MANIFESTO #1 | Debida Comunión by Lucila Rozas Urrunaga

We are excited to introduce the first manifesto of a series of multimedia manifestos created by participants in the "Fables from the Flesh" course taught by Jennifer Harge, which acted as a process-based creative incubator that explored the possibilities of performance through Black feminist thought.  Jennifer Harge is a choreographer and was in residence in Philadelphia as the Center for Experimental Ethnography fellow in in Fall 2023. This piece by Lucila Rozas Urrunaga features an experimental video manifesto accompanied by textual work. 

LUCILA ROZAS URRUNAGA

PhD Student, Annenberg School of Communications
​University of Pennsylvania

VIDEO WORK

Video Still #1 from Debida Comunión

Video Still #2 from Debida Comunión

For some time, I have been thinking through the indigenous concept of body-territory, because it defines the physical space and all that it contains as constitutive of the body. This entails that the body is an expansive site through which it is possible to reassert sovereignty and aliveness in the face of (gendered) political violence and extermination. This is very central in the thought behind the sustained feminist mobilizations taking place across Latin America and has expanded the notion of systematic gender violence. In that sense, it includes all of the instances in which state institutions, corporations, criminal organizations, and centrally, the structures that govern our lives, like neoliberal capitalism and widespread forms of modern colonialism, are sustained through the oppression of fem bodies, especially racialized ones. This happens through the destruction of natural resources, the occupation of land in territories of the Global South (and beyond), and the use of cruel forms of sexual violence that act like disciplining tools during but also outside of times of conflict, becoming normalized in everyday life.
 
My manifesto emerges in conversation with this notion and from the need to breathe life into the body, as an extension of the feminized territories that are facing continuous brutalization, thus transcending an individualized understanding of it. It is also an attempt to enact re-emergence and transformation from the loss that comes with being forcefully disappeared and exterminated. To open the potentiality for a new start, even when the violence exerted leaves us with nothing more than rubble and dust to mourn and rebuild from. Moreover, it is an attempt to reaffirm the permanence and expandability of the body across spatio-temporal articulations, both as a material and immaterial entity, as something that may flourish from the land, but also from the voices, the actions, and the fabulations of those sisters who mourn us and keep our memories present.
 
This manifesto is not an attempt to leave death behind and forgotten, however, but to properly honor the absences and the grief they produce, infusing vulnerability and a newfound force into our (collective) movements. It calls for healing and communion with those who feel alienated from the predominant affective frequency that marks some bodies as disposable and ungrievable. To summon life into being again through critical desire, which invokes us to put into practice the future we want now.
 

For my manifesto, I am inspired and in communion too, with those who influence my thinking, to whom I am indebted for sustaining me and giving me the language, which has been difficult to find because of the disorienting effect that mass death has been having at a larger scale. They have helped me see that the struggles aiming to sustain life through unimaginable violence touch us all and that it is my- and our responsibility to keep them going even when the pain and effort of doing so feel unbearable. I am with/after: Flora Tristán, Maria Pía López, Rita Segato, Sara Ahmed, Verónica Gago, M. Jacqui Alexander, Katherine McKittrick, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sonia Álvarez, Victoria Santa Cruz, Giuseppe Campuzano, Pedro Lemebel, José Esteban Muñoz, the feminist movement in South America, mis ancestras and hermanas in Peru and across the world who sustain my life, who take care of me, who’ll call me back into existence if for whatever reason I disappear, too.
 
I define my manifesto as a summoning of these important voices that enable mine, but also as an invocation of an alternate affective frequency where the bodies/territories who feel the calling can find each other to reclaim, remember, and revive those who are not deemed worthy of existence. It is a call for the recognition of us as a collective body, as part of an unbeatable force that can transform death into new beings. That holds the memory intact, so we remember, even when the world forces us to forget through the same violent means that led to the annihilation of those that it marked as disposable. This manifesto wants to move us into breaking the trappings that want to keep us forgetful, immobile, and inert.
 
These thoughts and intentions come to life in the visual piece, which I decided to build in two parts. The first part is influenced by the concepts and imagery behind various pieces. One is the public feminist performance BASTA (Argentina), where naked women inside trash bags that hang from the front side of a building make their way out of them, in an act of radical affirmation and aliveness.  There are also the stagings of Antigone and “Adiós Ayacucho”, by the theater collective Yuyachkani (Peru), which depict acts of remembrance and resuscitation of the ungrievable body. The performances and writings of Pedro Lemebel, who actively engaged his body in resistance and remembrance against the systematic elimination of queer, fem people, by the Chilean state, also inspire me. Even when imperfect, the first part was an attempt to put my body on the line by trapping myself inside a tightly wrapped funeral bundle made of black fabrics. Here, I was trying to give due recognition to death and the process of grieving, and how, even when difficult, it may provide the force and the potential to open the portals for life again.
 
The second part portrays the breaking through the portal and the coming back to life, although what is dead is not left behind or forgotten, but present, like the foundations of a house that is rebuilt after falling apart. This part contains my voice and presence more explicitly, as I appear centrally in the visual frame and my words wrap up the performance. These words are in Spanish, my mother tongue because I want to demarcate part of my cultural inheritance and resist the colonialist imperative of using English, even when I recognize that Spanish was also once a language of colonization. My words are one of the ways I found to reassert re-existence, beyond my struggles and my body, to make the connections between myself, the territory, and the collectivity that rebuilds me/us and sustains me/us. It recognizes the important role of sisterhood in memorializing and injecting life into collective struggles, back and forth in time and space, and beyond the material existence of our individual bodies.
 
Finally, I also wanted to make the body present through sound. The soundscape I composed for this piece contains the distorted sounds of hands clapping, breaths, and voices. Some I made with my own body, and some of them, mainly voices, I have sampled from two songs performed by different artists. One of them is the elegy “Triste (Con Fuga de Tondero),” sung a capella by Peruvian artist and activist Susana Baca, who is a central cultural figure in Peru, the country I come from. Susana’s voice has given me an important refuge to feel connected and alive in troubled times. I have also sampled (somehow unrecognizably) the choral voices in the protest anthem “Canción Sin Miedo,” by Mexican artist Vivir Quintana. This song is an act of resistance against feminicide and memorializes the women who disappear daily in Mexico (and all over Latin America) because of the extremely cruel forms of gender violence, that have become normalized and institutionalized in these territories. I want to honor these pieces here, too, as they portray the affects related to grief, mourning, and desire that I have been trying to convey in this performance.