Guillermo Gomez Peña

What is the future of the ritual?

Mapa Corpo 3: Interactive Rituals for the New Millenium – a prognostic ritual performance
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Development of Hybrid Future Personas – a workshop that was held from 5-31 to 6-2 2008 at the HAU 3 in Berlin
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Classical theories of ritual teach that it serves as a framework in transgressing borders. The border between the living and the dead, between childhood and maturity, between those who belong to a community and who do not, the border between violence, the sexes, mind and control, the border to delirium – all these boundaries are transgressed in ritual, at the same time confirming and redrawing them in the course of the framed transgression.

In this sense rituals establish identity, unity, authority, law and order, and shared values. But while tribal rites, frenzied dances and violence against chickens instinctively come to mind when thinking of ritual, calling up all manner of exotic clichés, rituality, as the framework for crossing borders in establishing identity and authority, is still a central element of contemporary societies.

Deconstructing rituals

The performances by Guillermo Gomez-Pena completely upset these circumstances. Aided by accomplices from the Pocha Nostra, Gomez-Pena deconstructs existing ritual practices to such an extent that the framing of border transgressions merely sustains the next frame breakage, instead of completion characterised by re-established identity and unity.

The performances by the Pocha Nostra create a movement in which the ritual is turned from the inside to the out, extroverting itself. The relationship between performance and ritual has far too frequently been misunderstood in past decades. No one manages to bring it so logically to its comical, critical and agitated point as Gomez-Pena and the Pocha Nostra.

Abysses of exoticism

They achieve this in part by playing on the exoticisms of Western cultures: as ‘chicanos’, the members of the Pocha Nostra can always count on their ritual performances being misinterpreted time and again by large sections of the audience as the ‘authentic’ expression of ‘another culture’ beyond modern civilisation – at least at first glance; looking again, onlookers are suddenly confronted with the fetishes and rituals of their own reality.

The border being transgressed here suddenly proves to be a transition to the world of personal exotistic phantasms, phobias and xenophobic clichés. Take, for example, the Temple of Confessions performance:

The piece was based on a religious metafiction; we became the last two living santos [saints] from an unknown border religion, in search of sanctuary across America. People were invited to experience this ‘pagan temple’ and confess to the saints their intercultural fears and desires. Roberto and I were completely unaware of the Pandora’s box we were about to open. […] people stormed into the Scottsdale Center for the Arts (Arizona) on opening day and expressed to our end-of-century santos their innermost feelings, fantasies and memories of Mexico, Mexicans, Chicanos and other people of colour. […] Opposite Roberto’s altar was the altar of the Chapel of Fears, where I sat on a toilet (or a wheelchair) costumed as ‘San Poncho Aztlaneca’, a hyper-exoticized curio shop shaman for spiritual tourists. […] Velvet paintings hanging on the red and black walls of the gallery depicted other hybrid saints: El Transvestite Pachuco, Santa Frida de Detroit, La Yuppie Bullfighter, La Neo-primitiva, El Maori Lowrider etc.

In this “temple”, the ritual crossing and restitution of the border is superseded and overwritten by a movement that defines borders reciprocally merely to pay homage to the transgression, the establishment of the hybrid.

In the process, Gomez-Pena himself appears so surprised at the aspect that makes the ritual performances by the Pocha Nostra so distressing – namely, that they actually function as rituals. Hundreds of confessions are made in just two days in the Temple of Confessions. The purpose is not only to give a temporary habitat to an impossible community made up of those whose identity is split in the heterotopia of the art gallery, but rather to confront the terror of those who suddenly feel acknowledged in their phantasms.

Cartel of Cultural Bastards

So is this the ritual of the future? No, these are rituals of the present. They can, however, assume a science-fiction character, as in the performance MexTerminator, in which gallery and website visitors also contributed to the design of so-called “ethno-cyborgs”:

Our goal was to incarnate the intercultural fantasies and nightmares of our audiences, refracting fetishized constructs of identity through the spectacle of our ‘primitive’, eroticized bodies on display. The composite personae created were stylized representations of non-existent, phantasmatic Mexican/Chicano identity, projections of people’s own psychological and cultural monsters – an army of Mexican Frankensteins ready to rebel against their Anglo creators.

Since then, this process has become a central principle of the Pocha Nostra.

The Spanglish neologism ‘Pocha Nostra’ translates as either ‘our impurities’ or ‘the cartel of cultural bastards’,

a cartel that describes itself as follows:

A garage performance troupe, an experimental sideshow, an interactive living museum and curiosity cabinet, and a politicized X-treme fashion show, […] a ‘performance clinic’, a radical school, a town meeting, an ‘intelligent’ rave, and a […] Trojan horse: a major institution may invite two or three artists but we bring ten to twenty others and involve them all in the process.

A workshop, a ritual

As part of Prognoses on Movement(s), the Pocha Nostra has said it will hold a workshop for 15 activists, artists and researchers concluding with a public ritual performance. Gomez-Pena writes:

Some of the questions underlying the workshop and the performance are: Where will the new cultural, political, spiritual and sexual borders be located? What will the new mechanisms and strategies to cross them be? Can art help us envision these mechanisms? What territories encompass the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘them’? How can our audiences help us co-create the artwork of the future?

We therefore ask Guillermo Gomez-Pena and the Pocha Nostra to provide a prognosis on the movement of border-crossing. It is in any case improbable that they feel bound to a commission they have not given themselves.

But will this prognosis also become a prediction on the future of the ritual? What is decisive is that “the ritual of the future’ does not necessarily have to be a future ritual. Ultimately, consulting an oracle is itself a ritual practice of special significance and divulgence. We are therefore interested above all in what will happen when the _Pocha Nostra_’s performance work turns to rituals of the future? What are hybrid oracles and what are the borders that must be transgressed to actually devise a contemporary ritual of the future?

Guillermo Gomez-Pena announces the workshop Developing Hybrid Future Persona and the performance Mapa-Corpo 3: Interactive rituals for the new millennium:

»Lorena’s nude body lies on a surgical table covered by the flag of the United Nations. An acupuncturist dressed in a lab coat prepares for surgery, laying out 40 needles. A small flag is attached to the tip of each needle, each representing a nation of the “coalition forces.” As I deliver a multi-lingual shamanic spoken word mass, the acupuncturist peels the flag from Lorena’s body, working from the feet up, as he methodically inserts the 40 needles into the body/map, leaving the audience to ponder the after-image of a “colonized” female body/world. I ask the audience to “de-colonize the Mapa/Corpo” by carefully removing the flags with the assistance of the acupuncturist. One by one each flag is lifted, completing the ritual. Parallel to this, at a second station, a curator/witch ritually shaves and washes the body of Sifuentes as if preparing it for burial. As the ritualized washing ends, Roberto’s exposed skin becomes a canvas for the audience members to write upon his body “a poetics of the future.” Those who accept the invitation also create tableaux vivants with his body, bringing tenderness and humanity to an objectified image.

Our method will be poetic-performative-shamanic in the live performance and pedagogical in the workshop.

As an interdisciplinary artist and intellectual, my work has focused in the development of original artistic models and formats which can anticipate/articulate/envision the immediate future. Both in the content of my work (envisioning a borderless world where the margins have moved to the centre, or where there are no margins left) as well as in my working structures and methodologies, prognoses is at the core of my work.

During both, the workshop and the live performance, the space becomes a metaphor for the larger social world and the human body becomes a site to re-imagine the world. In the performance, both artists and audience members engage in a ritual that calls for a different world, one without war. In the workshop, both Pocha members and participants realize that we can negotiate political, racial, gender, aesthetic, and spiritual differences. We are able to cross many borders in the workshop we simply can’t cross or think we can’t cross on a daily basis. This discovery is extremely empowering. Our process is then carried on after the workshop and tends to spill into people’s personal and professional lives. So in a sense, our ultimate goal is to help participants become good border crossers in multiple territories, not just in the terrain of art making.

Questions informing both projects are:
Where will the new cultural, political, spiritual and sexual borders be located? What will the new mechanisms and strategies to cross them be? Can art help us envision these mechanisms? What territories encompass the pronouns “we” and “them”? How can our audiences help us co-create the artwork of the future?«