The present essay is an extended conversation between the authors, on the critical literature of the experimental women’s cinema and video and documentaries of Colombian female artists. The meaning of self, womanhood, and female artistic practices is in the focus of the conversation. Methodologically we approach this essay as warmipura, a female circle, or rather, as we propose, maternal space of kin and alliance-making with multiple others around and within us. It is the space of porous openness to the world, the community, co-working and co-knowing, all together the process of co-creating with multiple others both human and non-human. Openness to the other in self while seeing self in the other allows making new alliance, that in their turn open up the new worlds to explore, their potentialities. Experimental practice is seen as such maternal space, an assemblage using Deleuze-Guattarian term, of bits of life, adopting Smelik and Lykke’s words. Largely informed by the feminist new materialism and posthumanism, the essay explores the alliances, intentionally, intuitively, and organically happening in the maternal space of warmipura. The present essay focuses on the vitality of fragments and allies in the process of disassembling self through and with the video practice.
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On Visual Walking-Remembering Warmipura – Among Women
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On Visual Walking-Remembering Warmipura – Among Women
Polina Golovátina-Mora, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana,
Medellín, Colombia
Bridget Sheridan, University of Toulouse, France
Ana María López Carmona, Universidad Pontificia
Bolivariana, Medellín, Colombia



Abstract

    The present essay is an extended conversation between the authors, on the critical
    literature of the experimental women’s cinema and video and documentaries of
    Colombian female artists. The meaning of self, womanhood, and female artistic
    practices is in the focus of the conversation. Methodologically we approach this
    essay as warmipura, a female circle, or rather, as we propose, maternal space of
    kin and alliance-making with multiple others around and within us. It is the space
    of porous openness to the world, the community, co-working and co-knowing,
    all together the process of co-creating with multiple others both human and
    non-human. Openness to the other in self while seeing self in the other allows
    making new alliance, that in their turn open up the new worlds to explore, their
    potentialities. Experimental practice is seen as such maternal space, an assemblage
    using Deleuze-Guattarian term, of bits of life, adopting Smelik and Lykke’s words.
    Largely informed by the feminist new materialism and posthumanism, the essay
    explores the alliances, intentionally, intuitively, and organically happening in the
    maternal space of warmipura. The present essay focuses on the vitality of fragments
    and allies in the process of disassembling self through and with the video practice.


Introduction: We

    In Quechua warmipura means ‘among women’, the female community,
togetherness of exchanging stories, the everyday knowledge and skills, the
knowledge of generations about the world, family or crafts, passing them on.
It is used here to name the experimental maternal space and practice — not as
an isolating and isolated territory of conservation of traditions, but the porous
openness to the world, the community, co-working and co-knowing, of ‘bits of
life’.1 Life, as Smelik & Lykke unfold, is not a homogenous harmonious whole,


1
 Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke, ‘Bits of Life: An Introduction’, in Bits of Life: Feminism at the
Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology, ed. by Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2008), pp. ix–xix.

                                                     Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 34, Spring 2020
          Polina Golovátina-Mora, Bridget Sheridan and Ana María López Carmona


but an ongoing dis-assemblage of different discourses and practices, the biological
and technological, their manifestations across disciplines, while making alliances
along the way.2 These bits of life, Deleuze-Guattarian disassemblages, and Minh-
ha’s fragmentations are our methodology, our subject, partners in conversation, our
kin. Warmipura is a support group, kin and alliance-making with multiple others
around and within us. The present essay focuses on the vitality of fragments and
allies in the process of disassembling self through and with the video practice.
   Audio-visual is the object of study, subject for reflection but also the language
of expression for each of the three authors of this essay. We want to share our
artistic and technical experiences and expertise employing a collaborative duo
(tri/multi)ethnographic methodology3 to discuss how visual forms and technics
are part of our knowing the world, how different senses complement each other
on this path and how they transform the visual expression. What unites us is our
interest in memory and walking. We understand walking as artistic and research
practice that enables staying with the trouble, in crisis, on the margins and in the
minority, crucial for further deterritorialization and mutual transformation in
and with the world.4
   Our dialogue partners include theoretical works we turn to in the next section
and works by Colombian female documentalists Marta Hincapié, Josephine
Landertinger Forero, Andrea Said, Melisa Sánchez Hincapié, Luisa Sossa, and
Clare Weiskopf.5 Their works share intimacy, explore different senses without
limiting oneself to the canon. Using light and closeups, they aim at sharing
the emotion, exploring their interplay with memory on the way of creating
the fluid constantly changing knowledge. Without moralization or judgement,
they explore relations between generations, family members, the victim and the

2
  Smelik and Lykke, ix.
3
  Richard Sawyer and Joe Norris, Duoethnography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012).
4
  Gill Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 105–106, 371; Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.
Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke UP, 2016), p. 3; Trinh Minh-ha and Jean-Paul
Bourdier, L’Autre marche (The Other Walk), Installation. Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France, 19
June 2006–2009 (2012), <http://trinhminh-ha.com/lautre-marche-the-other-walk/> [accessed 10
November 2019]; Simon O’Sullivan, ‘From Stuttering and Stammering to the Diagram: Towards
a Minor Art Practice?’, in Minor Photography Connecting Deleuze and Guattari to Photographv
Theory, ed. by Mieke Bleyen (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), pp. 3–16; Cornel West, ‘The
New Cultural Politics of Difference’, in Out There. Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed.
by Russell Ferguson (New York: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 19–38 (p. 20).
5
  Marta Hincapié, director, Piel, Documentary. Colombia (2006); Marta Hincapié, director, Los
demonios sueltos, Documentary, Colombia (2010); Josephine Landertinger Forero, director,
Home – El país de la ilusión. Documentary, Colombia, Portugal (2016); Andrea Said Camargo,
director, Looking for, Documentary. Colombia (2012); Melisa Sánchez Hincapié, director,
Warmipura, Documentary, Colombia (2014), Elemental, Fiction, Colombia (2015), https://vimeo.
com/116188301 [accessed 10 November 2019], Carpe Diem, Documentary, Colombia (2016),
https://vimeo.com/171328705 [accessed 10 November 2019], Kairós, Documentary, Colombia
(2018), https://vimeo.com/207853415, [accessed 10 November 2019]; Luisa Sossa, director, Inés.
Recuerdos de una vida, Documentary, Colombia (2013); Clare Weiskopf & N. van Hemelryck,
directors, Amazona, Documentary, Colombia (2016).

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                On Visual Walking-Remembering Warmipura – Among Women


murderer, the role of women in the conflict, the meaning of the conventional
truths, motherhood. Using a wide range of sources such as diaries, writings,
conversations, observations, thoughts and again, emotions, they walk, fly, dance,
run, float throughout their movies and invite the viewer to share the walk towards
each one’s Self as equal rather than as the led one. Documentaries explore the
thin line between fiction and fact, imaginaries, and truth regimes.
    Throughout this essay we revisit our own visual material directly in case of
Bridget and behind the scenes as we discuss the women’s experimental audio-
visual practices in each-other’s context, in women’s circle. The essay is a memory
walk that helps to understand and so to (co)-create6 the theory, practice and
thought of the other and those of ours. We keep the narrative poetic language of
conversation, intimately random as a resistance and deconstruction of the pre-
established order in exploration of the multiplicities and potentialities. The essay
is an explorative interplay of memories, experiences, thoughts and reflections, of
‘I’s in the entangled wholeness of ‘We’.


... women...

  Proverbs of different people reveal prejudice against women, both acceptance
and denial of their wisdom and loyalty. They reflect the traditional place
of a woman in the society, relations within female community but what is
more important they speak about the socially conventional separation of the
community to male and female, which is justified by the pregiven difference in
the way of thinking, feeling, saying and seeing things. They also speak about
the community and ties within it. Russian proverbs, for instance, underline the
marginality of women, the general hardship and under-appreciation of women’s
work in the patriarchal society: ‘Women’s work is unseen’ (Бабью работу не
видно), ‘Women’s happiness is like Indian summer — it is either short or not
happening’ (Бабье счастье, что бабье лето — то коротко, то вовсе нету),
‘The women regret about it while the girls long for marriage’ (Бабы каются —
девки замуж собираются).
  As we discuss the social imaginations on gender, Polina remembers:

   I walk up the stairs. My hand is on the rails. I suddenly notice my hand. I am 24. I
   enjoy what I see: long, slender fingers. A silver ring is slightly big. Have I lost weight or
   is it a cold day? The thought jumps to sadness: I do not have a man to admire my slim
   hands while they are. I am wasted. — Fifteen years later, I still remember that thought
   and it strikes me: the fear of change, the fear of being alone, the fear of being alone
   without a man, the fear, fear, fear; the fear of the presence of self.



6
  Trinh Minh-ha, ‘The World as Foreign Land’, in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation,
Gender, and Cultural Politics, ed. by Minh-Ha (New York: Routledge, 1991b), pp. 185–200 (p. 194).

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          Polina Golovátina-Mora, Bridget Sheridan and Ana María López Carmona


   It echoes the idea of the social educational and performative origin of the
gender relations, often discussed in the critical feminism literature, its profound
rootedness in the social order.7 Postmodern feminist thought emphasizes
transcendence of the binary approach throughout the dominated Western
thought and its inadequacy altogether.8 Alaimo & Heckman summarize, ‘that it is
imperative [...] to deconstruct the dichotomy itself, to move to an understanding
that does not rest on oppositions’.9 In its deconstruction of the binary world view
and practices of looking as a tool of oppression, discrimination and violence,
feminist thought10 is seen as a source of sensitivity to any form of oppression,
as a space of ‘in-between-ness and flows’,11 of ‘shared sensibilities which cross
the boundaries of class, gender, race, etc. that could be fertile ground for the
construction of empathy — ties that would promote recognition of common
commitments, and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition’,12 making kin or
alliances with multiple others, which includes the materiality of the entangled
and intra-active or mutually constitutive world,13 a space of vitality and a mode
of becoming, ‘becoming-woman/other/animal/earth, under the impact of
emergence of “Life” as a subject of political and ethical concern’,14 of alterity
and fragmentation as ‘a way of living with differences without turning them into
opposites, nor trying to assimilate them out of insecurity. [...] A way of living at
the borders’.15
   Female/women’s/feminist space then is understood here rather as a
maternal space. We do not speak of the psychoanalytical all devouring mother
compensating for her castration and Freudian binary principal of either devour
or being devoured principle,16 of either with or without penis. Nor do we speak


7
   Judith Butler, Undoing gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 198–99; bell hooks, Feminist
Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), pp. 5–6; Luce Irigaray, Speculum
of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 15; Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. by Leo Braudy
and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), pp. 833–44 (p. 834).
8
   Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, ‘Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist
Theory’, in Material Feminisms, ed. by Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington &
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 1–19; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe
Halfway (Durham: duke University Press, 2007), pp. 59–66; Iris van der Tuin, Generational
Feminism (Lanham: Lenxington Books, 2015).
9
  Alaimo & Hekman, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.
10
    Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
11
    Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), p. 78.
12
    bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 57.
13
    Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 2; Barad, Meeting the Universe, p. 33.
14
    Braidotti, p. 42.
15
    Pratibha Parmar & Trinh Minh-ha, ‘Woman, Native, Other’, Feminist Review, 36 (1990), 65–74
(pp. 71–72).
16
    Kristyn Gorton, Theorising Desire: From Freud to Feminism to Film (New York: Palgrave, 2008);
Ulrike May, Freud at Work: On the History of Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice, with an Analysis
of Freud’s Patient Record Books (New York: Routledge, 2018); Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror.
Theories of Representation and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988).

104
                On Visual Walking-Remembering Warmipura – Among Women


about a mother ‘capable of super-human feats of altruism, putting aside her own
grievances, doubts and worries for the sake of the child and all with a sunshine
smile’,17 when the choice is either a masochistic self-sacrifice or be punished by the
society and fate.18 Together with other feminist new materialist thinkers, Braidotti
also warns against the neo-liberal feminist version of patriarchy — the syndrome
of the exceptional woman, which only ‘fosters a new sense of isolation among
women and hence new forms of vulnerability’.19 In her summary of the feminist
cinematic ethics based on her profound revision of philosophy of Claire Denis,
Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, Hole proposes that maternal pregnant
body could be rather the metaphor of the on-going alterity, ‘an ongoing process
of sharing out’, a space of mutual becoming, porous openness and dependence,
‘an opening and extension, rather than a boundary and enclosure’,20 the space
for the new sensorial possibilities: of listening rather than speaking, touching and
feeling rather than watching and seeing. It challenges the dominant patriarchal
narratives while being a materiality situated in the relations of power. It is the
space of queerness that explores the alternatives in seeing, feeling, thinking from
within the margins.21
   From the feminist new materialist perspective, the world is seen as ‘a dynamic
web of interconnections or hybrid contaminations, as a principle of radical non-
purity’.22 It was well summarized in Avengers: Infinity War by Bruce Banner,
the character impersonated by Marc Ruffalo: ‘Your mind is made up of a
complex construct of overlays: J.a.R.V.I.S., Ultron, Tony, me, the Stone — all
of them mixed together, all of them learning from one another’.23 This is ‘the
entanglement of material, bio-cultural and symbolic forces in the making of the
subject’,24 which goes beyond mere discourse and semantics in the binary when
one is active and the other is passive, a repository, representation of someone’s
desires, will or consciousness.25 The proposed alternative to the above-mentioned
binaries is a co-creating maternal force that operates on the premise of the
‘more egalitarian principles of interconnection, solidarity and teamwork’.26 The
maternal force focuses on presence rather than on lacking, of being self, ‘an


17
   Emily White, ‘Hollywood’s Obsession with the Devouring Mother’, Movie Metropolis, blog
entry, 22 July 2018, <https://moviemetropolis.net/2018/07/22/hollywoods-obsession-with-the-
devouring-mother>, par. 6 [accessed 10 November 2019].
18
   Frigga Haug, Beyond Female Masochism. Memory-Work and Politics (New York: Verso, 1992),
p. 77; Smelik, pp. 13–14.
19
   Braidotti, p. 45.
20
   Kristin L. Hole, Towards a Feminist Cinematic Ethics. Claire Denis, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-
Luc Nancy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 127.
21
   Akira Mizuta Lippit, Ex-Cinema. From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012).
22
   Braidotti, p. 57.
23
   Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony Russo, 2018).
24
   Braidotti, p. 37.
25
   Silverman, p. 133; Smelik, And the Mirror Cracked, p. 10.
26
   Braidotti, p. 45.

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          Polina Golovátina-Mora, Bridget Sheridan and Ana María López Carmona


active, signifying force; an agent in its own terms’.27 It is the Deleuze-Guattarian
space of possibility, potentiality, hope and alliance in the journey of the ever-
becoming-other subjectivity.


Experimental: Assembling ‘Bits of Life’

   As an alternative art field, experimental together with avant-garde and
counter-cinema and video becomes women’s natural ally, and, as various
scholars mention, women excel in this art form.28 In her detailed analysis of the
feminist cinema, Malone speaks of various tendencies, strategies or voices of
the female cinema, which concern both the plot as the form and media in the
deconstruction of the power relations: social and cultural commentary, revealing
stereotypes and hierarchies, transforming routine to art, intimate and caring
view, an exploring instead of voyeuristic camera, no judging, reflection on one’s
own identity without the necessity of being validated by a male character. While
Malone suggests that the best support to women in film is to watch movies made
by women,29 it is clear for all the authors writing about ‘the female gaze’ that it is
never based on ‘the narrow view of gender’30 without considering the complex
structure of the world we live in and the patriarchal order that forms its truth
regimes. Referring to Braidotti, Smelik stresses that ‘“the female subject” is by
no means a monolithic category’.31 Neither are the cinema, filming techniques
nor a spectator, emphasizes Bolton.32 Video itself is symbolic, cultural and a
material category, as feminist cinema theorists argue.33 It requires consideration
of multiple complex relations and affects towards deconstruction of the form
and media, beyond representational and binary based psychoanalysis, beyond
the opposition of the gazing and the gazed towards further inclusion of media,
spectator, the author herself,34 towards multiple new alliances, whether with


27
   Alaimo and Hekman, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.
28
   Women’s Experimental Cinema. Critical Frameworks, ed. by Robin Blaetz (Durham: Duke UP,
2007); Alicia Malone, The Female Gaze. Essential Movies Made by Women (Coral Gables, FL:
Mango Publishers, 2018); Janet McCabe, Feminist Film Studies. Writing the Woman Into the
Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2004); Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting
Contemporary Feminisms (Durham: Duke UP, 2015).
29
   Malone, p. 13.
30
   Ivi, p. 12.
31
   Smelik, And the Mirror Cracked, p. 32.
32
   Lucy Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (New York:
Palgrave, 2011), p. 8.
33
   Shohini Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis,
Barbara Creed (New York: Routledge, 2006).
34
   Anneke Smelik, ‘Feminist Film Theory’, in The Cinema Book, ed. by Pam Cook (London: BFI,
2007), pp. 491–505; Nancy N. Chen & Trinh Minh-ha, “‘Speaking Nearby”: A Conversation with
Trinh T. Minh-Ha’, Visual Anthropology Review, 8.1 (1992), 82–91;Trinh Minh-ha, ‘All-Owning
Spectatorship’, Quar. Rev. of Film & Video, 13.1-3 (1991), 189–204; Trinh Minh-ha, ‘Painting with
Music: A Performance Across Cultures’, Discourse, 18.3 (1996), 3–19.

106
              On Visual Walking-Remembering Warmipura – Among Women


nature, a colleague or a family member, body, objects around us, camera, sound,
archives or the found footage.
   Various scholars spoke of ‘the paradox of the unrepresentability of the
feminine’.35 It is not enough for a woman ‘to become who they are’36 but to
rather deconstruct the meaning of a woman, critically revise it to prevent further
inequalities and discrimination from taking place, to become the Deleuze-
Guattarian minority. White characterizes minor cinema as practice of ‘resistance
to totalizing narratives of the world system’.37 Colombian female filmmaker
Catalina Mesa said in an interview, ‘I can’t speak from the position of gender.
I would invent things’.38 Yet, she does speak here about certain ‘female energy’
that circles her body together with the male one and is responsible for ‘the
receptivity, dialogue and cocreation, considering the other in the moment of
creating’. Another Colombian filmmaker, Natalia Orozco, in the same interview
sharing her experience of directing a movie, spoke of dialogue, not trying to
demonstrate you have it all figured out but co-creating. From this perspective,
we speak of experimental as a space of exploring, the practice of critical revision,
deconstruction, deterritorialization, queering and co-creation or the maternal
space.


Walking

   Bridget: I define myself as a walking artist — while moving my body becomes
a means of creating art. As I move through space, my senses interact with the
environment; touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste, all contribute to designing
my walk experience.
   I put walking first. I walk through the city and the urban landscape searching
for new passageways and unknown paths, focusing on architectural elements,
signs, noises and spaces. I like to explore and reveal the urban landscape in a way
that reconnects us with the ground. Urban landscapes obliterate the horizon,
creating an effect of constant immediacy and sudden surprise, cutting us off
from a deeper sense of belonging and memory. The concrete surface that the
urban walker glides over, suffocates the earth underneath. In the city, we are
often deprived of a sensual connection with the soil. I have made artwork in
urban areas. Yet, the main core of my art practice deals with the interrelationship
between nature, memory and walking and cannot thrive in the urban landscape.



35
   McCabe, p. 68.
36
   Bolton, p. 38.
37
   White, Women’s Cinema, p. 13.
38
   María Antonia Giraldo Rojas, ‘Las mujeres en el cine colombiano’, El Colombiano (2018)
<https://www.elcolombiano.com/cultura/cine/las-mujeres-en-el-cine-colombiano-GE9251899>
[accessed 10 November 2019].

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         Polina Golovátina-Mora, Bridget Sheridan and Ana María López Carmona


   Polina: For me walking is not something prior to art, but art itself. It is breathing
and touching the invisible matter. I admire people who walk as if dancing and
speak as if singing. As I wrote once, walking makes you ‘feel your inner breeze of
the morning air, listen to your inner talk of the birds and trees and explore this
forest of thoughts and images’.39 There is a lot of imagination in walking. It wakes
you up and leads you through the multiverse — the multitude of the parallel
and intersecting worlds. It is not the melancholic memory of a lonely walker,
walking is a constant co-creation of the memories-essences of those worlds with
everything and everyone you touch, see, move with, breathe in and with.

   Bridget:
   It is a bodily connection. The cycle of my own body influences the way I
perceive the natural revolution of various elements surrounding me. The rhythm
of the seasons and of the sun, the pull, the flow, the strength, the rhythm of the
moon and the tides, have all inspired the way my body moves along the paths in
my walking art.
   My works have taken place along the coastal path, as I photograph and film
various images of the sea’s pulling motion. I articulate images of vast empty
beaches with close-ups of the remnants of high tides, pieces of fishing nets,
seaweed, and lines of gravel. In the video D’une plage l’autre (From One Beach,
to Another), whilst walking, I convey memories of the daytime play along the
shoreline. The video is full of nostalgia, perhaps that of a young mother, who was
once a child and who questions precious time, simple moments that slip away
just like the tide clears the beach, returning whatever it desires.

  Polina: Walking whilst aking memories is the practice of making the in-
between space of dismantling and becoming. It is rhythmic like the tides. Those
rhythms rather then divide mark the lines of disassemblage.

   Bridget: In D’une plage l’autre, we are caught in between: two beaches at
two separate moments — day and night —, two tides — high and low —, two
realities — child and adult. My pico-projector implies a strong bright light and
surrounding darkness —, a mysterious and unusual lighting on an ocean beach
which evokes a dreamy surrealistic ambiance, a definite interval in space and
time.




39
  Polina Golovátina-Mora, Photography and Notes, <http://www.golovatinamora.info/> [accessed
10 November 2019].

108
               On Visual Walking-Remembering Warmipura – Among Women


   Polina:
   Walking along the seashore I silently talk to the sea. When my admiration
reaches a certain point, I feel the sea’s speech: I encounter a shell of the most
interesting shape or colour, a piece of amber, or a piece of ceramics with borders
and ornaments transformed by the time-movement of the water-sand-air-salt-
something else and the material of ceramics-enamel-paint inter/intra-action. Am
I part of this now? What do I share? I wonder what material could better evoke
empathy to the sea: the sound, the drum rhythm, a flow dance, classic or modern
then? a piece of purl-wise knitting, painting or a stone panel? What image would
be more appropriate for the sea as a living being?

   Bridget:
   As I walk, my whole being is attuned to the meshwork of nature. Each footstep
resonates throughout my whole body, the touch of my soles interacting with my
sight and my hearing. Colours, forms, light, sound, temperature evolve as I make
my way through nature. I question. How can I show the everchanging landscape
around my moving body in a work of art? What do I search for when I make art
as I move along? What do we learn from our wayfaring practices? And how is my
camera employed as a tool to unveil the landscape’s secrets? I am filled with awe
whilst I wander. I feel my belonging to the universal interplay that takes place
around and throughout my walking body. I feel that this same landscape acts as
a receptacle.
   Photographic interface punctuates my walk, each individual image belonging
to the whole like a series of strides along the path. Moving image, whether it be
an experimental video practice, projecting images whilst walking or recreating
a space for ambulation via installation-projection40 help me tell the story of our
common with nature, to share our collective memory.

   Polina:
   The artwork that walking inspires is not the mere repetition or the reproduction
of the walk. It is the other bodily experience, the other walk. As Trinh Minh-
ha and Jean-Paul Bourdier argued with their installation L’Autre marche (The
Other Walk), it is a learning practice ‘how to walk anew’41 in the multispecies
assemblage of multiple selves and multiple others.

  Bridget:
  During the art residency in the French Pyrenees, I met eight individuals who
were willing to walk with me for the artwork Drift with Me I had in mind. I




40
   Bridget Sheridan, Installations-Projections, Marcher Créer <https://www.bridgetsheridan.com/>
[accessed 10 November 2019].
41
   Minh-ha & Bourdier, L’Autre marche, Phase III.

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          Polina Golovátina-Mora, Bridget Sheridan and Ana María López Carmona


would move through my ‘fixed spatial field’, using the words of Guy Debord,42
in order to understand the psychogeographical articulations of the place.
   Each walk was unique and meant something different for each of my
participants. For the projection, I invited them to choose a manual activity that
they could link to their walk and perform it while I was projecting our filmed walk
on their hands. I wanted to show the mesh of the hands and the feet, following
the Tim Ingold’s idea of the strong relationship between the movement of the
hands, that of the mind and that of the feet whilst walking.
   During the projection, my eight walkers began to drift within their own walk.
Projecting the video of the walk on their hands created a special relationship
between the landscape and their manual work. One woman, the potter, found
herself creating bowls which seemed more magically organic. Trees would
pop into her bowls whilst the video of the walk would accompany the sensual
movement of her fingers on the clay. Bright green grass would highlight the wheel
and her skin as she gave life to the bowls. The other participant, whose hand ran
along the paper while she wrote a tale, had the impression she was walking in
water.
   The projection on the hands was re-materializing the walk as I filmed and
projected, then re-filmed and re-projected in the exhibition room. The installation
was an immersive experience for the viewer-‘sensator’ as Weber suggests.43 The
smell of the earth, the swaying movement of the eight videos, the sounds would
all work together recollecting the movement of bodies walking. The uncunny
interplay of light, colours and shadows transports the sensator into a different
spacetime.

  Polina:
  As in Deleuzean image-movement and image-time,44 where every body,
every surface produce ever new and different event in a constantly evolving
multidimensional film.

   Bridget:
   I had another open-air installation in the same village. I chose part of the path
that led up to the fields. In a space resembling a tunnel, I installed eight felt tents.
In each shelter, I projected a video walk. I attached the structures to the lowest
branches, pegged the material into the earth and then hung eight pico-projectors
from the top of the tents so that the video image was cast on the surface of the path.
I noticed that the children were particularly curious to look into each tent and


42
   Guy Debord, Theory of the Dérive (UBUWeb papers, 1956), <http://tbook.constantvzw.org/
wp-content/derivedebord.pdf> [accessed 10 November 2019].
43
   Pascale Weber, Le corps à l’épreuve de l’installation-projection (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003).
44
   Gill Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986); Gill Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989).

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               On Visual Walking-Remembering Warmipura – Among Women


discover what was inside. Each child would make their way along the path, crouch
down and peer into each tent for a substantial amount of time. Was it the small
illuminations inside the tent, the magic lanterns that would arouse their curiosity?
I do believe the Drift with Me den-like space of this dark path and the choice of
these small felt structures both created a small haven space along the path.


Random as intimate

   Melisa Sánchez, Elemental: the sound of the jackhammer is overwhelming.
Close up: a person opens their eyes. Next shot: their necklace, back to the eyes,
the face looks tense. Asphalt, pavement tiles, pavement tiles with grass. Is it the
resilience of life or the destruction for the sterile order of the concrete? A side
camera, the person looks aside. Workers are repairing the road. Camera shows
yellow sign on the engine: danger. Person’s hands in the form of the cradle hold
a little green plant with some soil. Water drips through their hands on asphalt.
Camera jumps from one image to another creating the sense of irritation and
panic. A wall with the Pachamama stencil graffiti. A person closes their eyes and
opens them slower as if in disbelief of awakening. Forest. Camera shows more
of the person and creates the sensation of breathing. The person looks around
wondering where to plant the little sapling. Water is dripping but now to the
different fertile soil. Camera shows leaves. The person is lying on the soil in
the foetus position, which produces the sensation of peace and recharging. The
sapling is planted; the person lies naked around it as if in mutual rebirth. Their
hair is entangled with the pine needles and grass, camera shows their skin with
its imperfections, fingers and toes and then as if expanding, switches to the tree
bark, lichen and moss. A person lies on the bottom of the forest. Camera retreats
showing more of the forest with the person being its part.
   The nature appears in Elemental not as an escape or as all devouring monster
but as a nourish mother, a space of mutual growth and co-creation, a space
of birth of Self-in. Melisa’s experimental videos share the philosophy of the
collective K-minantes (Walkers), she belonged to: filming while walking.45 They
explore the intra-action of everyday details, thoughts, memories, sounds, light
and colours as the video proceeds as if questioning how can one show such
dynamic entities as memory and identity of the moving body in a work of art?
Melisa creates the in-between space with her focus on the details of the swirling
elements, bodies and things. Two videos, Kairós and Carpe Diem complement
each other. Description to Kairós says: ‘New change of colour; it is a space open
to randomness. A trip directly to the centre, being a passenger (her) of the rain
(deluge) which is just starting. The river of colours warns its contents against
its flow’. Kairos is another concept of time, that unlike a sequential chronology


 K-minantes colectivo, Official web-page, Inicio (2012) <https://kaminantesfilms.wixsite.com/k-
45

minantescolectivo> [accessed 10 November 2019].

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         Polina Golovátina-Mora, Bridget Sheridan and Ana María López Carmona


means a propitious, opportune moment for action; a significant cut, a prevalent
importance of a fragment over the oppressing hierarchy of the invented whole:
‘A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being fragmented’.46 The
description to video Carpe diem invites to ‘love, recover, fly, live, travel, be the
light, be reborn’.
   Both videos are a dance of light, colour, smoke, hands and feet. This dance is
fluid, plastic, random, yet enough to make sense and provoke thought. Melisa
explores the possibility of matter, of filming. It is not a voyeuristic but curious
and sincere gaze. Not the gaze at the other with no voice, but at one’s self —
at the other within self as Trinh Minh-ha suggests — with an intention to find
the unknown in the allegedly all known. Fragments are not the background
or a substitute, but forces of the found footage, an invitation, the incentive to
deconstruct. Fragments seem random, they dance, introduce, frame, facilitate,
explore and accompany the artist in their quest in the films by Marta Hincapié,
Josephine Landertinger Forero, Andrea Said, Melisa Sánchez Hincapié, Luisa
Sossa, and Clare Weiskopf . Nature is an active participant in the selected films
and often becomes the found footage for the memory as in Los demonios by
Marta Hincapié, Home by Josephine Landertinger Forero and Inés by Luisa
Sossa. It is the natural ally of a woman47 as a queer space of queerness.
   Camera is another ally and companion. In Marta Hincapié’s video Piel (Skin),
three participants share the ‘treasures’ of their bodies. With increasing confidence,
they use a small camera and extreme closeups to explore their bodies. They are
the stories of pain. One man shares the story of the pain of bodybuilding, the
other man shares the pain of tattoo-making, the female modelling for an artist
shares the pain of a scar in her lower abdomen. In a strong and provocative way,
Marta Hincapié draws attention to the silent suffering of the fragile female body
and multiple faces of violence against woman: ‘This scar brought me back my
life. In exchange, I can’t give life to anyone else. [She frowns in pain of reliving
the memory or maybe of sharing her thoughts]. It is a weight of a mountain. It
grows with going up until you find the strength to climb it’. She hides her face
in her naked knees. She cries silently. The bodybuilder triumphantly poses in a
spiky costume of a gladiator warrior. The tattoo man thanks his tattoo artist with
a brotherly handshake. A woman continues posing naked for a male artist. The
growing voice of a female singing an opera aria increases the effect of the three
stories of pain and strength.
   Making kins is simultaneously the process and the result. Found footage is
an essentially intimate process as it requires opening-up to the unknown. So
is the sound-image desynchronization, which is recognized as a strategy for
deconstructing the male gaze in the female cinema.48 It is not a scopophilic



46
   Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 6.
47
   Alaimo & Hekman, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.
48
   Silverman, pp. 141-142, 163-168; Trinh Minh-ha, ‘Documentary Is/Not a Name’, October 52

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                On Visual Walking-Remembering Warmipura – Among Women


exhibitionism49 between the artist and the spectator, but the invitation to co-
create, think together, an initiation of a conversation between multiple ‘I’s in We.
   In Amazona, Clare asks her mother why she thinks Clare does this video.
Her mother answers: ‘To win a prize’. Clare chuckles. It sounds cynical, it also
reveals love and confidence despite the years of separation and absence of the
conventional mother-daughter self-sacrifice and masochism. Clare deletes the
scenes of her mom’s concert, which redirects the potential reading of the film as
such masochism to the journey of searching for the other in self, finding strength
in making alliances, learning to walk anew. She finishes the film showing her
new-born. Her voice over comments the importance of making this film: to be
able to continue with her life on the brink of becoming a mother, with her life
as an artist.
   Similar comments-clarifications are made in Landertinger Forero’s Home,
Said Camargo’s Looking for and Sossa’s Inés. Mother as the most intimate other
appears in these movies. She is not idealized. For example, in Amazona, a mother
assists the labour of her cat, her only intimate companion as she calls it. Then she
takes the newborn kittens to a herpetarium and watches the python eats them. A
moment in passing has a powerful symbolic reference as if questioning is it that
devouring mother-monster?
   The videos are mostly shot in the women’s circle and about women. They
explore their past, try to understand their actions. They are full of love and
compassion. This exploration reveals social stereotypes and prejudices against
women, that mothers themselves are not free of. By the end of the film, the
artists and their mothers or other female relatives become closer and develop the
necessary separation distance, together yet separate in their mutual and individual
entangled complexity. The genre of documentary emphasizes the open-ended
nature of this quest. The closure is a fragment in the lives of the authors, their
participants, and the spectators. There are other forms of seeing the film, as the
present meaning has been made in the assemblage of the postproduction.


Conclusions

  There are different ways of being a mother. Care and loving attention, Karen
Barad speaks about as the basis for our knowledge in, of and with the world,50
enable our kin-making with elements, plants, animals, camera, film, people, family,
passers-by, colleagues, audience, one’s own body, memories, imaginations, own’s
own children, the other in self, self. In warmipura, the extended women’s circle,


(1990), 76-98 (p. 80); An van. Dienderen, ‘Indirect Flow Through Passages: Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Art
Practice’, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, 23 (2010), 90-97 (pp. 91-92).
49
   Mulvey, pp. 835–36.
50
   Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quatum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. x–xi.

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         Polina Golovátina-Mora, Bridget Sheridan and Ana María López Carmona


that this text embodies, we explored how women facilitate such knowledge and
reach out to multiple allies with their artistic practices.
   I (Ana, Bridget, Polina) am a woman. I (Ana, Bridget, Polina) share the
experiences, memories, emotions, feelings and thoughts shared and discussed
in the essay. They are then of women. I see other women feeling them too. I see
some men also do. I recognize other beings reach in similar ways. That is enough
of a confirmation for me. Critical and at times deconstructive reflection over our
personal artistic, scholarly and life practices in each other’s multiple contexts
helped understanding those of the others and so co-create.
   The alliances contest the idea of authorship. We believe authorship is an echo
of the patriarchal system and contemporary critical literature calls for its revision.
From the position of feminist new materialism that largely informed this essay,
the main concern is not the authorship, but relations, affects that accompany the
process of creation and the voices the openness enables.
   All the practices discussed or kept in mind are the journey of exploring Self
in the world while making alliances on the way with multiple others, whether
human or non-human: relatives, friends, random passers-by, animals, plants, air,
sound, camera, music, thoughts and memories. It is the journey of deconstructing
the memories, social imaginaries of a woman, being a woman, a mother, a
daughter, an artist, a female artist, of a film, filming and spectatorship. As a space
of alliance, the process of deconstruction was both intentional, intuitive and
organic, happening in the maternal space of warmipura. Plasticity and fluidity of
these practices transform walking into dancing, talking into listening. As in any
dancing, sexual gaze is inevitable as we are speaking about the living bodies with
hormones and desires. Yet, there is an a-sexual gaze of admiration of the body’s
beauty and of its possibilities and potentialities that the unity with the matter can
provide. Their openness to the other in self while seeing self in the other allows
making new alliance, that in their turn open up the new worlds to explore.




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