Diversity of Arts and Culture x Human Rights
On Bodies, Belief and Transformation
The art installation Thinking Of You, by the Kosovan-born, London-based artist Alketa Mrripa-Xhafa, in Pristina, 2015. Photograph: Hazir Reka/Reuters
“ asi como despreciamos y condenamos a nuestra madre Malinali. Nos condenamos a nosotros mismos. Esta raza venzida, enemigo cuerpo.
(...)
Not me sold out my people but they me. Matinali Tenepat, or Malintzin, has become known as la Chingada-the fucked one … ”
“She told her story of sexual brutality. (...) she was then stigmatized by the society in which she grew up in and loved. She had to live with the fear of embarrassing her family. She was viewed as a woman without honour.
(...) she was forced to carry around crushing feelings of guilt and shame, bearing a lifelong burden without having ever even committed a crime. ”
Introduction
This essay is a reflective interplay between excerpts of the text Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua (1999) and the art installation Thinking of You by experimental artist Alketa Xhafa Mripa (2015).
The two pieces differ in era, having been created 16 years apart; in ethnographical location and experience where Anzaldua writes from the experience of a Chicana native of Texas and Xhafa Mripa’s work focuses on rape victims during the Kosovo war; and in medium where the former is published prose and poetry in a mixture of Spanish and English and the latter is a large-scale installation in football stadiums. Yet both women deal with the breaking and redefining of cultural borders through transformative feminist emancipation.
Structure
The essay will first outline the two works and then, in three acts, proceed to take cues from Anzaldua´s prose to give words to Xhafa Mripa’s installation, triggering reflections on the universal objectification of the female body in times of conflict within strong cultural power structures, and the transcendence of such structures through the embodiment of power.
Two pieces
Borderlands/La Frontera is a lyrical mixture of prose and poetry implying the murky precarious life in that frontier between languages and cultures. It meditates on a broad range of juxtapositions including being a lesbian in a straight world, being a woman in Hispanic culture, and being Chicano in an Anglo world.
Thinking of You is an art installation composed of 5000 donated skirts hung up in rows taking up the entire field of a football stadium. The skirts were donated by victims of rape of the Kosovo war of the mid-’90s. Sexual violence is used as an instrument of war and yet the victims are silenced and forgotten globally. The installation is a reaction to the silence these women have burdened to conform to patriarchal cultural customs and bring to light the role of women in times of conflict as a structural issue.
Reflections I | Bodies
“I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me.”
“But I didn't leave all the parts of me: I kept the ground of my own being... On it I walked away, taking with me the land, the Valley, Texas.”
“Born and raised in Kosovo, Alketa moved to London in 1997 to study Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Arriving as a student, Alketa became a refugee when the 1998-1999 Kosovo war broke out.”
The conquest of a body, the conquest of culture, the conquest of territory: The need to dissociate, de-align, to disembark from the restrictions of culture in order to transcend, reaccept, and uplift those traditions that empower your narrative. Like a feathered snake, or kusheldra, whose freedom through the shedding of its history is both revered and feared.
Reflections II | Beliefs
“Rebellious movements and treacherous cultures”
“Culture forms our beliefs (...) Culture is made by those in power - men. (...) The culture expects women to show a greater acceptance of, and commitment to, the value system than men.”
“I wanted to bring this issue into the man’s world, to a public place (...) in the main football arena in Prishtina. I decided to create a piece where thousands of skirts and dresses would be hung on washing lines across the stadium. No longer would the voices be hidden behind a curtain.”
Staged in a man´s world - the football stadium -, spectators to the past carnage, the game of war hung out to dry for all to see, institutions become spaces open to discourse. There is a parallel of Europe as the spectator during the war, wondering about the wandering borders of Europe and their relationship to them, all the while ignoring the ramifications of this demos at the epicenter of this fringe ethnos; of the impact on the European identity in the legacy of the necropolitics of this prolonged non-intervention. Yes, we stopped a genocide, but we did not stop the carnage of sexual violence which was silenced for 17 years, affecting the direct victims yet augmenting the inherited trauma that disperses like an aura through the culture and the body of the victims.
The pillaging of pride, of identity, of womanhood, the degradation of person to object through sexual violence: These anonymous donations of skirts, this display of deeds, letting the wind cleanse the space, bringing it to public discourse, normalizing the need to support victims of war. These 5000 skirts represent 20,000 silenced victims. A whisper in the wind, like a flap of a butterfly causing a hurricane, these skirts provoked a change of mindset in Kosovo and started a process of reconciliation for the affected women and their families, both psycho-socially and in the establishment of policies which I will highlight below.
Reflection III | Taking back the dignity | Transformation
“El dia de ta Chicana
I will not be shamed again
Nor will I shame myself.
I am possessed by a vision: that we Chicanas and Chicanos have taken back or uncovered our true faces, our dignity and self-respect. It's a validation vision.”
This ceremonial washing away of stigma was a turning point for the victims of sexual violence where, a year earlier, the “bodies of these women as the battlefields for the paramilitary forces of Serbia” had been recognized as civilian victims of the war by the Kosovo assembly and were eligible for pension. This participatory artwork, in which the victims donated the skirts and voiced their stories, and everybody else became a spectator to their truth, led to a rise in the applications for this pension: a true example of the soft power of art.
Art can whisper a thousand words that cannot be spoken.
Bibliography
Primary sources
Anzaldua G., Frontiers/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco, Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987
McVeigh K., ‘ ‘I didn´t want this to be taboo’: The case for women raped during the Kosovo war’, The Guardian, 4 August 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/04/didnt-want-taboo-fight-kosovan-women-raped-war
Xhafa Mripa A., ‘Thinking of You’, Alketa Xhafa Mripa home page, https://www.alketaxhafamripa.com/thinking-of-you , (accessed 9 August 2021)
Secondary
Etienne Balibar and Erin M. Williams. “World Borders, Political Borders,” PMLA, Vol. 117, No. 1, Special Topic: Mobile Citizens, Media States (Jan., 2002)
Green D., How Change Happens, Great Britain, Oxford University Press, 2016
Mbembe A. , ‘Necropolitics’, Public culture 15.1 (2003)
