Installation, Interviews, Offentligt rum, Rejser, Udstillinger, VideoARIEL FEMINISMSJanuary 10, 2021Ariel, Nina Wöhlk, Karen Vestergaard Andersen, Val Lee, Jo Ying Peng, Mexico City, English, Covid-19Comment

BUENOS DíAS MUJERES – ON DISTANT (YET CLOSE) ENCOUNTERS WITH FEMICIDE

A dog year; one where seven years of life changing events on a micro and macro planetary level easily seem to fit into the roll of the last twelve months that have occurred in what we got to know and call 2020. We are rewinding and fast-forwarding time, jumping back to early March, springtime last year, where we went on an ARIEL research trip to Mexico City, planning for the collaboration with Jo Ying Peng from Vernacular Institute in relation to her exhibition Buenos días mujeres, currently on view during this wintery Holiday and ’second lock-down’–season.

Buenos días mujeres – a conversation between directors of ARIEL; Nina Wöhlk and Karen Vestergaard, and the current guest curator of the exhibition Buenos días mujeres: Jo Ying Peng and exhibiting artist Val Lee. – Text and questions composed in collaboration with writer, Mille Højerslev.

Buenos días mujeres is the seventh exhibition at ARIEL, and is based on the artist, Val Lee's video work of the same title, which was researched and produced in 2019 in collaboration with Vernacular Institute in Mexico. The video work deals thematically with the killing of women, also referred to as femicide, and gives the audience a rare poetic take on the all-consuming and inherent violence of toxic masculine behavior. There are multitudes to speak of in terms of Buenos días mujeres, and so many interconnecting details, shaping the story of how the work – and later the exhibition – got to be.

Image still from the video work Buenos días mujeres, courtesy of Val Lee.

Nina & Karen: From the get-go we want you to take us back in time – more accurately back to 2019 where you first started working together on this work. How was your research process and can you share how this period was like, considering you were working on a topic like that of femicide?

Jo: I remembered that going through more and more case studies of femicide somehow brought me into a fictional cosmology where cruelty coexists on an invisible level with all of us. Inside this inner world, “I don’t know” becomes an excuse in which you know, but you chose not to know. It sounds like an irresponsible comment. However, since relocating to Mexico, I have been slowly and finally aware that I am actually undoubtedly living in a bubble-world, which is surely classified by the capital economic world. How? The wording of those violent events never stops happening, but never ever appears in the reality where I am (we are). So, what reality? Your reality or my reality? Which reality for whom to be or belong to?

For me, femicide is apparently a topic, that I still don’t know how to deal with. By investigating, I got more confused about my own position and went into questioning even more the legitimacy of my voice for it. Less and less I could demonstrate. Then I began to speculate whether “You and I don’t live on the same planet”? (This is the title of Taipei Biennial curated by Bruno Latour and it becomes a popular question amongst all of us at the moment).

Nina & Karen: Yes, and so timely! Those are such relevant reflections. To think about one’s own position in any type of research, especially insofar dealing with a societal issue like the thematics explored in Buenos días mujeres – the killing of female identifying people.

Val, when beginning the project, did you already know that you were going to deploy the method of action-scripts? What does it entail, and how does it correspond to the position of auto-cinema? Can you explain to us, how you developed the concept for Buenos días mujeres?

Val: Before the Mexico trip, I made a video – N – in New York with a similar approach; two strangers met in a hotel, and carried out the action-script that was provided on site. The footage had a lot of beautiful and failed moments, since there was never a real rehearsal. For the Mexico project, I wanted to build up a scenario that the two feminine characters needed not to perform. Rather, they just experienced the events that happened. They were more like guests to the film, and the process of the social relationship experiment became an auto-cinema itself. The composition, the rhythm, and the presence built up an experimental situation.

Val Lee, Buenos días mujeres. At ARIEL. Photo: Malle Madsen.

Nina & Karen: With ARIEL we are trying to bring awareness to all the many shapes and formations that intersectional queer-feminism take in the different movements of our time’s contemporary art. We often speak of feminisms in plural, and aim to foster a relation between our audience at large and positions that discuss and intersect. Beginning the question: What does it mean to work as a feminist artist or have feminst perspectives in an art practice? Looking at our own context, a work like Buenos días mujeres deals with topics around femicide very specific to Mexico and the country’s civic structures. These issues around gender related violence are of course active in a Danish context. Especially thinking of a time of lock-down, where all people, ranging from old to young, can be trapped in an unsafe environment with little care and support from the outside world.

However, the different structures around the intersecting causes of this problem here in the Nordic/Scandinavian region makes for a different way of approaching and experiencing the work. How and why would you say that Buenos días mujeres is interesting in a Mexican context?

Val: I had a precious opportunity to do a residency at and live in Vernacular Institute for a month, and started thinking of a way to build a temporary assembly with local residents, artists and neighbors. We casted most of our actors from a local security guard company as well as neighbors of Vernacular Institute. All the participants were invited to the screening of the video; they brought their wives, boyfriends, daughters and sons, and enjoyed an all-female mariachi band, a type of musical band usually consisting of all male members. Only at that moment, they realized, that we made a feminist film together. We completed a film about a young girl who lost her life. It was tragic, however, we tried to contemplate the issue together.

Jo: The importance is femicide as a socially structured machine, rather than the fact that it happens in Mexico. Collectively committing gender crimes physically or psychologically can not be ignored in which is associated with the capital-media material that encourages the trends. Like to say a Mexican context, is a so-called complicated complex institution. It blends with class, race, trade, technology, and the drug empire. By looking at the locality, the work intends to depict the critical narrative, and open up the discussions of the trajectory of the social agenda through the poetic interpretation.

Nina & Karen: It is the first time we invite other curators to curate an exhibition in our space. Taking into consideration the reflections you have just shared on the importance of knowledge about any and all complex contexts, it helps showing why it is so important to this exhibition project that you, Jo, would curate the exhibition in collaboration with us. Why is it important that curators work with other curators?

Jo: This is an interesting question to me because, to be honest, I don’t care much about the curator’s disciplines, or maybe I shall analyze it a bit more precisely; I rather research artists’ practices, I don’t normally pay attention to curatorial practices. What I am highly interested in is to collaborate. It makes it possible for me to learn and unlearn from other intelligent professionals. I have been trying to expand possibilities beyond linear narrative and dedicated to performing the curatorial fields in translating the collaborations under operating the independent institution or self-organization.

So, if, back to this question, I would say, it is very important for me to keep working with other “people” including, but not limiting it to curators.

Nina & Karen: For us, COVID-19 meant that we had to change a lot of our usual structures and further had the consequences that we, now for a second time, have made a ‘remote’ install together with the exhibiting artist. It is a strange setup, when an artist and curator cannot be present for installing and opening an exhibition. Thus, this exhibition has really been a joint venture of zooming on- and offline. Can you share with us the experience of remote installing?”

Val: We formed a cozy landscape among midnight Mexico City, afternoon Copenhagen, and late evening Taipei. Some chats, some sketches, and some online readings together. You, Karen and Nina were like avatars for me to sense the contours of ARIEL. I only tried to answer an easy question. How does a Dane walk past ARIEL in a bright afternoon? Once, for the ARI. Readings event, Jo led the online reading session and asked all of us to close our eyes while she read a paragraph of Sergio González Rodríguez’s The Femicide Machine. We were all in front of our own laptops in our separated own rooms, eyes closed, but simultaneously hearing the same voice. I would feel that special moment was like my experience of the remote install. In the end, the close-ups of our faces were shown on the Zoom.

Jo: It definitely could be the most common scenario for most of the home office people from the year 2020. Like Val mentioned, the landscape, we formed, was like those unattainable scenes yet at hand. The ideas landed where our hands couldn't touch. Through lots of video meetings via three time zones, each measurement of the arrangement was as if I was asked to draw lines with closed eyes. By practice, it could get closer to the reality of making the work of art. However, the challenge always brings opportunities. What I learned from this remote installation with ARIEL is that planning the most in detail for all, but keeping a maximum of open-mindedness to respond if anything arrives unexpectedly. Without being as flexible as possible, not only shrinking imagination, but cancelling the possibilities.

Nina & Karen: Making plans to carry this collaboration well into the future, could you tell us a little about your future plans with Buenos días mujeres? And what you would like to present and share, when hopefully, if all goes as planned the second or third time around, in Copenhagen at ARIEL?

Val: In 2020, the Buenos días mujeres was shown in a very standard film festival format in Paris and Berlin. It also has been shown in Taiwan in an extended cinema format, within which the ambisonic system and hypnotic sound and light design made the audience feel like the film was actually talking to them. The performative structure implied that we were not looking at someone else’s tragedy. If hopefully, we could go to Copenhagen and have enough time to understand the Danish context, I would suggest having a more ambiguous opening, where we could walk around the city with a secretive route, secretive notes, and one or two performative events along the way, to start forming a dialogue.

Jo: The next chapter of Buenos días mujeres will be continuing the theme and method of action-script and auto-cinema to construct the narrative. Underpinning with the theoretical discourse on Topology of Violence by Byung-Chul Han, parallelly exploring the gender crime, the psychological state of the perpetrators of violence, and analyzing the spatial and psychological characteristics of the total institution.

For a possible presentation with us attending and being physically present at ARIEL, I would very much like to bring the new work, the second chapter of Buenos días mujeres, to screen alongside a performative participatory scenario for the audience by a collective reading of the action-scripts. Besides, I wanted to present for the opening of 2019 a series of mini-lectures which were written with real short stories behind the filming scenes. Therefore, I would like to realize it to share it with the visitors if possible.

Nina & Karen: We look so much forward to this, and for the second chapter of Buenos días mujeres. Thank you both so much for your time, elaborations and care in regards to this exhibition-making and figuring out this curatorial mode and endeavour around Buenos días mujeres together. Let’s see what 2021 brings for these coexisting – sliding doors-ish – planetary states that we are all questioning, organising and mobilizing around.

ARIEL FEMINISMS

ARIEL is a platform and interface for the development and dissemination of exhibitions of high artistic quality, centered on new ramifications of feminism in the aesthetic field. Through an innovative facilitation of artistic research, the project seeks to expand and nuance the framework of understanding of the field of feminism and to create a contact area where the topics can be accessed. The initiative is Nordic and internationally oriented with a long-term perspective on branching out into new collaborations, contexts and situations. ARIEL is initiated by Nina Wöhlk, and co- run and curated with Karen Vestergaard Andersen.