PERFORMANCE

3 JUN, 15 JUN, 1 JUL | 8PM

CINTHIA DE LEVIE

PERFORMERS: ANA G. ZAMBRANO, SOPHIA ISIDORE, DANIELA DE LA TORRE

SOUND DESIGN: HERD

Coordination: Carla Lamoyi

Editing and translation: Ashley Michelle Casillas, Carla Lamoyi 

Assistance: Joshua Jobb

Documentation: Aimée Suárez

Printer: SARA (Sociedad Anónima Reproducción Autogestiva)

The exhibition ASDFGHJ by Cinthia De Levie arises from her investigation in Mexico in which she studied the use of puppets to “teach” behavioral norms to the indigenous people.

This project investigates the representation of encounters and interaction with the other, the stranger, and foreigner through an installation that dis/assembles the elements of puppetry and disperses them throughout the space. The proposal seeks to put movements and behaviors into practice that explore and inhabit the contact zone between the others and the things, imagining this border as an interface. It explores what can come about when bodies enter in connection, are modified and transform themselves in turn.

There is a work called Petul and the Foreign Devil written by Rosario Castellanos in 1961 that narrates the encounter between an indigenous person and a foreigner who don’t speak the same language. The indigenous person doesn’t “know” if the stranger is a ghost, a devil or a man and due to not being able to understand him, doubts his humanness and ends up endangering him. This work was written based on a true story: Arthur Sliz, a German painter, who traveled to San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas and was killed by machete blows by the indigenous people with whom he could not communicate.

In the puppet screenplay, there is a dialogue between the indigenous person, the foreigner and a “mestizo” in which they try to communicate with one another, understand each other, in order to know what they are made of and what are the others. This work and this dialogue are appropriated and reconstructed in an absurd or grotesque way where an animist manner of living in the world is explored as well as alternative forms of connecting with others.

For this adaptation, elements from the original work are extracted (characters, materials and movements) and transformed into a critique regarding the politics and practices behind the pedagogical and ludic methods that sought to colonize these populations. The exhibition space is inhabited by puppets, lengths of latex cloth, prop elements, prosthetic body parts and characters reminiscent of fluids, invertebrate beings and skin.