Matrilinear Biographies (2019)
“It is more arduous to honour the memory of anonymous beings than that of the renowned. The construction of history is consecrated to the memory of nameless.” -Walter Benjamin-
Matrilinear Biographies is a performance developed in TĂ rrega, Catalunya, with the female community of this city.
This project is a try to honour the memory of nameless par excellence, the women, and to honour the matrilinearity and female genealogy. It has its roots in authors such as Luce Irigaray, Adrienne Rich and Walter Benjamin.
Women are the nameless par excellence, not only metaphorically but substantially; when was upheld the established order by patriarchy, man was put as head of the household and on the basis of that, daughters were separated from their mothers and from own family, in order to be relocated into the husband’s family. So, female genealogy was sucked forever into just one genealogy: the husband’s genealogy. Thus, the matrilinearity – the tracing of kindship through the female line was completely canceled and lost forever, and with it, were lost also the matrilineal surnames, the names transmitted to daughter from mother, in favour of patrilineal surnames.
Nevertheless, there is a female genealogy in each one of our families, but we tend to forget it and even to deny its uniqueness. One of the goals of this project, “Matrilinear Biographies”, is to point out that exists also a female genealogy.
Inspired by the thought of Luce Irigaray who considers to be an ethical guilt the act of deleting a genealogy into another, through this work I involved the female community living in TĂ rrega, in a research into the Arxiu Comarcal de l’Urgell (ACUR) public archive, in which each woman was able to trace her own female genealogy and to rebuild her own matrilineal surnames, getting the name and surname of her female family members, collecting photographs, pictures, letters or every kind of material about her descents through the female line.
At the end of this research period, in collaboration with all the participants, I created the performance, Matrilinear Biographies, working through different ways; with a live performance that took place in a public park close to the ACUR, involving in it some participants, and through a urban act in many public TĂ rrega’s places, during which I hung in the town squares, the pictures of the matrilineal trees of all the participants, and I attached some stickers of the fragmented photos of my female family members on the paving stones of some streets, in order to underline the impossibility to rebuild the memory of our invisible ancestors.
Thus, the whole city was involved in a collective act whose goal was to perform an act of social justice, by which to “correct” the cultural injustice that has as victim the same female identity, in order to restore and to cure this loss of individual and collective identity for women and for our society in general.
This project was developed with the support of the Arxiu Comarcal de l’Urgell (ACUR) and of the Alba Foundation, thanks to the participants: Monserrat Aloy Roca, Maria JosĂ© Vinuales, Monserrat Roca Anglarill and Mieria Fontanet Viladot and their own female family members.
