Teresa & Marguerite: Finally Together in Ávila?

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Teresa & Marguerite: Finally Together in Ávila?

Curatorial Rationale

Supervisor: Margaret Salmon Fine Art Photography, The Glasgow School of Art

By Kaya Erdinç Word Count (without quotes): 4254

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3 Synopsis

This writing is the Curatorial Rationale for an exhibition titled Teresa & Marguerite: Finally together in Ávila? and is set in and around the old city centre of Ávila, Spain, where mystic saint Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) was born. The exhibition will try to constellate a long lineage of artists and thinkers who have felt drawn to her position and subversive politics implied by her scriptures, which she sustained in the face of various oppressive structures of control and censorship by the Catholic Church. The works gathered in this exhibition will altogether suggest, in the local context of the saint’s birthplace, topics secreted in her writings that she could not live out during her lifetime.

It takes as a starting point Cynthia Cruz’s text about Marguerite Duras titled Duras the Mystic, in which Cruz recognizes Duras in all her complexities, including a reflective rumination on the latter’s unconcealed alcoholism. The main axis is drawn from the Convent of St. Teresa, where Teresa of Ávila was born, to a replica of Duras’s self-bought home in Neauphle-le-Château, France, which is recreated outside of the city walls as a newly commissioned piece by Cornelia Parker.

The main texts that will frame the exhibition are by Julia Kristeva, Bibi Straatman and Maura Reilly, next to ones by Ávila and Duras themselves. The exhibition will feature works by Shriwana Spong, Nathaniel Dorsky, Robert Beaver, Yvonne Rainer, Marguerite Duras, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, Cornelia Parker, Dora García and a lecture-performance by Tavi Meraud.

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5 Contents page

List of illustrations…………………………………………………......... 6 Map of the exthibition………………………………………………….... 7 Introduction……………………………………………………………… 8-12 Chapter 1: Seancing in a tomb…………………………………………... 13-24 Chapter 2: Marguerite meets Teresa…………………………………….. 24-37 Chapter 3: You cannot keep the inside out……………………………… 38-40 Conclusion: Fire in the belly, or how to yearn like a female mystic……. 41-42 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….. 43-46

6 List of illustrations on map and in writing (both in order of appearance)

Figure 1. Hand Film (Yvonne Rainer, 1966) Figure 2. Exterior view of the Monasterio de Santo Tomás Figure 3. The room where Hand Film will be projected, in the Monasterio de Santo Tomás Figure 4. Marriage Story (Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, 2020) Figure 5. The Hearing Voices Café (Dora García, 2014) Figure 6. The Plaza de Santa where the performance will take place, in front of the Convento de Santa Teresa Figure 7. The Negative Hands (Marguerite Duras, 1978) Figure 8. Temple Sleep (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2020) Figure 9. Exterior view of the Plaza del Toros Figure 10. Interior view of the Plaza del Toros Figure 11. The Hedge Theater (Robert Beavers, 2003) Figure 12. Entrance of the Convento de San José Figure 13. Google Street View image of where the planned piece by Cornelia Parker will be Figure 14. Instrument F (Alice) (Shriwana Spong, 2018) Figure 15. Marguerite Duras’s former home in Neauphle-le-Château, Yvelines, France

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8 Introduction

Let nothing trouble you, Let nothing frighten you, Everything passes, God does not change.

Patience Attains all things; Whoever has God Lacks nothing: God alone suffices.

– Teresa of Ávila1

‘Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God.’ – Marguerite Duras2

1

Teresa of Ávila. The Interior Castle, trans. by Otilio Rodrigues (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1979).

2

Marguerite Duras. Writing, trans. by Mark Polizzotti (Minneapolis, Minn: Univeristy of Minnesota

Press, 2011), p. 7.

9 Despite a working life full of censorship by the Catholic Church, Teresa of Ávila is known for still having written down her truth, regardless of the patriarchs that would go through, edit, and revise her texts until after her passing3. It is in her handwritten manuscripts that scholars have found ground for translations that allowed for very different receptions of her legacy4.

Four centuries later, Marguerite Duras was born, who worked less directly in relation to religion, but made several very strong statements about the influence of God and religion as a governing political body with an unmistakable influence on her life and work. The exhibition will be a continuation of Fear Nothing, She Says, a 2015 show that took place in the Nacional de Escultura museum, Valladolid, whose title, borrowed from the Duras novel Destroy, She Said, already hinted at the unexplored links between the two.

In this exhibition, their imagined meeting is staged in Àvila, with something very specific running through all the works: the city walls and its extramural churches, which were declared UNESCO World Heritage in 1985. Starting outside the old town, in Tomás de Torquemada’s tomb, the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain and witchhunter, the audience will read Duras the Mystic, by Cynthia Cruz5. The freedom that Duras claimed as she moved away

3

Alison Weber. Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ., Princeton University

Press, 1990), p. 3.

4

Nuria Sanjuán Pastor, 'When Flesh Becomes Word: Teresa of Avila's Handwritten Relics',

Neotestamentica, 181, (2017), p. 17-30.

5

Cynthia Cruz, Duras, The Mystic (2016) <https://plumepoetry.com/featured-selection-cynthia-cruz-

and-nancy-mitchell/> [accessed 12 November 2021].

10 from French Indochina contrasts Teresa’s, while at the same time the exhibition will attempt to envision how both lives correlate. Importantly, the historical difference in time is taken in account and how that implicates the curation of this show6.

Current questions regarding privacy will also be probed: how Teresa of Ávila can be a prism through which to rethink our relationship with media culture and the cemented impression that self-expression is a given7. I will deliberately include academic sources from fields other than Religious or Biblical Studies, as the compartimentalization of the latter two has often led to a lack of interdisciplinarity8, arguably more so than elsewhere, resulting in a very particular echo chamber.

As Lucy Lippard writes in the foreword to Curatorial Activism:

Reilly’s examination of various counter-hegemonic strategies is a valuable part of this book […] She advocates a ‘leveling of hierarchies’ and a ‘fundamental redefining of art practice, transnationally.’ She demotes revisionism, which is always popular at the beginning of such long journeys and can correct some past deficiencies, providing a base

6

Lauren Berlant, 'Thinking about feeling historical', Emotion, Space and Society, 1.1, (2008), p. 4-9.

7

Bibi Straatman, 'Palimpsest: Science as a Talking Cure', Women’s Studies International Forum, 43,

(2014), p. 67-74.

8

Johannes N. Vorster, 'Introduction: Interconnecting Discourses—Gender, Bible, Publics.',

Neotestamentica, 48.1, (2014), p. 1-31.

11 for contemporary work. But, as Reilly points out, revisionism ultimately accepts the centrality of the white male Western canon, and can even strengthen in by maintaining criteria that are prejudicial or inapplicable to disparate cultures9.

This is an important pointer towards relationality that I hope Teresa & Marguerite: Finally Together in Ávila? will reflect.

The visitor will be led through different conceptions of sainthood, seen from the present moment, and extrapolated by a wide range of artists. Various perspectives are offered about Teresa’s historical significance, and visitors end up at a replica of Duras’s French home outside of the city walls, which in Teresa’s time was known to be where the peasants resided.

Newly commissioned for Cornelia Parker, it will be a white space inside, apart from a glassblown sound sculpture by Shriwana Spong.

The exhibition will consider the need for political dissent in times when possibilities of closure and retreat are reduced to a minimum. It will briefly draw upon work by Byung-Chul Han on the technological erasure of boundaries, which the very locale of this exhibition challenges, and the work of Bruno Latour on our unwilligness to deal with religious speech and how this have divided the western world. The curated works, made by a wide arrange of

9

Lucy R. Lippard, 'Introduction', in Curatorial Activism: towards an Ethics of Curating., ed. by

Maura Reilly (London, UK: Thames and Hudson, 2018), p. 11.

12 artists, muster up the courage to revise these ideas and provide them with newly excavated vitalities.

13 Chapter 1: Seancing in a tomb

Figure 1. Hand Film (Yvonne Rainer, 1966)

When free movement is threatened, the question of imprisonment arises almost simultaneously.

And the body is what it encounters first10. It is during the recent pandemic that we have been reminded of how unromantic it is to be tied to one place. Backed up by decades of research, refugeeing women and their children get exposed to this realization most directly11. In this

10

Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New

York: Vintage, 1977), p. 3-31.

11

Maria Tamboukou. 'Feeling the Real: The Non-Nomadic Subject of Feminism.' Theory, Culture &

Society, 38(3), (2021), p. 3-27.

14 chapter, I will explore the foundations of this question as much as I can within the given wordcount, since it is conducive to the exhibition I am about to propose.

Having looked at feminist curatorial theory, in particular Elke Krasny’s writing, I tried to listen to her words as much as to the figures that form the main points of my proposal. Acknowledging my own gendered position as a male12, I adhere to a set of feminist values that stem from several formative relationships with certain women in my life, and I hope it is appropriate enough for me to write this Rationale. I have tried to follow through on everything that Krasny describes in the following text, except for my lacking experience of womanhood, which I can only admit to by returning the word, and referencing more rather than less:

The following cultural analysis of curating practices is attentive to what Adrienne Rich in 1984 called ‘’politics of location.’’ She emphasized the ‘’need to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history in which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create’’. Such a dialectical approach is useful to the “curatorial materialism” employed here. Rich advises to “begin with the material” and to pay attention to “when, where, and under what condition”13.

12

Lucy R. Lippard, 'Introduction', in Curatorial Activism: towards an Ethics of Curating., ed. by

Maura Reilly (London, UK: Thames and Hudson, 2018), p. 24-25.

13

Elke Krasny, 'Curatorial Materialism. A Feminist Perspective on Independent and Co-Dependent

Curating', ONCURATING, .29, (2016), 96-107, in Curating in Feminist Thought <https://oncurating.org/files/oc/dateiverwaltung/issue-29/PDF_to_Download/OnCurating_Issue29_DINA4.pdf> [accessed 23 November 2021].

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Social and cultural taboos, for example, have always prohibited many different people, but especially women, from dealing with the everyday in creative and sustainable ways. The work of Straatman, and her personal use of an intergenerational talking cure, functions as a bridge between herself and Avila, but also Duras:

The intersectional (re)reading of the oeuvre of Teresa together with psychoanalysis, Foucauldian genealogy, feminist ethnography and post colonial theory has encouraged me to restate my position and concept of science as a fragile co-production; a practice that is framed around a dialogical setting which is able to cut through the centuries. I propose a specific dialogical setting; the ‘’talking cure’’, as a research method for twenty first century feminist epistemology and other takes on epistemology aiming at transformation; not only at the emancipative transformation of hierarchical power structures, but also at the transformation of dualist epistemology14.

Aditionally, it hopes to provoke thought on who gets to look15, and consume new or different images, and who does not. As Weber’s research suggests, Teresa’s life was one in which she was oppressed and possibly kept from going where she wanted. Instead, every trip or journey

14

Bibi Straatman, 'Palimpsest: Science as a Talking Cure', Women’s Studies International Forum, 43,

(2014), p. 67-74.

15

Nicholas Mirzoeff, 'Introduction: The Right to Look Or, How to Think With and Against Visuality',

in The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 135.

16 had to be in service of her sacred duty, which in hindsight was a way to control her movement and use of power. To argue that this was a case of imprisonment, is questionable, despite the church and the prison being historically connected, especially in relation to women16.

However, even though she was very confined, she did manage her uncertainty with great wit, agility and diplomatic skills17 but she came from a very wealthy family, which must have given her more space to develop these faculties. Assuming a flawed revisionist view here, and not based on historical context, we can tell Teresa’s case was distinctly different case from those of people that get incarcerated in the 21st century.

To act on this statement, this exhibition will begin in the tomb of the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain, Tomás de Torquemada, who also was a feared witchhunter. In 1836, two years after the inquisition officially ended, vengeful robbers broke into the tomb, stole his bones and burned them where his victims had perished before him.

16

Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New

York: Vintage, 1977), p. 3.

17

Alison Weber. Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University

Press, 1990), p. 5.

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Figure 2. Exterior view of the Monasterio de Santo Tomás

Over the last few decades, several revisionist studies have started to surface that question the Church more thoroughly, like the persecution of witches and other female practitioners of magic, and how witchcraft provided these women with an agency that allowed a circumvention of the societal ways of moving through the medieval world, by which such centres of power felt threatened18. There is a common sense among people, that the middle ages are dusty, and far behind us, sentiments that many sources and events keep refuting19. At the same time, there is a tendency to romanticize and idealise the past, as it accompanies

18

Silvia Federici, 'Witch-Hunting and the Fear of the Power of Women ', in Witches, Witch-Hunting,

and Women (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018), p. 52-70.

19

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1993), p. 35-39.

18 many ideological dangers that risk disregarding what we, as a species, have tried to integrate time and time again – the ommision of these attempts is what allows for corruption and narratives that deny the present reality20.

Facing up to this reality involves the questioning of affects and customs that are the building blocks of the here and now, without adhering too much to its nostalgic pull21. What remains of the current Left, no matter how divided and splintered it may be according to some, requires a critical self inquiry that requires more than a look at ‘’our’’ values. The real challenge lies in not acting as if religious feeling, conservatism and political reactionism, have never belonged to us.

A major text that makes this clear, is Teresa of Ávila’s The Interior Castle, which allegorically tells the story of the different chambers one needs to endure before reaching ecstasy, or freedom, from what each of the rooms imposes on the individual. As a female mystic, this story was a way for her to write down her inner dialogue without explicitly

20

Anna Fisk, 'Appropriating, Romanticizing and Reimagining: Pagan Engagements with Indigenous

Animism', in Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Modern Paganism, ed. by Kathryn Rountree (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 21-42.

21

Thomas A. Prendergast, Stephanie Trigg, 'Loving the past', in Affective Medievalism: Love,

Abjection and Discontent (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 95-117.

19 accusing or complaining about the Church and its shackles22. In another reading of this text, Julia Kristeva discerned the entrapment and suffering she had to go through as a woman coming close to power23.

One way of acknowledging this, may be by means of this exhibition, as it allows us to travel to an old heart of power. And instead of denying that this very place no longer contains what was planted then, I propose via Straatman, a heartfelt and non-dualistic look at it with some of the insights art has uncovered since24.

Someone who has explored this in the past was Marguerite Duras, particularly in her film The Negative Hands, wherein she contrasted her Paris with the same place, a few million years before, as she talks about the handprints found in cave paintings all over France. And how she and they, are more alike than we like to admit. This cultivated spiritual connection with those who came before, is very much explored in the text by poet Cynthia Cruz, who sees Marguerite Duras as her own mystic saint. One can call it a process of highly personal

22

Alison Weber. Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University

Press, 1990), p. 42-48.

23

Julia Kristeva, 'From Ecstasy to Action', in Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila:

A Novel, trans. by Lorna Scott Fox (New York: Colombia University Press, 2015), p. 279-280.

24

Bibi Straatman, 'Palimpsest: Science as a Talking Cure', Women’s Studies International Forum, 43,

(2014), p. 67-74.

20 canonization, based on Cruz’s own affiations with Duras, and no one else’s, which in this case boldly focuses on the transgressiveness of her alcoholism, and her need to revolt:

Her work is passionate–she is stepping directly into the fire (as opposed to considering, reflecting). As a result, I’d say then the reader is also put directly into the fire—and the fire is impossible to bear (this is precisely why Duras needs the booze, as she says). This intensity scares some off, while others insist her work is too intense, that she is making too much of things. This intensity is too much for some readers to bear. In her final work, No More, as Duras moves nearer to death, her voice and the writing become more intense, more clear and honest. Again, this type of transparency, this nearness to God or truth, is often too much for people. They respond with a visceral reaction, a condemnation: Duras is hysterical, that she is making too much of things. She has no control. When, in reality, she is translating truth for us, a kind of mystic.

By using the writings and artworks of these two women as a lens, I hope to approximate the distance between ourselves in 2021, Marguerite Duras in 1996 and Teresa of Ávila in 1582, the respective years of their passing. What is it about the relation between religion and freedom that they understood so precisely and heart-wrenchingly? The risk of committing hagiography is always present, but with Cruz’s subversive choice to make Duras a saint herself, she gets us to think about idolatry in a present-day sense, and that overglorification is perhaps a religious feeling that we have taken over in a world that simultaneously become less and less aware of its religious inheritance, or as Bruno Latour implies in his book Rejoicing: or the Torments of Religious Speech, it might be a matter of shared confusion:

21 It is not of the religious that he wants to speak, not of the fact of religion. It is not of that vast stratum of institutions, law, psychology, rituals, politics, art, cultures, monuments and myths; of what for so long and in all climates took hold of human beings obliged to band together in conglomerations and attend to the things connecting them – link and scruple being the two etymological senses of the word religio. The only thing he wants to reactivate is religious utterance, that very strange habit which developed over the course of history in the form of the Word, and which seems to him today to be so horribly confused.

He doesn’t want to study either the religious or religion – still less, religions plural – but only to disinter a form of expression that used to be so free and inventive, fruitful and saving in days gone by, but that now dries on his tongue whenever he tries to recover its movement, excitement, its structure. Why does what used to be so alive for him (turn deadly boring whenever he endeavours to talk about it to others – his children, for instance? What monstrous metamorphosis makes what once had so much meaning become absolutely meaningless, like a blast of words freezing on the lips of convicts in the Siberian cold?25

The body and voice as producers of material agency need to be acknowledged if we want to reflect what has in fact changed since Teresa of Ávila’s passing, which is why I want to start with something that is integral to human embodiment: the hand, which can decide to either write or drink; or do both. Duras shows in the film, by juxtaposing the caves of sub-altern Europe with her filming of sex workers and binmen, that the dark night of soul is connected

25

Bruno Latour, 'Above all do not believe', in Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech, trans.

by Julie Rose (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), p.2.

22 to our experience of the body, and that it is a base political experience we either accept or repress26.

Figure 3. The room where Hand Film will be projected, in the Monasterio de Santo Tomás

Near Torquemada’s tomb, one will read the by text by Cruz in a small room in front of a loop projection of Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Film (1966) which is a piece she made when she was badly injured, and could not leave her hospital bed for weeks. She could barely move a limb, except for her very hand. Placing this on the same floor level as Torquemada’s tomb, we

26

Nina de Vroome, The Negative Hands (2016) <https://www.sabzian.be/text/the-negative-hands>

[accessed 25 November 2021].

23 confront the building with its boasting architecture, as the film by Rainer points to the present moment, and to the bodies of those who will read the Cruz text in front of it, having much more choice to enact their agencies than any of Torquemada’s victims did, but also reminding them of the perilousness of this freedom.

Cruz expands on the interview that precedes her essay by providing us with important context27:

CC: And as you say, the emptying of one’s self that occurs when writing is, in itself, a kind of communing/communicating with God; a type of prayer. And Duras writes precisely about this in Writing, for example, when she explicitly states, ‘The text of texts is the Old Testament.’ One can read, in fact, not just the act of her writing but also the act of drinking alcohol as a type of prayer. Prayer via the bottle; prayer via the word.

These two works will disturb the ghost of the inquisitor, an emancipatory communication28 awakened through body and voice. The senses are very prominent in both pieces and amplify the capacity to redefine one’s relationship with situations of the most severly constraining kind, alluding to the inner experience of the dark night and how the emergence from that, no

27

Cynthia Cruz, Duras, The Mystic (2016) <https://plumepoetry.com/featured-selection-cynthia-cruz-

and-nancy-mitchell/> [accessed 12 November 2021].

28

Jean-Luc Nancy, et al., The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, ed.

by Andrew J. Mitchell, Jason Kemp Winfree (New York: SUNY, 2009).

24 matter how complex or painful, can only be kickstarted via the use and acknowledgement of the simplest gestures.

To start this exhibition with the pairing of alcohol with mystic sainthood, I hope to acknowledge the blurring of boundaries the church tried to control for so many centuries before the separation of state and church and failing in preventing our need to revolt29. Which is a response to power still exercised today.

Chapter 2: Marguerite meets Teresa

‘All our interest is centred in the rough setting of the diamond, and in the outer wall of the castle -- that is to say, in these bodies of ours.’ – Teresa of Ávila30

In this main chapter, I will explore the route of the exhibition and the works and theoretical texts that will stage the encounter between these two female figures. La noche obscura (the dark night of the soul)31 has been of great importance to both. Georges Bataille, who also was

29

Julia Kristeva, 'What Revolt Today?', in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and

Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Jeanine Herman (New York: Colombia University Press, 2000), p.

4-5.

30

Teresa of Ávila. 1979. The Interior Castle, trans. by Otilio Rodrigues (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press).

31

St. John Of The Cross. 'The Dark Night.' in The Collected Works of St. John of The Cross, trans. by

Kieran Kavanaugh and Rodriguez Otilio (Washington, DC, ICS Publications, 2010) p. 351-457.

25 interested in christian mysticism and Teresa’s writing, described the experience of the dark night most adequately:

The picture of ash and flames which Andre painted after we had told him about it was near Laure when she died; it is still in my room. Halfway along our path, having entered an infernal region, we could also discern, in the distance, the volcano's crater at the far end of a long valley of lava. One could not possibly imagine a place which demonstrated more clearly the fearful instability of things, and Laure was suddenly gripped by an anguish such that she fled, madly, running straight ahead; she was driven to distraction by the terror and desolation in which we now found ourselves. Yesterday, I continued the ascent of the hill to her grave, overwhelmed by a memory thus charged with nocturnal terror (but with a subterreanean glory, too, with that nocturnal glory known not to real men, but only to shadows trembling with cold). Upon entering the cemetery, I was myself so moved that I lost my wits; I felt fear of Laure, and it seemed that were she to appear to me, I should only cry out in terror32.

Which Julia Kristeva explores more elaborately in her book Revolt, She Said as a place that is not the dark and hopeless rut you get stuck in33, as many men have done, but more as an event

32

Georges Bataille and Annette Michelson, 'The Ascent of Mount Aetna', October, 36. Spring,

(1986), p. 103-105.

33

Julia Kristeva, 'From Ecstasy to Action', in Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of

Avila: A Novel, trans. by Lorna Scott Fox (New York: Colombia University Press, 2015), p. 337.

26 that returns you to the world, full of unfinished work:

I try to interpret this word [revolt] in a philosophical and etymological sense. The word revolt comes from a Sanskrit root that means to discover, open, but also to turn, to return.

This meaning also refers to the revolution of the earth around the sun, for example. It has an astronomical meaning, the eternal return. On a more philosophical level, since Plato, through St. Augustine and until Hegel and Nietzsche, there is a meaning that I wanted to rehabilitate and that you would find equally rehabilitated by Freud and Proust. It is the idea that being is within us and that the truth can be acquired by a retrospective return, by anamnesis, by memory34.

The old town of Ávila has been preserved very well, and little has been built over the last couple of centuries. This will allow for the exhibition to go along similar places and routes the people would take in Teresa’s time. There are many buildings that are successfully conserved over the years, and in 1985 its walls and extramural churches were declared UNESCO World Heritage.

What this entails for this exhibition is not unimportant. Teresa of Ávila’s writings were edited under the judgemental eyes of confessors and inquisitors, up to her canonisation, and we are presented with several examples of her lineage being instrumentalised for the sake of preserving

34

Julia Kristeva, Philippe Petit. Revolt, She Said: An Interview by Philippe Petit (Los Angeles,

Semiotext(e), 2002), p. 99-101.

27 cultural heritage and notions of national identity35. In terms of its visual placement, the walls stand for the hard boundaries that were more common then, when writing and reading was inaccessible to most and when the feudal system still structured western societies36, whereas now the democratising effect of the internet has allowed, at least in the west, for the blurring of boundaries that begins in our pockets37. Ávila, a town that feels as if you enter a different time, brings back a different experience of social and cultural boundaries, where the architecture of cities and villages mediated the ways people moved around and whereto.

As the visitor sets off from the Convento de Santa Tomas towards the old town, either by taking a shuttle bus or by foot, they will not be able to see Ávila’s city walls until they near the city more closely. As one enters one of the smaller gates, one encounters an analogue 35mm film projection of Jessica Dunn Rovinelli’s Marriage Story (2020) by going through a big wooden door in a building that has been standing empty for years. Described as an autofiction under the eyes of a female christ, the piece attempts, through its maker’s political

35

Alison Weber. Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University

Press, 1990), p. 3.

36

Chris Harman, 'From feudalism to capitalism', International Socialism, 2(45), (1989), p. 35-87.

37

Byung-Chul Han. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. (Medford, MA, Polity

Press, 2020). p. 33-34.

28 disposition as a trans femme, to inquire into the idea of matrimony and marriage. By reading in her bedroom texts by female mystics, especially Teresa of Ávila’s, in this neglected corner of the latter’s birthplace, that Teresa is invoked by someone whose body politics destabilises the doctrine of the Church through an engagement that breaks down the dogmatism that surrounds religious reading. In this way, it is suggested that even through its consistent preservation of this town and its traditions, it is very possible for people with very different backgrounds and socio-erotic orientations to subvert the patriarchal text of a place and reinterpret canonised writing in an emancipatory manner religious insitutions have often tried to prohibit, and with questionable success.

Figure 4. Marriage Story (Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, 2020)

For it is not in these Mansions, but in those which are farther on, that it rains manna; once there, the soul has all that it desires, because it desires only what is the will of God. It is a curious thing: here we are, meeting with hindrances and suffering from imperfections by the thousand, with our virtues so young that they have not yet learned how to walk -- in fact, they

29 have only just been born: God grant that they have even been born at all […] – Teresa of Ávila38

Across the street from the screening site, we find the most recent iteration of The Hearing Voices Café, an ongoing project by the Spanish artist Dora García, who was inspired by Teresa, as well as Socrates, St. John of the Cross, to others like Virginia Woolf and Paul Celan, who all wrote about the voices they heard and how that affected their spiritual and creative lives. It asks the question whether these people just heared voices, or if they were in fact cultivating an inner dialogue that differed from the hard-lined custom of putting something out there, for the sake of being heard.

Figure 5. The Hearing Voices Café (Dora García, 2014)

38

Teresa of Ávila. The Interior Castle, trans. by Otilio Rodrigues (Mahwah, NJ, Paulist Press, 1979).

30 Her aim is to destigmatize something that every human being experiences, bringing it back to a place where we can least distinguish between other people’s voices and our own: a café.

The locality of this Hearing Voices Café is particularly important for García, as the artist herself is from this area and has deeply drawn on the mystical christian tradition. Aditionally, the work speaks to her interest in psychoanalysis and how it has helped us to review our notions of what it means to confess, and to whom, a process that recognises the shifting parameters regarding interiority and the stories we tell ourselves39. García’s work displays, in a very social manner, the fruits of acknowledging the links between religion and psychoanalysis, two traditions that have always been related from the offset40. It is only in this piece that what has been earned and is brought out into the open.

‘Treats of the insecurity from which we cannot escape in this life of exile, however lofty a state we may reach, and of how good it is for us to walk in fear.’41

39

E. Summerson Carr, 'Signs of the Times: Confession and the Semiotic Production of Inner Truth.',

Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 19(1), (2013), p. 34-51.

40

William W. Meissner S.J, 'Freud and the Bible', in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. by

Bruce M. Metzger, Michael D. Coogan (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 232.

41

Teresa of Ávila, 'The Third Mansions', in The Interior Castle, trans. by Benedict Zimmerman

(London, UK: Fount, 1995), p. 31.

31 From here on, one proceeds to the Convent of St. Ávila, which was built on top of her childhood home. In front of it there will be a lecture performance by Tavi Meraud, who carries on the work she did on the opening night of the e:flux publication What’s Love Got to Do With It, where she spoke her poetry and performed it as she moved through the audience in a very intimate setting. Here in Ávila, where she will perform on a big square with more spread-out audience, a performance is planned concerning ecstatic love and Meraud’s characteristic vocality as she will try to speak to Teresa’s heart as directly as possible in order to invoke her to the current present, with the Convent and the square being her stage. As in all her performance work, the audience will once again be implicated directly and personally.

Figure 6. Plaza de Santa, in front of St. Teresa’s Convent

32

Figure 7. The Negative Hands (Marguerite Duras, 1978)

Simultaneously, inside of the lodging house that part of St. Ávila’s Convent, one will once again be invited to retreat into the darkness to see and hear the Marguerite Duras film The Negative Hands. By not bringing Duras into Teresa’s displaced and built-upon home, we maintain the tension of the distance they share in time.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible

33 book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome42.

Figure 10. Temple Sleep (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2020)

Two other pieces will be shown off-route. One of them, Nathaniel Dorsky’s Temple Sleep (2020) will be at the Plaza del Toros, which very much looks like a castle, and gives us a concrete example of a very violent and externalized notion of the castle as place. The film will be playing at set times in a bullring. It is in situations of this kind, that masculinity and its

42

Marguerite Duras. Writing, trans. by Mark Polizzotti (Minneapolis, Minn: Univeristy of Minnesota

Press, 2011), p. 8.

34 objectifying tendency is displayed and reiterated on a weekly basis. The piece’s placement and materiality will try to challenge and resist the ease of projection and the medium of cinema, by critiquing itself43. Filmed by the artist himself, it captures a large pond in Golden Gate Park, near to Dorsky’s home, he describes it as follows44:

‘The fly casting pools in Golden Gate Park became a mind healing place for me, a calming space of sacredness, tempered by the fear of the on-coming unknown. A place of feminine power’

It forms a tentative contrast to the violence one expects to see find within a bullring, and the piece provides context for her text titled Four Waters of Prayer which is whispered to the visitor via several low-frequent speakers, in which she suggests a variation on The Interior Castle that is more grounded and in touch with the ecology of the earth. The labouring of the land, and the act of watering it, is one of her mostly used metaphors45 giving us a different

43

Jean-Louis Comolli, 'On a Dual Origin', in Cinema against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology

Revisited, ed. by Daniel Fairfax, trans. by Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), p. 147-169.

44

Nathaniel Dorsky, Temple Sleep: Two Film Stills. (Aug. 2020)

<nathanieldorsky.net/post/627039239859830784/temple-sleep-two-film-stills> [accessed 21 November 2021].

45

Julia Kristeva, 'How to Write Sensible Experience, Or, Of Water as The Fiction Of Touch', in

Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila: A Novel, trans. by Lorna Scott Fox (New York: Colombia University Press, 2015), p. 89.

35 perspective on Teresa’s inner dialogue, one that does not explicate the precariousness of freedom, but instead brings it inward46.

Figure 11. Exterior view of the Plaza del Toros

46

Teresa of Ávila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila: By Herself, trans. by J.M. Cohen

(Harmondsworth, Mddsx., Penguin Books, 1958), p. 78.

36

Figure 12. Interior view of the Plaza del Toros

The other site where work will be shown is at Ávila’s Convento de Santa José, which Teresa founded and where she lived over twenty years, until her death. From here, she would also found and administer sixteen additional monasteries throughout the whole of Spain. The Hedge Theater (2003) by Robert Beavers extrapolates a meticulous and beautiful queering of a deeply sacred and architectural space. By showing it in one of its most austere rooms, one will be able to realise the care of looking and feeling the architecture of this place for retreat, evoking the suggestion that this very film could also be shot here, lending you its precise and homoerotic eyes – in a piece that exudes a reciprocal exchange of touch between two men in love, even though that is never directly shown.

37

Figure 13. The Hedge Theater (Robert Beavers, 2003)

Figure 14. Convento de San José in Ávila

38 Chapter 3: You cannot keep the inside out

Figure 15. Site of the future piece by Cornelia Parker, with the city walls in the background

‘Solitude also means, either death or a book. But first and foremost it means alcohol. It means whiskey.’ – Marguerite Duras47

As the visitors leaves the city gate behind, they will encounter a replica of Marguerite Duras’s home, recreated from the image above, by Dorothy Parker. The piece will be similar to how she re-staged Norman Bates’ house from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The artwork will only differ from her Psycho piece in the way that one can open and enter the door, which will lead to a fully white space and a single artwork inside it: Shriwana Spong’s Instrument F (Alice), an audio sculpture annex instrument that would make different sounds according to the circle you touched. Initially it was shown together with a video work, which has been taken away by the artist to let the sculpture sing for itself. As Spong’s piece evokes the shape of a human torso, it brings into this empty space the possibility of the voices that the visitor has encountered through the trajectory of the exhibition.

47

Marguerite Duras. Writing, trans. by Mark Polizzotti (Minneapolis, Minn: Univeristy of Minnesota

Press, 2011), p. 7.

39 Based on the seven dwelling places in Ávila’s core text The Interior Castle, one is invited to accept the inaccessible interiority of both these two women, as one’s fantasy of entering Duras’s private home is not met, as well as being denied entrance to Ávila’s interior castle, despite getting so close48. Precisely due to this, the 21st century viewer is invited to meditate about the inner space as a place that can only be entered via risky endavours that take you away from the conformism of corporate social media, as there will be no one waiting to like your posts, but where we will also take a break from narcistically valorising the self.

This is where we return to the solitary dark night of the soul, in which the promise of transcendence is not fulfilled, as there will be no God or divine being that will do this for you.

For Duras, alcohol was a way for her to enter her dark night. Similiar to Duras’s actual home, which has been sufficiently documented from the moment of her passing in 1996. There is a lot of cultivation to do after every dark night, which hopefully is the echo that Spong’s sculpture retrieves. It is here that one will find, not behind glass, but on the back wall after Spong’s sculpture, the page of Marguerite Duras’s original manuscript of Writing in which her passion for alcohol is given its rightful place.

48

Bibi Straatman, 'Palimpsest: Science as a Talking Cure', Women’s Studies International Forum, 43,

(2014), p. 67-74.

40

Figure 15. Instrument F (Shriwana Spong, 2018)

Figure 16. Marguerite Duras’s former home in Neauphle-le-Château, Yvelines, France

41 Conclusion: Fire in the belly, or how to yearn like a female mystic

By looking at multiple different fields of inquiry, writing the Rationale for this exhibition has allowed me to ask questions about how we can return to an everyday from which the religious roots are not erased, but without regressing to a narcisstic and delusional relationship with its – now often digital and uprooted – outgrowths, learning that it is not a matter of picking and mixing a bag of sweets, it instead attempts to look in the eye the current state of western democracy and how that is reflected by these artworks in particular.

Straatman’s article played a big part in tying together more than one discipline, as each opened up more pathways to the fierceness with which Teresa held her position, and backing up modes of thinking that concurr with events that happened since Straatman’s text was published.

What all the works have in common, is their various angles through which they deal with religious affect49, as well as our Christian heritage as a foundational institution that still impacts how we think and move through the socio-cultural structures we encounter in our day-to-day. From a curatorial perspective, Maura Reilly’s distinction between a revisionist

49

Donovan O' Schaefer, 'Introduction: Species, Religious Studies, and The Affective Turn',

in Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 810.

42 approach and a relational one, seems to suggest a direction that does not require a fixating loyalty to core texts. Instead, her proposition of an exhibition-as-polylogue created more breathing space for me too, as the author she cites borrowed that term from Julia Kristeva, who said: ‘polylogue is an interplay of many voices, a kind of creative ‘‘barbarism’’ that would disrupt the monological, colonizing, centristic drives of ‘civilization.’

This in turn influenced me to think of the exhibition more openly and widely, in which I could write about the curation more tangentally. Jessica Rovinelli’s work especially would not have fitted in with older curatorial strategies, as in those cases her politics might be accused of undermining the reparative task at hand, whereas the polylogical approach argues against a separation of spheres and political dispositions, and trusts that integration will lead to integrity. As well as an urge to revolt in Kristeva’s sense: ‘to discover, open, but also to turn, to return’.

Much of the questions that this Rationale asks, have been refined as the writing developed, but they seldom gave me more answers, and instead clarified amounts of detail in my inquiry that required more attention and thinking than they had in any previous phase. One of the dilemma’s I struggled with throughout, is the matter of direction in my staging of the route, which very much took place within my mind, even though I have consulted two female thinkers that are very dear to me, I still feel that the degree of control and lack of spontaneity in how people might stumble on all the separate works, is a valid point of critique.

However, I am convinced that establishing a focus on cultivating inner dialogues with ourselves, as opposed to monologues, has been fruitful in supporting my suggested thesis that an former challenges those who mansplain with such hurry and high pace, and the attempt to bring Teresa and Marguerite back to that age-old conversation, feels appropriate enough.

43 Bibliography

Books

Ávila, of Teresa, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila: By Herself, trans. by J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth, Mddsx., Penguin Books, 1958) ——, The Interior Castle, trans. by Otilio Rodrigues (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1979) ——, The Interior Castle, trans. by Benedict Zimmerman (London, UK: Fount, 1995) Comolli, Jean-Louis, Cinema against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited, ed. by Daniel Fairfax, trans. by Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015) Cross, of the John St., The Collected Works of St. John of The Cross, trans. by Kieran Kavanaugh and Rodriguez Otilio (Washington, DC, ICS Publications, 2010) Duras, Marguerite. Writing, trans. by Mark Polizzotti (Minneapolis, Minn: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2011) Federici, Silvia, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018) Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977) Han, Byung-Chul, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (Medford, MA, Polity Press, 2020) Kristeva, Julia, Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila: A Novel, trans. by Lorna Scott Fox (New York: Colombia University Press, 2015) ——, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Jeanine Herman (New York: Colombia University Press, 2000)

44 Latour, Bruno, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech, trans. by Julie Rose (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013) ——, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) Meissner S.J, William W, The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. by Bruce M. Metzger, Michael D. Coogan (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993) Mirzoeff, Nicholas, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) Petit, Philippe, Kristeva, Julia, Revolt, She Said: An Interview by Philippe Petit (Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2002) Reilly, Maura, Curatorial Activism: towards an Ethics of Curating, (London, UK: Thames and Hudson, 2018) Schaefer, O’Donovan, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) Trigg, Stephane, Prendergast A. Thomas, Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection and Discontent (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018) Weber, Alison, Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990) Winfree, Kemp Jason, J. Andrew, Mitchell, The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication (New York: SUNY, 2009)

45 Journal

Bataille, Georges, Michelson, Annette, 'The Ascent of Mount Aetna', October, 36. Spring, (1986) 103105 Berlant, Lauren, 'Thinking about feeling historical', Emotion, Space and Society, 1.1, (2008) 4-9 Carr, E. Summerson, 'Signs of the Times: Confession and the Semiotic Production of Inner Truth.', Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 19(1), (2013) 34-51 Fisk, Anna, 'Appropriating, Romanticizing and Reimagining: Pagan Engagements with Indigenous Animism', in Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Modern Paganism, ed. by Kathryn Rountree (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) 21-42 Harman, Chris, 'From feudalism to capitalism', International Socialism, 2(45), (1989) 35-87 Pastor, Sanjuán Nuria 'When Flesh Becomes Word: Teresa of Avila's Handwritten Relics', Neotestamentica, 181, (2017) 17-30 Straatman, Bibi 'Palimpsest: Science as a Talking Cure', Women’s Studies International Forum, 43, (2014), 67-74 Tamboukou, Maria, 'Feeling the Real: The Non-Nomadic Subject of Feminism.' Theory, Culture & Society, 38(3), (2021), 3-27 Vorster, Johannes N, 'Introduction: Interconnecting Discourses—Gender, Bible, Publics.', Neotestamentica, 48.1, (2014), 1-31

46 Online Journal

Krasny, Elke, 'Curatorial Materialism. A Feminist Perspective on Independent and Co-Dependent Curating', ONCURATING, .29, (2016), 96-107, in Curating in Feminist Thought <https://oncurating.org/files/oc/dateiverwaltung/issue-29/PDF_to_Download/OnCurating_Issue29_DINA4.pdf> [accessed 23 November 2021]

Online

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