As space was absorbed and consumed in movement by a spectator, a new architectonics was set in motion: a “picturesque revolution” that was born of setting sites in moving perspectives (…). The new sensibility engaged the physicality of the observer, challenging her ability to take in space and more space-a mobilized space.
During the eighteenth century, the production of travel discourse began to grow and took on a variety of forms, from literary to visual and spatial configurations. Journeys, poems, view paintings, and gardens views were among the new forms of shared spatiovisual pleasure. (…) the historian Alain Corbin writes: (…)The Italian veduta had learned to take a comprehensive view of their cities, and for ages tourists had rushed to take in the Bay of Naples from the terraces overlooking the city…The ‘prospect view’ offered a pleasure, combined with walking and the ideal day, that gave rise to a new way of seeing. Scanning sites and cityscapes, moving through and with landscapes, this opening of spatial horizons fashioned spectacular spectatorial pleasures. The “collective attraction for views” was another of the forces that shaped the cultural movement which proleptically led to the cinema. (…) Vedutismo was a particular incarnation of the observational gaze.(…) As they merged the codes of urban topography and landscape painting, city views also incorporated the cartographic drive, creating imaginative representational maps.
from Haptic Routes: View Painting and Garden Narratives
‘Is an experimental avant-garde possible in an underdeveloped country?’ was a provocative question asked by Catherine David, one of the curators of the first large international retrospective of Hélio Oiticica, raising geopolitical questions in art history and criticism. Multiple Brazilian avant-garde artists subverted ‘higher’ aesthetics values by focusing on folk and popular aesthetics and emphasizing the ‘lower’ senses of touch, taste, and smell suggested by digestive and sexual metaphors.”*
“(…) Gregory Ulmer’s Electracy-electronic literacy-for instance, argued for(…)the Brazilian samba as a model for writing hypertexts.(…) Ulmer’s reference to the Samba is a welcome reminder that audience participation has a broad history that could include total participation in church liturgies, processions, and especially festivals such as the very pagan yet very sacred four days of Carnaval in Brazil. Artists such as Hélio Oiticica have fused these oral traditions-such as the Samba-to misread and reinterpret European modernism, thus translating geometric abstraction into kinetic body-centered performances.”
*Examples include Anthropophagy (1928 manifesto), Neoconcretism (1959 manifesto), Cinema Novo (1962 Aesthetics of Hunger manifesto), and Tropicalismo (1969 Tropicália album-manifesto). (…)
from Body-Centered Metaphors of Cannibalism, carnival, and Hunger
Geography as a room of one’s own
An Intimate Map
“Taking Place”: from salon to Gardens
Furthermore, as we have seen, in the history of the Native commons we find the best, most concrete example of a commoning use of resources realized without any private property claim or exclusionary regulations.(…) According to Allen, the value Native people placed on freedom, lack of hierarchies, and egalitarian relations has been a major source of influence on not only socialist thought in Europe and America, but especially American feminism, an influence symbolically evoked by the gathering of the first feminist conference in the United States on what had been Indian land: Seneca Falls.
It is not, thus, a pure coincidence that the first reconstruction of a territory on the continent organized on the principle of the commons was realized by Native Americans- the Zapatistas- or that the Women’s revolutionary Law is central to their constitution, establishing a broad range of women’s rights that is unprecedented in any country.
The Women’s Revolutionary Law was adopted in the 1992 at the time of the Zapatista uprising. It stipulates seven key women’s rights, including the right to participate in the revolutionary struggle, as they desire and need to, to work and receive a just salary, to decide how many children they will have and care for, to participate in the affairs of the community and hold positions of authority, if freely and democratically elected, to education, to choose their partner, and to primary attention in matters of health and nutrition. (For the text of the Law see Zapatistas! documents of the new Mexican revolution (December 31, 1993-June 12, 1994. Brooklyn:Autonomedia 1994)
from Beneath the United States, The Commons
Introduction: Why Commons?
At least since the Zapatistas took over the Zócalo in San Cristobal de las Casas on December 31, 1993 to protest legislation dissolving the ejidal lands of Mexico, the concept of ‘the commons’ has been gaining popularity among the radical left internationally and in the U.S., appearing as a basis for convergence among anarchists, Marxists, socialists, ecologists, and ecofeminists.(…) The new enclosures’ have also made visible a world of communal properties and relations that many had believed to be extinct or had not valued until threatened with privatization.
(…) In this context the idea of the common/s has offered a logical and historical alternative to both the state and the private property and the state and the market, enabling us to reject the fiction that they are mutually exclusive and exhaustive of our political possibilities.
from Feminism and the Politics of the Commons in an Era of Primitive Accumulation
(…) markets too, the argument goes, depend on the existence of nonmonetary relations like confidence, trust, and gift giving. In brief, capital is learning about the virtues of the common good.
We must be very carefull, then, not to craft the discourse on the commons in such a way as to allow a crisis-ridden capitalist class to revive itself, for instance, as the environmental guardian of the planet.
from Global Commons, World Bank Commons
(…)Most important has been the creation of urban gardens, which spread across the country in the 1980s and 1990s, thanks mostly to the initiatives of immigrant communities from Africa, the Caribbean, or the South of the United States. Their significance cannot be overestimated. Urban gardens have opened the way to a ‘rurbanization’ process that is indispensable if we are to regain control over our food production, regenerate our environment, and provide for our subsistence.
The gardens are far more than a source of food security: they are centers of sociality, knowledge production, and cultural and intergenerational exchange.
from What Commons?
“ The location of art and archives in particular historical contexts and national histories brings to the forefront political dimensions of art in relation to life, technology and difference, and thus, social and political struggles involving class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and colonialism, often at the center of utopian revolutions leading to various authoritarian and democratic regimes. In this struggle, more than a few twentieth-century Brazilian avant-gardes have enlisted the body centered metaphors of cannibalism, carnival and hunger in order to simultaneously incorporate the foreigner into the familiar and subvert cultural hierarchies that disregarded popular and folk forms of cultural expressions.
from Body-Centered Metaphors of Cannibalism, Carnival, and Hunger
One factor that encourages women’s role as custodians of the land and communal wealth is their greater role in preserving and transmitting traditional knowledge. As tejedoras de memoria, weavers of memory, as Mexican theorist/activist Mina Navarro puts it, they form an important instrument of resistance, because the knowledge they sustain and share produces a stronger collective identity and cohesion in the face of dispossession* The participation in the new movements of indigenous women, who bring with them a vision of the future shaped by a connection with the past and a strong sense of the continuity between human being and nature, is crucial in this context. With the reference to the ‘cosmovision’ that typify indigenous cultures in Latin America some feminists have coined the term ‘communitarian feminism’, where the concept of the commons is understood to express a specific conception of space, time, life, and the human body.
*Mina Navarro, Luchas por lo común:Antagonismo social contra el despojo capitalista de los bienes naturales en Mexico (Puebla:Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2015), 248-264.
from Women’s Struggles for Land and the Common Good in Latin America
A further sign of rising feminist consciousness is the emergence of a new critical stance among indigenous women who are questioning the patriarchal structures that govern their communities, especially the transmission of land, which often occurs in a patrilineal fashion. This differential inclusion has major consequences, as Gladys Tzul Tzul, an indigenous scholar/activist from Totonicapán area of Guatemala, points out, as it affects “the registration of the family’s property, the guardianship pf the children, and the symbolic meaning of having children outside of marriage”
from Women’s Struggles for Land and the Common Good in Latin America
Women’s travel writing
As the italian feminist critic Paola Melchiori , a passionate nomad, observes dislocation has always marked the terrain of the female traveler. Analyzing the literature of travel as a site of sexual difference, she writes: Reading women’s travel writing, one notices an absence of the past. Women who leave are not nostalgic. They desire what they have not had, and they look for it in the future. The desire does not take shape as “return” but rather as “voyage”. Nostalgia is substituted by dislocation*. Thinking as a voyageuse can trigger a relation to dwelling that is much more transitive than the fixity of oikos, and a cartography that is errant. Wandering defines this cartography, which is guided by a fundamental remapping of dwelling. A constant redrafting of sites, rather than the circularity of origin and return, ensures that spatial attachment does not become a desire to possess. In the words of Rosi Braidotti, “the nomad has a sharpened sense of territory but no possessiveness about it**”.
*Paola Melchiori, “Un sentimento senza oggetto”, Lapis no.19, September 1993, p.22
**Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects:Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Thought, New York:Columbia University Press, 1994, pp.35-36
from Gender Nomadism: The Journey of Dwelling