This Saturday we went to the MACBA to attend the seminar La Nouvelle Vague Porno organized by Beatriz Preciado; leaving aside the personal interest that each one might have in the subject, we were attracted by the possibility of discovering a practical and theoretical approach to a cinematographic genre that we usually find among the outstanding interests of, and not so much, teenagers. This may seem scandalous to some, although we harbor no intention of scandalizing. Pornography is part of the visual culture of many young people and offers a series of cultural constructions about gender and sexuality that are more or less influential in their imagination. In addition, it constitutes in some way, informal, unregulated, a type of sex education. Obviously, pornography may not be, by far, the best access to sexuality, among many other things, because it is not the purpose of the genre; for that reason alone, it seems necessary to us to take a little distance and (re)think pornography, although it is not the main objective of this entry.
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On the other hand, at this moment, the participants in projecte3* are proposing and structuring their research projects that, in the long run, will become the “curriculum” of a new space in the instituto Joanot Martorell, self-managed by themselves. Among the proposals, which range from concrete phenomena of youth culture to global political issues, pornography appeared, of course, between the generalized jocularity and embarrassment of the person who launched the proposal. Ours is not a hippie policy of uncritical respect for freedom of expression, otherwise, it is about thinking to what extent pornography is important for students and what issues of interest come into play in its dissemination and consumption.
Having said and clarified all this, let’s go back to the seminar organized by the MACBA: the truth is that the program started as early as 6 in the afternoon, we arrived a little late and due to the large influx of public we had to wait until the 10 o’clock break to be able to enter, so our chronicle may not be entirely substantiated…
The crux of the evening is concentrated in the question of a girl from the audience who, in reality, was almost a response to the introduction that Beatriz Preciado made of the speakers of the evening session: Coraline Trinh-Thi, HPG and Lidia Lunch. In that introduction Beatriz Preciado told us about an emerging scene in France of pornographic directors who, together with a part of the French intelligentsia (she only cited Michel Huellebecq) was subverting the established codes of the genre by introducing elements from the aesthetics and gothic culture, manga (I imagine she was actually referring to hentai) and others, where the normalized representations of heterosexual sexuality were also subverted and that made one think of a renewing movement that, in a provocative way, Beatriz Preciado called the Nouvelle Vague Porno by analogy with the new wave of French cinema of the mid-last century.
The fact is that, after watching a few fragments of films, commented in situ by Coraline Trinh-Thi (ex-porn actress) none of those present observed any type of subversion, contamination or experimentation with the genre, but rather a series of typical porn movies from the 80s and 90s. And this is what the sharp-witted assistant observed who questioned the table. Beatriz Preciado’s response was a kind of dodging/transubstantiation by which the fact of being there, in the bowels of the institution (for those who do not know it, the MACBA auditorium is located in the basement of the museum) talking about porn movies was, in itself, a realization of the nouvelle vague porno ¡voilà!
After this and some other things, Lidia Lunch’s I’ve-been-on-the-wild-side-of-life vibe ended up boring us and we went out for drinks.