Project 24
Hombre, blanco, cis: una etnografía de la blanquitud - Lucía Egaña Rojas
October 14th - November 5th 2021, Tangent Projects gallery.
White cisgender man: an ethnography of whiteness
The "map of books" that we have read, come from, at most, ten countries in the world. Almost all of these books are concentrated in the US, Canada, and some parts of Europe.
These books, and countries, are full of institutions, fraternities of science and knowledge, and Nobel laureates. These spaces are inhabited by white cis-gender men whose names are constantly repeated which, in turn, builds a litany of word power, speech power, and publishing power.
These men tend to write a lot, but its difficult to imagine them cooking, cleaning, or caring. These White men who write, think, define and translate, ultimately dictate how the world 'is'.
There is no fault in success and achievement, and intellectually speaking the incomplete cartography of these ten countries are blameless.
How can we open new epistemic spaces in our colonially encoded subjectivities?
Your head inherits an old department crowded with antique furniture, in this department you can't move. The furniture doesn't let you walk, you try to get rid of it but it has become too big to get through the door or windows. You are trapped.
The books, set in stone and immovable like statues, form the infrastructure and politics (and policing) of discursive authorisation. This ethnography of whiteness seeks to pierce the nation states - with a drill or tweezers - to break the closed system of referentiality. An ethnology of intellectuals, interfering with our private lives and creeping into our ways of thinking, before exploding into public and collective thought.
Lucia Egañas Rojas has a degree in art and has completed a Diploma in Aesthetics and Contemporary Thought, a Master in Creative Documentary and a PHD in Audiovisual Communication. As an artist, she works on collaborative projects, problematising the construction of social imaginary and sources of knowledge. Her projects have been exhibited in many different spaces, museums and institutions. Her creative practices overflow, permeating many different territories such as technology, pedagogy, writing and sexuality. In the educational field, Lucia moves between criticism and emancipatory pedagogies in formal and informal learning contexts.
She has been a professor and part of the academic direction of the Programa de Estudios Independientes (PEI) of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona (MACBA), was an associate professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at University of Barcelona, as well as a visiting Master of Gender professor at the University of Chile and the MUECA master's degree. She also participates in the FIC research group (Fractalities and Critical Research) for the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
For 20 years, Lucia has developed independent communication projects on community radio and television, and to date she has published various press and critical thinking media. She has been part of the minipimer.tv collective, and currently works with the Techniques Cooperative, a feminist self-employment project that works around technology.
In this line of work she gives talks, conferences and workshops in collaboration with different collectives and feminist associations. In the sexuality field, she has been part of the Muestra Marrana organisation, an international, itinerant festival about post-pornography and radical representations of sex. In 2011 she made the documentary "My sexuality is an artistic creation" and is currently co-directing the Institute of Porno Studies with Francesc Ruiz and Ona Bros.
Her written works explore an array of formats, including fiction and essay work, as well as poetic prose, the manifesto, and academic research. Alongside Josefa-Ruiz Tagle, she published the “Encyclopaedia of love in times of porn” (Cuarto propio, 2004, second edition with Trio editorial, 2020). She has also published some solo work, including the essay “Atrincheradas en la carne”- Readings on post-porn practices (Ediciones Bellaterra, 2018).
Working with Caroline Betemps, Lucia also co-published the book “Acá soy la que se fue”. Sudaka Voices in Fortress Europe (ticking editions, 2019) as well as working with Paulina Varas on “A strange cartography" (Metales Pesados, 2021).
Lucia is currently completing an investigation, titled "Metodologías subnormales" as well as directing the Musea M.A.M.I and the Pluriversidad Nómade project , which investigates institutional criticism and the power of self-institutional practices.
Her main interests are related to feminism and trans-feminism, methodologies, technology, free software, north-south power relations, colonial and migratory processes, extractivism and error.