Street Militancy | Valeria Andrade Proaño

A LA BRAVA

Carnivalesque practices of artistic production

I am going to begin by reading a fragment of the text that accompanies Prácticas Suicidas, the work that has opened these doors for us and that gathers certain concerns turned into forms of artistic production and creation, still current in our processes, which spread through the scene.

In a system whose margin of unpredictability rests on the chaos of the rules of the game, the impossibility of measuring distances between facts, characters, national conjunctures, makes everyday life exasperate us with its sudden metamorphoses and exaggerations of peculiar logic.

Slipping along in this inertia, our scene is one of precarious structures, systems and institutions, where artistic production answers with its own tools. The making process is almost artisanal and is delimited above all by scarcity. The lack of financial support means needs are met through barter; so give-and-take, I-back-you-up, are the modes of artistic operation.

A la brava, the hard way, we keep producing art in a context of institutions that still have not managed to establish a system of cultural policies that encourage production and research, that shore up the work achieved or guarantee a mode of circulation nationally and internationally. We produce in a small and dislocated scene where efforts get lost in personal matters or vanish for lack of continuity, for lack of support, for lack of a vision broadened in time and space.

However, this is not necessarily a complaint; it is to take on those dynamics that the system offers for and against artistic production and creation. It is to try to find possibilities that also account for a critical and political position before the context of the country, which in turn responds to globalizations.

In the course of that barter and encounter, laughter always appears, an effervescent guffaw that imposes rhythms that sometimes work and flow, other times hinder. That is what I call the carnivalization of artistic production.

I take up a carnivalesque sense in the work, as a way of challenging our reality through humor, parody, irony. Through laughter working as a means of renewal and liberation; because we take it as a mechanism that unbalances the established, which allows us to know and contest the world from a critical perspective. Guffawing laughter as a distancing that unmasks the stiffness of certain social and artistic practices in our present environment. Also as a device that reworks the world from a mood-based reality, which shares certain circumstances to create other perspectives, other symbolic and aesthetic worlds.

Humor appears as presence of mind that transforms the environment. This is the dynamic of inverted reality that is born of our constant carnival, the juarasjuasjuas, where order is placed neither right side up nor upside down. The beginning and the after are chaos, which is the starting point of all possible and imaginary worlds. All the possibilities of production that appear in disorder and play relax and amuse, stink and enrage at once, without this meaning that substantial processes and results are not obtained.

On the other hand, within this humor, a phenomenon of playful and fictional character, the instinct of play is reactivated. Play is a precisely human activity in which desires, aspirations and intuitions are resolved, which does not seek usefulness but always has a meaning. It is the possibility to expand and propagate understanding and, from there, creation. Through play and its dialectic of situations, we enter a process of appropriating the body, of emotional release, of stimulating the senses that answers to a function of production as much as to a form of survival here, now.

From this social dimension, from laughter, humor, play, affectivity appears as an engine, as a first-order force that activates knowledge and judgment; as an immaterial value that generates social networks of production, which make evident the energies, expressions, bonds, knots and forces of the community. Affectivity as knowledge from a psychic and subjective, intellectual and sensitive whole, as a form that proposes emotional responses to organize a social practice of collective artistic production.

In this way, we establish a sort of politics of collaboration, of exchange, of barter that allows us not only to subsist but to produce and create, through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary processes where individual ideas are exposed as a form of seduction. This mechanics of giving and appropriating provokes other associations, new forms spread from one to another that hybridize languages and give formats a breadth. This is how disciplines, linearities, cubes, borders fade away, toward an understanding of multiple relations and contemporary events that intersect the social, the political and the urban.

And at this point, this affiliation with the urban, this street militancy of routes, journeys, buildings, parks, squares, part of our momentary everyday, obliges us to love and deconstruct the collection of semiotic patterns, subtexts, histories, ethnicities, in rhythms, in resonances, in actions that resignify, collide, project, and challenge relations with others in their human, emotional, social, political aspects. Then we assault public space to establish other links that modify reality. From an image, a sound, a word, a presence. From the production of dance, performance, audio, video we provoke a play of reflections, revelations and rebounds gathered and translated from experimental video.