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Diário de bordo.4 – Prisma Mexico

Oaxaca, Mexico, June 2009.

I begin with this header because this is the place and it is important that it is Mexico (just like it would be important if it were Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Belize or Panama. Or the south of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, Brazil or Uruguay, just to keep it in the Americas.)

But it is in Mexico City and in Oaxaca.

“Places force men to exchange”, said Brazilian geographer Milton Santos.
Exchanges are taking place here and now and come and go from different parts of the world.
Welcome aboard Prisma Forum Mexico.

Prisma Forum Méxicois a self-managed encounter and not a festival. This means that although it offers different kinds of seminars, classes, performances, lectures and meetings with artists of many nationalities (elements common to festivals around the world), Prisma was conceived and built by each participant, from their own ideas and projects.

In 2007, after a meeting of the international collective Sweet and Tender Collaborations at PAF in France, Mexican dancer Monteserrat Payró started to think about producing a meeting in Mexico and along with Mexican cultural promoter Horacio Lecona, she started to outline what this meeting would turn out to be.

Prisma started in 2008 through its website, where people would submit their ideas for meetings, seminars, workshops, presentations, work in progress, work with local communities, debates or special projects. During the three months submission period it was also possible to meet, get in touch and exchange ideas with other participants via website.

From March 2009 until a few days before the beginning of the meeting (June 27) the Prisma Forum team, coordinated by Montserrat Payró, evaluated each project’s production possibility and organized the day-to-day schedule and the format of the meeting.

Behind (and all around) this project, national and international supporters from different levels like cultural centers, associations, state and federal government, embassies, universities, festivals, different types of collectives and above all the individual effort of each participant to make their visit to Mexico possible; all that combined built this meeting.

I embarked on this trip, I mean, I got to know its idea from my friend Montserrat, also a member of Sweet and Tender Collaborations, a collective I take part in. We were in Portugal, in a big Sweet and Tender meeting and she introduced all us to her plans and asked us to help her carry out this great enterprise.

(I take a jump in time and right now in a street in Oaxaca’s center I must interrupt my writing because in front of the cafe I´m in a big brass band is passing by with giant puppets like ones found in Olinda during Carvanal, besides two hundred people. They are participating in a manifestation for “a non-registered candidate” and they yell UNIDOS, SI – PARTIDOS, NO.) (This kind of “interruption”, I mean this kind of concrete reality erupts all the time here and it is impossible to forget we are in Mexico, it is impossible to forget that in this country about 60% of the population is of mixed ethnicity, 15% are Amerindians and 25% is of European background, and that politics and immigration are a critical point in discourses and reality here).

Coming back, a soon as I reached Mexico City, still carrying my luggage under intense heat, I went straight to see a project called The Community Pictures Series. This project was initially conceived by Myriam Van Imschoot and is currently being developed by David Bergé (Belgium) and Trajal Harrell (EUA). If you follow the link to the website, you´ll see that the idea is to portray communities around the world, investigating an idea of belonging to a community and the responsibilities and relationships this kind of idea implicates. David and Trajal develop the series The Dance Community Pictures. They arrived at Mexico City before the beginning of Prisma Forum and they visited dance academies, schools, companies, theaters and associations, summoning their participants for a collective picture and asking the question: Do you consider yourself a member of the Mexico City dance community?

I was there in the external staircase of the huge Auditorio Nacional and I saw that group with people from such different dances, united in a beautiful picture. I put a sticker on myself saying “ Me declaro miembro de la comunidade de danza de Mexico” (I declare myself a member of the Mexican dance community) and I took this picture of the group myself. I felt I had just actually set foot in this land. What a great start!

Micheline no México / Foto divulgação

After that we took a bus and 8 hours later we reached Oaxaca, where it all begins.

(Already on the way out of Mexico City, we passed by the most poor part of town, filled with large street with intense trading and really chaotic traffic)

The way to Oaxaca was filled with very high mountains, dangerous curves and some difficulty breathing at that height. And a lot of borders. . Tehuacan, Miahuatlan, Santiago Nacaltepec…, I couldn´t understand so many different names but we stopped at every border.

Speaking of crossing borders, in the bus I talked to Gilad Ben Ari (Israel) who proposed the project Running into the Political Equator/ Encuentro con el Ecuador Político, which also took place “before” Prisma Forum. (I’ll explain: there is a branch of Prima called “Prisma Extensions”, with projects related to specific places in Mexico and that happened here before or after the “official” period of the forum.) The project took place in the Mexicali region, in the border between Mexico and the USA and it lasted 3 days. There, Gilad met with local artists, artists who came specially for Prisma forum, educational institutions and the local population, investigating different ways to react to the reality of the border and working with artistic, economic, social and political aspects of that reality. After 3 days, they presented “a result” of this meeting, even though “result” is not the most adequate word for this kind of proposal. Gilad told me that he´ll do one for us in Mexico City, a presentation with photos and videos of that meeting, although (again and he says so) it is something local, local, local.

flyer Projeto Running / Divulgação

I go back to thinking: it is important that this meeting is happening here and the networks and relationships that are increasing from this place are important.

I remembered a Samuel Beckett quote I really like:

“First the body..
No.
Fisrt the place.
No.
First both.

Samuel Beckett
Worstward Ho
1983

And I remembered this quote because I´ve been thinking a lot about this: the bodies carrying places and discourses or discourses and places themselves as parts of the bodies. And I don´t think about this debate in terms identity, I mean, identification, as if a body could or should be clearly localizable regarding its “origins”.

I think about it more in terms of all kinds of sausages: since bodies can carry places, discourses, relationships and values that come cooked, mixed, grounded and embedded into those bodies.
But ok, this is another long conversation!

Then I jump in time again and I am in Oaxaca, Prisma already started with a beautiful speech by Jaime de Labastida entitled Una Visión de Mexico/Conferencia de Contextualización (“A vision of Mexico/Contextualization Conference”). In this speech (and I´ll sum it up, of course!) he links the languages and dialects spoken in Mexico to this day and their political and power tensions with the necessity and responsibility to keep opening space for each one of these dialects and, consequently, each of the people who speak them, so they keep existing. A speech about opening space and keeping space open for differences.

The opening night had Mexican performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez Pena, who presented Corpo/Ilicito: The Post-Human Society # 69, an impressive and disturbing piece about the exploration of the body as a place of spirituality, memory, activism, fear and hopes.
In the next day, we began with classes in the morning, followed by talk sessions or workshops and seminar in the afternoon, many of them were simultaneous, thus offering options for those who wished to focus their interests. At night, there were performances and/or talks.

Well, this “logbook” will be kept during the next three weeks, the time I´ll be in Mexico presenting my work and doing many other activities at Prisma Forum. I feel I still have a lot to say and great wishes to exchange here and there.
I didn´t even speak about the extremely stimulating conversation I had with Guillermo Gómez Pena and today’s debate with Amaranta Goméz, a “muxhe” activist (a gender identity of Zapotec origin), who proposed other values about gender, sexuality and pre-established identities and told us how all these discussions are present in the everyday life of Jochitán, a city in the south of Mexico, where she lives.

This afternoon we´ll have a talk with Jan Ritsema (The Netherlands), Marten Spanberg (Sweden), Xavier Le Roy (France) and Eszter Salamon (Hungary/France) about Un Cuerpo: multiples aproximaciones(“A Body: multiuple approximations”) and at night, Alain Buffard (France) at Teatro Macedonio Alcalá.

Tomorrow I´ll present CARNE at Teatro Juarez, sharing the evening with Christoph Leuenberger (Switzerland), who will present the Masculinity Project and after the presentation, I´ll coordinate a debate about gender, culture and performativity.

I hope I can take people from Brazil to México, inspired by this writing and carry myself too, from one place to the other, in these fruitful migration movements I follow from this side.

Now I must rehearse.

See you next week, hasta pronto!