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CULTURAL
title>REHEARSING AN ABSENCE/ A PRESENCE
OF A CULTURAL BODY
author>Lina Issa
In my text 'Why Marco Polo can never be a citizen? published in 'Production
of Public and Private Space', I try to grasp my idea and relationship
to 'homeland' and its transformation through my experience of dislocation.
I do that looking at Ernst Alphen's 'Imagining Homelands', where 'home'
as a geographic place is experienced by the 'migrant' through imagination
rather than real interaction. 'Home' is not necessarily located in the
past, for it is continuously remembered, lived and imagined in the present.
Memory and imagination are no longer two separate things facing in opposite
directions- memory of 'the past', and imagination of 'the future' come
together in 'the present'- casting me in 'the now' and casting my life
in 'passing images'. These images belong to the 'now' I inhabit.
This project will focus on the loss of language and of cultural reference
that happens with displacement, and the paradox that I still carry these
cultural references in my body, and the sensuous or other experiences
that challenge translations.
The lost and found in the course of (space or time) travel are often expressed
in terms of non audio visual sense knowledges, therefore, my focus will
be on the sensory bodily experience of my ‘stand-in’ there
and myself here in return.
Drew Leder, in his book ‘The Absent Body’, 1992, writes: A
certain degree of alienation from our bodies is crucial. Vision, as the
sense generally most separate from the body in its ability to perceive
over distances, is the central sense to this necessary alienation. According
to the Latin roots of ‘absence’, it does not mean ‘a
void’ but ‘being-away’, a being that is away from
itself. The lived body combines 1st person and 3rd person perspectives,
in order to have the distance from itself necessary for functioning.
From this perspective, I am interested in sending another being
to ‘embody’ my places of memory and identity. It is a way
to distance me from myself.
But is she in this case a ‘subject’? Is she herself? Is she
‘me’? Will she also take the task of distancing herself from
her by performing this ‘stand-in’ role?
Could there exist reciprocity in the cancellation of each of mine and
her existence, in the cancellation of each subject’s tenuous position
as ‘subject’? Replacing me, exchanging lives, passions, wills,
transforming oneself in the other’s stead. It is perhaps the only
way one can finally fulfill one’s self. An ironic way, maybe but
all the more certain!
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