The border Line

The Memory of the Everyday

A line is drawn in space (the clothesline)—it connects with my memory as a Latin American woman and mother. Hanging laundry is hanging memory, emotions, thoughts, manifestos… To hang on that horizon line is a repeated action, a gesture that can be unconscious, automatic.

Washing clothes can be compared to cleansing the body—it is merely an everyday task of removing dirt from the rags used by the body. Washing and hanging is labor I repeat as a mother, as a gesture of care for my daughter and self-care for the traces of my own body and society.

Women have systematized love—it has become a routine of concrete, automatic actions that allow them to sustain their children.

The Border Line is a work born from the periphery, born from the reimagining of resources, from a place of enunciation that narrates a place in the world. It asks, through an intersectional lens: Who am I? Where am I? What do I do? What do I have, and what surrounds me? Who and what surrounds me?

These questions allowed me to see another way of telling a thought, an idea, a manifesto—so that if the everyday has meaning, it must be through its symbolic force.

The reflection on what happens politically outside my home—but alters my daily life and exerts decisive pressure on my private life—means that what happens «out there» is not separate from my clothes, nor my room, nor my bed (nor my intimate life). From this emerges the idea of tracing a drawing in space: a zigzag line with a long rope that pulls my intimacy into public space.

Hanging laundry, then, can also be a political exercise, a poetic exercise, or a humanist manifesto.

From Intimate Space to Public Space

The dirty clothes hung under the sun, or the clean laundry on display, are a tapestry of narratives about our intimacy. The traces left on these garments are also our bodies imprinted on them—my panties or stockings, bras or bralettes, t-shirts or shirts, fabrics and handkerchiefs—all represent a content that narrates us as political subjects, as part of a society and a system, speaking about the world we inhabit.

The Border Line emerges from reading this intimacy; it is also a self-portrait. It traces the history of a woman who is Venezuelan, Latin American, a mother, and an artist—who, like so many other women, witnesses the normalization of violence, discrimination, and racism against our own sons and daughters, against ourselves, and against everything we tirelessly sustain at home. All of this unfolds under the «freedom» of capitalism, under the «freedom» of power institutions, of laws and policies created by the U.S. and Europe.

The Manifesto of the Work

The Border Line offers a meta-time, plays with the scenic, and is an exercise in constructing freedoms. When trans philosopher Paul B. Preciado states that freedom does not exist, they warn us that we will have to invent it. This opens an immense window toward creativity and shatters preconceived notions of freedom based on consumption generated by the hegemonic system.

A rural or marginal clothesline, vibrant with color, can recreate the mechanisms of control and domination exerted by power institutions over subjects—imposing a «normalizing» and discriminatory pressure that casts doubt on one’s identity and existence.

A clothesline, as a scenic space for a mother-woman, can rebel and become a site of freedoms through the symbolic act of resisting the «norm.»

A mother-woman can revolt against the normalization of violence—violence that has been naturalized and increasingly inflicted upon her feminine, reproductive, exploited, and underestimated body. From her household clothesline, now a humanist manifesto, she resists.

Likewise, play, freedom, and pleasure are abstract concepts for the mother-woman—concepts absorbed by the normative rule of the dominant paradigm enforced by schools, the Church, and the state as institutions that produce «truth.» Paul B. Preciado borrows Michel Foucault’s concept of freedom, asserting that truth as a liberating principle is a profound illusion. Freedom is a construction of our diverse truths. In this sense, life itself can be the construction of a work of art.

Why can’t my life be a work of art?

The Body

The Border Line is a work with ephemeral bodily intervention and sound by Argentine musician Rodrigo Díaz and myself. The body gives ephemeral life to the work.

The creation of this work is the transmutation of a body. Working with used clothing is working with bodies. The act of hanging laundry is my perpetual bodily repetition—the mantra of my body in La Vega, hanging clothes. My body enters the scene. My body is reborn after the work’s manifestation. My body is sown anew, grateful for the possibility of creative acts as a mode of constructing my freedom, as the birth of another history. This is why the flowers used in the action represent both a death and a birth.Why can’t my life be a work of art?