I Jornadas sobre Arte y Turismo - Canibalismo y sociedad de consumo.

November 27 and 28, December 2 and 3, 2014.

Museum of History and Anthropology of Tenerife.

San Agustín, 22, 38201. San Cristóbal de La Laguna.

The myth of anthropophagy, cannibalism, has always accompanied the Western anthropological imagination and is one of the most recurring tropes when explaining cultural differences. In recent decades, it has become a topic of debate that crosses both disciplinary boundaries and spheres of action in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In the most recent attempts to characterize the sociocultural practices of late modern societies, the figure and myth of the cannibal has proven to be especially fruitful and, also, inevitably controversial.

Programa:

Thursday, November 27:

17:00 – 18:00 Juan Pablo Wert, Cannibal: Domestic Tourism.

18:30 – 19:30 Mariano de Santa Ana, Cannibal Mix.

19:30 – 20:30 Round table.

Friday, November 28:

17:00 – 18:00 Julián Díaz Sánchez, Tacit Cannibalism in Impressions of Africa.

18:30 – 19:30 Vicente Benet Ferrando, Traces of Excess: Cinema, Tourism, and Experiences of the Extreme.

19:30 – 20:30 Round table.

Tuesday, December 2:

17:00 – 17:30 Damián Báez, Cannibal Oscar Domínguez: Tenerife, "This Is Pure Surrealism".

17:30 – 18:00 Ingrid Krilewski, Cannibal Chavism: The Ingestion of the Patriarch.

18:30 – 19:30 José Díaz Cuyás, Art, Globalization, and Cannibal Movies in the Jungle.

19:30 – 20:30 Round table.  

Wednesday, December 3:

17:00 – 18:00 Ralph Kistler, The Revolution Devours Its Children: The Case of the El Cabrito Commune.

18:30 – 19:30 Fernando Estévez, Fetishes, Ghosts, and Cannibals: Three Pre-Modern Avengers.

19:30 – 20:30 Round table.

Lectures:

Juan Pablo Wert, Cannibal: Domestic Tourism.

A large part of what is understood as exoticism turns out, in general, to be a delirious introspective product that is experienced as a social project (utopia). Cannibalism constitutes a paroxysmal form of exoticism, which is approached through three milestones: the historical localization of the cannibal (M. de Montaigne), the representations of exoticism in the "nouvimundi" or "tutilimondi" (viewers of fantastic images of the "New World"), and contemporary insertions in the tourism industry (the tourist as a photographic subject in the work of Martin Parr and in an example of 1970s B-series erotic cinema, Black Emmanuelle, White Slave [or Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals]). This aims to illustrate, even in an embryonic manner, the circular—properly tour-istic—and interior character of all exotic fantasy, and especially of its extreme manifestations.

Mariano de Santa Ana, Cannibal Mix. 

Without dance, there is no cannibal ceremony worth its salt. Without dance, no anthropophagous feast would taste the same. The talk can be nothing other than an invitation to the dance. To this end, during the session, we will observe the rhythm marked by different figures parading through these islands that some know as the Islands of Insolation and others as the Islands of a Thousand Romerías.

Julián Díaz Sánchez, Tacit Cannibalism in Impressions of Africa. 

In his essay on Raymond Roussel, Michel Foucault speaks of how "the word hides what it doubles and isolates it through a subtle thickness of night." The presentation will attempt to read Roussel's work and its visual aftermath from that point of view.

Vicente Benet, Traces of Excess: Cinema, Tourism, and Experiences of the Extreme. 

As is well known, the image of Spain as a country of passionate and exotic experiences stems from the romantic vision spread by travelers, artists, and writers, further magnified by universal expositions. But there is a derivation of this vision that would turn the trip to Spain into a meeting point with the extreme, understood as a place for entropy, degradation, death, bodily debauchery, or the abject. Outlining some characteristics of this concept, I will propose a long-term research project integrating this elaboration of Spain as a country of extreme experiences, focusing on its reflection in cinema.

Damián Báez, Cannibal Oscar Domínguez: Tenerife "Pure Surrealism". 

Oscar Domínguez resorted in his work to elements related to anthropophagy, much like his surrealist contemporaries. However, in Domínguez's case, a distinguishing element is worth highlighting: his work in general, and the cannibal trope in particular, relates to a specific place: Tenerife. Breton visited the island on the occasion of the 1935 Surrealist Exhibition and, during one of his excursions, proclaimed it surrealist.

Ingrid Krilewski, Cannibal Chavism: The Ingestion of the Patriarch. Cannibalism is an obligatory topic of discussion in Latin America. In this sense, the presence of the Caribs as indigenous peoples of Venezuela—from whom the term cannibal derives—versus the messianic figure of Hugo Chávez Frías, proposes anthropophagous keys to understanding the political behavior of the territory.

José Díaz Cuyás, Art, Globalization, and Cannibal Movies in the Jungle. 

Before pop, no one dared to celebrate the eroticism of the new consumer society like Salvador Dalí; nor was there anyone in the sixties who took the new speculative character of the commodity as far as Yves Klein. Both addressed cannibalism in their work, but above all, they developed an anthropophagous theory that, contrary to what was usual, was stripped of negativity and exoticism. The metaphor of the cannibal seems especially appropriate to refer to the bodily economy during the boom of consumption. For the new globalized culture of the sixties and seventies, which witnessed the birth of mass tourism, the reference to cannibalism turns out to be symptomatic in the art of the period, but also in popular cinema, where new subgenres were born, such as that of cannibals in the jungle—devourers of tourists—.

Ralph Kistler, The Revolution Devours Its Children: The Case of the El Cabrito Commune.

The establishment of a utopian community in La Gomera in 1987 evidences the link between the artistic ideas of the radical avant-garde of the 1960s and the generalization of the tourism model in late modernity. The holiday headquarters at the El Cabrito estate was the final setting for this commune, founded in Vienna in the early 1970s by Viennese Actionism artist Otto Muehl, whose work can be interpreted through an anthropophagous lens.

Fernando Estévez, Fetishes, Ghosts, and Cannibals: Three Pre-Modern Avengers. 

A large part of modern identity—and therefore many of its obsessions—is permeated by the ways in which the ancients were described, interpreted, and valued. In the unfortunate definition of modernity as the opposite of tradition, barbarians, savages, and primitives embodied everything that would have preceded and denied enlightenment and reason. The irrational was erected upon the permanent presence and constant ambivalence concerning the primitive. Taking them for irrational animists who believed that things—fetishes—have a life of their own, it has ultimately turned out that capitalism, by hiding the true value of commodities in the market, is the realm of fetishism. Having not acknowledged the murder and usurpation of their lands, primitives return time and again like ghosts demanding justice. Accused of cannibalism, the worst of sins, now it is modern consumer society that is cannibalistic. They never served to understand the ancient; on the contrary, fetishes, ghosts, and cannibals have been three great metaphors to, precisely, attempt to understand the modern. Literally or metaphorically, the others have always returned like the eternal return of the repressed and, perhaps, seeking revenge.