Feminist Performance: An Interview with Colectivo LASTESIS

Abstract

Susana Draper:How did LASTESIS emerge? What moved you to form the collective?

LASTESIS: We are a collective founded in 2018 comprising three interdisciplinary artists—Daffne Valdés Vargas, Sibila Sotomayor, and Paula Cometa Stange. The formation of LASTESIS came out of the urgency and need to bring different theories written by women, queer, trans, and nonbinary people to the stage and to move beyond theoretical foundations. We were mainly interested in the diffusion of feminist ideas in a particularly conservative Chilean context, amid discussions around the right to abortion, which can only be performed under three conditions in Chile today. We made our first work in 2018 using Silvia Federici's text Caliban and the Witch, and in 2019 we made a second work, you are the rapist, which we created using Rita Segato's ideas on rape, along with governmental and nongovernmental data on sexual violence in Chile. That work reached a synthesis on the streets during the November 2019 protests in Valparaíso. From there, the work a rapist in your path was dispersed, sent to other places in the world beyond Valparaíso and Santiago. Broadly speaking, at this point we've worked on different types of workshops on virtual and in-person platforms at universities and with different feminist activist groups in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. And we've also published books that bring together the ideas of the collective, as with Antología feminista (Feminist Anthology), a compilation of feminist texts that for us make up an important theoretical foundation for an open—although not necessarily chronological—reading, along with some images of artworks by twentieth-century women. So, in a general sense, that's been our trajectory and the idea of the collective.

SD:Why “LASTESIS” in capital letters and all one word? Is there a dramatized reflection or meaning in that name for the collective?

LASTESIS: Definitely! First, we call ourselves LASTESIS because our idea, what we wanted to do and what we are still doing, is to disseminate the theses of women, queer, trans, and nonbinary authors. And considering that there are so many theses with which to work, we always saw it as a plural project—not just a one-time thing but rather something to keep doing over time. We liked this idea of kind of generating another concept, another composite word combining “las” (“the”) and “tesis” (“theses”) into one whole thing and also writing it in capital letters, like a graphic declaration and a shout: This is LAS TESIS! In fact, our work always contains a moment that says “This is LASTESIS” or “We are LASTESIS,” or Daffne's recorded voice saying “LASTESIS,” which we play from the computer, and it's like this idea of a stamp or a hallmark, right? This is how we see the importance of the capital letters and the composite word, which clearly has been a challenge because most people tend to separate it into “las tesis,” and we keep saying, no! it's just one thing.

SD:You talk a lot about embodying critical thought in forms that transform the meaning of the theoretical via feminist performance. What is LASTESIS's methodology? As you say, it's about modes of making that fight back against the lack of access to feminist ideas in formal education and also the fact that there are styles of thinking that don't necessarily follow the norms of what is classified as “theory.” In this sense, there's a pedagogical component that simultaneously goes beyond the idea of a “classroom,” of class, of an agenda in what you do. Can you tell us more about your methodology as a feminist intervention in its own right?

LASTESIS:Our methodology is collage. That's what we call our form of making. We get inspired by the two-dimensional collages that most people think of as resulting from a technique that became prominent in the twentieth century as a way to bring together images or texts or different languages—to steal them and put them into a new image in order to say something else. So, relatedly, what we do has a lot to do with that technique too, because we take and steal the ideas of women, queer, trans, and nonbinary authors, and we transform them into another language and into something else. In this way, other people can access these theories, these languages, can engage with them by another means because maybe they haven't been able to access heavy-duty theory, or they haven't wanted to or didn't have the time. . . . There are infinite reasons why they haven't yet encountered this content. Then suddenly it occurred to us that translation through the visual, audiovisual, and sonic language of the body is easier to propagate with these ideas and convey to others who maybe never would have come across a book of Silvia Federici's, for example. We do what we do in the service of this objective, and we're bringing up the methodology of collage as a use of language—not in a vertical way, because we don't believe any one language is more important than another, but rather as in a network, a rhizome. And this structure is so much more in line with feminisms than that other patriarchal structure where there is a director or an author, for example. So it's important to us to always keep asking ourselves that question about form. If the content of our work is always employing feminist theory, there's also the question of how to do that, what form these ideas should take so that they're distinguished from the classical patriarchal forms that we also learned at university about how one creates. Instead, how do we rethink the form in which we're working, the forms of making a performance, the forms of making a workshop, too. . . . The forms that this thing, this idea, this theory could take: How to give it body? How to give it rhythm? How to give it color and sound? These are questions that we are constantly trying to ask and to stage.

SD:Picking up on that thread of staging and dramatizing ideas outside of the patriarchal structures imposed on us, I'd like to ask you about how you untethered yourselves from the idea of the “manifesto,” which appears as the subtitle of Quemar el miedo and that disappears in the English edition, Set Fear on Fire! What kind of shift is at play? Does it have to do with that more horizontal feminist methodology that problematizes a more traditional kind of leftist writing whose voice would give us directives?

LASTESIS:When we wrote Quemar el miedo, it was proposed to us as a manifesto, and the first thing we said was, “We are not going to write a manifesto,” because for us the feminist perspective and the feminist struggle—and especially the feminist struggles of the Global South—are very far from wanting to position themselves in a place of setting forth a truth or a hegemony or a way of doing, but rather the opposite. It has more to do with calling out, with making demands, with raising questions, with expanding those open questions that also connect us to different forms of embodiment, to different subjectivities. . . . It's about understanding the feminist fight as a plural fight, as a diverse fight, not just related to one type of body or to one type of subjectivity, but rather something much more expansive. That's why the idea of a manifesto seemed off to us. So when the time came for the English translation, we took advantage and said to Verso, “Look, we don't like when people say this is a manifesto, because it's not.” And luckily, they said, “Oh, great, perfect.” Then of course they gave it a different subtitle that's like super grandiloquent and all. But, well, those are publishing houses’ marketing strategies, and in a way you have to let it go and say, “Okay, whatever.” And in the end, what's important is to find the most effective way to disseminate this message, to disseminate these ideas that are present, which we mentioned earlier, which are primarily open questions, callouts, and experiences, individual experiences approached from the point of view of the collective. That's another political wager we make by positioning ourselves as a (women, queer, trans, and nonbinary) “we,” understanding that we are talking about collective experiences that we can tackle only from a collective perspective. But yes, there is absolutely an impetus to differentiate that from certain traditional forms of literary production or protest, including forms of protest that are more associated with the left, more traditional, let's say. In other words, it's a political move to say: “This is another way of doing it.” And this other way has to do with understanding feminisms not only as content but also as form.

SD:The way you talk about performance reminds me of how the feminist assembly is being resignified as a means of embodying and activating forms of collective intelligence, as Verónica Gago says. It seems important to me how you propose performance as a feminist aesthetic form that critiques colonialism, extractivism, debt, privatization—from the body and from the texture of the everyday. Can you tell us more about that transversality and articulation within a long history of violence and divisiveness?

LASTESIS: We could say that, for example, what you're saying about the assembly and moving through the body is occurring, and at the very least occurred in 2018 in Chile, when there were feminist mobilizations at universities, where for the first time in the history of the country we saw the organization of assemblies of women and sex-gender dissidences starting to be able to offer testimonies of cases of abuse, sexual harassment by professors toward students, and so on. And at higher and higher devastating rates. So you start to realize that this experience that's personal—and as we see again and again, the personal is always political—gets expressed collectively because it happened to one person and to another too, and it was the same professor and no one knew. So then what starts to move through the body is an experience that's personal, and even if it didn't necessarily happen to you, you understand that it's shared because of your condition of gender or whatever condition links you—it's a shared issue. That's also where this links up with the viral phenomenon and the mass movement of a rapist in your path: it's about an experience that's both personal and collective, and it's about a history that's patriarchal, that comes from colonization, that's economic and operates on bodies. From there we can understand that there are many dimensions in dialogue in that type of performance—and by extension, maybe we should also say in all our work—as when we were talking about methodology and the movement and translation of the text, how it looks, how it sounds, how it's lit, what words get added to a text that's already written, but, long story short, all of that requires an exercise that's both mental and embodied, because it's also choreographic. We can also consider how the body lies beyond the material, remembering that it takes a nexus of so many creative actions to be able to stage a theoretical production, which makes use of a lot of repetition. There's also a very important element there, not didactic because no one is trying to teach anything, but rather that of introducing a theme. And after that it's up to the disposition of each person, how this type of information moves through their body and resonates with their experience.

Since we understand performance as actions based in bodies, these actions become meaningful during moments of interaction. As we've said, there needs to be someone acting and someone observing that action. And as a result people are interpellated and affected starting from the body, via the performance, which is also being observed. So it's a bit about breaking with the idea of passive versus active, or the person who emits versus the person who receives; actually, it's something that takes place in a relational environment and has to do with transmission. And in this case what gets transmitted is the individual-collective experience of calling out; it's the demand for rights for the body and from the body too. That's what's at stake here. And what also gets added is this decolonial perspective connected to the transmission of knowledge, the transmission of know-how, the transmission of ideas through bodies, which began in precolonial systems and persisted under colonial ones: the liminal keeps resisting, the peripheral keeps resisting, the margins keep resisting. And this counters the idea of the archive as what is consolidated via words and holds the place of truth or hegemony. Instead, these other stories are constructed and transmitted through bodies as well. And that's something that's not new; actually, it's pretty old in our territories, it's something that resisted and that continues. And later, especially in the twentieth century (of which we have more records and information), a kind of great tradition of women and sex-gender dissidences who act from their bodies and from within collectivities is created. There's also something that interpellates us from a historical place, as we always say: it's not like this idea of performance comes to you out of nowhere. No. There's a whole history in between; there are many people who have done it and who keep doing it too. And there's the site of the body as a tool of struggle, an oppressed territory that's really present in the feminist struggle too . . . and above all in our context, which is a context of colonial histories that were still occurring until relatively recently. Especially if we think about the dictatorship—a topic we're going to be talking about all year with the fifty-year mark since the coup in Chile—as a moment when the body was subject to violence, torture, disappearance, assassination, exile. . . . And it's from that body that we can resist, struggle, act. Given all this, the focus is in no way minor.

SD:Now I'd like to ask you if you think performance can open up another dimension of internationalism as a way of generating a form of collectivization, of centering the body in order to find common ground. It's about taking to the streets, translating and updating to local contexts, as they did in Turkey with a rapist in your path, but with a tonality and meaning that is shared across different territories, through dancing, singing . . .

LASTESIS: In what we can see in our particular case, in how our performance went viral, it's pretty unique; this shows us or showed us even without our knowing, without our foreseeing it, something pretty important about language. Because if there are ideas of sexual violence—common for many people and also approached from different perspectives and theorized accordingly—that take shape in language, an interesting exercise involves translation, moving these ideas through the body. So there, doing the performance, there were people who maybe theorize about that from an intellectual or from a feminist perspective, and they have their own experiences, too, from activism. But there were also other people who weren't even necessarily connected to that type of activism, to feminisms, but who could still connect with this exercise in translation: moving it through the body in a public space or in front of some institution or the representatives of those institutions. People coming to perform alongside other people they may not have even known before. So maybe that's where there's a key to this knowledge, this way of knowing, as we mentioned, this way of transmitting knowledge and know-how both old and new—it's a language that can be adapted and taken up by more people. And we can also see why people—with a culture very different from ours, who speak other languages, who have a different relationship to patriarchy and to sexual violence, and so on—did this and why they continue to do it. There are many things about our situations that differ, but through an action that's so simple and so short, we can communicate and feel the same thing. So maybe it's this idea of internalization, of knowing what's shared. In other words, patriarchy is such an old sociopolitical system throughout the world, but maybe it's through other forms of communicating through language that we can search for solutions for all, which speak through every culture.