Autofictions of Desire
What is desire? Why do we get obsessed with certain topics? How do we decide today to choose something and how are we determined to continue working towards that?
For many, desire is to go live on a Caribbean island, to have a house in the countryside to go for walks and be filled with pleasures in the open air. For others, the drive is born out of creating something from the intellect, to the simplicity of baking a cake or transplanting a plant to make it bloom better.
The drive that moves the creator is the same one that moves my grandmother to paint or to prepare coffee: the need to get going. For many, however, what ought to be is what moves desire, the external, the need to recognize oneself in the other. No drive is better than the other, but to depend on the external can burn desire faced with the frustration of not being acknowledged in the other’s eyes: pleasurelessness.
Personally, the drive for writing and making photographs is created from a chronicle of autofiction and self-portraiture. Self-representation in photography begins with the portraying of oneself. Nowadays, self-representation is not the discovery of your own body, but the discovery of it in another — what the other uncovers in you — and how the drive of your own representation stems from the pleasure of becoming a desired object. No selfie escapes from that. Social media have perverted the self-portrait in order to strip it off its inner drive and make it external; your representation does not depend on you anymore.
I stopped posting all the self-portraits I made years ago, because of that rough patch between desire and pleasure generated in the digital. Self-portrait had stopped being a form of giving myself pleasure through my drives, to turn into a new business model which revealed insecurities.
Even though desire can also be created from insecurity, I’m suspicious about the power of creating from such doubt in self-portraiture, for it turns into an empty container, a depending pleasure. However, I fall into judgement because it is already a statement without a clear solution: What is it that defines our appearance? Is it society, our own psychology or the aesthetic studies? There is no single answer.
The photographic duo Tehnica Schweiz, formed by Georgely László and Péter Rákosi, or the photographer Juan Urrios, propose in their works the opposition between being and seeming[1]. For the Surrealists, the camera dug out the unconscious submerged in the gaze. This is, perhaps, the theory that resonates the most with my desire for creation: We make self-portraits in an attempt to recognize ourselves behind the mask, to get to know us better, to desire ourselves better, to access the pleasure of recognizing ourselves in being and seeming. The container-creators (the non-empty ones) search in their enjoyment for the reproduction of themselves, not only by presenting themselves as objects but by gazing at themselves from the outside in order to understand the inside. To find pleasure in this intimacy.
Maybe I stopped posting self-portraits or thinking of me as a photographer because I didn’t feel understood by what the art market wanted. My mistake was to search outside without wanting to assume the panoptic gaze. Still, the desire to put out my erotic unconscious through the eye and take it to a representation has not been reduced by the market — it just lives on the cloud or in my computer, within the intimacy of my being.
The authenticity of the body’s pleasure as an object, of feeling desired before our own gaze — or a foreign one too — reveals the quest of female desire. A pleasure perhaps severed by a fraction of the feminist movement of the ’60s, as by the ambiguous patriarchal tale, as by stigmatizing women’s roles which label who may exhibit an erotic and sexual being. But intimist photography and artistic nudes have been resistant shields for taking back and speaking up for representations outside this stigma.
In creation, it would be worth to ask ourselves something that the Madrilenian sociologist and feminist Carmen Romero Bachiller points out in her essay “Desatar el deseo”[2] (‘Unleashing Desire’): «How are we configuring spaces of desire if we cannot talk about the power relationships that traverse and inform them?»
The power of creating from erotic desire, both in writing as in photography, entails a big burden of prejudices around it (which, of course, the creator will know if she/he cares about them or not, because that’s what desire is about, not succumbing to external pressure); however, this burden is there precisely for the one who watches, for whom eroticizes their eyes with the image or text. «Are our fantasies remoras of our heteropatriarchal, racist, snobbish, sexist learnings? Yes, of course. Yes, without a doubt. Yes, how could it be otherwise? But maybe answering positively to this question does not mean that we should just flagellate ourselves for not having a feminist enough imaginary — and of course, not granting ourselves any kind of pleasure in that process. Perhaps we could tighten the ropes and rethink the questions,» asserts Romero Bachiller.
Desire, in my case, is a rope that gets tightened and untightened: the drive to tighten the inner rope, to feel the explosion of the body’s call, and then untighten when I see it and eroticize the eye, my eye, or that of another. Desire is generating doubts and conflicts to others, transgressing my own pleasure and throwing it towards foreign eyes, but especially, it is answering the questions of my own body.
I will keep looking for answers to the topics that I get obsessed with. I hope desire feeds the creating pleasure of my future. And what about you, what moves your desire?
[1] Extract from La Cámara de Pandora, La fotografí@ después de la fotografía (‘Pandora’s Camera: Photogr@phy After Photography’). Joan Fontcuberta. Editorial Gustavo Gili. Barcelona, 2012. Pages 80–81. Free translation.
[2] Extract from “Desatar el deseo” (‘Unleashing Desire’), essay included in El libro del buen amor. Sexualidades raras y políticas extrañas (‘The Book of Good Love. Weird Sexualities and Strange Politics’). Ed. Fefa Vila Núñez y Javier Sáez del Álamo. Madrid, 2019. Pages 123–125. Free translation.
Ariana Basciani Fernández (Caracas, 1983). Journalist and digital marketing consultant. She is the editor of Culturetas, ‘culture with tits’. For 20 years, she has orbited the world of photography since her studies at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas and at the Organización Nelson Garrido. She is based in Barcelona since 2009 and has taken part in viewings and exhibitions in Caracas, Miami and Barcelona.
Anagrams of the Erotic Body is a Search Line aimed at looking into the spectrum of representations of the erotic body in contemporary imaginaries, as well as its relationships with the carnal body. We are interested in discourses and artefacts which explore, question, play with or defend the body as an erotic, autonomous and human territory.
It is edited by Marianela Díaz Cardozo.
Translated by Marianela Díaz Cardozo and Valentina Diaslara.
In Mollusca, we stand for freedom of speech, which is why we publish genuine voices that take responsibility for their words.
