LUPE
KUNSTLERHAUS MOUSONTURM FRANKFURT AM MAIN, DE 2016
TABAČKA KULTURFABRIC, KOŠICE, SR 2017
by RAHM & ZZ
with René Alejadro Huari Mateus
perf. 45 min
https://vimeo.com/199568135
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66VZA0_KLCw&fbclid=IwAR3Fo9CyyxbjABy8ZCZhLcHNxym01lXucBZtLu34dFtgjkoU6uvyrQZ2NMY&app=desktop
Její rolou je být jednou z nás / Her role is to be one of us.
Ján Mančuška
The Latin American artist Lupe Ontiveros died in the summer of 2012. She was best known for her approx. 200 roles as cleaning lady in Hollywood films. Thanks to her fruitful carrier, she promoted higher education for Latinos. Later, after her death, she was reborn into the body of a romantic polyduet in 2016.
Since this time LUPE started to question the contiguity of bodies coming from different geopolitical contexts sharing similar memories and stereotypes rooted in their flesh and bones.
LUPE is a cruel polyduet inviting her guests to share the almost forgotten - but embed in the Bonds, the pleasant experience of being feed as fetus on a family fest. LUPE invites her guests to an island above a labyrinth; where she dances slowly with her cleaning tools. Together with her guests, she organizes a magic dinner where both, soup and cake are mashed.
LUPE felt sometimes like a foreigner who doesn't belong yet here, but also there anymore. And who after spending the night under and over the table, realized that it’s just the matter of arrival. LUPE reflects the cooperation between two artists René Alejandro Huari Mateus (CO/ DE) and Zuzana Žabková (SK/DE) in collaboration with their invited guests, based on their interests upon foreignness and queerness in relation to the spatial positioning towards a table. What is happening under above and around the table? And what those spatial conditions offer to relations between audience and performers.
As Sara Ahmed writes in her Queer Phenomenology (2006;67) “Queer is after all a spatial term, which then gets translated into sexual term, a term for a twisted sexuality that does not follow a “straight line”, a sexuality that is bent and crocked (Cleto 2002;13). The spatiality of this term is not incidental. Sexuality itself can be considered a spatial formation not only in the sense that bodies inhabit sexual spaces (Bell and Valentine 1995), but also in the sense that bodies are sexualized through how they inhabit space. The body orientates itself in space, for instance, by differentiating between “left” and “right”, “up” and “down”, and “near” and “far”, and this orientation is crucial to the sexualization of bodies.”
René and Zuzana presents their actual research on LUPE as a queer table dance, where audience and invited performers and audience are experiencing the hidden imaginary childish utopia under the table, the drunken memory above the table, both in relation to the presence of bodies dinning around the table.
The cooperation of Huari Mateus and Žabková is based on their interest to reconsider the stereotypes and hierarchies between the audience, the performers and the social hierarchies as such. LUPE is questioning and emphasising the notion of the invisible labour and omnipresent care. Who was taking care of the space before we even entered? When the table is ready they invite their guests to redo the memory of a dinner they did, the not yet experienced dinning together with others, with strangers?
