Desclasificados
Socialismos

El domingo volví a ver “Goodbye, Lenin”. La versión en DVD omite escenas importantes, pero no sé dónde ni a quién quejarme. En cualquier caso, volvió a ser un placer agridulce recordar la extraña sensación de libertad que se respiraba poco después de la caída del Muro.

Yo había visto aquella muralla obscena diez meses antes de que se desmoronase. Acababa de cumplir 18 años y cruzar al otro lado fue una experiencia extraña. Muchos recuerdos, aunque el que más se me ha quedado grabado resulta bastante absurdo: el sabor al pastel de queso del principal supermercado de Berlín Occidental. Era exactamente igual que el que preparaba mi abuela adoptiva alemana al otro lado del Muro, pero con menos sabor. Todo era igual, pero algo peor. Para mi grupo de adolescentes izquierdosos fue muy triste ver de qué modo se habían prostituido los ideales de una sociedad más justa.

Hoy escuchaba a Fidel Castro negar que su isla se haya convertido en un destino para quienes perpetran el turismo sexual. Y eso me recuerda una película que vi en La Habana en enero del 2001. Su título es "Hacerse el sueco". Trataba de un delincuente escandinavo que se hace pasar por un eminente profesor y se aloja en casa de la familia de Amancio, un ex policía. Su mujer y su hija le alquilan ilegalmente la habitación y Amancio lo intuye de sobras, pero prefiere “hacerse el sueco” y mentirse a sí mismo, porque de otro modo no podría aceptarlo nunca. Iría contra sus principios.

La gente en el cine reía sin parar y protegido por la oscuridad de la sala alguno se permitió verbalizar lo evidente, el paralelismo no dejaba lugar a dudas.

Precisamente, un grupo de artistas cubanos y suecos se ha unido a otro de albaneses para crear un proyecto mediante el cual expresar sus diferentes visiones del socialismo, un concepto que todos ellos han vivido también de modos muy diversos.

El título de la exposición es “Juntos”, escrito en los idiomas de los diferentes autores: "Sebashkujuntostillsammans". La muestra podía visitarse en Uppsala cuando estuve allí el mes pasado, pero no pude verla. Mi amigo Niklas sí lo hizo y hace unos días me mandó el enlace a la página donde se explican los diferentes trabajos y me recomendó el del artista albanés Anri Sala. Su video, de 15 minutos, imagina cómo se transformaría la vida en Tirana si sus paredes grises amaneciesen un día pintadas de los colores más brillantes de la paleta.

Leyendo entre los textos expuestos en la web de Sebashkujuntostillsammans, he encontrado un mail que ha conseguido sorprenderme. Es el de una artista sueca que propone un nuevo proyecto en el que ella podría expresar qué sintió siendo la hija de un “burgués idealista” que soñó con un mundo mejor y acabó siendo un adicto a la heroína. De pequeña ella vio cómo su padre la consumía y uno de sus juegos consistía en imitarle. Cuando su madre lo descubrió pidió el divorcio. Esa pequeña no pudo hacerlo, siguió ligada a su padre y muchos años después reflexiona sobre ello. Reproduzco en esta anotación su mensaje, que me recuerda a cosas que ya he comentado antes acerca de las películas La mala educación y Las invasiones bárbaras.

Dear Edi, Joa, Rodrigo and Yuni and all of you,

I would like to propose another project for you that I think maybe fits better into the concept of “juntos” than “Rapture and silence”; at least in my interpretation of the concept, it is another view of the “togetherness” of the seventies, that also was part of my childhood, and some other consequences of it.

This new work I want to present is in a way about my relation to my father, to this life and his friends in the seventies. My father was in many ways typical for his time. He came from an upper middle class family in a very bourgeois area called Nockeby. His father was architectural director of Riksbyggen, a great construction company, and his mother was a typically bourgeois house wife –she prepared receptions, etc. Inspired by the time my father joined left political movements and attended at Konstfack, an art academy, and very soon and still very young started to experiment with drugs as many other at that time, and became addictive to heroine when I was a child.

This society of togetherness and idealism was radically changed into a new way of living with new conditions and experiences. And I followed this very closely as I was a child and became very familiar with the procedure of taking a zip. I know that I saw this many times, and I had a game of my own I sued to play where I pretended to take a zip, and when my mother once saw me playing that game she divorced my father and moved out on the countryside with me. These memories have marked me and I carry them in my sub consciousness, in the beginning of this year I tried to remember that tools where needed just out of my memory (and the play) then collected the items and I have done a still-life painting “Xenia” with them but in a very classical way. And I’ve also done two portraits (paintings) with two of my father’s friends, “Anders” (my father doesn’t know if he’s still alive) and “Ängeln” (“The Angel” which was his nick-name because of his appearance, he is still alive) when they are on heroine. The source for the portraits comes from my father’s photo-album; and it’s two photos in passport size, when “Ängeln” and Anders have taken a zip.
(…)

My father like many others were driven by radical an utopian ideals, of wanting to change the world, and exposed their own lives for consequences they couldn’t master and had in the end to adapt themselves to new conditions and trespass many boundaries undermining moral values and their idealism –the togetherness got here new meanings and were tied to the very personal experience and addiction, in the end a kind of reverse togetherness. This was a journey from class to class but different to the ideal class journey, and instead of creating a new classless society they ended up in the bottom of all classes.

For me this whole historic experience, because it was not something unique for my father, raises many questions, and opens up for great many perspectives. There is the question of consequence and action, if these experiences are related to the ideals. There is the personal perspective of the witness, for me as a child that followed him into these different situations it was something more than witnessing it was to live that life, from a child’s perspective. And also to see what kind of interactions between different social contexts there were between these new situations and the old structures. For my father for instance was never rejected from his parents’ home, he still attended feasts and holidays and participated in a bourgeois social intercourse. He could pass from one context to the other, and I could be with him in both of these –there was a growing social convention that believed it to be fundamentally important for the children to be with their parents. My father’s family never accepted the fact that he was addictive of course, and his other world was not represented in their albums, that world didn’t exist for them even when he actually personified it.

(…)
Love
Ylva

Publicado por magda Julio 27, 2004 11:39 AM | TrackBack