A Quote by Alante Kavaite
Setting aside the issue of gender while highlighting the symmetry of bodies seemed indispensable in order to focus on the narrative of human beings in the making.
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I try not to focus on the gender issue too much but I think you have to acknowledge it in order for it to go away.
In our current society, it is considered a weakness to be female and a treason to protest this. Highlighting inequality results in aggressive insults and threats, all of which are propped up by the repeated narrative now that women are 'playing the gender card'. And this is the final insult. That of all the unfair things associated with women - the violence and insults, the financial oppression, the very undermining of our worth as human beings - it is the acknowledgement of these inequalities that gives us some kind of unfair advantage over the men who benefit from them.
As a gender variant visual artist I access 'technologies of gender' in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design, (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their 'ambiguous' bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at 'normalization'. I believe in crossing the line as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across.
All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.
On September 11 one of the messages on our answering machine was from The New Yorker saying get down here right away for a special issue we'll be doing. That seemed so irrelevant to me, considering the cataclysm. I went to my studio for a while and I was processing the news. Because when we were in the thick of it, it just felt like Mars Attacks!, Is Paris Burning?, and I had no perspective. For a while, I thought I should go down and look for bodies. At the same time, since The New Yorker was looking for images, I thought, "Well, I'm more trained to look for images than for bodies."
A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.
Human beings are not on earth to be citizens, or taxpayers, or socially engineered pawns of other human beings; rather they are here in order to grow, to transform, to become their authentic selves.
Comparing and contrasting is a valuable human skill - and not just during high school English exams. Our ability to rank-order things is invaluable in making choices and setting priorities.
Secrecy is as indispensable to human beings as fire, and as greatly feared.
I need to tell the things that are important but which don't make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.
For while we are enclosed in these confinements of the body, we perform as a kind of duty the heavy task of necessity; for the soul from heaven has been cast down from its dwelling on high and sunk, as it were, into the earth, a place just the opposite to godlike nature and eternity. But I believe that the immortal gods have sown souls in human bodies so there might exist beings to guard the world and after contemplating the order of heaven, might imitate it by their moderation and steadfastness in life.
I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.
Our notion of symmetry is derived form the human face. Hence, we demand symmetry horizontally and in breadth only, not vertically nor in depth.
The law of right-left symmetry was used in classical physics but was not of any great practical importance there. One reason for this derives from the fact that right-left symmetry is a discrete symmetry, unlike rotational symmetry, which is continuous.
I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film.
We had thought that we were human beings making a spiritual journey; it may be truer to say that we are spiritual beings making a human journey.
