance with authority is obviously related to fear. Antigone tells Creon that the people ofThebes would certainly approve what she has just done were they not afraid of him.15 ‘Fear shuts their mouths’, she says. Fear prevents people from acting, from committing themselves,from doing the right thing.Creon describes later what he is going to do to Antigone: I shall take her to where there is a path which no man treads, and hide her, still living, in a rocky cavern, putting out enough food to escape pollution, so that the whole city may avoid contagion. And there she can pray to Hades, the only one among the gods whom she respects and perhaps be spared from death; or else she will learn, at that late stage, that it is wasted effort to show regard for things in Hades. (Ant 773–80) It is impossible, as an Argentine spectator, to attend a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone and not to react to this passage. Creon is not saying that he is going to punish Antigone by killing her because of what she has done. He is going to hide her. It is not just about killing, it is also about hiding. It is about preventing others from seeing her, from being witnesses of her fate. He will ‘hide’ her from view in a cave, still living, so that, as Antigone herself says at lines 850–52,she will be neither dead nor alive: ‘Ah, unhappy one, living neither among mortals nor as a shade among the shades, neither with the living nor with the dead’. Neither with the living nor with the dead, ‘ni vivo ni muerto, desaparecido’. Later on, Tiresias warns Creon against continuing to desecrate the corpse: Give way to the dead man, and do not continue to stab him as he lies dead! What is the bravery of killing a dead man over again? (Ant 1029–30) The man is already dead so there is no gain in doing him wrong now. Similarly, not handing over the bodies of those desaparecidos was a way to continue to harm them as well as their families, to keep killing them over and over again. So, what was the right thing to do? Surely, to release the prisoners and return the bodies, so as to allow the families to mourn and bury their dead. When Creon cries for advice, the chorus’ reply is no other but this: ‘Go and release the girl from the subterranean dwelling, and make a tomb for him who lies there’ (Ant 1100–1). The correspondences are certainly striking.At the end of the tragedy, Creon not only admits he was wrong but also regrets his decisions, which he now realizes were mistaken. He proclaims he has learned, even if it is too late:Woe for the errors of my mistaken mind, obstinate and fraught with death! You look on kindred that have done and suffered murder! Alas for the disaster caused by my decisions! (…) Alas, I have learned, unhappy as I am. (Ant 1261–5; 1271–2) However terrible the ending of this tragedy might appear, to an Argentine audience it seems, on the contrary, quite a positive one. The person responsible for the death of innocent young people, the person who established a law against gods and humans alike, mistaken as he was, at the end learns his lesson and tries to repair his mistakes. This is the dearest dream and hope of every single relative of a desaparecido: that the murderers finally admit they were wrong, ask for forgiveness and ‘give way to the dead’. Excerpt from: IDENTITY, DIGNITY AND MEMORY: PERFORMING/RE-WRITING ANTIGONE IN POST-1976 ARGENTINA © M. Florencia Nelli, Oxford University/ U.N.L.P.-CONICET Argentina ARTIFICIAL RESPIRATION Ricardo Piglia 10/20/2010
  Juan Carlos Distefano, The Mute. Owing to the dictatorship’s restrictions on political activity and public debate, the risks of speaking out were enormous. Although ever present, repression could be acknowledged only in private, far from watchful eyes and untrustworthy ears. Thus, resistance was practiced from behind the protective cover of silence. In 1980, Ricardo Piglia published Artificial Respiration - a novel that metaphorically discussed state violence and censorship through allegory. The book immediately became a channel through which a community of survivors could tacitly shed light on the possible causes of a shared national ordeal. The novel tells the story of a writer, Renzi, who sets out in search of his uncle, professor Marcelo Maggi – a nonconformist historian with un-orthodox ideas – who has mysteriously “disappeared”. Piglia uses this central anecdote as a pretext for digression into a discussion of national cultural traditions and the history of violence that has haunted Argentina from its inception. In the following passage, Renzi converse with Vladimir Tardewsky, a polish intellectual who may or may not have the key to Marcelo Maggi’s location. What begins, as an enquiry rapidly becomes a long and erudite debate on the role of Europeanism in Argentina literary self-perception. Like Piglia, his characters believe that the explanation and possible redemption of an age intolerant of intellectual freedom are encrypted in the politics of literature.  (photo above - a common image on the streets of Buenos Aires) In this imaginary tango the role of the Other is performed by ‘La Otra’ the female other (Argentina) This Otra is guilty of Otherness or, to put it differently, is accused of being an Otra in that she lacks and exceed in “something” compared to the male (Colonizer). Her excessive passion and her lack of control over it beg for the male’s embrace and leadership. She will be dragged into the dance, be led through it, and be held while performing unstable/excessive footwork. Her instinctive “passion” can never totally subdued, she passionately resist and is comforted by the male embrace/control. But her passion is aroused by the male desire...In the performance the exotic Argentina (Other) threat the colonizer (the One) through her display of excess. The exotic is the passionate hunting past at the margin of the imperial civilized world. For the Other to become an Exotic, this threat needs to be tamed, tilted toward the side of the pleasurable, the disturbingly enjoyable: the erotic. The dangerousness however, should be retained, evoked again and again, as proof of the necessity of colonial civilised domination. Exotic places, persons and things often display the amiable side of the Other: plants, perfumes, clothing, jewellery, food and spices, art, courtship, songs and dance. The threatening side equally exoticised, remains in the background, a haunting violence: dictators, volcanoes, diseases, polygamy, poverty. The femaleness of the exotic is identified precisely in this ambivalence. The exuberance, sumptuousness, danger and sensuality of the exotic are again, a result of measuring the Other (as she is constituted) with the imperial bourgeois morality of the coloniser’s stick. The exotic Other always comes out of this operation as an oddity lacking something-rationality, control, decorum, propriety – and exceeding in something else – violence sensuality and passion. THE WORDS OF SILENCE 03/10/2010
 A lesbian Jewish woman who suffered from schizophrenia, Pizarnick experimented with language to trace the open wounds of her daring choices and the contradictions that tormented her inner self. However the beauty of her poetry exceeds the bounds of the merely biographical. The difficulties of writing and the permanent gap between words and things give Pizarnik’s verses, shocking strength and allow the reader to step into an existence circumscribed by silence.Pizarnick writing reveals an awareness of the separation that language implies. At the same time, it is marked by the stubborn wish, that poetic language could bridge the gap between the language and its referents. Poetry is often invoked as a kind of promise land that could counteract a sense of exile from world self and language, but the vain effort of such an invocation soon becomes apparent. Pizarnik at times regards writing as potential asylum for “unspeakable silences” at other she sees it as the place where the poet is held hostage by the impersonal forces of language and by un undefined memory that refuses to be silenced. Fuentes (1974) writes “could there be anything more Argentine than this necessity to verbally fill these empty spaces to fill the blank book of Argentina?” (p.25). In order to illustrate how the universal stories which the world libraries set the standard for Argentine selfhood, I have choose Part III of a group of short poems entitled, "Los Pequenos Cantos," published in December of 1971 (Pizarnik 234) to illustrate Fuentes’ claim. el centro de un poema es otro poema el centro del centro es la ausencia en el centro de la ausencia mi sombra es el centro del centro del poema the center of a poem is another poem the center of the center is absence in the center of absence my shadow is the center of the center of the poem (my trans.) http://pages.slc.edu/~mnegroni/pizarnik/index.html ARGENTINA : PERCEPTION AND REPRESENTATION 01/14/2010
 Victoria Ocampo, the Argentine intellectual creator of SUR, recalls in a memoir how Virginia Woolf asked her to describe the blue butterflies of the pampas, ( Woolf probably found this information in a travel book by Darwin) butterflies that Ocampo had never seen and that probably had never lighted on any of pampas flowers. To please Woolf, whom she idolized , Ocampo made the British writer a gift of a set of mounted butterflies, feeding the fantasy that would give her entry into Woolf’s company. She would trade butterflies and the fanciful Argentina they represented for access to the Europe of her own desires. Ocampo recounts: " the people sent to bring the large package to Tavistock Square were a cousin of mine and an English governess. Neither one looked mysterious or strange. But with Virginia it was hard to foresee what kind of person she would invest with a mystery that flowed from her, or what her antennae captured. On this occasion she writes to me: “ Two veiled ladies I underline because I have never seen my cousin or Miss May wearing veils), two mysterious women arrived in the hall of my house…these ladies handed me a large package and after murmuring some unintelligible musical words they disappeared”. ( here I will make a note. My cousin speaks English. Miss May was as English as Virginia. Unintelligible? Let us follow after this parenthesis, the author of Orlando; her imagination is more seductive that our overly matter of fact vision.) It took me - she continues - ten minutes to realise that it was a gift, and that this gift was a box filled with butterflies under glass. Nothing could have been more fantastically unreal. ( Nothing but you yourself, Virginia, I thought.) " Kazminsky 2008, p. 3 ZAHIR 01/04/2010
 What make Argentina such an appealing place? Why does it continuously hold fascination for people who never stepped foot there? Argentina’s place in the imagination of the western world has its roots deep into the nineteen century, when Englishmen, North Americans and Germans where recruited to build railroads educational system, and a whiter nation for a newly formed republic.By the end of the twentieth century Argentinian Tango, Eva Peron and the mothers of Playa de Mayo, the Falklands war and the Dirty War, Jorge Louis Borges, Diego Maradona and economic chaos were entrenched into the consciousness of the western world. My curiosity for this nation felt for me like a Borgesian Zahir - something that stick in the mind refusing to be shaken. Literary text from the United States, UK, Italy and Argentina itself as well as internationally recognized films, advertisements and newspaper features, re-circulate the work to form the country meanings. Argentina crystallizes in the representation made of it, representations it invites, but that are not always to its liking… TANGO…..TANGERE: TO TOUCH (LATIN) 12/20/2009
 Tango, as signifier of darkness and illegitimacy, of desire and counter-culture is more than a dance. In its popular representation, Argentine Tango is described as a dance that evokes illicit sexual desire through a movement that often looks choreographed. But Argentine Tango is much more than this mythic evocation of a movement of desire. Tango is everything from a dance of solitude to a nomadic movement of cultural displacement to a strong signifier of national identity. It is a dance of encounter and dis-encounter, an embrace of repressed sensuality and a complex network of misunderstood directions. The Tango I am interested in exploring here is improvised. In fact, it is the improvised nature of Tango that fascinates me and makes it possible for me to use Tango as an example of the politics of touch. Since the movements of Tango are always to come, it is impossible to speak of a Tango, of an ideal gesture or a contained negotiation: Tango works as an attempt to explore relations in the context of potential corporeal negotiations. Although Tango could be introduced as the ultimate signifier of Argentine national identity, I do not approach Tango from this vantage point, preferring instead to locate it as an international crossing of human and political boundaries, as the politic of touch that shift all notions of inactive encounters with an-other. “Tango is a movement across time and space, an unruly politics that engages with the night world to re arrange its system of control, and through bodies that exist not for the outside world, but for the inner exchange between two silent subjects, moving quietly, eyes half closed towards dawn.” (Savigliano 1995-p.xvii) Tango as an encounter it is a peripheral engagement with the world that introduces us to a different way of living with an other. It is a movement that offers the possibility of improvising our encounters. It is a dance that turns us toward an other to whom we might not speak. Tango takes places in the periphery of the social order. Tango is a dance that is about movement between here and there, about an exchange between two bodies, about the pain of disconnection and the desire for communication. THE OTHER WITHIN 12/14/2009
 I am currently staying in Buenos Aires for a period of research which will last for roughly two months. My own first knowledge of the place is minimal, however my research is concerned with drawing a link between the theory of Tango, touch and the body in constant movement. Buenos Aires being the city of Tango and a place which history is deeply rooted in the concept of migration, represent the place where in the next few weeks I will attempt to extend my enquire, through exploring the city’s social, political and cultural life, . The engagement with touch is not an exploration of something I could clearly define as a sensing, but as an encounter with the notion of a sensing body in movement. One of the things that one cannot avoid when stepping foot in Buenos Aires is coming to terms with the events which has left indelible scars in the country’s psyche and soul and still now ripples through the life of its people. In brief, during the late seventies, when the government was overthrown by the military junta ( 1976-83), roughly 30000 citizens, mainly left wing militant, women, children and other people totally extraneous to political events, have been kidnapped, tortured or thrown alive into the sea by the military dictatorship, because they were thought to be a ‘metaphysical enemy’ of the junta and a threat to the security and stability of the nation. They have came to be called the ‘Desaparecidos’ A pacific protest was organised by the mothers of the ‘Disappeared’. This involved the meeting of all their mothers and wives in the major square (Plaza de Mayo) where everyday they would walk endlessly around the main monument of the square in front of the government palace, in the hope to find out about the destiny of their beloved and to stop the kidnapping of more innocents. Their symbol is a white handkerchief wrapped around their head. For more info http://www.yendor.com Last week I have attended the weekly manifestation of the ‘ Mothers of Plaza the Mayo’ which currently take place every Thursday at 15.30. These are a few thoughts that came to me in the aftermath of the event. Lifessness is movement how do dead stories move? Can we have the power to present what in the present has no name? Images of traces and traces of images. There is nothing that was there and now is gone. | ArchivesSeptember 2011 Categories |
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