works from last century feminist questions object subject

lost bunny 1999 London

my work has had different concepts floating on its discourse, addiction, sexual abuse,madness and mental illness , prostitution, but always questioning all of those roles and knowing how also, the stereotype and archetype will play on the social representations of all of those issues.
So will be the aestheticization of all of this situations a perverse turn on its self by a perverted female artist ? or will it be a way of pointing out the topic , the use of that topic and the interest inherent on its use by social monitoring rules and distributed roles.

here an interesting essay in french by Dianne Watteau

 Esther Planas, une jeune artiste anglaise, manipule un énorme lapin en peluche qui devient un instrument masturbatoire. DansVoodoo (1999-2000), elle se place dans un univers enfantin : dans un paysage de montagne innocent, elle est nue et tient la tête du lapin entre ses jambes. Ces dessins seront une sorte de story bord d’une vidéo Lost Rabbit (2000) dans laquelle elle se trémousse avec le lapin géant. Elle tient la pose, mime les clichés féminins (tirer ses cheveux vers l’arrière). Dans Dirty snow (2000), un jeune homme se substitue au lapin, devant lequel elle suce une sucette. Esther Planas crée une forme de perversité en jouant sur des interdits de masturbation infantile en faisant de l’autre un instrument. Mike Kelley mettait déjà en scène en 1990 (Manipulating Mass-Produced, Idealized Objects, 1990, performance, New York) une femme chevauchant un grand lapin, tandis que lui déféquait sur une petite peluche. Il voulait traiter plus « de la répression de l’érotisme, des conditions de cette répression que du désir proprement-dit dans une œuvre cochonne[17] [17] Art Press, septembre 1993, « Un miroir faussé de...
suite ». Dans les deux propositions, l’entorse passe par le déplacement de l’acte sexuel vers le jouet. Les peluches ne sont pas destinées aux enfants pour Kelley, mais sont une représentation asexuée pour les parents. Le jouet chez Barthes construit le mythe de l’Enfance. Ces artistes revisitent l’activité de sublimation freudienne, soit « la capacité d’échanger le but sexuel originaire contre un autre but, qui n’est plus sexuel mais qui lui est psychiquement apparenté ». Le sexe féminin dans le travail de Planas est assumé dans son caractère de produit de marché. Recourir au jouet comme partenaire, ou faire d’un homme un jouet, c’est insister sur un contexte qui est celui de l’évitement de la rencontre de l’autre au profit d’un recours au fétiche. Une autre jouissance est proposée dans un passage de la réalité à la fiction par la régression. Lolita anti-fatale, Planas met à plat, dans ces exhibitions, la réduction de l’autre à l’état d’objet. L’image du couple est rivée à l’objet qu’est le jouet, et l’acte artistique lui-même est désacralisé, rabaissé par les médiums mêmes. Les questions féministes des années 1970 sur l’émancipation du féminin sont bien loin : Esther Planas joue avec la position fantasmée des hommes excités dans les peep-shows ou les films porno. La violence de la mise en scène a pour miroir un passage à l’acte dérisoire qui rend l’ensemble terriblement vain.

the making of women

WHY FEMINITY IS MADE AND DREAMED BY MAN
an extract:
In a recent work on American media culture andpsychoanalysis called _Enjoy Your Symptom!_ (1992), Slavoj Zizek asks in the title of one chapter, "Why is woman a symptom of man?"
What he alludes to in this intentionally humorous question is a proposition within contemporary psychoanalytic theory (and feminism) that character traits and social roles associated with women come from what are basically male fantasies. Women, in other words, did not themselves invent the idea of "femininity"; rather it was invented for them by men. While the definition of "femininity" changes depending upon historical period and geographical location, generally the term refers to those talents and
shortcomings which make women "best suited" to perform domestic labor -- and perhaps renders them incapable of doing anything else.
Clearly, the idea of femininity is ultimately more beneficial to males than females: it guarantees men freedom from domestic work and grants them the privileges of public authority.
I find Zizek's question useful because it implies that gender division is itself a form of "illness" which generates symptoms.
Furthermore, the question reminds us that the fantasy which is "femininity" tells us more about men than it does about actually existing women. What I want to contend is that transgender is a symptom, just as woman is a symptom, of the social disruption caused by gender division. While "woman" is an ancient and enduring symptom of gender division, transgender is perhaps the most historically recent one; it is, as I will argue below, what might be called a post-feminist symptom generated by the slow withering away of what we know of today as "woman".
American culture experienced the heyday of the women's movement just two decades ago, at which time many real women fought to be appreciated for their professional skills and intellectual capabilities rather than their beauty and vulnerability. To a certain extent, the women's movement is changing the roles available to women in American culture generally. Women have gained more social power in the past few decades than ever before in history, but they still have relatively little power when compared to their male counterparts. Nevertheless, men are aware of the threat women pose to their jobs and social prestige. It seems to me no surprise, then, that a post-feminist culture has found out a way to reinvent
the woman as she once was: socially dis-empowered, largely unemployed and eager to appear physically attractive. And this woman is just as much man-made as ever--in fact, she is a man who has simply altered his physical appearance in order to be "female".
When a middle class American slums, she experiences a heightened sense of her own power and importance on the basis of her national, ethnic and class identity. But slumming is not about feeling powerful. It is more precisely a controlled dosage of impotence -- a temporary identification with the disempowered, oppressed or underprivileged which allows the slummer to enjoy slum culture without having to confront the material consequences of life in the real slums. It should go without saying that the slum means something very different to someone who was born and grewup there. Slumming implies *choosing* to live in poverty, and one can only make this choice if there already exist groups of people and places where poverty is not a choice, where poverty is *imposed*.
Earlier I discussed how an identity like transgender gets produced when particular actions and choices are represented in dominant culture as expressions of a person's "soul". Likewise, the identity of the slummer suggests that living in poverty is a choice people can make because they are naturally inclined to a life of marginalization, disempowerment and material scarcity. To a certain extent, slummers fantasize that real members of the underclass have *chosen* their identities too. Their easy downward mobility becomes "proof" for the ease with which one might become upwardly mobile.
Slumming is therefore the perfect compensatory fantasy for the middle class in regards to class division. It perpetuates the myth that class is merely a state of mind. When a middle class person dresses up in underclass drag, she convinces herself that the line between economic classes is fake, just a kind of masquerade. Of course, it is masquerade for the slummer, but rarely is it so for real underclass people.
Acts of slumming justify the division between the middle class and the underclass, just as acts of transgendering reinforce gender inequality. The middle class maintains its privileged position by
inventing an underclass to do its dirty work -- to perform manual labor, salaried domestic labor and menial service jobs. Man, as I have already contended, invented woman for much the same reason.
What gender division shares with class division at this point in history is a structure of domination which is maintained through the deliberate effacement of the difference between fantasy and reality.
Transgendered people and slummers are two identities generated, like symptoms, by unresolved class conflict. Both are identities predicated upon the use of fantasy to cross and even protest social
divisions without actually dismantling the divisions themselves.
However, the transgendered person and the slummer reveal to us that "forever" is sheer fantasy. Transgendered people and slummers are historically *specific* forms of identity -- that is, they
could only have come into being contemporary with late capitalism and post-feminism. One could not have transgender-as-identity without feminism (or gay rights), which came along only a few years
ago. And one could not go slumming without living in multinational capitalism, which was invented in this century. Gender division andclass division as we know them have not gone on "forever", nor do
they have to continue into the future. The idea that social division is "natural" because it has "always" been there is a fantasy people have at their own expense. It is a fantasy that benefits some powerful
people -- for they can claim that their power has "always" existed --and leaves the rest of society trapped, immobile and divided.

by: Annalee Newitz BAD SUBJECTS #7, SEPTEMBER 1993

a dance relation /// colaboration with Theo Cowley/// at Whitechapel project space 2005

Collaborating with Theo Cowley on few occasions all about of shared relation to Dance, he invited me and filmed me on various of his works. Here our last collaboration at a gallery.

Mad , Bad and Sad

Its been a very long time since I am debating about writing again a journal, a space of text that can be very simple and very automatic , like my secret journal at my old website ( now down) Club Esther.
Been on crisis for so long and every each time for different reasons all of them correlated and a in a very same way to be conscious of being and of been alive on this context on this times on that past ones and even more ago.
Some how I have the sad suspicion that what's about to be my fate clearly it is consequence of something much more complex and obscure , and it is related with the fact of been female, woman, a girl in the past..
But it is also as well, related with the fact of been an out classed bourgeoise , of been poor, of not been too famous or known on my field , of not been much more than a bit of a cult figure , but very very frail one , almost phantasmatic , and of not belonging to any of the zones that will secure me as a worth wile artist, and then by consequence a worth wile human been it seems...
Yes , I feel extremely sad, and deceived, and have to make a huge effort to not became sour, cynical or a murderer ( why not...)
Living in London, the Victorian Monster City that makes sure that you enter a code of values all set up since Victorian times.. all about morals of success and money and conservative , individualistic behaviour , rations of alcohol , and indifferent people crossing my path, does not matter we can be near, I always encounter indifference. Solitude, fear, depression...
Because here relations are transactional, Marx knew it all... we have to be useful, if beautiful we are useful as a gadget that symbolise wealth and glamour, if you are young the same more or less if you are rich great! if you are old and rich great!! but if you are old, poor, and just attractive..... sorry but its not very good news.
Not for this kind of world, not at all.... this is why I feel like a sort of out dated machine, and more and more often I feel like auto exterminate my self, but my way of doing this is getting drunk and wild and take huge risk like end up maybe at the hands of a Jack the Riper..
I had been thinking so much about his victims and I do think they where all a sort of Junkie of the times ( they where Gin Ladies ) and did the streets to pay for the liquid gear.... Some times I need to drink and forget, some times is too hard.. I need evasion and some times it works.. I am still here in London and not at my home town because in there things are even worst.
But what is success?? and unsuccessfoulness
In the world is just Money... in my field art is money and visibility, been in certain galeries, museums, biennales, collections etc etc.. if this is not the case then one can convince one self that still is relevant of course but its quite possible this will be just a subjective angle only, and the sad truth will be that not, one is not and will never be relevant.

Pissing surrounded by Rational Architecture in Barcelona

Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present by Lisa Appignanesi 560pp, Virago, £20 Lisa Appignanesi has a notable track record as a novelist and a sophisticated commentator on ideas. Freud's Women, which she wrote with John Forrester, engaged with the theme that is explored more deeply and fully in this book: the puzzling and often disquieting place of women in the understanding and treatment of mental affliction. Let me begin with a hearty cheer. Mad, Bad and Sad is an ambitious, sobering and often entertaining account of a contentious subject. At the same time it is scholarly, acute and written with judgment. Appignanesi's prose is lucid and unpretentious, free of the portentousness and jargon that can encumber writing in this genre. It is a long book but never a tedious one, and I went to bed each night looking forward to learning more. The book has two avowed aims: to give a historical survey of the evolution of "mind doctoring" and to consider what, if anything, distinguishes the female mind from the male - is it society or something inherent in the feminine psyche that causes it to be perceived and treated differently from the male? Thus, at the heart of the book is a feminist inquiry, but this is conducted without shrillness - indeed, with a balance that admits contradictory evidence and gives due weight to the fact that all report is culturally influenced and partial. Most tellingly, Appignanesi seeks to disinter and illuminate the hidden assumptions that conflate moral and mental health, and confuse natural affections and sentiments with pathology. Is madness bad or sad? Is sadness madness, or madness mere sadness? Is it badder to be mad or sad? Or is it better to be simply bad? The evidence cited in the book is wide, drawing from historical records, many of them literary. The book begins with one of literary history's most famous instances of mental aberration: the sudden, violent and uncharacteristic behaviour of Mary Lamb, sister of the better known Charles, which led to the murder of their mother. This story is a paradigm for the book's whole enterprise: Mary, the intellectually precocious and emotionally neglected daughter of a crippled mother who favoured her firstborn son, and intimate of a bright but fragile younger brother, Charles - himself prone to melancholia - became the chief support of her beleaguered family through her industry as a needlewoman. A punishing workload, leading to extreme physical exhaustion, together with a history of emotional privation, seems to have provoked a fit of matricide at odds with Mary's known public character. The story of "serene" and "sensible" Mary's murderous - yet entirely understandable - outburst and her eventual return to the community is instructive. Thanks to the swift action of Charles, she was confined in an institution, which served as an immediate protection and, by ensuring that her insanity was established, as a safeguard against any judicial punishment. As Appignanesi points out, the case was treated with a leniency that later eras, including our own, would not have condoned. Mary, while ever after affected by her descent into madness, was released back into a life of patchy equilibrium. She lived with her brother and produced creative work, which allowed her imagination a scope beyond the limits of needlework. Three factors seem especially relevant in Mary's initial breakdown and tentative recovery. The degree of strain to her constitution, brought about by her responsibilities and long hours of unrewarding labour; the disparaging treatment she had received since childhood from her mother; and the crucial intervention of her brother. That her chief tormentor and victim of her "madness" was removed - by her own action - and that she received the attention and concern of her beloved brother may have been enough to restore her "sanity", if only temporarily. It seems likely that childhood damage was the main factor in her malaise. For the rest of her life she was subject to agitating "distempers", and she and her brother kept a straitjacket permanently to hand. There is a touching vignette of them weeping as they walked to the institution where Mary was to be confined, carrying between them the restraining garment. Appignanesi describes numerous shocking brutalities to which those designated insane have been subjected. She is especially chilling on the techniques of force feeding, which led to loss of teeth and, frequently, broken jaws. There are dreadful examples of surgical assaults performed in the name of cure. One diabolical "care giver", Superintendent Henry Cotton of the Trenton state asylum in the US, "carried out an obscene campaign of surgery on the tonsils, stomach, colon and uterus of [female psychiatric] patients alongside removal of teeth. In the process, he maimed and killed thousands." One of the pleasures of Appignanesi's approach is her willingness to entertain the possibility that such simple restoratives may have their virtue. The old saying "nature cures and the physician takes the fee" is not sheer cynicism. The provision of a safe haven, a respite from quotidian strains, calm and kindness may be more remedial, ultimately, than drugs or more focused human intervention. One fact shines clearly throughout the book: the concerned and sensitive attention of another human soul is the single consistent feature in any successful treatment. And there is also the recognition, inimical to our fix-it age, that "cures are rarely absolute or for ever". Appignanesi also makes the point that the deracinated and deranged were more socially acceptable before becoming medical subjects and thus liable to be stigmatised. And with this shift occurs the strange and well-documented phenomenon of the accord, rarely recognised or addressed at the time, between any prevailing theory and the nature of symptoms manifested. Thus we have the glut of hysterical paralysis in the late 19th and early 20th century, a condition unusual today but commonplace to Freud and his contemporaries; in the late 60s, with the prophet Laing, conflicted states of mind were represented by an upsurge of disembodied "voices"; more recently, there has been the march of multiple personalities, allegedly taking their origin from sexual abuse (though Appignanesi usefully presents historical cases where this was never a factor); and now we are beset with the attention disorders of our children, which plague distracted teachers and parents. The example of Mary Lamb is but one among many cruelly captivating stories. The latter part of the book contains clear and comprehensible accounts of the major psychological contributions of the last century. But the white-hot core of the book lies in the compelling readings of the disturbed lives of Théroigne de Méricourt (the French revolutionary rescued by the Marquis de Sade from a coterie of screaming women), Alice James (sister of Henry and William), Virginia Woolf, Sabina Spielrein (Jung's patient, lover and early analyst), Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe. Appignanesi resists the temptation to romanticise insanity, but examples such as these demonstrate a correlation between an unusual talent, or sensibility, and a susceptibility to being destabilised. The case of Celia Branden is particularly fascinating, partly because like Rousseau she illustrates how the child is father to the wo/man. Branden's experience of physical correction as a child became the demonic ruling fantasy of her later sexual preference (the book shows why loving kindness to children is essential for the individual adult's wellbeing and for the general welfare of society). Branden provided her own highly intelligent confessions, revealing a Freudian perspicacity. Plainly, she had read and grasped Freud and was able to apply his theories even if, incarcerated against her own sexual demons, she never received the potential benefits of his "talking cure". Appignanesi is too canny to attempt any one theory of the place of the feminine in the history of mental illness but she intimates that, both by upbringing and for procreative genetic reasons, women are generally more adaptive. They are better at picking up clues both as to what is being asked of them and what is acceptable (and what is "acceptable" is also whatever it is the current fashion to disown). It figures, then, that women may conceive and deliver whatever strategy gives their inchoate dissatisfactions the shape to fit the theories that are abroad in the collective consciousness. Appignanesi is not a sexist feminist - but the book slyly suggests that women are often the dramatic, if tragic, harbingers of men's radical "new" theories. · Salley Vickers's Where Three Roads Meet is published by Canongate

Glitter Nights Amsterdam 1999- Barcelona Club 2010 or how to be a woman on medication ..............

 

At some point of my trajectory I had a call to show installations that related to a theme where dream and deception was bind together,a sort of teenage dream gone wrong, a nightmare in purple and glitter, where isolation and alienation had taken over a way of seeing life and art too. 

A deception about the Art World, a need of rebelling against and critique it, trough out a sort of indifference to its rules and games, where a self boycott and auto destructive suicidal attitude of fuck it all was relevant to my critical discourse, a non discourse based in counter cultural statements where the way of not doing and not engaging was a "way" on its self.

Underground cultures been revived once more almost as the death of the swan sing song, and once again for the lat time, from the end of the XX century, as a sort of Fin de Siecle. A nihilist call to death and silence till the last year of the Art Noveau decade of the 2000's and the new century XXI where all its been co-opted again and disempowered , devoid of meaning. From 1999 to 2010 the pictures of fragmented installation shots of a piece called Rock and Roll Suicide and the pictures of material of research and making of the project Time Theft in Barcelona, during which I would live and go down deep the traces of the ghost from our Civil War down in el Raval.

LIES LIES MENTIRAS

Find more dirty snow songs at Myspace Music

Drinking from the Art Fountain ( an ephemeral becoming of a Jean Genet spirit homage to toilets for a short intervention at the White Cubicle Gallery in London

Drinking from The Art Fountain 

And the more low I go

so down

and lost

I have to recognise

that the only one

I am searching for

is you

You that hid

in the darkest

shades

there

where my soul

can't find you

There where

we can only

bite the heart

of the beasts

And yes

The lust again

under the stars

that we can't see

from the city

A lust

that appears

at any face

at any touch

Kisses so deep

and fingers

that taste

our wetness

Liquids

of what so many

had called Hell

A Heaven

That only lasts

a bit

while we go down

Down down down

Down on to this

that seems like

Oblivion

Flesh, skin and bones

tied to this present

Again

This is the place
where I meet you
a Temple
where we were
once sacred
The deepest
of holes
draining
golden drops
where the skin
learned the softness
of the cold tiles
This is the place
where the scent
is strong
profound
and wild
It would happen
again
an again
An always here
in that place
this lost and damp
territoire
And us

ABOUT MARIA LLOPIS

PORN PUBLIC DOMAIN
The performance is a porn version of the piece Public Domain of Roger Bernat, catalan theater director.
“Public Domain does without the actor as the main aspect of the show and leaves the audience as the only participant. It is not about turning the spectator into an actor, but about fulfilling the narrative possibilities of the group using statistical tools. The spectators are part of a fiction without the need of exposing themselves as individuals on a stage that, on the other hand, has as many actors as spectators watching the show.”
So the statistical tools that Roger is using will be porn statistics. I will ask the participants about their sex life, porn preferences, sexual desires… and we will play. Those ones who have sex toys at home, one step forward. Those ones who are into submission, make a cross on your left arm. Those ones who had a wank this morning, put your hand between your legs. Those ones who thought about their underwear before coming here today, show it to us. Those ones who have sweating hand in stress ful situations, touch your neighbour´s tits.
It is a game with no scheduled results.
LINK: http://www.mariallopis.com/

Common Women ( Mom is the end product of she )

Philip Wylie, "Common Women," from Generation of Vipers (1942, 1955)

What follows is an example of the "Momism" philosophy in American Cold War culture, from the 1955 edition of Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers, a popular book which had gone into twenty printings by 1955.

Chapter XI: Common Women
MOM^* IS THE END PRODUCT OF SHE.
She is Cinderella, the creature I discussed earlier, the shining-haired, the starry-eyed, the ruby-lipped virgo aeternis, of which there is presumably one, and only one, or a one-and-only for each male, whose dream is fixed upon her deflowerment and subsequent perpetual possession. This act is a sacrament in all churches and a civil affair in our society. The collective aspects of marriage are thus largely compressed into the rituals and social perquisites of one day. Unless some element of mayhem or intention of divorce subsequently obtrudes, a sort of privacy engulfs the union and all further developments are deemed to be the business of each separate pair, including the transition of Cinderella into mom, which, if it occasions any shock, only adds to the huge, invisible burthen every man carries with him into eternity. It is the weight of this bundle which, incidentally, squeezes out of him the wish for death, his last positive biological resource.
Mom is an American creation. Her elaboration was necessary because she was launched as Cinderella. Past generations of men have accorded to their mothers, as a rule, only such honors as they earned by meritorious action in their individual daily lives. Filial duty was recognized by many sorts of civilizations and loyalty to it has been highly regarded among most peoples. But I cannot think, offhand, of any civilization except ours in which an entire division of living men has been used, during wartime, or at any time, to spell out the word "mom" on a drill field, or to perform any equivalent act.
The adoration of motherhood has even been made the basis of a religious cult, but the mother so worshiped achieved maternity without change in her virgin status--a distinction worthy of contemplation in itself--and she thus in no way resembled mom.
Hitherto, in fact, man has shown a considerable qui vive to the dangers which arise from momism and freely perceived that his "old wives" were often vixens, dragons, and Xanthippes. Classical literature makes a constant point of it. Shakespeare dwelt on it. Man has also kept before his mind an awareness that, even in the most lambent mother love, there is always a chance some extraneous current will blow up a change, and the thing will become a consuming furnace. The spectacle of the female devouring her young in the firm belief that it is for their own good is too old in man's legends to be overlooked by any but the most flimsily constructed society.
Freud has made a fierce and wondrous catalogue of examples of mother-love-in-action which traces its origin to an incestuous perversion of a normal instinct. That description of course, sound. Unfortunately, Americans, who are the most prissy people on earth, have been unable to benefit from Freud's wisdom because they can prove that they do not, by and large, sleep with their mothers. That is their interpretation of Freud. Moreover, no matter how many times they repeat the Scriptures, they cannot get the true sense of the passage about lusting in one's heart--especially when they are mothers thinking about their sons, or vice versa.
Meanwhile, Megaloid momworship has got completely out of hand. Our land, subjectively mapped, would have more silver cords and apron strings crisscrossing it than railroads and telephone wires. Mom is everywhere and everything and damned near everybody, and from her depends all the rest of the U. S. Disguised as good old mom, dear old mom, sweet old mom, your loving mom, and so on, she is the bride at every funeral and the corpse at every wedding. Men live for her and die for her, dote upon her and whisper her name as they pass away, and I believe she has now achieved, in the hierarchy of miscellaneous articles, a spot next to the Bible and the Flag, being reckoned part of both in a way. She may therefore soon be granted by the House of Representatives the especial supreme and extraordinary right of sitting on top of both when she chooses, which, God knows, she does. At any rate, if no such bill is under consideration, the presentation of one would cause little debate among the solons. These sages take cracks at their native land and makes jokes about Holy Writ, but nobody among them--no great man or brave--from the first day of the first congressional meeting to the present ever stood in our halls of state and pronounced the one indubitably most-needed American verity: "Gentlemen, mom is a jerk." Mom is something new in the world of men. Hitherto, mom has been so busy raising a large family, keeping house, doing the chores, and fabricating everything in every home except the floor and the walls that she was rarely a problem to her family or to her equally busy friends, and never one to herself. Usually, until very recently, mom folded up and died of hard work somewhere in the middle of her life. Old ladies were scarce and those who managed to get old did so by making remarkable inner adjustments and by virtue of a fabulous horniness of body, so that they lent to old age not only dignity but metal.
Nowadays, with nothing to do, and all the tens of thousands of men I wrote about in a preceding chapter to maintain her, every clattering prickamette in the republic survives for an incredible number of years, to stamp and jibber in the midst of man, a noisy neuter by natural default or a scientific gelding sustained by science, all tongue and teat and razzmatazz. The machine has deprived her of social usefulness; time has stripped away her biological possibilities and poured her hide full of liquid soap; and man has sealed his own soul beneath the clamorous cordillera by handing her the checkbook and going to work in the service of her caprices. These caprices are of a menopausal nature at best--hot flashes, rage, infantilism, weeping, sentimentality, peculiar appetite, and all the ragged reticule of tricks, wooings, wiles, suborned fornications, slobby onanisms, indulgences, crotchets, superstitions, phlegms, debilities, vapors, butterflies-in-the-belly, plaints, connivings, cries, malingerings, deceptions, visions, hallucinations, needlings and wheedlings, which pop out of every personality in the act of abandoning itself and humanity. At worst--i.e., the finis--this salaginous mess tapers off into senility, which is man's caricature of himself by reversed ontogeny. But behind this vast aurora of pitiable weakness is mom, the brass-breasted Baal, or mom, the thin and enfeebled martyr whose very urine, nevertheless, will etch glass.
Satan, we are told, finds work for idle hands to do. There is no mistaking the accuracy of this proverb. Millions of men have heaped up riches and made a conquest of idleness so as to discover what it is that Satan puts them up to. Not one has failed to find out. But never before has a great nation of brave and dreaming men absent-mindedly created a huge class of idle, middle-aged women. Satan himself has been taxed to dig up enterprises enough for them. But the field is so rich, so profligate, so perfectly to his taste, that his first effort, obviously, has been to make it self-enlarging and self-perpetuating. This he has done by whispering into the ears of girls that the only way they can cushion the shock destined to follow the rude disillusionment over the fact that they are not really Cinderella is to institute momworship. Since he had already infested both male and female with the love of worldly goods, a single step accomplished the entire triumph: he taught the gals to teach their men that dowry went the other way, that it was a weekly contribution, and that any male worthy of a Cinderella would have to work like a piston after getting one, so as to be worthy, also, of all the moms in the world.
The road to hell is spiral, a mere bend in the strait and narrow, but a persistent one. This was the given torque, and most men are up to their necks in it now. The devil whispered. The pretty girl then blindfolded her man so he would not see that she was turning from a butterfly into a caterpillar. She told him, too, that although caterpillars ate every damned leaf in sight, they were moms, hence sacred. Finally, having him sightless and whirling, she snitched his checkbook. Man was a party to the deception because he wanted to be fooled about Cinderella, because he was glad to have a convenient explanation of mom, and also because there burned within him a dim ideal which had to do with proper behavior, getting along, and, especially, making his mark. Mom had already shaken him out of that notion of being a surveyor in the Andes which had bloomed in him when he was nine years old, so there was nothing left to do, anyway, but to take a stockroom job in the hairpin factory and try to work up to the vice-presidency. Thus the women of America raped the men, not sexually, unfortunately, but morally, since neuters come hard by morals. I pass over the obvious reference to the deadliness of the female of the species, excepting only to note that perhaps, having a creative physical part in the universe, she falls more easily than man into the contraposite role of spiritual saboteur.
Mom got herself out of the nursery and the kitchen. She then got out of the house. She did not get out of the church, but, instead, got the stern stuff out of it, padded the guild room and moved in more solidly than ever before. No longer either hesitant or reverent, because there was no cause for either attitude after her purge, she swung the church by the tail as she swung everything else. In a preliminary test of strength, she also got herself the vote and, although politics never interested her (unless she was exceptionally naïve, a hairy foghorn, or a size forty scorpion), the damage she forthwith did to society was so enormous and so rapid that even the best men lost track of things. Mom's first gracious presence at the ballot-box was roughly concomitant with the start toward a new all-time low in political scurviness, hoodlumism, gangsterism, labor strife, monopolistic thuggery, moral degeneration, civic corruption, smuggling, bribery, theft, murder, homosexuality, drunkenness, financial depression, chaos and war. Note that. The degenerating era, however, marked new highs in the production of junk. Note that, also. Mom, however, is a great little guy. Pulling pants onto her by these words, let us look at mom. She is a middle-aged puffin with an eye like a hawk that has just seen a rabbit twitch far below. She is about twenty-five pounds overweight, with no sprint, but sharp heels and a hard backhand which she does not regard as a foul but a womanly defense. In a thousand of her there is not sex appeal enough to budge a hermit ten paces off a rock ledge. She none the less spends several hundred dollars a year on permanents and transformations, pomades, cleansers, rouges, lipsticks, and the like--and fools nobody except herself. If a man kisses her with any earnestness, it is time for mom to feel for her pocketbook, and this occasionally does happen.
She smokes thirty cigarettes a day, chews gum, and consumes tons of bonbons and petits fours. The shortening in the latter, stripped from pigs, sheep and cattle, shortens mom. She plays bridge with the stupid voracity of a hammerhead shark, which cannot see what it is trying to gobble but never stops snapping its jaws and roiling the waves with its tail. She drinks moderately, which is to say, two or three cocktails before dinner every night and a brandy and a couple of highballs afterward. She doesn't count the two cocktails she takes before lunch when she lunches out, which is every day she can. On Saturday nights, at the club or in the juke joint, she loses count of her drinks and is liable to get a little tiddly, which is to say, shot or blind. But it is her man who worries about where to acquire the money while she worries only about how to spend it, so he has the ulcers and colitis and she has the guts of a bear; she can get pretty stiff before she topples. Her sports are all spectator sports.
She was graduated from high school or a "finishing" school or even a college in her distant past and made up for the unhappiness of compulsory education by sloughing all that she learned so completely that she could not pass the final examinations of a fifth grader. She reads the fiction in three women's magazines each month and occasionally skims through an article, which usually angers her so that she gets other moms to skim through it, and then they have a session on the subject over a canister of spiked coffee in order to damn the magazine, the editors, the author, and the silly girls who run about these days. She reads two or three motion-picture fan magazines also, and goes to the movies about two nights a week. If a picture does not coincide precisely with her attitude of the moment, she converses through all of it and so whiles away the time. She does not appear to be lecherous toward the moving photographs as men do, but that is because she is a realist and a little shy on imagination. However, if she gets to Hollywood and encounters the flesh-and-blood article known as a male star, she and her sister moms will run forward in a mob, wearing a joint expression that must make God rue his invention of bisexuality, and tear the man's clothes from his body, yea, verily, down to his B.V.D.'s.
Mom is organization-minded. Organizations, she has happily discovered, are intimidating to all men, not just to mere men. They frighten politicians to sniveling servility and they terrify pastors; they bother bank presidents and they pulverize school boards. Mom has many such organizations, the real purpose of which is to compel an abject compliance of her environs to her personal desires. With these associations and committees she has double parking ignored, for example. With them she drives out of the town and the state, if possible, all young harlots and all proprietors of places where "questionable" young women (though why they are called that--being of all women the least in question) could possibly foregather, not because she competes with such creatures but because she contrasts so unfavorably with them. With her clubs (a solid term!) she causes bus lines to run where they are convenient for her rather than for workers, plants flowers in sordid spots that would do better with sanitation, snaps independent men out of office and replaces them with clammy castrates, throws prodigious fairs and parties for charity and gives the proceeds, usually about eight dollars, to the janitor to buy the committee some beer for its headache on the morning after, and builds clubhouses for the entertainment of soldiers where she succeeds in persuading thousands of them that they are momsick and would rather talk to her than take Betty into the shrubs. All this, of course, is considered social service, charity, care of the poor, civic reform, patriotism, and self-sacrifice.
As an interesting sidelight, clubs afford mom an infinite opportunity for nosing into other people's business. Nosing is not a mere psychological ornament of her; it is a basic necessity. Only by nosing can she uncover all incipient revolutions against her dominion and so warn and assemble her co-cannibals.
Knowing nothing about medicine, art, science, religion, law, sanitation, civics, hygiene, psychology, morals, history, geography, poetry, literature, or any other topic except the allconsuming one of momism, she seldom has any especial interest in what, exactly, she is doing as a member of any of these endless organizations, so long as it is something.
I, who grew up as a "motherless" minister's son and hence was smothered in multimomism for a decade and a half, had an unusual opportunity to observe the phenomenon at zero range. Also, as a man stirring about in the cesspool of my society, I have been foolhardy enough to try, on occasion, to steer moms into useful work. For example, owing to the fact that there was no pasteurization law in Miami and hundreds of people were flecking the pavement with tubercular sputum, while scores, including my own wife, lay sick and miserable with undulant fever, I got a gaggle of these creatures behind a move toward a pasteurization law, only to find, within a few weeks, that there was a large, alarmed, and earnest committee at work in my wake to prevent the passage of any such law. This falange, fanned by the milk dealers, who would not even deliver the stuff if they could get their money without, had undone even the one small crusade because it had uncovered a quack doctor, unknown and unheard-of, who had printed the incandescent notion that cancer, the big boogie of the moms, was caused by the pasteurization of milk!
In the paragraph above I have given, I know, the golden tip for which any moms able to read this volume have been searching all the long way. I had no mother: therefore, all my bitterness and--especiary--this cruel and wanton attack on moms for which, they will doubtless think, I should be shot or locked up. Well, let them make the most of that. All mothers are not such a ravening purulence as they, and mine was not. Mine, I can show, felt much as I do about the thundering third sex, as do all good women, of whom there are still a few. But I have researched the moms, to the beady brains behind their beady eyes and to the stones in the center of their fat hearts. I am immune to their devotion because I have already had enough. Learning the hard way, I have found out that it is that same devotion which, at the altar, splits the lamb from his nave to his chaps. And none of the moms, at least, will believe that I am a lamb. Let them mark time on that. In churches, the true purpose of organized momhood is to unseat bishops, snatch the frocks off prelates, change rectors just for variety, cross-jet community gossip, take the customary organizational kudos out of the pot each for each, bestow and receive titles, and short-circuit one another.
Mom also has patriotism. If a war comes, this may even turn into a genuine feeling and the departure of her son may be her means to grace in old age. Often, however, the going of her son is only an occasion for more show. She has, in that case, no deep respect for him. What he has permitted her to do to him has rendered him unworthy of consideration--and she has shown him none since puberty. She does not miss him--only his varletry--but over that she can weep interminably. I have seen the unmistakable evidence in a blue star mom of envy of a gold star mom: and I have a firsthand account by a woman of unimpeachable integrity, of the doings of a shipload of these super-moms-of-the-gold-star, en route at government expense to France to visit the graves of their sons, which I forbear to set down here, because it is a document of such naked awfulness that, by publishing it, I would be inciting to riot, and the printed thing might even rouse the dead soldiers and set them tramping like Dunsany's idol all the way from Flanders to hunt and haunt their archenemy progenitrices--who loved them--to death.
But, peace or war, the moms have another kind of patriotism that, in the department of the human spirit, is identical to commercialized vice, because it captures a good thing and doles it out for the coin of unctuous pride--at the expense of deceased ancestors rather than young female offspring. By becoming a Daughter of this historic war or that, a woman makes herself into a sort of madam who fills the coffers of her ego with the prestige that has accrued to the doings of others. A frantic emptiness of those coffers provides the impulse for the act. There are, of course, other means of filling them, but they are difficult, and mom never does anything that is difficult--either the moving of a piano or the breaking of a nasty habit.
Some legionnaires accept, in a similar way, accolade due their associates only. But legionnaires learned a little wisdom, since they still can function in ways that have some resemblance to normality. Furthermore, competition with the legions from the new war will probably make veritable sages out of thousands.
But mom never meets competition. Like Hitler, she betrays the people who would give her a battle before she brings up her troops, Her whole personal life, so far as outward expression is concerned, is, in consequence, a mopping-up action. Traitors are shot, yellow stars are slapped on those beneath notice, the good-looking men and boys are rounded up and beaten or sucked into pliability, a new slave population continually goes to work at making more munitions for momism, and mom herself sticks up her head, or maybe the periscope of the woman next door, to find some new region that needs talking over. This technique pervades all she does. In the matter of her affiliation of herself with the Daughters of some war the Hitler analogue especially holds, because these sororities of the sword often constitute her Party--her shirtism. Ancestor worship, like all other forms of religion, contained an instinctual reason and developed rituals thought to be germane to the reason. People sedulously followed those rituals, which were basically intended to remind them that they, too, were going to be ancestors someday and would have to labor for personal merit in order to be worthy of veneration. But mom's reverence for her bold forebears lacks even a ritualistic significance, and so instructs her in nothing. She is peremptory about historical truth, mandates, custom, fact, and point. She brushes aside the ideals and concepts for which her forebears perished fighting, as if they were the crumbs of melba toast. Instead, she attributes to the noble dead her own immediate and selfish attitudes. She "knows full well what they would have thought and done," and in that whole-cloth trumpery she goes busting on her way.
Thus the long-vanished warriors who liberated this land from one George in order to make another its first president guide mom divinely as she barges along the badgering boulevard of her life, relaying fiats from the grave on birth control, rayon, vitamins, the power trust, and a hundred other items of which the dead had no knowledge. To some degree most people, these days, are guilty of this absurd procedure. There has been more nonsense printed lately detailing what Jefferson would say about matters he never dreamed of than a sensible man can endure. (I do not have any idea, for instance, and I am sure nobody has any idea, what Jefferson would think about the giddy bungle of interstate truck commerce; but people, columnists especially, will tell you.)
Mom, however, does not merely quote Thomas Jefferson on modern topics: she is Thomas Jefferson. This removes her twice from sanity. Mom wraps herself in the mantle of every canny man and coward who has drilled with a musket on this continent and reproduced a line that zigzagged down to mom. In that cloak, together with the other rniters, rings, scepters, and power symbols which she has swiped, she has become the American pope.

---

^*You are now about to read (or re-read) one of the most renowned (or notorious) passages in modern English Letters.
This chapter has put the word "momism" indelibly in our language; it has broken a path through sacred preserves into which all manner of amateur critics (along with the stateliest psychiatrists and the United States Armed Services) have since proceeded, pouring out articles, monographs, bulletins, research reports and shelves of books showing how right I was to speak as I did of a certain, prevalent sub-species of middle-class American woman; and the chapter has typed me apparently forever as a woman hater-indeed, as the all-out, all-time, high-scoring world champion misogynist.
It is this last I regret. The fact that legions of individuals, and finally the Army, followed me in condemnation of that special type of American mother I called "mom" merely affirms my work: the Oedipus complex had become a social fiat and a dominant neurosis in our land. It was past time somebody said so. As a way of life, it is shameful in grownups of both sexes; as a national cult, it is a catastrophe.
But, since I love women more than most men, I believe I love them more deeply and knowingly, and since I respect motherhood whenever and wherever it is worthy of respect, I find it somewhat distressing to be forever tagged as Woman's Nemesis. The fact is that only moms--or incipient moms--could imagine, after a close reading of this very chapter, that 1 had any other sensation for real women than love. Quite a few thousand ladies perceived that fact and so wrote to me. But millions, who thought they read otherwise--or who never read the text but took rumor of my diatribe as Gospel (in mom's fashion)--have given me a false name.
To such females, womanhood is more sacrosanct by a thousand times than the Virgin Mary to popes--and motherhood, that degree raised to astronomic power. They have eaten the legend about themselves and believe it; they live it; they require fealty of us all.
From them, I received dozens of scurrilous, savage, illiterate, vulgar and obscene epistles, letters which but made my point that much clearer--to me. But I have had hundreds of times as many communications from moms who confessed, from the sons and daughters of moms who suddenly saw whence their sickly dependencies came, and from multitudes of the learned, the celebrated, the world's leaders, who said in effect: Thanks.
So, for individuals, the message has often been of value. But insofar as its effect on this great nation is concerned (about which possibility people sometimes enquire), my risky effort to sever the psychic umbilicus by which millions of moms hold millions of grown American men and women in diseased serfdom, achieved nothing.
Mom still commands. Mom's more than ever in charge. Hardly five Americans in a hundred know today that mom and her bogus authority have ever been questioned--by me, or by anybody else. The nation can no longer say it contains many great, free, dreaming men. We are deep in the predicted nightmare now and mom sits on its decaying throne--who bore us, who will soon, most likely, wrap civilization in mom's final, tender garment: a shroud. Today, as the news photos abundantly make plain mom composes the majority of Senator McCarthy's shock troops--paying blind tribute to a blind authoritarianism like her own. Mom reaches out from her shrieking hordes, cries, "I touched him!" and faints away. The tragic Senator stalks smiling to the podium and leads the litany of panic, the rituals of logic perverted, the induced madness of those the god's have marked for destruction. "McCarthyism," the rule of unreason, is one with momism: a noble end aborted by sick-minded means, a righteous intent--in terrorism fouled and tyranny foundered.
Today, too, there is mom and her mass affair with Liberace. . . .
Tomorrow, she will shriek around and dote upon some other Hero, as sick, or as fatuous.
Today, while decent men struggle for seats in government with the hope of saving our Republic, mom makes a condition of their election the legalizing of Bingo. What will she want tomorrow when the world needs saving even more urgently?
We must understand mom before we lose touch with understanding itself.
I showed her as she is--ridiculous, vain, vicious, a little mad. She is her own fault first of all and she is dangerous. But she is also everybody's fault. When we and our culture and our religions agreed to hold woman the inferior sex, cursed, unclean and sinful--we made her mom. And when we agreed upon the American Ideal Woman, the Dream Girl of National Adolescence, the Queen of Bedpan Week, the Pin-up, the Glamour Puss--we insulted women and disenfranchised millions from love. We thus made mom. The hen-harpy is but the Cinderella chick come home to roost: the taloned, cackling residue of burnt-out puberty in a land that has no use for mature men or women.
Mom is a human calamity. She is also, like every calamity, a cause for sorrow, a reproach, a warning siren and a terrible appeal for amends.
While she exists, she will exploit the little "sacredness" we have given motherhood as a cheap-holy compensation for our degradation of woman: she will remain irresponsible and unreasoning--for what we have believed of her is reckless and untrue. She will act the tyrant--because she is a slave. God pity her--and us all!

Philip Wylie, "Common Women," Generation of Vipers (New York: Pocket Books, 1942, 1955), pp. 184-196.

THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A WOMAN ARTIST

Document 11A: Guerrilla Girls, "The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist," 1988, at the Guerrilla Girls website; and in Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls, by the Guerrilla Girls (whoever they really are) (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995), pp. 52-53.

Introduction

The Guerrilla Girls call this 1988 poster their all-time favorite. They like it because it reflects discrimination experienced by all kinds of women, both within and outside of the art world. Here the Girls attack not only the difficulties of being recognized as a female artist, but also the difficulties of balancing a professional life with a personal one in a society which undervalues women's contributions. Because of its popularity, it was translated into several languages and shown throughout the world.

Copyright © 1988 by the Guerrilla Girls

AGENTE E2162 excerpt of my work at the show during BCN Producció/10 La Capella Barcelona

This is a journal, printed on offset as a news paper, its part of a project that was selected at the prestigious Catalan art show edition BCN Produccio/10 in Barcelona.
Is an artist projects contest that selects every year 5 artist for an expanded proposal.
My work had various layers, one been this journal, a movie, a soundtrack, an unfinished
tale and installation and a live performance.
The text as part of the unfinished tale could be considered as performative writing and issues
themes related to the woman as a spie and prostitute.
Been two of the main muses, Caridad Mercader and Africa de las Heras.
Both very transgressive womans even if I am not at all a Stalinist , I do believe this women where at least corageous and I am sure they also could have been very much criticised and abhorred .








A little bit about Caridad:

Caridad Mercader née Caridad del Río was from a family of aristocratic landowners in Santiago de Cuba. Following Spain’s loss of the colony in 1898, the family moved to Catalunya where Caridad, at the age of just 16, married Pablo Mercader, a rich Catalan industrialist. The couple had five children but Caridad grew to detest the staid, bourgeoisie existence and found herself drawn to the Bohemian life she discovered along El Paral.lel, with its heady mix of cabaret artists, bon viveurs and anarchists. Seduced by the latter’s revolutionary ideals, Caridad soon became involved in direct action, even setting fire to her husband’s factory before being caught and sent to a lunatic asylum. Her anarchist friends managed to spring her from captivity, and she fled to France with her children in 1925, never forgiving the Mercader family for imprisoning her.

Two days later, on July 25th 1936, the first column of volunteers was organised under the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti, and Ramón, though a communist, signed up to fight. He was seriously wounded on the Aragonese Front and returned to Barcelona in December. Here, his mother convinced him to become a Soviet spy, and he cut his teeth, reporting on foreign volunteers and teaching espionage to David Crook, a young British communist in charge of spying on George Orwell who was in Barcelona.

he war staggered on, but the NKVD had greater plans for Mercader and in July he was summoned to Moscow. There, he was trained in the arts of deception, sabotage and assassination and given the code name Gnome. In 1938, Gnome was set up in the Sorbonne area of Paris as a wealthy Belgium student, Jacques Mornard. He was handsome, impeccably mannered and endowed with flawless French and English. He quickly seduced Sylvia Ageloff, an American confident of Trotsky. The relationship paid off and he eventually gained an invitation to the home of the old Russian near Mexico City. Mercader’s mother had also moved to Mexico to oversee the operation, entitled, appropriately enough, “Mother.” Once Mercader had ingratiated himself within Trotsky’s inner circle, it was simply a case of choosing his weapon and moment.

Meanwhile, his mother, Caridad, a constant shadow in his life, worked at the Cuban embassy in Paris. She died in 1975 in some luxury, surrounded by her jewels, perfumes and expensive clothes, an unrepentant Stalinist, reputedly drinking 40 coffees and smoking 80 cigarettes a day.



A little bit about Africa de las Heras

Algunos le darían, además, mucho morbo al discurso de Mir, que seguramente conoce el texto de Miravitlles sobre las orgías de sexo y sangre de la patrullera África de las Heras militante y alto cargo del PSUC en las Patrullas de Control del CCMA, y con posterioridad coronel del KGB, reconocida con la Orden de Lenin.

Africa de las Heras, l'autre Mata Hari

A.S.A.
18/09/2009 | Mise à jour : 14:26

Elle s'appelait Africa de las Heras, mais aussi Maria-Luisa, ou « Znoy » pour les Russes... Engagée par le KGB pendant la guerre civile, cette Espagnole entra dans les services secrets comme on entre en religion. En 1947, elle allait à Paris pour séduire et épouser (rien de moins) le poète uruguayen Felisberto Hernández et le suivre à Montevideo. Sa mission : tisser le réseau d'espionnage soviétique sur le territoire américain. L'écrivain Alicia Dujovne-Ortiz, fille d'agent du Komintern, a fait de cette espionne, qui aura voué corps et âme à sa cause, un flamboyant personnage de roman *.
Julio Algañaraz ROMA. CORRESPONSAL.
jalganaraz@clarin.com

Africa fue la más legendaria espía soviética en la América del Sur de la posguerra y arribó al Río de la Plata, desde París, en mayo de 1948. Desde Moscú llegó la orden de seducir a un eminente sudamericano para entrar por la puerta grande y Africa eligió en la Ciudad Luz al gran escritor uruguayo Felisberto Hernández, quien fue el segundo de los tres maridos que se le conocen. Africa de las Heras y Gavilán era entonces una belleza de 38 años, nacida en el enclave español de Ceuta. Como era costumbre en las familias bien de la época (su padre era oficial del Ejército), recibió el nombre de la protectora de la ciudad, la virgen de Africa.

El matrimonio con Felisberto Hernández duró tres años y el escritor nunca supo nada de la verdadera actividad de su mujer. El omnipotente servicio secreto soviético, la KGB (sigla en ruso del Comité de Seguridad del Estado) le dio el nombre secreto de "Patria" y la tuvo en actividad -con centro en Montevideo, pero con ramificaciones que ella controlaba en Buenos Aires y otras capitales latinoamericanas-, durante dos décadas. Nadie sospechó nunca de Africa, quien a sus colegas espías repetía: "Mi patria es la Unión Soviética".

Antes de la llegada a Montevideo sucedieron algunas de las aventuras más extraordinarias de la española, que según los testimonios narrados en la biografía del periodista y escritor uruguayo Raúl Vallarino, publicada hace dos meses en Montevideo, era muy bonita, de carácter férreo y, al menos en su juventud, muy disponible al sexo.

En 1930 era ya una agente de operaciones especiales del partido Comunista Español. Participó en el levantamiento de los mineros asturianos de 1934 y en 1936: era integrante de las Juventudes Comunistas de Cataluña. Africa comandaba una de las llamadas patrullas ciudadanas. Según el libro el grupo tenía su cuartel general en el Náutico de Barcelona, donde se fusilaban a "los fascistas". "En el mismo lugar donde ejecutaba a sus enemigos", la patrulla de Africa "realizaba interminables orgías sexuales", afirma uno de los testimonios.

Dark Star 2008

Time Theft Agent 2162 ( excerpt of unfinished novel published as part of expanded work at BCN Producció/10

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.










Here starts my journal , that text that is printed as a memory of a journey ,
a journey to a territoire which I discovered and that travels with me for ever.
El Barrio Chino , in Barcelona is a place where my heart lives , my whole
body is el Xino.
The place where I went so low and where I found my redemption.
The place where I betray and was betrayed, where I found the ghosts
who talked to me and trough out me.....
What time is now?
I don't know, it feels like there is no more time out there, now or yesterday
are melting with each other.
Long ago predates today and never wake up to a new morning but just
a looping old new day again.
The souls that posses me are taking me with them to precise stages and
situations they guide me and show me so that my eyes became yours
El barrio Xino is a whole world and even if the whole time pass by it
never a place had more of the same , repeating its geographic speciality
A labyrinth , a container of lives and experiences bordering the lowest,
the outcast , the free for all , the villains , the whores, the addicts ...
One day of spring 2182, I gravitated towards El Xino, and I will just drift
getting lost and found on its dark humid streets.
Old, very old buildings, intense smells of acid urine residuals ,putrified rubbish,
fried oil and some scent of flowers that I could not really place or see but where
floating like next to the sea salt humid air beaten up by the flying doves.