Every day, when I try to get out of the silence that implies to be foreigner, I just open my Facebook and as a voyeaur, I spy life and images about people from the country that I had been left behind. In the middle of the images that I find, I watch Andrea´s Barragán and Angela´s Robles pictures, that they label as “camioneras” (truck drivers), that is the word that usually people in Colombia use for insult those women due to their sexual orientation or gender representation about the female performance, that are not allowed to be “representable” in the public space in Latin America.
In the last months with the images in my head I figured out why these images are sliding in my thoughts and I try to connect with the concepts of body, corporeality, gender and Latin America that have been working in the seminar. After weeks, I believe that those images works for me as a window of something more meaningful and powerful about representation and materiality of the lesbian bodies in Colombian context. Those images strike in the matter of visibilization of bodies that usually are “invisible” or hidden, due to those specific condition that present females performance that does not belong to the binary order of heterosexualism.
For understand the gesture of the pictures, I believe that is important to explore in the aesthetic proposal of these young artist that had been taken public and virtual spaces as political visibilization of the corporeality and desire of lesbians in Colombia.
In the case of Andrea Barragán, her work had been focus since 2006 in the idea of female masculinity and how those representations implies a subversive act to outbreak the role of woman and her epistemological status in the heterosexualism system of binary representation. In her own words:“La intención con respecto a las barbas de lentejuelas era transgredir ese: “ellos nos quieren ver bellas”, masculinizando lo femenino (de alguna manera “afeando” lo femenino, pues a mi modo de ver este gesto resulta molesto para los hombres, las mujeres amachadas pierden su “belleza” y su “encanto” que supuestamente las caracteriza); para así enunciar (tratar de evidenciar) una encarnación femenina desde otro cuerpo, pero que en este caso rechaza ese deseo masculino colonizador.” (Barragan, http://yoyoxoxo.blogspot.com/2008/04/la-explicacin-de-los-calendarios-de.html).
In the last five years she had being working with pictures and videos as a drag king with her character Sergei Ltda that parodies with golden “lentejuelas” beard, the idea of masculinity performing gestures with feminine contents, as the video of rancheras of Chavela Vargas (Mexican song writer and singer) Helenita Vargas or Rocio Durcal. For her, the most important is destabilizing the binary system of gender and sex showing how the feminity can be spectacle of the masculinity as a performance. Toward the des-naturalization of the categories, her work invites to think about the natural role and how some concepts that we consider “superior” “natural” can be de-constructed to show us the other side of the mimicry of the master in the body of the subaltern.
On the other hand we have the Angela Robles work. Even as a professional she starts the last year, her work as taken public spaces of the city had been recognize as a meaningful acts of resistance from the lesbian community usually invisibilized for the common practice of gay visibilization since the drag queens and the male bodies in Bogotá. Using the Cartel (posters) and expositions, her work attempt to take public spaces that belongs to the gay community in the city , and paste this images about erotic lesbian bodies with insults (Machorra, camionera, gayina, arepera) that typically condemn the lesbian existence and put that in the closet as an abject practice of the desire and corporeality. For her, the idea is (as the queer word in the scholar environment in United States) uses the insult with images to invert the mechanism of the quilt and point out the desire as a reality in these poster in the middle of the streets.
However, Barragan y Robles, both are compromise with the idea to take the city and social networks, that usually are forbidden for the lesbians in Bogotá, and represent other kind of female corporeality that escape of the woman ideal for the straight eyes. Her proposals defying the silence of being lesbian in Colombia and propose from the excess other representation of the women and the lesbian as “real” subjects in the public space.
Works cited
- Ceron, Jaime, Los degenerados http://www.revistaarcadia.com/arte/articulo/los-degenerados/22515
- Andrea, Barragán blog http://yoyoxoxo.blogspot.com/2008/04/la-explicacin-de-los-calendarios-de.html
- Sergei Ltda videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MhsC-uCsC0
- Picara Magazine. ¿Dijo usted lesbiana? http://www.pikaramagazine.com/?p=3822#comment-28286
- Angela Robles blog http://www.myspace.com/vinagredecenizas
- Angela Robles toma de Chapinero carteles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzh88unLPi
