From the Tortilla Curtain to the former East Berlin:
The performances of Guillermo Gomez-Peña and the city in-between identities and times
From: MUSEO 6 (Spring 2006)
By Jesse Shapins

 

Borders: Collisions of Identities

Order soma, Here/there, the indigenous and the immigrant share the same space but are foreigners to each other. Here/there we are all potential border-crossers and cultural exiles. We have all been uprooted to different degrees, and for different reasons, but not everyone is aware of it. Here/there, homelessness, border culture, and deterritorialization are the dominant experience, cheap soma online, not just fancy academic theories.

— Guillermo Gomez-Peña ⁱ

A border is a path of collision, an area along which the cultural practices, diverse histories, and asymmetrical power relations of different groups confront each other. A border zone is the spatial and mental extension of a border's tensions into a large-scale region often defined by violence and desperation, but also by creative cultural intermixture.

With globalization and the increased mobility of both goods and people, the boundaries of nation states have become some of the most significant and contested borders of our times. In physical terms, national borders have either been increasingly militarized (e.g, order soma. αγοράζουν online soma, US/Mexico) or progressively dismantled (e.g. within the European Union). At the same time, immigrant and diasporic communities have challenged the conceptual foundation of these seemingly static boundaries, destabilizing long-held notions of national identity.

Unfortunately, the result of this unsettling of seemingly secure forms of national consciousness has in many cases led to an increasing right-wing nationalism. In the United States this is most obvious in the swell of unbridled nationalism and the treatment of people of Arab decent since September 11th, or in the ongoing debates concerning the rights of Mexican immigrants, most notoriously expressed in the racist underpinnings of Proposition 187 in California, buy soma online without prescription. Order soma, In Europe, the political platforms of such politicians as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Jörg Haider in Austria have been based upon racist opposition to Europe's current and future immigrants.

On the other end of the spectrum, many people have responded to these changes by adopting denationalized, hybrid notions of cultural and national allegiances. While on one level this movement finds its voice in calls for enlightened multiculturalism, it has also been supported increasingly in recent years by an emergence of global cultural migrants. These artists of all types choose to abandon the structural straightjackets of nationalist culture and pursue projects that advocate hybrid, transnational identities, and find audiences and collaborators around the globe.

The most well known and most frequently discussed border situation is the over 3,100-kilometer long mass-security complex that separates the United States and Mexico. For some, Cheap soma tablets, the "tortilla curtain" is representative of the division between the privileged and powerful of the world and the masses of the planet's poor who are left without a fair share of the earth's resources and political might. Others see the US/Mexico border as the definitive boundary between a cherished mythology of a white America and an always evil, threatening, invading "other". For believers of this ideology, the whole border zone transforms into a literal battleground; weapons are purchased and immigrants hunted in the defense of the soul of the United States.

Since moving to California in 1978 from Mexico City, performance artist, poet, and theoretician Guillermo Gomez-Peña has used the US/Mexico border zone as a starting point for expeditions into questions of national identity, cultural purity, and racial stereotypes, order soma. Gomez-Peña chooses to interpret the border as a concrete and metaphorical space, successfully expressing the specificities of the region, while at the same time extracting the fundamental tensions latent in US/Mexican relations and articulating their relevance to many similar situations around the globe.

Gomez-Peña's work from the beginning has been a combination of literature (poetry, drama and theory) and performance and multimedia experiments. In the 1985 he was one of the founding members of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, cheap soma from canada, a collective that set out to develop innovative artistic strategies for exploring the US/Mexico border. In the 1990s, Gomez-Peña developed various projects that engaged the (at the time) new technology of the Internet. Seeing the Internet as a fantastically anonymous network, Gomez-Peña initiated a website that extracted visitors' most extreme stereotypes in the form of confessions. Order soma, He then integrated the shocking material into his performance work "The Temple of Confessions". In 1996 The New World Border, a collection of Gomez-Peña's essays, Buy soma without prescription, poems, and performance photographs, was published, solidifying his place as one of the world's most-respected performance artists and cultural critics. Most recently, as an ultimate testament to his success, Gomez-Peña performed at the first-ever performance art festival organized by London's Tate Modern. Constantly traveling, perpetually reinventing his own identities, cheapest soma online, always "here" and "there", Gomez-Peña has been one of the forerunners in the development of borders as a powerful category of investigation in contemporary art and cultural criticism.

The Performance: "Mexótica 2002—A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others"

I oppose the sinister cartography of the New World Order with the conceptual map of the New World Border—a great trans- and intercontinental border zone, a place in which no centers remain. It's all margins, meaning there are no "others," or better said, the only true "others" are those who resist fusion, Delaware DE Del. , mestizaje, and cross-cultural dialogue. In this utopian cartography, hybridity is the dominant cultureÉand monoculture is a culture of resistance practiced by a stubborn or scared minority.

— Guillermo Gomez-Peña ⁱⁱ

On November 15th and 16th, 2002, Gomez-Peña staged "Mexótica 2002—A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others" in the VolksbŸhne in Berlin, order soma. The performance was part of a more than three month-long Mexican cultural festival in Germany's capital city that sought to present the diversity and complexity of contemporary Mexico. Gomez-Peña's piece was part of an eight hour-long evening that presented nine different works about contemporary Mexico, ranging from a discussion and film on the present state of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas to the Mexican gothic rock of the band Santa Sabina to performances by the young Mexico City dance company "En dos Partes".

Gomez-Peña's performance occupied the foyer of the enormous VolksbŸhne, Berlin's most experimental and politically-charged theater. Before appearing with his co-performers Juan Ybarra and Ulrike Ulber, two screens at the back of the room displayed the sentences: "Mexican artists made in Taiwan. Body parts assembled in Tijuana, soma without a prescription. Order soma, Property of the Museum of Intercultural Fetishes. Props and costumes have been provided by the Banana Republic and the Gap". Meanwhile, flyers were distributed, instructing viewers to look closely at the "living dioramas", to move around the room as much as possible, and warning that at different points in the performance the "Ethno-Cyborgs" would invite members of the audience to participate.

Gomez-Peña and Ybarra appeared on two small stages facing each other from opposite sides of the room. Ybarra, Nevada NV Nev. , titled "Robo-oxlotl" in the "exhibit", was naked except for three rubber penises that covered his actual genitalia. His head was shaved and body covered in small, painted block dots, evoking the appearance of a diseased man. A rubber chicken hung above him, strangled by a noose, order soma. Gomez-Peña, "El Mad Mex", wore a costume that was a mixture of an exaggerated version of an Aztec warrior and various symbols of global pop culture; one arm was encased in a plastic brace covered with the icons of the Power Rangers. At one point he put on boxing gloves, ordering soma from canada, one fist adorned with the American flag, the other with the Mexican flag, and proceeded to land blows from each side against his head repeatedly. The most dramatic point of the show came when Gomez-Peña invited viewers to take a rifle initially pointed at their own faces, slowly grasp it and look down the barrel of the gun into the eyes of Gomez-Peña. The violence inherent in the upholding of cultural stereotypes was infused into the bodies of those who chose to engage Gomez-Peña's weapon.

Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Performance Photograph from The New World Border, Soma online stores, 1996. �

Order soma, While Gomez-Peña and Ybarra were the main performers, local artist Ulrike Ulber accompanied them. Armed with a whip, dressed in revealing black leather and a straw, sombrero-like hat, she took on the role of "Femma Latina Extrema". While each "Ethno-Cyborg" performed on their respective platforms, the two screens in the background played clips of previous performances by the artists, along with such provocative statements as "Berlin is Istanbul", "London is Madras", South Dakota SD , and "Madrid is Marakesh" that pushed the field of tension beyond Mexico-US relations into the problematic of immigrant communities in Europe as well. The statements also consistently switched linguistically from Spanish to English to Spanglish to German to Turkish. Gomez-Peña intentionally placed the audience in a situation they did not completely understand in order to express the constant sensation of miscommunication inherent in border culture.

The performance, similar to many that Gomez-Peña has done in the past, was successful in achieving its main objective. The piece presented exaggerated versions of cultural stereotypes in a performative context that critically confronted a colonialist anthropological view of seemingly "exotic" and "primitive" cultures in order to reveal the absurdity of such visions, order soma. After witnessing and participating in this living museum of fetishes, preconceived notions of cultural identity—in all their sexual, Farmacia soma baratos, racial, and political forms—collapsed upon themselves. The performance encouraged viewers to reinterpret the impermanence of identity as a blessing.

The Performance of the City: Berlin as a Border City

All of eastern Europe has overcome a challenge that still stands before the West: to accept the risks of "in-between time" (Zwischenzeit), a time in which old standards and conditions are no longer sustainable, but in which the new has yet to assert itself; to be able to live in the provisional, and to not perceive it as the end of the world (Weltuntergang); to not fall into panic and hysteria when the seemingly obvious means of understanding forms of living stop being so obviously understandable; to allow one's self into a movement of searching whose end is not yet known.

— Karl Schögel, "Berlin und das StŠdtenetz im neuen Europa" in Kursbuch Stadt. Stadtleben und Stadtkultur an der Jahrhundertwende. ⁱⁱⁱ

Departing from Gomez-Peña's theories and performance, order soma from canada, one can more easily see Berlin for what it really is: a border city whose particular qualities of urban life are manifestations of border culture. Order soma, Uwe Rada, the most insightful of Berlin's many urban critics, says: "One might have to get used to the fact that Berlin is not the metropolis that the big businesses and political leaders still extol it to be, a Global City in waiting, but instead a cleared out industrial city, a metropolis nonetheless, but for gold-diggers and the adventurous, more a saloon than a salon, a wild mixture of Detroit and Lodz, a border city to the East." ^iv Despite all of the ambitions of the city's planners and the nation's elite, Berlin is not a capital city of glitz and glamour, but a constant urban performance of the uncertain and the provisional.

Of the over 440,000 residents of non-German citizenship that make up part of Berlin's population of 3.4 million, over half are a new wave of immigrants from the countries of the former Eastern bloc that have arrived since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Former West Berlin was a city whose diversity was comprised almost entirely by Turks, but was also home to many Kurds, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Italians. Whereas many of the city's older immigrant communities still inhabit the inner-city districts of the former West, Soma online kopen, the city's new immigrants have settled primarily in the peripheral neighborhoods of the former East—Lichtenberg, Friedrichshain, Marzahn, Hellersdorf, Hohenschön-hausen. Daily, a train departs from Moscow, arriving at best 28 hours later at the station Berlin-Lichtenberg; the train rests for a couple of hours, before making the return journey, Nebraska NE Nebr. . This is the only direct connection between Berlin and Moscow; it never reaches Berlin's inner-city train stations Ostbahnhof or Zoologischer Garten.

Border culture in the former East Berlin's edge districts is characterized by a black market economy and provisional lifestyles. This is where Berlin begins to become oddly similar to Tijuana, order soma. Spontaneous, short-lived markets occupy vacant public and private spaces. The traders and the goods come from all over—Kazakhstan, Siberia, Dubai, Poland. παραγγείλετε online soma, Miles of empty industrial buildings and high-rise apartment blocks are either bulldozed, turned into short-lived dance clubs, or clandestinely occupied by youth groups from the radical left and right, along with middle-of-the-road teenagers looking for a place to relax away from the watchful eyes of their parents. Graffiti culture flourishes, for better or worse, smearing swastikas, anarchist signs, and bright colors in the face of city authorities hopelessly without control.

Two of former East Berlin's most prominent architectural forms are the wagon and the kiosk, ordering soma online without prescription, physical embodiments of a culture of uncertainty, impermanence, and self-initiative. Order soma, Empty lots are often transformed into temporary homes for many in the form of wagon villages (Wagenburgen). These communities are comprised of people living in trailers similar in appearance to traditional gypsy wagons who embrace an alternative lifestyle that is cheap, close to nature, and self-determined. Kiosks, Buy soma, often rapidly made of scrap wood and metal, appear and disappear throughout the city, selling such diverse items as Chinese noodles, broken electronic equipment, Russian pierogies, colorful flowers, and a wide array of bratwursts. Sometimes, a kiosk sells all these goods at once, ordering soma without prescription. Hidden around the wagons and kiosks, the surprising wealth of wildlife in the inner city is another testament to the cracks in Berlin's strivings for control. The city is full of strange patches of land where horses roam at night, foxes make their homes, and wild boars scavenge for survival, order soma. Like all of Berlin's eccentricities, this fauna is not a permanent feature of the cityscape—it is yet another sign of border disorder.

Borders of Time: Surviving in "In-Between Time"

Those who can improvise still have no clear future, but at least have the hope of one. For those who cannot improvise, the sentimental look back is the only thing that remains.

— Uwe Rada ^v

We are living in a present without a future, Purchase soma, overcome by the imperial strength of a United States culture that at its core mythologizes history, propagates fear, encourages violence, discredits alternative visions of the future, and insists upon a vacuous present of total consumption. Survival in such a state of affairs is not easy. If the performances and writings of Gomez-Peña along with the border culture of the former East Berlin can give us anything of lasting value, it may be the encouragement to stop insisting that things last.

The question of impermanence today is as irrelevant and obvious as it was since the beginning of time. Order soma, It is a fact: we live in a state of permanent transformation. What matters is how we respond to this constant dialectic of decomposition and growth, soma pills. One response is to succumb to fear and fall prey to blind patriotism, returning to the nationalist values of the 19th and 20th centuries, forgetting all of their negative outcomes. Another strategy of survival is to embrace the positive lessons of border-crossing, inventing new concepts of national identity, living in "in-between time" (Zwischenzeit), critically excavating the past and the future, Soma pedido en línea, searching for shards of hope in this present mess of fluctuation. The abyss of the unknown is only frightening if you enter it with expectations.

i. Guillermo Gomez-Peña, "The Free Trade Art Agreement/El Tratado de Libre Cultura," in The New World Border (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 6, order soma.
ii. Ibid., 7.
iii. Karl Schögel, quotation taken from Uwe Rada, Berliner Barbaren, Køb billige soma, (Berlin: BasisDruck, 2001), 208. Order soma, iv. Uwe Rada, Berliner Barbaren, (Berlin: BasisDruck, 2001), 196.
v. Ibid., 206. .

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