The concluding sequence of Ramirez-Figueroaâs performance featured the act of expulsion. Kristeva explains the staining, ingestion and expulsion of the familial (colonial) construct, as enacted through the body: “Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The same of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them … nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. ‘I’ want none of that element, sign of their desire; ‘I’ do not want to listen, ‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it.” (31)
Kristeva further positioned the abject in the context of forgetting the presence of refuse, and of the corpse “… it shows me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live… There I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. (The abject) disturbs identity, system and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”(32) Ramirez-Figueroaâs performance The Sun is Crooked in the Sky; My Father Is Thrown Over My Shoulders is an investigation of reclaiming the other half of the image and the word, and reconstructing a visual language of representation that is previously situated half elsewhere, “at the borderline between oneself and the other.” (33)
References
(1) Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference it Makes” in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 51.
(2) Ramirez-Figueroa, Naufus. Interview by Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.
(3) Ramirez-Figueroa, Naufus. Interview by Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.
(4) Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. (NY: Continuum <1944> 1987).
(5) Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and The Sociological Imagination. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). pp. 19-20.
(6) Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and The Sociological Imagination. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). p. 64.
(7) Seekins, Sandra. “Prosthesis as Souvenirs of War: Otto Dixâs Representations of Veterans in Weimar Germany”. Department of History of Art, University of Michigan. Delivered at the conference “Souvenir” Ann Arbor, October 1998. [See: http://www.umich.edu/~tapassoc/souvenir.htm]
(8) Ibid.
(9) Ibid.
(10) Ibid.
(11) Tisdall, Caroline. “Joseph Beuys: Bits and Pieces”. Tate Modern Talk. The Social Sculpture Research Unit. [See: http://owww.brookes.ac.uk/schools/apm/social_sculpture/tisdall/TateModernLecture.htm]
(12) Mujica-Olea, Alejandro Rual. Co-op radio interview on El Mundo de la Poesia with Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa. Vancouver, 2002.
(13) Figueroa, Byron. In conversation with Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, November 29, 2003.
(14) Sosa, John R. The Maya Sky, the Maya World: a symbolic analysis of Maya cosmology. (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1985). v. 498.
(15) Ramirez-Figueroa, Naufus. In conversation with Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.
(16) Figueroa, Byron. In conversation with Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, November 29, 2003.
(17) Graham, Rodney “Interview with the artist” by Anthony Spira, curator, Whitechapel Art Gallery. [See: http://www.whitechapel.org/content.php?page_id=461]
(18) Shaheed, Farida. “Militarization and Global Conflict” from the plenary session Women Challenging the New Political and Military Order. (Association for Womenâs Rights in Development, 2002). [See: http://www.awid.org/forum2002/plenaries/day2farida.html]
(19) Ramirez-Figueroa, Naufus. In conversation with Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.
(20) Toledo, Aida. “Poetry, Body and Performance as True Aesthetic Emergencies in Todayâs Guatemala” in Temas Centrales. Ed. Cuauhtemoc Medina. (San Jose: Teoretica Galleria, 2002). p. 358.
(21) Loughlin, Irene and Ramirez-Figueroa, Naufus. “Glossary of Terms” from the performance White Intravenous at the Church of Pointless Hysteria. Vancouver, 2002.
(22) Cazali, Rosina. “Octubreazul to the point of Madness: Emerging Art in the postwar Period in Guatemala”. Art Nexus No. 43 March 2002.
(23) Interview with Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa by Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.
(24) Ibid.
(25) Ibid.
(26) https://www.peacecoffee.com/pcfg/0402/
(27) Copelon, Rhonda. “Intimate Terror: Understanding Domestic Violence as Torture” in Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives. Ed. Rebecca Cook, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). p. 138.
(28) Ibid.
(29) Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference it Makes” in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 44.
(30) Ramirez-Figueroa, Naufus. Interview by Irene Loughlin. Vancouver, February 2006.
(31) Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (NY: Columbia University Press, 1982) [See: http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/krist.htm]
(32) Ibid.
(33) Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference it Makes” in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 44.