The Songs of Diana: the Countess of Otherness"

The Songs of Diana: the Countess of Otherness

Otherness, as a philosophical, anthropological, and epistemological notion supposes a geocultural historical knowledge about the “other”. A principle where the heterogeneous is submissive under language and the homogeneous, pre-established, immovable categories…

Diana Blok, an Uruguayan-Dutch artist, uses this thinking and position of otherness to articulate a groundbreaking artistic production, questioning in every sense of the word. She has created her own space of enunciation, in which she shows the condition of the rarity of the “other” subject as a possibility of existence, a need for reflection and presence.

Analyzing the discourse of otherness as the philosophical basis of Diana Blok’s work, allows us to understand the peripheral subject from different points of view, starting from her personal experience as a nomadic subject, as a migrant, and chameleon-like woman. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and later lived in Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and the Netherlands, the latter becoming her more permanent home. She grew up and was formed with all this cultural and identity diversity nested in her body, and this was the main leitmotiv that she has expressed through her artistic production. She questions ideas and positions; she challenges solid structures; she destabilizes systems of thought. In her words: “…I often felt as if I were looking from the outside in” (Statement by the artist).

Blok offers with her visual representations an artistic context where we can identify ourselves from our differences. It normalizes otherness and assumes it as a flag. She proposes a visual system that operates parallel with the concept and praxis of art as integration and integration as art. In this way, her proposal is integrated into the artistic production system of the Netherlands, Latin America, and the Caribbean and into the social integration systems of each of these geo-cultural contexts. In this sense, rich symbolic parallelism is established between The Songs of Maldoror, by Count de Lautréamont, and Diana Blok’s artistic production.

The Count of Lautréamont -the Count of the Other World- was an Uruguayan-French character who recognized himself as different. His masterpiece, The Songs of Maldoror, constituted a destabilizing social and cultural tactic in his time. From the assumption of the French language for its narration to a pseudonym with a dense social and political background, with a harsh language to narrate, to an aesthetic that today we would classify as queer, the social denormalization of that time. The Songs of Maldoror and the Count of Lautréamont represented a suspicious initiative while facing a contingency to penetrate the systems of thought and visualization of his time.

The Count of Lautréamont -the Count of the Other World- was and, Diana integrates herself in that, let’s say, the antecedent of art as integration and integration as art, also from a singular, unusual, even twisted posture and discourse. She moves from her geo-cultural context of the Netherlands, inserts herself in the Latin and Caribbean production system from where she builds collaborations to highlight and normalize that otherness.

‘Gender Monologues’, ‘I challenge you to love me’, and ‘Presence, the singularity of plurality’, make up Diana’s songs in this showroom. She assumes the otherness, the singular, and the subject as vertices of a system of production which positions them in similar conditions of symbologies, of discourse. With all this she has diagrammed a systematization of a singular documentation process, that revels in the different, the twisted, and the strange. 

Gender Monologues questions and disrupt the historical limits of gender identity through an operation in which performers assume roles of the opposite sex. This is a kind of performative action based on photography, video, and installation, where the spectator is confronted with the discovery of these other identities -fictitious; assumed by the actors. 

I challenge you to love me also discusses the fluidity and variability of every concept: regarding the diversity of affective and sexual relationships. Mainly, it deals with everything related to otherness and projects it as a testimony, without any concealment: “…the characters portrayed [accentuate] the reading of otherness and the relevance of understanding the interaction and social interdependence with the other as if to sustain: you are me; you are the other; I am you” (Cinara Barbosa, curator, researcher, and professor at the Department of Visual Arts of the University of Brasilia).

Presence, the singularity of plurality constitutes an artistic proposal with a manifest dose of cynicism and questioning. To appreciate these compositions of leaves that seem to levitate and react to the movements to which the artist submits them is to understand a position of human-plant resource equity. She strips all objectivization from what she portrays and humanizes it to the point of disturbing so much realism, so much truth. The human and the singular, the established and the twisted: Diana proposes through these images readings of an otherness that remains at a disadvantage since the times the Count of Lautréamont struggles to insert himself organically into society. Therefore she breaks those systems of thought, reading, and action from a singular, uncomfortable and different representation. From within her artistic praxis, she normalizes this supposed “denormalization”: just as the Count of Lautréamont did in his time. 

Nelson Gonzalez. Curaduria Malandra
Dec. 2021