New Dam Helps Farmers Shake Off Poverty

Womanifesto 2003, a bi-annual art event, launched Procreation/Postcreation, a box that makes you delve further. Keiko Sei reports.

According to the November 10 edition of “India Today”, female feticide is increasing at an alarming level in India. This is in spite of improving educational standards and wealth of the nation. It is unlike any expectation that modern education must bring awareness of gender equality to a large number of population and unlike any assumption that poverty is the main factor of a family wanting to have a male child in the first place. On the contrary, the biggest culprits of female feticide are found in the most prosperous areas of the country and among the most educated people. In these cases, modern technology is helping people determine the sex in the uterus, to terminate female fetuses and in some circumstances, to produce a male child with chromosome manipulation.

On November 11, coincident to the publication of this report another publication, this one celebrating woman hood – its life, art and intelligence – by “Womanifesto 2003”, was launched in Bangkok. And its theme this year – this is the 4th of this biannual project – was “Procreation/Postcreation”.

The project itself is an archive. It collects and archives contributions, by both women and men, on this theme in the form of art pieces, poetry, graffiti, comments, ideas, stories, theory et cetera. The statement of the organizers also says that it is “about exploring old and new myths surrounding both pro and post creation and how these myths have influenced our thinking in the past and, continue to do so today and into the future.” 88 contributions from different parts of the world are printed on papers, one by one, and are contained in a re-cycled cardboard box.

In the time of Internet, for many net users this is like their daily experience: you hit a search engine and voila! out come so many different ideas, texts and pictures in so many different forms from just typing one single word or a phrase. Questions then arise – Is there any site worth looking at amongst the millions? Is there any document worth putting in my file? Am I missing something? Don’t I need some filters that help me choose something worthwhile?

A simple box thus emerges as an interesting antithesis against raging use or misuse of technology on the topic of procreation (and postcreation). The organizers didn’t select by gender, race or quality, they only called for contributions and archive all.

We can read a scholarly paper about the problematic perception of sexuality of Arab women (Mona Bur), about different textiles used for babies in China, India and Japan (Padmini Balaram), a Luganda (language of the Baganda people in Uganda) lullaby about a traditional way to give birth and a Mongolian proverb about bringing up a child (Hasi), to mention a few. There is a photo collage based on graffiti written by a Dutch soldier found in the army barracks in Srebrenica (Selja Kameric, Tarik Samarah and Grazia Neri), a drawing of a woman-like figure with one eye and sewn head and a string coming out of her navel that makes the word “uncondizhahnal love” (Bops), a photo of a young couple just after they had sex (Martine Stig), a digital print of two teeth that fell out, one of which belonged to the mother and the other to her daughter (Lisa Jones). There are even recipes of foods related to birth customs, such as sweetened noodles with Tahini from Rhodes, that are traditionally prepared for nursing mothers (Dana Squires). Many contributions are about giving birth and having a child and some are tales and nuances of losing a baby and mistreatment of women.

There are as many personal stories and, emotions are more explicit than in a curated art show: excitement, happiness, sadness, bitterness, remorse and anger. Some make valuable documents of birth conditions in different places, such as one about a hospital in Alice Springs (Pamela Lofts). There are also metaphors, such as ‘occupied territory’ for example, woman, womb, and land-wise. A photo of a young Jewish woman who is about to take a video of Arafat in Ramalla, entitled “Arafat and Me” (Tamara Moyzes) challenges probably one of the most misused myths in history and it reminds us that a myth equals an occupied territory itself in mind. A digital image by Varsha Nair, based on a photo of an arm of a young woman, the arm with painful numbers of slashes tracing her suicide attempt after a disastrous marriage, is entitled Occupied Territory (a woman’s body as). And there is a near anonymous contribution from Burma, a photo of a shopping bag made by political prisoners as prison labor-work. Here, for women and men alike, too many bodies haven’t belonged to themselves for many decades already.

A poem by Nilofar Akmut, which is accompanied by a photo of an iron bed or a chair like object with a cushion from which sharp nails stick out, says “……Catch them [the silent voices]/Twist them around/The truth has a tendency of revelation.” One of the opening day performances, by Esther Ferrer, was about nothing but silence, or as she calls it - emptiness, and she actively creates it: she looks around the audience, counting the numbers of women and men and placing a board that said “1st minute of performance” on a chair on the stage, and repeating the same action by placing a boards saying “2nd minute of performance””3rd minute of performance”……. Up to the 7th minute of her performance. In this case emptiness is used as a space for everyone to fill in and to contemplate. An interesting effect of this performance was that the audience was talking and chatting to each other while she was silently performing (“What is she doing? “What is this supposed to mean?”) and so here, the positions of the performer and the audience are reversed. Don’t let silence go without telling you anything. Catch it and twist it around. Don’t let emptiness go without you saying something.

A performance by Mink Nopparat, entitled “Flowers”, starts with her action to place voice bubbles onto characters from art or from general photos, which otherwise remain as mere objects of gaze by the audience. So, Venus de Milo says “I don’t care about my arms,” a photo of Muslim women clad in chadors pronounce “I could be a doctor if…..” After this action, she folds the papers with the pictures and texts and makes a flower out of them: a silence thus becomes a flower. In another performance, “Control Your Brain” by Liliane Zunkemi, remote-controlled replica toys as brains crawled amongst the audience, knocking at their feet, as if stating that they’ve been forced to separate from bodies (in the performance the audience use remote controls to operate the brains).

A group from Chiang Mai called The Beauty Suit Team took the subject of the myth of beauty for their performance. The group came together at an exhibition entitled “The Beauty Suit” which was curated by Katherine Olston, a member of the team, and which has just ended at Chiang Mai University Art Museum. The exhibition was about different perceptions of beauty by different people and about cultures and myths, belief and misbelief around it, and they brought this concept to Womanifesto. In a cabinet like room three women look into mirrors, separately, and the audience can watch each of them through the transparent mirrors as the women face them but do not see them. The women are busy taking care of themselves – one is whitening herself, one is wearing black make-up to become darker and the other in a wedding dress grumbles to herself “Am I beautiful?” “Am I too fat?”… The performance projects anxiety of every woman, about her image to the outside and about a common myth in Asia that a woman must be white to be desired by men and society in general. The women talk only to themselves and to the mirrors about their problems, but the audience can catch their voices clearly.

The publication Procreation/Postcreation archives what we can call “eloquent silences” and, those who catch it. Yes we live in the time when technology, such as Internet, helps to bring more voices out into public space, so much so that we cannot decide which to pick, read and to hear. But we also live in the time when, again with a help of technology, more and more female voices are killed even before they are silenced. Given the current scenario, this plain box filled with diverse input makes us slow down, think, and, possibly, care about the issues, as a quiet manifesto.

For a note, men occupied a half of the audience at the well-attended launch of this publication.

Womanifesto 2003 was funded by the Bangkok regional office of The Rockefeller Foundation and organized by Preenun Nana and Varsha Nair. Procreation/Postcreation, launched on November 11, 2003, is a limited edition publication. To order a copy contact the organizers at: info@womanifesto.com Website: www.womanifesto.com

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i Wait, do not drop the veil/These silences are real voices/Hidden by threats/Innuendo and abuse/Grotesque/Bloody/Macabre/Catch them/Twist them around/The truth has a tendency of revelation” Nilofar Akmut
ii The members: Boondarik Sukhaboon, Katherine Olston and Estelle Cohenny-Vallier.