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About wild capitalism & its patriarchal performance in our lives | Colectivo LASTESIS
And the first thing that comes up,
the exploitation of life
and not in a figurative sense.
More like such a sharp literalness,
that to sit here and reflect is painful at the least. They’ve taken everything,
except for the rage.
And sometimes, between collecting the dead, letting wounds heal and surviving,
we take it to the streets and sing our rage.
The song goes something like this.
exploitation of our body
exploitation of our ideas
exploitation of the Earth
exploitation of water
exploitation of the forests
exploitation of the animals
exploitation of family
exploitation of women
exploitation of sexuality
exploitation of mothers
exploitation of the right to decide
exploitation of forced motherhood
exploitation of child mothers
exploitation of reproduction
exploitation of production
exploitation of work
exploitation of domestic work
exploitation of education
exploitation of marginalisation
exploitation of poverty
exploitation of infancy
exploitation of youth
exploitation of adulthood
exploitation of old age
exploitation of health
exploitation of fear
exploitation of vulnerability
exploitation of confinement
exploitation of memory
exploitation of uncertainty
exploitation of revolt
exploitation of dignity
exploitation of life expectancy
exploitation of life
exploitation of death
Deep breath.
We’re face to face with the description of a territory, which goes something like this.
An extremely unequal, neoliberal country, with laws that look after the economic interests of the private sector and not after the lives of the people; the dignity of the people. A country where the precariousness of health only underlines the expendability of bodies that do not contribute to the productive machinery. A sick body is a useless body, therefore, there is no safeguard for that life. It becomes very difficult to reflect on everything else while we see how the government makes decisions that violate lives. The finances of large private companies are protected, but not those of all the rest.
The rest, that was left.
The rest, that stayed.
That did not matter.
That had no worth.
The rest, that does not live, but survives.
Manifest about living and surviving.
Here we inhabit the dimension of survival, and not of living. Living implies having certain basic needs resolved and being able not to question their vital capacity. On the contrary, survival keeps us in direct connection with it, with the concern and action revolving around not dying, around surviving;
surviving with pandemic
surviving without pandemic
surviving becoming sick
surviving unsafe abortion
surviving extreme inequality
surviving the confinement with your assailant
surviving the debts
surviving choosing art as a trade.
(There’s a silence)
A dystopia.
A global stage, a global platform.
We’ve seen the fear.
The invisible – the unknown.
A fiction that disarms and locks up humanity. It detains it.
And in it, what seemed essential to us before.
From what point do we define the future?
Isn’t this the future maybe?
What do we do with this reality now? We don’t have the answers, just a pile of questions lined up to be answered by the great scholars of the academic world. Only they would dare.
What do we do with this reality now?
Sometimes, between collecting the dead, letting wounds heal and surviving, we take to the streets and sing our rage.
The song goes something like this.
let it all burn
and be rewritten
create
for colonial deconstruction, anti-capitalist, but above all
ANTI-PATRIARCHAL
in a rage for having the odds stacked against you
or in favour of you?
because fighting state-wide, structural, regional, communal & domestic
insufficiency
is not an easy task
even less so when the only thing you have are unsteady lines
contained rage and ever so powerful enemies
in the field of precariousness we have little to lose
so we’re staying here
burning everything
in the on-going uprising
breaking down hierarchies
imposing demands
illustrating new ways of being
inventing stages where there are none.
Colectivo LASTESIS is a feminist performance collective from Valparaíso, Chile. Their street performance ‘un violador en tu camino’ (A Rapist in Your Path) led to a mass movement against sexualised violence. The protest performance was reproduced all over the world by women and protest movements.