IMAGINING OTHERNESS: ATTEMPTS OF A COMMUNITY OF IMAGES.
NOÉ MORALES MUÑOZ
I have been asked to write about imagining community.
My first, immediate, almost unconscious reaction is to build an image in my mind –or, more precisely, to borrow one.
The image I steal is the image of someone who has been thoroughly known for dedicating himself to one of the artistic enterprises that have captivated me the most in recent times.
I think of Philippe Bazin, a French medic and a photographer. I think of his own image and the images he has taken from others. I think of his own image unraveling from the images of all the people he has photographed through the years.
Bazin has produced a series of closed—up portraits of beings he literally describes as “unknown to me but without whom I could not live”.
Bazin portraits what all we could define in one word —otherness. And while doing this he has not only produced an aesthetic gesture but also a political one. He has contributed to what the French philosopher Georges Didi—Huberman has called “the politics of image” –a visual production situated between History, art and society that links imagination and politics.
Among the subjects of this extensive imagery are those who have traditionally been regarded as marginals. The elder, the newborn, the teenaged, those affected by mental disorders. A gallery that might fit into Michel Foucault’s analysis of theStultífera Navis– “The Ship of Fools”— myth: the alleged crew of the vulgar and the coarse that actually was, in Foucault’s words, the radical reverse of sheer intelligence.
That’s the precise reason why Bazin’s work haunts me. Because in his closed—up pictures he radically captures a common essence we share with all those stigmatized as eccentrics. That’s nothing but thepathos, the certainty of death, the Other with a capital O as Lacan proposed. Nothing but the mystery of what we lack, of what we want, of the reasons of why all we are here. And, as most of those individuals are facing directly to the camera lens from a short distance, Bazin also opens a deeper game. A game of gazes in which thepunctumof the images gets extended and thus contributes to a transitory suspension of time, and in which the subjects in the pictures look directly into us while we look at them and though this also look into Bazin’s gaze and thus materializes the relational path that involves the enigma of the Other –which in more than one sense is nobody but ourselves. I look while I am being looked and therefore relate to another gaze—the artist’s. All in a similar yet distinctive fashion to what happens with Diego Velazquez’s paintingLas Meninas,a phenomenon that Foucault discusses in his bookThe order of things.
That’s why the first image that came to my mind when I was asked was the artist’s and not all those portraits he has taken.
And that’s precisely the same reasons why I write and write specifically for the stage. Because I firmly believe that we can create a territory to face and embrace Otherness, a space tolook directly into the Others’ eyes while we let them do the same and then share questions, doubts, and perhaps knowledge and revelations. I reckon that being a playwright implies a wish to open conversational spaces about what matters to a specific group of people that, because of the same reasons that the photos of Philippe Bazin reveal, might share with us more than we could imagine beforehand.To me, writing for theatre should intermingle both a philosophical and social experience, and propose a relational bond that works in the same way of Bazin’s production. For all these reasons, in recent years I’ve been mainly focused in theatre projects that balance a strong social accent,addressing themes that relate to the contexts where those projects were produced, and a formal interest in contemporary art and the transdisciplinary.
This is how I have forged my attempt of imagining community through the years. I am aware of the contemporary discussion about thedictus of the communitas, or the way in which our desire to impose the idea of community might overwhelm and standardize the differences and contribute to create risky tensions between individuals. I think that the ephemeral and, in many senses,limited condition of stage art nowadays might evade the dangerous temptation of imposing and excluding. Although thinking that might be naïve, today I consciously choose to stick to that thought.
Finally, I would like to thank the Shanghai Writers’ Association for selecting me for the 2019 International Writing Program. I can hardly imagine a better opportunity to relate to others in such an exciting and stimulating context. I firmly believe that artistic international exchange is one of the best ways of imagining sensitive communities and to pursue the reflective bonds implied in art production. Extremely flattered and grateful, I am here to abandon myself to otherness in the best spirits.