To Unfold a Life in Sylvia’s Tracks
Cecilia Sjöholm
Text from The Sylvia Fractions, catalogue, Kalmar Konstmuseum, 2013. [The Sylvia Fractions includes Y’all Better Quiet Down!, 87 Sylvia and The Jane/Joan Dialogues
History in the USA are often seen and heard as the speeches of leaders: Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon … their speeches are well disposed, clear and convincing. Sylvia Rivera does not sound like them. She is furious, adversarial and very personal. The speech, like the picture of it, is fragmented. But that is not the reason for it taking such a long time for the event of the speech to catch up to itself.
The early performance artists, those who were active in the 1960’s and -70’s, liked to focus on their sexuality. The body art could become very macho, like with Bruce Nauman, or very feminist like Carole Schneeman or Hanna Wilke. An activist like Rivera placed in a no man’s land, only sparingly explored in art, literature or media. She is transgender, a term which through its latin prefix, trans-, signal a change, a transformation, a conversion. It is also a prefix that signal a passage, through, to the other side, beyond. Transdoes not point out a movement from one place to another, but rather a movement that is continual, a passage that does not reach home. The images of Rivera, remarkably enough, become more current than the images of many of those who clearly defined themselves as “men” or “women”—as if just this trans—allowed a possible transit, a transposition, a transfer in time. As if the event of the speech has waited to occur, as if it demanded its own passage through a time that has in itself been transformed.
The movement of time enhances events, diminishes, transforms or displaces them. As we search backward through history, searching for something that is meaningful to us in the great web of stories, biographies and testimonies that has been left behind, we do not always perceive what we expect. The historian search systematically: what was the social construction of genus like in the 1970’s? How was the homosexual subculture in New York formed? What was the releasing factor in the Stonewall riots? To try to grasp a life, in the great web of tales we are always a part of, is something else. It entails moving in a passage, in a transformation and transportation of time itself, and to allow oneself to be carried along through a shifting environment where some events become clearer, and some fade into the background.
To try to grasp a life is also a form of transcreation. This term has been used, mostly by the brasilian author Haroldo de Campos, to refer to translation; whoever is translating must not just transfer, but transform and create anew. However, de Campos literary term can be expanded widely beyond the area of translation. The recreation of the lives of others, and of the events that today seem to appear in a completely new way, plucked out of their original environment, needs just such a transcreation, a creating anew that by necessity is also a recreation, travelling through the passage of time. In order for people, and the events that surround them, to be able to appear, not only research and investigation is needed. The appearance also demand a different kind of creation, a trans-creation, a creation that transfer us through and beyond the original. Maybe as a choreography of a speech, as in Conny Karlsson Lundgrens adaptation of Rivera’s speech: a taking apart that lets the rage fall, only to be lifted into a completely new form many years later, in a completely different room, in a completely different place, through completely different voices, that cannot share the rage but rather present it in a completely other form and in a completely different ambience.
Conny Karlsson Lundgren’s work The Sylvia Fractions collects events, connected to life tales that all have connection to the name Sylvia; Sylvia Rivera’s speech, the author Sylvia Plath, the astronomer Elizabeth Isis Pogson and the asteroid 87 Sylvia. In his work, they appear with a new tone, in a new light and with another weight that we might have expected. What kind of stories are they?
Carolee Schneeman, who liked to use herself as focus in her art to communicate something about her time, switched the term history for Istory—here you can hear how the “I” also becomes the eye of the story. The story teller is also the one seeing and testifying. In The Sylvia Fractions, the stories have fragmented. There is not one life in focus, but several, not one story teller but several, not the impression of one eye but a crystalline collection of objects, texts and images. In this splintered collection of images and words, the event is born again, receives a new significance and a new tone. In the web of stories creating the now, writes Hannah Arendt, we often forget that we ourselves take up space. As authors, philosophers, historians or artists, we might seek a place outside and beyond the web of stories; we prefer to se them in their essence, portrayed in their truth. But even as we seek such a place, we always find ourselves in the middle of the web, recreating rather than retelling or reciting. Through our seeing, telling or imagining, we ourselves create a place from where the events start to move off in a new direction, maybe in a new form. In The Sylvia Fractions, several possible routes are laid out. Maybe that’s why the events really can be recalled in all their clarity, as well as the life stories that surround them.