terça-feira, 20 de novembro de 2007

LIFE AND ARCHIVE: THE EXOTISM OF OUR WESTERN CULTURE


Dominated by a fundamental lack, our culture is obsessed by the idea of freezing life and put it into an archive. Since the Greeks, we have been looking at the other in order to absorb it, to digest it. Our interest by the other as a fixed image (as in anthropological discourse, or photography, for instance) comes from a desire of filling a gap of ourselves, a basic need of self–identification and fulfillment. But to try to record and to retrieve everything (heritage production) is more than a utopia, it is pure madness. Also, we have detached humans from nature and we have tried to submit it, and again to put it in museums and at the same time to make museums in the nature (natural parks). All this tension between fixed matter (text) and unpredictable, living experiences (improvisation, creativity) reappears in theatre and performance, and in archaeology too. Traditional archaeologists wanted to recover the past. Now archaeologists desire (and are asked) to enact past sites (filling them with narratives, events and people) in order to give life again to a dead body they have invented. This paper will explore these well known paradoxes of modernity, ending by a reflection on tourism as a massive symptom of this exotic, strange obsession of capturing the other and freezing it into a “museum”, an archive”, a record, the phantasmic shrine of (our lost) totality. On the altar the perpetual candle of “information” shines over a never ending pilgrimage of consumers, people eager of fragments of “real life” prepared to be “taken away”.

Photo: Linda Elvira Piedra
Source: http://www.wertzateria.com/lindapiedra

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