Kütral Statement

My work is a mutant exploration of the potentialities, modes of existence and presence of the body and fiction in a performative situation. In other words, it explores how human and other than human bodies perform fiction, and the means, meaning, and function of that fiction. Although it takes different forms and it is in constant transformation, I can enumerate some of the characteristics that define it; It is nostalgic, somewhat energetic and it aches from a kind of unrest that I can not yet understand.

I operate in a wide range of sets, from disruptive interventions in everyday spaces with “Twenty Astronauts Moonwalking”, to a psychedelic anti-colonial sci-fi movie in “Visions from the desert”, to performative political actions with the collective EscenaPolitica.org; from study groups, workshops, and reflective writings, to delicately crafted sound performances with “A Wild Land”.

Over the past two years, I have been engaged in long-term research that seeks to dismantle the “colonial/eurocentric gaze” in performing arts. This shift of perspective is the result of a slow and confusing process where personal desires, narratives, and intuitions are in a tense but intimate relationship with political and artistic questions, relating theory, history, and practice. This research is rooted in a practice of listening to both ancestral resonances and my constantly being out of place; in a looking back at my primal experiences in a desolate landscape -a territory in conflict, and on how these conflicts are inscribed in my body.

In this trajectory, the works of filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, feminist anthropologist Rita Segato, and philosopher "Bifo" Berardi have been fundamental. Working with Martel I discovered the importance of vibration as a structuring force of the deliberately precarious ground of her films, in particular the sound as a constituent element of the narrative as an immersive experience. In the case of Berardi and Segato, it is from them that I conceptualize around sensitivity as interface, battlefield, and bond in both affective, sensuous, and political realms.

Though eclectic, all my work aims to “disorient sensitivity” by exploring those corporealities in contempt of the "colonial gaze". More precisely, I’m interested in activating instances where those corporealities can unfold and emerge. In that sense, I aim to create work that produces the potential for altered states, experiences, thoughts, and ideas to occur. This is founded in a belief in art as a motor for change; when confronted with something that doesn´t perform as expected or resists classification we have to look for new approaches, and in these moments of liminality there is potential for the unpredictable and unforeseen to occur.

Overall, I'm trying to find positions where I can hold myself accountable for what I do, positions where the overwhelmingly complex and painful narrative we are immersed in, is overrun by the joy of at least be trying to not comply with the catastrophe, to be attempting otherwise - where frustration, indignation, sadness or impotence transform into a poetic type of attitude, always in relation with something else, insisting in and aware of that “There is a poem only if a form of life transforms a form of language and if reciprocally a form of language transforms a form of life”.

I have always perceived my own trajectory as an escape. That has defined not only biographical aspects but, mainly, the development of my artistical project. At a formal level, every escape requires a plan, a strategy and a series of tactical elements. But what it certainly demands, for it to be effective, is a continuous re-adaptation, always unfolding and maximizing our skills, creating temporary or everlasting alliances, constructing shelters, rejecting any kind of speculation. Biographical and artistic strategies come together.

But, an escape from what, from where?

What drives our biographical paths must be one of the most difficult things to discover, and to name. And this is no exception, though I think that I can identify some of the conditions that gave birth to that movement.

The law of ferocity.

I grew up in Neuquén, the most important city in the Patagonia in the late ‘90s. Growing up in that city was like juggling with Molotov bombs. I remember having the constant hunch that everything was about to blow up, and feeling that would be better than to continue with the juggling act. However, after every social unrest (there were many social conflicts at the time), the city would fall back to its usual apathy, and tension would always rise. And the wind kept blowing. Just like it does with forest fires, the wind feeds insanity and violence. It also fed the most horrid stories, scenes that seem to have been taken from Bolaño’s Santa Teresa, or the real Sonora. Cars burning in the hills with the drivers inside, dead women in farms, inside canals, by the side of the highway. And the city, apathetic, trying to keep its status of touristic and oil-business paradise.

Many years later I understood that the city where I grew up was, and still is, fighting a war against itself. An undeclared war, seemingly silent, but which systematically claims its victims all the same: women, teenagers from the lower classes, kids. Behind a facade of wealth and prosperity, all you could find was the police and dirty oil. Just by unveiling the mask of successful business, unique landscapes and neatly organized residential areas, you could find the law of ferocity.

Hence, an artistic escape is a vital strategy against violence.

ABOUT THE ORIGINS OR THE TRIGGERS

There are certain events that transform our perception of the world. Some of them are huge, some are small movements, the infra-ordinary, as George Perec would say. Other times, what makes us move is something in between. The echoes of catastrophe. Echoes that made me turn around and look at my land’s wreck.

My cousin Nicolas Saso took part in a homicide. The victim was beaten up with an axe, burnt and buried alive in a trash dump in the hills. My cousin was judged and imprisoned.

A friend from childhood, Fernando Gatti, was shot in the chest. He bled to death in front of his sister. After years away from hometown, I came back to the funeral. I got lost and confused by the sadness and violence in the city. I realized that, in a way, I cannot speak its language any more.

The police murdered Rafael Nahuel, a poor young man, of Mapuche provenance (natives from Patagonia) as part of a new and systematized attack towards indigenous communities. The young man was shot in the back, and he was unarmed. The government stands up for the police.

I found out that my great grandmother was a "Machi" (a Mapuche shaman), and that part of my family history was hidden, silenced, denied. All her knowledge was lost and disappeared and my family name whitewashed.

These tragedies that are personal, but also social and political have affected me deeply and determined a new vital need to think about and research on violence and, mainly, counter-violence. Of course, this social violence has its historicity, and it is not limited to Patagonia. It has its particularities and similarities throughout the whole history of Latin America.