[paper/課程論文/論文] 表演研究/Performance Studies/ “Colonial Peeps” by Xandra Ibarra /後殖民、影像、性別、凝視

此為表演研究（Introduction to Performance Studies）課程的分析作業，結合了性別、殖民/後殖民、凝視、多媒體等等議題而成的短文，是我很喜歡的作品，歡迎大家指點！

希望未來能繼續走在表演研究的路上努力！

Analysis of “Colonial Peeps,” by Xandra Ibarra 

Shelly Shih

Source and Credit: https://vimeo.com/174892977

I have an evolving experience of watching“Colonial Peeps,” by Xandra Ibarra. When I first watched the video, I was watching it in mute at Moffitt library in Berkeley. With only visual stimulation, I couldn’t take my eyes off of the nudewoman and had to constrain myself so hard not to see it sexually. But I failed. The blurry, duplicated body lured me to see if she would seduce me more, though I know the video contains some message. I had my earphone on at the second time. With the constant rolling sound of film strip, a sense of surveillance for both me and the artist crept up. For me, I felt “being watched” by others like I’m in cinema because of the sound. As for the woman, I felt that she was repetitively, moreover, permanently watched as an “object” trapped in the archive. Then I googled the artist and found out an interesting thing. The woman standing in front of the camera is the video editor herself. The video became more complicated than a demonstration of a colonized and sexualized body. It stakes strong claim to act and be active against a “stripping over” gaze of a “colonizer” to see her through.

What I wanted to see in the video is exact what the performance refuses to let me see. It is her body. We do not actually know it. We are not allowed to know it. We are never able to know it through the video. The dictatorship or the higher position of viewers is suddenly smashed down because we viewers are the ones suffering from the thirst and begs more of the video. It is Ibarra’s victory, or to be more specific, the decolonial project’s victory over “colonial peeps,” as long as we sit down, crave more and finally feel relieved when we see nudity at last.

There are some visual effects in the video creating the desire in me to see something that the performance refuses to let me see: Blurring, opacity, flashing and overlapping. In the beginning of the video, the blurry image of woman who is taking off a white cloth appetites our expectation to see nudity. Some opacity, starting at 00:35, blocks our “access” to the nudity and was followed by flashing images of another woman with different gesture around 00:42. The image of another woman, which are not as seductive as the first blurry image, distract us and reminds us of our improper expectation with comparison. Furthermore, the other woman looks into the audience and wears an aggressive expression at 01:26 and 01:48. Then, at 2:20, the two flashing images overlap each other and gradually fusion as one. Around 3:13, one woman seduces the viewers more with the slight wiggle of her hip. Again, opacity interrupts the pleasure brought by the sexuality feeling at 3:29 to frustrate the viewers. At 3:50, both women turn their faces to the viewers and finally stare right into us with a stern face.

Ibarra is doing this to visualize the fact that “we don’t understand each other—and recognize that each effort in that direction needs to work against notions of easy access, decipherability, and translatability” (Taylor 2003: 15). We can never know other “peeps (people or friends)” thoroughly through a “peep (look)” or limited access and understanding from “peep (words).” Only if we are aware of and accept the truth can we approach more to the others. In addition, sexualizing a woman’s body is severely accused. As Taylor said, “performance also replicates themselves through their own structure and codes,” (20) the performance of this video and the reaction to the performance are the same no matter in the eye of colonizers or we people who thought ourselves as civilized. We both dehumanize other people as object.

There are three meanings that the word “Peeps” has in Ibarra’s title. According to Cambridge Dictionary, “peep” could mean “look” as verb and “a sound, or a spoken word” as noun. What’s more interesting, “peeps” means “people or friend.” If the audience take up the first meaning, “Colonial Peeps” is dealing with the problematic fantasy of colonizer, which is similar to Orientalism, patronizing some imagined representation of another land. It could result in the effort to assimilate the Other but still hope for difference as mark in Mimicry. The second meaning would be more frightening. The woman in the video is devoiced. The only “sound” is not “speaking” of a “character” but the constant rolling sound of film strip. Both the watched and the watchers are settled to silence, not a direct communication. The third meaning heightens a tension of colonism and sexism, and even points to the lack of humanity. Do we viewers really see the woman in the video as a person or a friend? Why don’t we turn our head and walk away when we are watching a body that is kept unrevealed for at least two minutes, just as we can “break the cage and save” The Couple in the Cage. Overall, we overestimate our kindness and underestimate our malice. The desire to “peep” into someone is pulling us from respect for subjectivity of other people, of other “peeps.”

Then, why Ibarra is using this pun in the title? I think there are two reasons for it. First, the clever use of the ambiguous word “peeps,” opens up a space for “our desire for access, and reflect the politics of our interpretations” (6) for the performance. The interpretation tells people more of us than the performance. Second, with any of the three interpretations, we are still watching the video, repeating the “the colonial ‘encounter’ ” that is “structured in a predictable, formulaic, hence repeatable fashion” (13). The idea sustains what Ibarra said in the interview by The Exposed Suture, “The video plays with the idea of colonial contact as never ending, on loop, and the relationships I have to my own body via the significance of this ongoing contact.” Meanwhile, she is suggesting the positive-feedback relationship between the several possible meanings of this word. I would like to illustrate the relationship with more details. If we see the woman in the video as “colonial peeps (people),” it is impossible for us to get a bigger picture of their culture and thus just take some “colonial peeps (look)” at each time. To make it worse, even if the “colonial peeps (words)” are struggled to voice out, it sounds like silence to viewers with colonizers’ gaze. With the failure of communication, we concrete and strengthen the idea of “colonial peeps (people)” and the systematic colonial experience goes on loop.

The performance asks us to think about items we might see as part of the archive as if they are part of the repertoire in two ways. First, the extremely dynamic archive somehow becomes a repertoire. With the four visual effects, blurring, opacity, flashing and overlapping, we cannot see the body clearly. Therefore, it’s impossible for us to grapple it in a second with regular descriptive language. We have to ensure every detail to get a better understanding. The individual experience, strangely, becomes an interpersonal relationship between you and the woman in the video. Second, also the most importantly, the woman in front of the camera is the editor herself. She has decided what can be and what can’t be recorded, edited and represented. We viewers are not having an active position to “peep” a colonized “peep” as we want to. Instead, we are given and limited to just a “peep” by Ibarra. Thus, the method applied to the video reverses the archival women into an agent, and moreover, an agent with agency. Therefore, I would say that Ibarra disrupts some of the myths of the archive that Taylor discusses by creating her own archival material through this performance in three aspects. 

First, the regained agency of the woman, who is referred to colonized people, is exactly through the presumption, intention and interpretation from the viewers. The mode of watching challenges what Taylor said about archive, “What changes over time is the values relevance, or meaning of the archive, how the items it contains get interpreted, even embodied” (19). The meaning is not changed and changing at the same time. The reason it is not changeable comes from the purpose of the video. It is a self-selection as a container that is presented to people to be filled up with varied imagination. The process and the result of self-selection turn an seeming archive into a repertoire, twisting the archival process that is “selected, classified, and presented for analysis” (19) by a authority into a fluid than a fixed definition. The reason it is changing is because of the various feedbacks from the audience. Whatever is projected in the video is examined by the artist to visualize the portion of “colonism” and “sexism” deep-rooted in a viewer. Second, the visual effects, such asopacity, “can allow performers to redefine themselves outside of the colonial on vicitming gaze” (Burelle 2015: 115). The repetition of the visual effect failed to form a “real image” in archive is very powerful because the performance doesn’t prove “a ‘miniature’ or a diminished version of the ‘original’” (Taylor 2003: 9) as people would mostly expect of. The more we intend to see more into it with a sexualized expectation, the more we watchers fail. Only if we give up the expectation could we somehow grab more information of it. Third, it takes “double gesture” of the Ibarra and the viewers to complete the experience. Surely “double gesture” in the context of Taylor’s discussion is Victor Turner’s western-like imagination to another culture. If we expand the meaning a little and see the term as “the desire injected into oneself and desire projected to others,” it can explain some other things in the video. To Ibarra, the double and overlapping images of women are the “double gesture” that expresses a desire to be a human with different aspects, and a human saying no to a physically and mentally brief “glimpse” by others. To the viewers, the watching experiences are the “double gesture” to satisfy the desire of being upper to see nudity with delayed gratification in the very end of the video, and the desire of being lower to be educated and enlightened by the famous artist and the famous art piece. The power relationship of author and viewers complicates more when the archive with a tone of repertoire is motivated by both injected and projected desire of two groups of people.

To sum up, “Colonial Peeps” realizes a goal that a performance “belongs to the strong and the weak” (22). For “the strong,” they can feel the inapproachable and impossible expectation in colonism history that is condensed in four minutes. For “the weak,” they can resist a steadily uncomfortable gaze into themselves by failing other’s expectation, turning to their face, and saying “You don’t own me and my body” through the noise in images.

Work Cited

Burelle, J. (2015). Theatre in Contested Lands: Repatriating Indigenous Remains. TDR: The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies, 59(1 [T225]), 97–118.

Taylor, D. (2003). The archive and the repertoire : performing cultural memory in the Americas. Durham : Duke University Press, 2003.