I feel very inspired by Regina José Galindo’s work. Her disciplined and unapologetic approach in creating incredibly thoughtful works that are just thick with meaning is really something to learn from.
My first encounter with Galindo’s work was at a MoMA exhibition “Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art” this year. In “Looting,” Galindo’s piece included in the exhibition, she had eight Guatemalan gold fillings inserted into her teeth by a dentist. Then, she traveled to Germany, where she paid a dentist to extract the fillings. This performance, through its non-metaphorical approach to the body and its action, exposes colonial and extractivist violence. This work is mentioned in Diana Taylor’s engaged text Making Presence.
The question of care and “caring enough” appears throughout Taylor’s text: “Nobody, apparently, cares enough to end the calamity” (p.111), “No one seems to care” (p. 122), “when Melania Trump (…) visited the migrant children held in detention on the U.S.-Mexico border (…) she wore a jacket that read, “I really don’t care, do u?”” (122).
What kind of care is possible in the face of unbearable violence and extremely unjust distribution of privilege, wealth, and basic health necessities? Approaching the topic of care would require admitting our interconnectedness – we are all intertwined with each other. It made me think of Judith Butler’s significant text, Precarious Life, where Butler argues that our vulnerability to each other is a basic human condition. Perhaps the denial of our interconnectedness allows people in people to uphold the unjust social hierarchies and the violence that sustains it. Perhaps those who claim not to care do so in order to maintain their positions of privilege, and to be able to close their eyes to the violence that makes their livelihoods possible.
At the end of her essay, Taylor considers “the political force and efficacy of Galindo’s performance” (p. 125). She suggests that the performance doesn’t have the power to fully and immediately transform the political landscape, however the performance isn’t completely infertile in its political capacity. “Maybe, says Galindo, it is sufficient for the performance to impel the spectators to reflect on the issue. For her, this modest goal is sufficient,” (p.126) Taylor writes. I agree with them both that the capacity to inspire conversations is one of the greatest powers of performance. While it doesn’t turn the world upside down in a span of its duration, the performance is capable of engaging the participants in more genuine ecologies of care. And that is sufficient.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso Books, 2004. Taylor, Diana. 2020. "Making Presence" ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence. 105-126. New York University: Duke University Press,