A blurry category
The history of my life is that I don’t look disable enough
This story is personal.
It is kind of a weird and awkward realization I had from lived experience studying and inhabiting myself abroad.
Funnily enough, I never knew how to narrate and position myself in relation to this theme I am going to expand on, because, contrary to the quote I used for opening this essay, “the history of my life is that I don’t look as part of a minority enough”. Moreover, I have always been very respectful about discriminatory affairs and never felt I was really part of them.
It might have been because I come from a Jewish Polish family, but I am already a third and second generation born and raised in Buenos Aires. [1] It might have been because my grandfather (the immigrant), was very poor when he arrived to Argentina, but that became his motor to succeed in a developing vigorous time of the country’s social and economic history. Since then, all that branch of the family has studied and become pretty successful. This is our gift and our curse, as in the beginning and middle terms of our careers, every time there is a gap of uncertainty with less possibilities, we just feel “not good enough” or even a failure.
Notwithstanding, being the first member of this family with a masters abroad, I always recognized myself as very privileged. I have been surrounded by people with more and less privileges than myself, but I could never recognize myself as a minority. I am Jewish but I have not been discriminated for that (at least that I remember). I am a woman but I have been raised with the same rights than my brothers (I have rarely been treated as “a girl” until I became an adolescent). I was simply me.
However, being quite hypersensitive, injustices affected me. My grandmother used to call me “the poor and absents’ defendant”. This was not conscious; it was part of my personality since being a child. Also, since youth, I have moved around what people conceive as alternative environments. The artistic atmosphere is full of us and I am usually comfortable with that.
Nevertheless, there was this time which I cannot forget, in which I found myself in the apartment of one of my professors from an English institution -this person was a foreigner itself as many Londoners, but after many years living in the city, it had become almost English in my perception (for some characteristics I understood as English back then). We were discussing my future after graduation, considering different scenarios, when all of a sudden, me, who always understood my education as Western (because not only Argentinean colonizers were Western, but also my origins were Western), realized that this woman referred to where I came from as something else. I was put into a category I did not know it existed. “If I was not Western, nor Indigenous, nor Eastern, what was I?”, “Isn’t Argentina in the Western side of the map?”, I didn’t get it.
But when time passed, and I kept reading English, German and American bibliography, and kept participating in symposiums, fellowships and open calls, I understood that, although I didn’t look different, I was perceived as “exotic”. Did even the organizers of all these programs and symposiums knew where Argentina is on the map?
At the same time, it was awkward understanding I neither fitted into “the other” categories and trends that circulated in UK open calls: I am not Indian, I am not African, I am not Islamic, I am not precisely a Latino; I am not queer, I am too cis, but still, I am definitely not part of the ones judging me. I am a blurred category which I still don’t figure out what is it (how do they perceive me?), and because of that, I wasn’t able to recognize myself and talk from that point of view they unconsciously put me. Therefore, my topic of research was never related to “the other”, “otherness”, “race”, etc. because I never felt I could talk about this from a solid perspective.
During 2020 pandemic, when I started participating in international talks whose main topic was community and care (a big trend that year), I spoke a lot about Buenos Aires, where I was born and where I was standing at that moment. Back then, I was starting to understand how rare was for me, that my international friends did not came here and assumed that I would go to the “supposed centre of the world” to meet them. It made me sad. It also made me sad, how much ignorance there was about the inflationary system that colonises Argentina’s economy since ever. A kind of inflation which made my salary back then (a good one for the cultural sector here), equal to less than the minimum salary there. Therefore, it was impossible for my peers to understand how difficult is to travel for us, and how much effort do we have to put in order to exchange and be heard.[2]
For all the privileges I had in life, I feel responsible for. Responsible to transmit a message that goes beyond me, beyond my story and beyond how I look.
I really do hope that at some point, people in the world understand that we are equals. Because what they don’t understand is how much they lose for imagining themselves as superiors. And the funniest thing is that these structures are so intertwined in our networks that even the “progressive”, the “avant-garde”, and the “critical places for critical thinking”, reproduce these mechanisms of power (hopefully, in an unconscious way).
For example, an American or European artist who becomes a must in the international scene, gets more attention and space for its work to be seen and thought than a Latin American artist that reaches the same place (struggling with all the difficulties I have mentioned above, plus developing a career in a scene far away from their comfort zone).
We adapt to a language, a culture, and an education system, among other things, in order to be heard and participate in global discussions. But these discussions are quite “centric” and “hegemonic”, and there are no special considerations for those far away from home, which of course, makes as weaker at the time of competing in supposedly open scenarios.
Scenes are not open, open calls are not open. I don’t think that the place of the victim is a rich place to be. I would not like this text to look as if I am making myself a victim. On the contrary, I am trying to pick up the place I used to occupy when being a child: the sensitive, the empathic, the one bringing different friends from different places to the same playground and introducing them, building a place to play and grow together.
What I think I am trying to say is that, we should be really careful of how we look, work, talk and refer to upon everyone we relate to. To connect with this sensitivity means to be connected to our bodies and our skin. It means to ask ourselves, even it may carry difficulties and contradictory feelings, what are we afraid of? What happens if we call lose our privileges?
Rarely enough, even I don’t want to lose them.
Renata Zas
2021–2022
[1] My other part comes from Czech Republic and Russia but they arrived a generation before my grandparents, so they were less attached to their roots in a way.
[2] For what I have exchanged with peers from Pakistan, their economic situation is quite alike regarding how much an American dollar is in relation to their national coin, and I am aware we are not the only country dealing with the situation I am describing.
