Sui Generis
Performance festival
curated by Eugenio Viola and Angel Moya Garcia
with Luigi Presicce, Ruben Montini, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Yan Xing, Alexandra Pirici e Manuel Pelmuş, Rosy Rox, Carlos Motta, Eddie Peake, Karol Radziszewski, Miguel Gutierrez and Regina José Galindo
March – july 2016
The performance festival Sui Generis, curated by Eugenio Viola and Angel Moya Garcia, has explored the conceptual complexity of gender, as part of a season that the Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio has dedicated to this theme.
The Latin expression “sui generis” (literally: of its own kind), is well-known, in the language of scholastic philosophy, and is most commonly used to emphasize the atypicality of a subject or an argument. Moreover, how can we relate, today, to the delicate and complex concepts related to identity and gender? Is it still necessary to discuss these, without the risk of locking them into framework of an ideology, of a normative order that forces them into a panorama of already established possibilities? How should we confront them in their various ethical, political, social, cultural, anthropological, religious, imagined and symbolic implications? Finally, what are the spaces for a critical debate that embraces, in a perspective that inclines towards the co-existence of the differences, the various phenomena that inhabit the conceptual universe linked to gender, such as heteronormativity, feminism, body, identity and egalitarianism of gender?
It is common knowledge that the term “gender” refers to a sexual identity free from the biological difference between the sexes and is used to distinguish both significant social connections to this difference, as well as the relative symbolic projections and the resulting cultural depictions derived from this. Therefore, gender studies represent an interdisciplinary approach that is extremely heterogeneous, an environment of studies that is considerably discussed and in constant evolution. It is no accident that the same concept of “gender” is subject to numerous variables, determined by geo-political area, historical period and socio-cultural contexts of belonging.
The so-called “gender theories” continue to provoke the political and cultural debate, gathering diverse issues, from philosophy to social science, that intercept both feminist theories - linked to the discussion on egalitarianism of gender; and political debate - related to homophobia and the right to self-determination for transsexual and intersex persons, meeting the demands of a varied LGBTI universe and complicating what is accepted as “natural” and biologically normal. It is no surprise that the debate on gender questions the role of tradition, stereotypes, language, education, actions, style, dress or networking modes, provoking reactionary positions that erect barriers of violent ideological collision and waves of renewed intolerance that often animate the public debate. We only have to look at, by way of an illustrative example, the recent events in Italian politics, specifically the reactionary arguments in the discussion of a bill, trying to fill the legal vacuum that makes us one of the last in Europe, to introduce same-sex civil partnerships. For this reason, therefore, the discussion on gender still remains a perennially pressing current issue. From this, rather difficult, premise, Sui Generis, curated by Eugenio Viola and Angel Moya Garcia, has examined the conceptual complexity of gender, presenting a series of performances, as part of the season, which the Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio has dedicated to individuality
in relation to and/or in conflict with gender. The series approaches this theme, investigating both its semantic ambiguity and its relative forms, stylistically and in media, adopted by the artists to analyse the ongoing transformations.
After all, we live in a present that witnesses the paradox of a huge theoretical production about gender and its normativization, as opposed to a reality experienced by old and new sectarianism that feeds on the hate, prejudice and fear of confronting all those individuals considered “diverse”, and out of social conventions or from consensual practices that outline the boundaries of so-called normality. On the one hand an approach supported by genetics and biotechnology that interprets gender in neutral meaning, like a “provisional assemblage”, porous and multi-coded, at the intersection of multiple identities, suspended between the social, biological and symbolic; on the other hand, a convenient predisposition towards homogenisation and control, imposed or instilled through manipulation, orientation, influences or alterations of the everyday and measured on the basis of defined social or cultural parameters, such as language, education, actions or customs.
Considering these premises, Sui Generis has proposed artists whose work, connected to the body and performativity, offers perspectives of heterogeneous research that address problems of identity and gender and their portrayal in the media. Dissimilar artists in their perception, declension and poetry, who overturn socially acquired and uncritically pre-formed concepts, reaffirming the reasons for reflection on the difference that can outline, from diverse points of view, a discourse on equality. Artists able to trace possible paths of communication between universes apparently opposed, towards a recognition of equality that is, at the same time, full recognition of the difference, confronting, without prejudice, the theme of relationship, of meeting and the handling of otherness, not only sexual and gender, but also cultural, ethical, religious, social and political.
