Performance from perspectives

 

Gutierrez’s scenographic conscience and theatre production background was reinvested into setting up five phases: Introspection, Collectivity, Iteration, Resonance and Dialogue. 

Various works, with mediums ranging from paper to Augmented Reality, were adapted from interviews, conversations, and field recordings from the #NiUnaMenos protests in Buenos Aires. 

 

Turning the exhibition into a space of mutation was inspired by the agitated fluxus movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and its deconstruction of norms. Like the fluxus mischief-makers, PAPER NOISE embraced ephemerality, involved the viewer, and made improvisation its medium. Rearranging SBC weekly, based on emerging dialogues, captured the spontaneity of oral storytelling - and perhaps prompted the rawer side of our reactions. PAPER NOISE demonstrated the interconnectedness of art, identity, and daily experiences. This also broke with the conception of a gallery as a white cube, to welcome the brazen craft of disruption. 

 

Walking the city as identity 

 

Between each of the five phases, a keen eye observed before creating. 

 

This learned capacity to observe flows from years of flânerie and walking the city with curious pupils, reading the faces between buildings. A flâneuse turned facilitator, Gutierrez’s perspective is particularly rooted in the gendered experience of urban space. Popularized by the dandyist prose of Charles Baudelaire in 19th century Paris, the concept of “flâneurie” - roaming the city as leisure, observing, with no destination or agenda – is steeped in the footsteps of art movements over the decades, from Surrealists to Situationists. Within this tapestry, a question mark emerges, one that points to the absence of female flâneuse figures on the surfaces of modern literature (Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse’). The woman freely wandering the streets of Baudelaire’s Paris, for instance, risked the association with prostitution (Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Walter Benjamin: escritor revolucionario’) before one of contemplation. 

 

The right to move one’s body freely in the public space has historically been a different one for different genders, whose footsteps have been met with varying levels of cultural and social inclusion, exclusion, or violence. In our daily walks of life, the fear of being harmed or harassed can lead us to contort the self, in exchange for greater protection in public - by adopting new techniques, behaviors, habits or clothing. 

 

Collage as resistance

 

PAPER NOISE mapped one of the ways in which organized groups of women, trans and non-binary people expressed experiences of gendered and racial violence. It spotlighted the street collage method adopted by decentralized feminist movements around the world. 

 

By hitting the walls of a city with a black on white ephemeral slogan, these groups insert alternative words and tones into public dialogue. City space is (re)claimed and vocalized.

 

The act of pasting is one of performance, that recognizes the exclusions of urban life, and answers through a chosen form of “urban intervention” - which, as graffiti does, “subverts the system, persistently throwing spanners into the works, counteracting homogeneity” (Alain Bieber, ‘Desires’)