MR | THE INDIAN COMES OUT OF ME, BY JORGE BRUCE | PSYCHOANALISTo

THE FIRST TIME I LOOKED AT THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF MR, it was something brief and my immediate reaction was of concern and confusion. That night I went to bed thinking those images had a paradoxical effect - according to the purpose of the authors - that not necessarily helped the reason that I presumed they have been conceived for: to show by means of hostile taking-out-of contest procedures, the disturbing alienation/familiarity of the other refused, divided, discriminated. Briefly: racialized. I think my first doubt was based on the stylization of the compositions. For me, racism is usually linked to violent, degrading and humiliating settings. My internal disagreement was that these photographs with a frozen, ironical beauty could be mingled in something like an advertisement picture or a magazine production. Too much glamour in this coloring display, I feared, for a subject that in psychoanalytical slang, as long as I understand it, relates to anal examinations in an environment infested by monochromatic retentions and droppings. Thus, this makes easy the selection and charting: this fits in, this does not fit in. However, the next morning - I presume the oneiric phase did its work - I did not feel it like that anymore. It was as if through the night the images had entered me, invading the space of my imagination silently tearing down my intellectual resistances.

Yes, our language is contaminated. We say “invasion” or “to settle” and summon series of representations which, at the same time, are bound by emotional ties including shame, fear and rejection. Or else anger, the recovery eagerness, the rage towards disparity and the wicked injustice. But also the guilt, the remorse and even, who knows, a germ of curiosity that could change into a recognition or, why not being utopian, something beyond. In any case, the experience induced by the photographs of MR will be hopelessly expressed in terms saturated of meaning, deprived of pureness or innocence.

Let us say, for instance, “Indian”. What happens to us will depend on who we are, is it clear? (or is it dark?). Now there is no turning back. The veil of invisibility that racism spreads out over denigrated individuals has been drawn back. The negative hallucination of Freud - the active erasure of a perception - changes the meaning of the images devised by MR. They are deceiving, inconceivable representations, but there they are, firm, fearless and elegant. The other devalued, the other insignificant, the other as depositary of our more repulsive, stinking and obscene projections is seated at the table aside. At the art gallery. At the privacy of my gymnasium. At the living-room of my own house. He has taken possession of my relief, recreation and elitism privileged spaces. Just there where the idealized identification of the members of my reference group functions as a narcissist prosthesis whose security, I was reassured, was omnipresent and for life.

And he is looking at me.

Martin Chambi captures his individuals in situation. It is not fair to think about his portraits as naturalist or realist, poetry of the popular moment at a Cartier-Bresson style. The situations of an evident and false harmony are created by himself - an avant la lettre situationist - and by means of this trick he obtains a powerful and universal truth deeply moving. MR gives a more theatrical twist to the scenery, if possible, and plays the role of cognitive dissonance. While taking a look, we find the humanity of the insignificants and thus we face some alarming presences because they were always really down there in spite of the fertile, political desire, as Vallejo says, of ignoring them. Or else to relegate them into a glass cabinet of exotic objects, just as we collect pre-Columbian antiques, we hear vernacular music or we adjust typical costumes to Contemporary fashion design, in a filtered, aseptic and essentially impersonal environment.

The expression “the Indian comes out of me” comes from a rancid racist stock. It means the unexpected bursting of primitive, aggressive, destructive contents. It is taken for granted that from an Indian does not come out an Indian: this can only happen to anyone else. The Indian represents, in this sense, what is repressed, divided, the most primary defense against the disintegration distress and the return of my expelled parts, marked wih the sign of what is calumnious and inadmissible. But looking at the photographs of MR, the Indian comes out of me in a concealing way and this "desfamilyzation" makes me admit it without disturbing myself because it appears with a peaceful strength and goes through the exiled alleys by means of this subterfuge called by Freud “prime of seduction”. Contrary to what I thought at the beginning, the charming aesthetics of the images is what allows the overlapping of worlds and pierce the standstill compartments. Then ghosts gain life and require their right to identity. Fortunately, someone will decide to accompany them and go back the gap separating the narcissism of life from the narcissism of death. To hate, says the psychoanalyst Paul- Laurent Assoun, is a way of self-preservation until the destruction of the other while to love is a way of making the other to exist. It is a matter of selection.