"To speak of love within the rigid political culture of radical movements or in the cool and up-to-the-minute environment of the art world is always uncomfortable. These were the words with which Mariela Scafati, dressed in dozens of t-shirts, broke the silence of one of the rooms of the Castagnino del Rosario Museum on October 11, 2012.
Words expressed by John Jordan, also printed on the T-shirts of the Popular Serigraphy Workshop (TPS) and Serigrafistas Queer (Queer Screen-printers)(SQ).
In the echo of the room each gesture became a memory exercise.
Today, within the framework of the Arte en el Germani exhibition, the same but different thing happens. T-shirt by t-shirt, word by word, we not only see how a body ceases to be one to become all bodies (in all corporalities), but also gives us back the possibility of reliving each of the slogans and actions carried out by the TPS and SQ.
The performance, or as I prefer to call it, the affective action that Mariela carried out, and today she presents again, is an open invitation to the corporal experience of memory, a poetic-loving experience of having been there, which is renewed and reactualized in each space, in each situation.
I like it and I choose to also think of this action as a possible archive. A living, experiential and talking archive, outdoors, mobile, that gathers and shares in, with and from the body.
Returning then to the phrase with which Mariela broke that, and this silence, I believe that "To speak of love within the rigid political culture of radical movements or in the cool and ultimate environment of the art world" is no longer so uncomfortable, and I dare to say that it is almost inevitable.
With these few and not so few words I intend then, and above all after having seen the action, to add that so many actions carried out by TPS or those currently being carried out by Serigrafistas Queers would not be possible without the generous and committed exchange; a situation that I cannot think of in any other key than those of a gesture that overflows the words transforming them into a place inhabited by and for affection. A collective statement that wraps up time.
This text is a transcription of the words shared by Guillermina Mongan in the framework of the Muestra Arte en el Germani in which Mariela Scafati performed the action "Ni verdaderas ni falsas" (Neither true nor false on April 26, 2013.
