#PORTFOLIO#PHOTOGRAPHY#PROJECT «TRAVELO» OF PEDRO GANDÍA
PRELIMINARY
As vital praxis and socio-political tool, the art of TRAVELO —from French slang «transvestite»―, serves a transgressor function, that of deviation. It violates the prevailing cultural codes, those of a destructive male patriarchal system. And to deconstruct («fuck») gender standards, an obsolete social invention. A Project in favour of otherness and difference, a new and multiple female and male expression, for a more plural vision of reality. And against heterosexist and phallic canon standards of the dominant ideology: against its moralistic laws, its uniformed labels, conceptual dogmatism of its identity policies and sexual normative.
But also transvestism art, heraclitean theory of identity in contradiction, is a magic ritual of transition, in which it assumes the male/female duality ―the androgynies Tiresias, Dionysus or Heracles dressed up with Omphale’s clothes, the Queen of Lydia―, cosmic metamorphose solved, in harmony, into the divine.
Here the beautiful referent ―the ephemeral beauty of the young man, as a subversive, transgressor power―, of different countries and cultures. Or the Spectrum as Barthes would say. He plays to transform itself, in constant creativity, through the garments or outfits that, supposedly, it shouldn’t wear in accordance with its culture or with the imposed social gender.
Body as a subject fetishized by the game itself, game of masks; the world, an immense masquerade. Object of desire: a metamorphosed reality, a mixed race and multicultural society, with a new relationship between human beings, where there is no room for racism, xenophobia and hatred of the difference.
DISCURSUS
the woman will wear man’s clothes, and the man woman’s, and whoever does such a thing will deserve the approval of yahweh [sic]. mobilis in mobile, the spirit is a changing entity. (instead of substitution): everything returns to its original place.
EPILOGUE (*)
In the Europe of nowadays, bipartisan dual policies, exclude plurality, the variety, they equate and massify and are the root of intolerance. Although it may seem strange ―indicates Freud in Moses and Monotheism― the people’s intolerance manifests itself more intensely against little differences rather than against the fundamental ones. That minor difference takes us without remedy towards the most despicable «isms» ―racism, classism, sexism, fundamentalism…in sum, to fascism― in the same way that a greater difference would takes us, without discussion, away from them.
Of utopia (Barthesian pastiche, impure, the defining feature of the white writing, its zero degree, satori). Or better, from the atopy, my «little compartment adrift»: I imagine a society with pluralizing politics focusing on difference. A society infinitely divided, of non-social divisions, that is, non conflictive divisions. A world where there would be nothing but diversity, in a way in which being different would not mean exclusion. A world where natural (legal) would paradoxically be the minority, the marginal; and naturalness, the public nonconformisms.
Shall we live tomorrow?
(*) Gandía, Pedro, «Puro Pasolini o El Artista Natural», Valencia, Debats, Instituciò Alfons el Magnànim, n.107, 2010/2, p. 54; after in Madrid, Espéculo, year XV, n. 46, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, November 2010-February 2011. Online, in:
https://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero46/pasolini.html
Web: https://www.pedro-gandia.com