Surveillance and the bodie[s]

Monica Enriquez-Enriquez critiques survellaince practices and touches on issues of identity, language and [im]migration through visual recorded media and personal stories. More importantly, she touches on the significance of surveillance and identity on a personal level. For example, in Asilo Queer she presents us with a fragmented body, of which we know nothing. This body has things written on it, but the words are upside down, and so we cannot quite make them up. We are directed through this body and its words by the camera movements and voice over. The voice over is at the center of the piece, because it speaks what the words read; it gives the piece movement and rhythm. The text, the narration, is in both English and Spanish, or Spanglish. These do not translate each other but rather complement each other. One language fills in a space, a gap that the other language cannot signify. The text tells us about duality, about various identities at play and conflict within Monica’s life. The combination of Spanish and English, of course, represents this duality. Similarly, the decision to not show us the full body that carries the words Monica speaks adds to this notion of multiple identities, of identities in conflict, because it shows us a fragmented body, a body whose parts cannot come together.

Objectos de Memoria, deals with how it is that we maintain our identity, what real and metaphorical objects are at play in helping us define ourselves. In this piece we are also denied access to a person’s body, a person’s face. Instead we only hear a voice that is being asked questions, is answering them and in that, is telling a [personal] story. What we see instead is a pair of shoes that belong to this person. These boots, she tells us, are a way of remembering where she comes from and what brought her to where she is right now. It is a way of anchoring oneself to one’s past. At the same time, because they are boots they also represent a journey that was and that is. In this sense these boots are an objected to memory, but at the same time memory is objected to the boots. In other words, this woman has picked these boots because they represent certain aspects of her past, her identity, that are relevant to her future, any other object would have not been the same perhaps. But, at the same time, the memories would not be as strong were they not attached to a material object that can contextualize them and signify them.

The surveillance that Monica is talking about in these pieces, is a surveillance that comes from societal and cultural norms. All these intricacies work in subtle ways. For example, we have been learning about how biopolitics disciplines bodies not only through policies or programs, but through the institutionalization of normative notions of what a good population is to be like, what a good citizen is to be like. So these efforts at managing bodies, thus, dehumanize them as well, converts bodies into data, rates and quantifiers that are void of identity. Puar Jasbir tells us in Homonationalism in Queer Times, that “ Data collection enables a mapping of race through aggregates and disaggregates […] (last page) and that “The profile establishes the individual as imbricated in manifold populations – the designation to a dehumanizing population instead of the communalism of community […] (last page). Here we can see then how these pieces exemplify efforts, attempts, at re-appropriating identity, or re-humanizing bodies. The conflict of identities shown in Asilo Queer, is a conflict of wanted and unwanted identities. The use of Spanglish signifies this and puts these normative at odds with each other.


Hasan Elahi’s work is clever and it exemplifies a different type of resistance to the surveillance of bodies. Here the surveillance is done by him at the request of state body that requires that of him. However, as discussed in class, he finds points of resistance in his compliance. His body, his self is literally being tracked by state and so he decides to give them more than what they asked for in documenting every meal he has, every bathroom he goes to, every airport he passes through, etc. The term aggressive resistance discussed in class is an excellent concept that describes Elahi's work. His work is also interesting and it relates to ideas of everyday militarisms and technologies. We discussed many examples in which everyday lives are militarized, through ID numbers/cards, online networking/bank accounts/emails, GPS in cellphones, etc. These are all technologies that track our movements, our interests, collect data, but that we use in our every day lives. Elahi's work is an example of this were, he uses the intern, a smart phone with GPS and a camera to document his every move and allow the state to track him. Of course, he decides exactly what he is documenting with these technologies, resisting to surveillance in creative ways. For example, there are no people in any of the images he has shared, we cannot even see his own face.

This absence of the body I think links both artists' work in particular and interesting ways, especially since both pieces are about bodies, in fact they are central point of the art itself. But by not showing us any individual, physical bodies, they point to the de-humanization of bodies as such. What is really important is the information we can differ from them, not necessarily the body itself. Of course we know that in biopolitics there is also a focus on personal bodies and what they look like, and so forth, but on a larger scale bodies are monitored differently.


P.S: I was trying to tie this up with the ideas of self monitoring that we discussed in class, and the concept of everyday militarisms but I find myself a bit unable to.

Here it is! The Pentagon Channel, aperantely available online to everybody! : http://www.pentagonchannel.mil/