Clapping Hands

​

The theatre. A pantheon which imposes demands on audiences. One can be transformed by the spectacle of movement, words, chants and sounds. Beyond the stage, the audience: coloured fans, headless bodies, clapping hands.  These are the trappings of public gatherings in stadiums and plazas, in the roots of religious worship and the concept of nationhood, where communal structures can be fostered by a charismatic voice.  A maternal voice. Enter Eva Perón as the embodiment of a nation. Hands. All rise. Clap. Order. Salute. Sit. Smile. Wave.

 

The clapping hands motif is a summary of thoughts I have been developing over the course of this year, responding to situations in which an audience becomes an active participant in authoritative political systems, that inculcate national unity and cultural advancement through public displays, textbooks and populist propaganda. The hands embody notions of social relations, personal identities and group participation in institutional structures, by referencing a commonplace gesture that connects ideas of unity and collective potential while amplifying a more complex narrative around patriotic education.  

 

I grew up during the Peronist movement in Argentina, which had a strong female leader at the helm, Eva Perón.  Eva was presented to the public as the “Spiritual Mother” of the nation, using her voice and words to invoke "not only the sound and sentiment of popular melodrama, but the sound and sentiment of religious oratory"[1]. The first words I learned to write were in hand-formed cursive text, a compulsory requirement, one cursive letter at a time. Mamá. Eva.  I held on to one of my teenage diaries and the collaged words reference both a confessional and autobiographical style of writing in which memory and personal history are interwoven with my perceptions of much larger social structures.  As a young girl, there was a subservient and dutiful role prescribed for women; my father used to say "the mallow in its pot, the dog in its bed, and the woman in the kitchen".  The materials I am working with, and the laboured process I have employed, reference the domestic use of craft and the traditional role of the woman in the home, allowing me to question the frame for female experience and subjectivity that was prescribed within a patriarchal Argentine society.  

 

The laboured, handwork activity of attaching beads one piece at a time mimics the repetition of each clap. Presented in a public space and removed from its private domestic setting, the work hovers over a question of emancipation, and the complicity of the hand.

 

The theatre in its darkness hides the public from the performer’s eyes as they rise to applaud. From afar, the hands appear as glowing footprints.

​

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

References

Luigi Patruno (2020) The City Evita Built. Cinematic Childhood and Peronism in Luis César Amadori’s Soñemos (1951), Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 29:1, 63-84, Retrieved 10 November 2020 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569325.2019.1692800

​