This video essay is an attempt to find a place. A place to speak, to thrive, and to live—paraphrasing bell hooks—which has remained, in my experience, quite elusive.1 I’ve always thought I would find this place elsewhere. In a different geography, in another language, in the constant leaving one place to arrive in the other. In becoming other. And othered. Yet in this movement, I didn’t realize I was escaping the very place I was hoping to find. I was unwilling to stay, in Donna Haraway’s terms, and feel, and see what this place really was.2 As if the historical and affective densities, complexities, and violence constituting this place—my place—were too much to grasp, or too complicated to assume, despite my rational and critical capacities to name it and represent it and study it from a distance. As if my senses were numb—or had to be numb—for a distant and controlled relationship with this place to be sustained, and for a movement, almost addictive, toward an ever ideal elsewhere to be perpetuated.
This video essay is about a moment in which my senses are shaken, and this place, this troubled and elusive “personal landscape,” appears, becoming unavoidable. It is about a moment, in other words, of sensorial interpellation—a carnal thought, as Vivian Sobchack would put it—that I experienced when watching Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga (2001).3 My senses were shaken and the buried memories of my body growing, moving, floating, dancing, and almost drowning in this place suddenly resurfaced. What is this place, exactly?
It is many places at the same time. I initially thought of it as the “Chilean postdictatorship”: a dismembered landscape haunted by the horrors of the recent dictatorial past. Horrors that far from visible and accessible were largely submerged and deliberately hidden and erased, yet stored and experienced epidermically, as an echo or corporeal nuisance reverberating in the environment and across bodies. I grew up, like many in my generation, sensing this in my body yet unable to make sense of it. While with time it became more accessible to see and name the injustice, the violence, the horror—to oppose it—a more difficult question lingered unanswered, almost taboo: what was my place in this place?
The sensorial disarming I experienced with La ciénaga brought me to an uncomfortable recognition: that my place in this place is largely determined and traversed by the structures of whiteness, authoritarianism, privilege, complicity, silence, and decaying bourgeoisie. That to start thinking about this place—to disarm it—I must first recognize the many ways in which it constitutes me. The many ways in which I am this place. To recognize and stay, in other words, with the affective structures of authoritarianism, fascism, and patriarchy within (and against) me.4 That it is of an existential urgency and responsibility—both personal and collective—for these structures to be unsettled and expelled.
This video essay, which is part of a larger research and artistic project, takes up this task—following Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Frantz Fanon—through the flesh.5 Through my flesh, which I see as inseparable from and constituted by the media landscapes—TV shows, military marches and parades, my dad’s home videos, and Lucrecia Martel’s films—that have shaped my seeing (and not seeing), as well as my movement. Determining my ways of being (and not being) in my body. By placing some of these images, sounds, and audiovisual documents together, I begin to ask: what does it mean, really, to leave my safe position at the edge of the swimming pool and throw myself into its waters? How can this gesture become a methodology?
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Endnotes
- bell hooks, “Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body,” talk at The New School for Liberal Arts, 2014.
- Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
- Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004).
- Here I am grateful to Macarena Gómez-Barris and her timely suggestion, in relation to my dissertation project, to “stay with the dictatorship.”
- Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, editors, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Penguin Classics, 2021).
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