Performances with different Super Disidencias at different locations, installation (videos, photos, song, letter, outfit (mask, overall, gloves)), SUPER DISIDENCIA’S GOLDEN BOX, website
(in collaboration with Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, Jessy Bulbo & Leika Mochán)
2012
SUPER DISIDENCIA is a “social wrestler” who aims to destabilize and de-fetishize that which is understood to be gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, appearance, age or social class and thus to fight alongside those who challenge these categories.
SUPER DISIDENCIA appropriates strategies of “social wrestlers” in Mexico: Since the 1980s masked social activists have been fighting for various causes to enact social change in Mexico – Supermudo, La Mariposa de la Democracia, Super Barrio, Ecologista Universal, Super Gay, Super Animal, and Fray Tormenta –, while performance artist Guillermo Gómez Peña considers Subcomandante Marcos ‘undoubtedly the latest popular hero in a noble tradition of activists which includes Superbarrio, Fray Tormenta (the wrestler priest), and Super-Ecologista, all self-proclaimed “social wrestlers” who have utilized performance and media strategies to enter the political “wrestling arena” of contemporary Mexico.’(i) Three years ago, on October 11, 2009, SUPER SME (Sindicato Méxicano de Electricistas / Mexican Union of Electrical Workers) joined the aforenmentioned group of “social wrestlers” and took on Mexico City’s police during a protest against the government’s dissolution of state-owned power company Luz y Fuerza del Centro.
Song “Super Disidencias“
in collaboration with Jessy Bulbo & Leika Mochán, cover of the cumbia song “Las Luchadoras“ by Sabor Sonidero with altered letters Download SONG (mp3)
Website http://www.superdisidencia.net/
The websites provides information about SUPER DISIDENCIA, dress patterns (outfit, mask, overall, gloves), the letter of SUPER DISIDENCIA and the song for downloading.
Performances
SUPER DISIDENCIA distributes and performs their letter (based on Super Barrio’s letter (1987)) in Spanish and/or English, and plays the song “Super Disidencias“.
Here is where the luchas come in with all their color and extravagance, the fans and their fury: the luchas are best when the fantasies they project are pure reality. Sometimes rude and brutal, sometimes beautiful and kind, emanating from the will to fight on. This is where the golden light comes from, the flaming outfit, the mask, collective will, a truth to revolutionize what is widely understood as sexual relationships. This revolution demands that we stake out a radical democracy, a reason to fight since it “essentially presupposes the political necessity of liberating minorities integrated by their anomalies.”(Manuel Asensi) (fragment from SUPER DISIDENCIA’s letter)
ACF London (2012)
UVA Tlatelolco Mexico City (2012)
Installation
Different combinations of videos, photos, the song, letters, the outfit (mask, overall, gloves) and the website make remnants of SUPER DISIDENCIA’s performances available.
(i) GÓMEZ PEÑA, Guillermo. 1995. “The Subcomandante of Performance.” In KATZENBERGER, Elaine. Coord. First World, Ha Ha Ha!: The Zapatista Challenge. San Francisco: City Lights. p. 90
Performances of SUPER DISIDENCIA took place at the UVA Tlatelolco in Mexico City, at the ACF in London and at The Mission in San Francisco (2012).
The installation was part of the exhibition “La Quebradora – Lucha Libre in Contemporary Mexican Art“, curated by Amy Pederson, Mission Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco (2012).
