Identity and Ritual.
A Conversation Between Yael Bartana and Virginia Roy
Virginia Roy (VR): Today we endure identity claims that have an extreme form of expression, both political and technical. On one hand, there is an omnipresence of essentialist identity discourses in multiple spheres (political, economic, religious). On the other hand, we have a growing mistrust for “the other” which has led to an obsession with means of biometric control and “personal” data, in terms of what Giorgio Agamben has called an “identity without a person.” In this sense, it seems necessary to rethink the significance of identity ideas, as you propose in most of your pieces. How do you understand the limits of identity formation in your work and how is it produced?
Yael Bartana (YB): The prevalence of “essentialist identity discourses” that you mention and the mistrust towards the “other” don’t necessarily contradict each other. We all see the power and at the same time the danger that lies within identity politics in its current stage. We all have multiple identities. I am much more interested in observing and subverting signifiers of identity with my visual work than taking part in that theoretical debate. I believe that narrowing down an identity is mostly systemic and helps the nation-state and big corporations to define us. The “other” is being used in that context to reinforce our own identity—we define ourselves based on differences from the others. Identity, I think, should be something that is fluid, multiple, diverse, playful and adaptable to help us navigate in this life. We should always look where we stand in regard to the others, both the ones that are considered similar to us and those who are our immediate opposites. It’s too easy to place oneself under a title of let’s say “humanist,” “feminist” or even “left wing” and to feel that the work is done. It gives a lot of space to becoming fanatic and keep seeing oneself under a certain title. It’s empty of content.
VR: Your work seems to operate in the field defined by the Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities (1983) about the nation-state as a cultural artifact, as a politically imagined community. Images and narratives appear all through your work as the means by which national identity is produced and manipulated.
YB: My work is based on finding exactly these elements that make specific societies to what they are, but I often try to undermine the agreed narrative, undermine it and create new images. The only way to be in this world, I think, is to try to expend, alternate and at times to reverse the narratives we are so familiar and comfortable with. We must constantly challenge what we know about belonging, about defined groups, question our place within them. Only then can we make a change.
VR: The Undertaker is a sequel to the performance Bury Our Weapons, Not Our Bodies, which was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the fall of 2018. In fact, some choreographic shots in the film took place on the stairs of the historic museum building. How do you relate these two pieces?
YB: The film The Undertaker is based on the performance/protest/ritual Bury Our Weapons, Not Our Bodies. In fact, it was clear from the very first moment that the act in Philadelphia would be documented and then become a piece on its own, a part of a greater project that I’ve been working on since the beginning of 2016, What if Women Ruled the World. The film crew documented the performance that took place in front of an audience on the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in addition to that we had two shooting days for the scenes in the cemetery, without any audience. What the film allowed me that the performance did not was the actual burial of the weapons, which stands at the very center of the work and was practically impossible to do at the site of the museum. The cemetery as a location also serves as an important element, it’s about all the lives that were lost in the name of power, of violence. In Israel national myths revolve around cemeteries and it made sense to introduce that space and alternate its purpose.
VR: In your film a long procession files through Philadelphia and some of them wear a mask with a very specific design. This makes me think to the word “person” and its etymology in Latin (and previously from Greek) that comes from the mask in theatre. In fact, in one of the final scenes, the undertakers stand in a circle, like a Greek choir. How do you understand the role of masks in your work?
YB: That takes us a bit back to the discourse of identities. The film shows an alternative ritual in which instead of burying soldiers we bury the guns and the choir is there to witness it. Unlike Greek tragedies, in which the choir is there to comment and give context, here they are silent, they observe, they don’t provide any information. I am a very visual person, I’m much more excited about images than I am about words. Images have the power to bring together different elements that words simply can’t; the masks, for example, are three different entities in one—they are human faces, but also grotesque masks, and in add-on they have the form of a shield. The starting point of the design was the appearance of the gas mask—a tool of protection and then it expanded into different forms.
The masks are suggesting neo-tribalism movements while referencing the abstract masks created by the Bauhaus and Dada movements.
VR: As we mentioned, The Undertaker is a burial of weapons. As you have indicated on several occasions, it is a tribute and ceremony to the living that declares the end of violence. However, the visuality of the burial and the grave has very particular connotations in Mexico, with the number of missing persons looked for by their families. Like in Antigone’s myth, there is a growing concern on the question of how to deal with grief in the case of missing people and their bodies, and the need of producing rituals of loss. Would you agree that The Undertaker alludes to the importance of rituals in the community?
YB: It’s very true that I am not focusing in my works on rituals just in order to explicitly dismiss them. Rituals are part of the life of every society in the world, of every human being in fact. The question for me is always—what is behind a ritual? Who is planning, producing and leading it—and why? The pandemic we are living through clearly changed and will continue to change how we behave in society, how we treat the public sphere. Especially in times of loss and deep trauma the need for community is essential, the main question is how? Zoom conversation with relatives that are deteriorating to their death doesn’t seem sufficient in dealing with grief. We are in the process of learning, of conceiving new ways of living and of dying. So on the one hand it’s true that The Undertaker is a clear statement about the need to end violence, but it’s also about the need to rethink our collective habits, to be able to define ourselves and belong to groups and communities without having to base it on the oppression of other groups and individuals. For that we need visionary leaders who can articulate new ways of being. Leaders who can protect us.
