Picture
(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.
 
 
Picture
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
 
 
Picture

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
 
Picture
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…



 
 
Picture
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
 
Picture
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.