La inacabable creación constante de cotidianidad (The Endless, Constant Creation of the Everyday)

 

YEAR 2017

FORMAT Conference paper · Dance

PRESENTATIONS First International Performance Festival “Invisibility of Women in Art”, Facultad de Artes, Universidad Central del Ecuador, Quito (2017)

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I firmly believe that being here, together, in these moments is above all a political prerogative. In these societies, as we see, that constantly close off the structures and the possibilities of existing in a dynamic alternative to the market system and to the accumulation of capital, it is very difficult to put forward our writings of reality from a female perspective. Even more so a feminist one, not only because the term provokes so many doubts and suspicions, not only because blindnesses, confusions and common senses are built around it; but because female presence, existence, work, creation and production have historically, for centuries, been stripped of all value.

Feminist theory has shown for decades now that oppression goes far beyond class relations and struggles and the commodification of labor. It posits that the development and accumulation of capitalism was not a natural development but a violent and counterrevolutionary one; one that required, and still requires, an incessant imposition of ways of domesticating, organizing and dividing work and life. To become free slaves of capital entailed an enormous destruction: destruction of resources, destruction of bonds, destruction of knowledges and destruction of forms of resistance; in short, destruction of the common. Historically, earlier forms of human and natural reproduction were eliminated; while others, based on the privatization of women, of their bodies and of their labor, were enabled in their place.

 

This privatization of labor gave rise to the disciplinary technologies of gender driven by capitalist modernity; which separate production from reproduction, the public from the private, the waged from the unwaged. That is, it separates the masculine, productive, public, waged spheres from the feminine, reproductive, private ones, stripping women's work of monetary value. The sexual division of labor was not only, and still is, a powerful instrument of accumulation; it has become a baneful system of control. This instrument of discipline and system of repression, which endure to this day, have historically expropriated from us the control of our own bodies, stripped the value of our knowledges, and belittled feminine forms of subjectivity. It is no exaggeration to say that women's work is a production of non-value and that this dispossession radiates toward every domain of creation, including the artistic.

 

Invisibility is naturalized in every kind of institution, but above all in the gaze. In the subjective gaze that, from its regimes of perception, simply cannot see; much less give value to female or feminized work and creation. Because all that work and production is the reproduction of non-value, even though it sustains life itself.

 

Thus, the adjustment of the reproduction of human and natural life to the process of accumulation remains a crucial question that affects women in a specific way; where violence is an offensive against any gesture of autonomy, against pleasure and desire, sensual and bodily, outside of procreation. Violence as punishment for our indiscipline, which tries to subvert the market values to which life is made to submit.

 

Therefore, to keep resisting centuries of dispossession of the value of our work is to propose the construction of imaginaries and representations of the diverse female identities that bring to the fore our knowledges and know-how, our power of creation and our capacity to transform reality. Because our work does not only reproduce, but is the incessant creation of the everyday, is the constant re-creation of life; and all this, beyond the instrumental morality of sacrifice attributed to women.

 

Being here, sustaining this space, is to recognize that we are totally dependent on the care of others: to care is to maintain life, to take charge of someone's protection and well-being. Being here is a political prerogative of solidarity, a communion that arises as a principle of survival, but also of recognition of our responsibility toward others.

 

Being here is to give body to the political desire to recognize one another, to be, to be together in the world, to care for and embrace one another. We do not only care, we protect the life and dignity of the other. Because our work is the creation and containment of an everyday life so that the other can be; an everyday that appears forceful in its repetition, but holds the fragility of its always possible disappearance.
 

Ponza (Conference paper · Dance)

 

This is a dance-lecture presented as part of the First International Performance Festival of the Facultad de Artes, Universidad Central, organized by Geoconda Jácome Villacrés.

 

References

 

Federici, Silvia. (2004). Calibán y la bruja. Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria. Editorial Traficantes de Sueños:Madrid. Recuperado de https://www.traficantes.net/sites/default/files/pdfs/Caliban%20y%20la%20bruja-TdS.pdf

 

Segato, Rita. (2016). La guerra contra las mujeres. Editorial Traficantes de Sueños:Madrid. Recuperado de https://www.traficantes.net/sites/default/files/pdfs/map45_segato_web.pdf

 

Vega, Cristina; Martínez-Buján, Raquel y Paredes, Myriam. Editoras. (2018). Cuidado, comunidad y común. Experiencias cooperativas en el sostenimiento de la vida. Editorial Traficantes de Sueños:Madrid. Recuperado de https://www.traficantes.net/sites/default/files/pdfs/TDS-UTIL_cuidados_reducida_web.pdf