Theme 52: Taboo

"Be a sponge. Expand who you are watching and who you are reading."

La inspiración de la calle, los murales que hay en las taquerías, todos los logotipos de los clubs de mala vida, la Revolución; todo eso alimentó muchísimo lo que hacíamos.

Si te haces mi novia, tú y yo vamos a ser el Diego Rivera y la Frida Kahlo de las caricaturas.

Stop creating excuses for yourselves. Don't ever allow anyone to interrupt your journey, to disturb your passion and take away what you love to do.

Word began to spread, and our audience became our megaphone.

At that point I decided to let no one interrupt my journey.

Presumptions of our circles can turn into taboos, and we need to fight them.

Estamos todos aqui respirando o mesmo ar, o mínimo que a gente precisa é se respeitar.

Esse movimento que nos faz sem estar em constante vontade de querer criar e se expressar.

O graffiti e a pixação são efêmeros. Você fez agora, se derrubou a parede ou passou tinta por cima, sem choro.

A pixação, a arte, é fiz. Não vou fazer, não vou pensar em fazer. É fiz. Está lá, pronto, acabou.

A publicidade é tão agressiva quanto o pixo, por que ainda é aceita?

A pixação que estamos falando veio de São Paulo, é genuinamente brasileira.

Os alunos de periferia da minha irmã falaram que não vão ao museu porque tem medo de serem presos, eles sentem que não fazem parte daquilo e nem chegam perto.

No muro, o que eu acho importante e mais interessante, é que ela [a pixação] atinge absolutamente todos.

Como entender o que eu não conheço? Se eu não compreendo é muito fácil ignorar, falar mal ou negar.

O pixador chega, não pede licença e faz justamente no lugar em que não é convidado, que sabe que não é bem vindo. Isso é o que geralmente incomoda.

A gente pode considerar o pixo como uma forma de arte, já que ele provoca tanto quanto.

A arte não está somente dentro de uma galeria, não foi feita pra ser bonita ou ter alguma utilidade. É uma expressão de dentro pra fora que busca provocar.

Something’s only a taboo if we choose not to talk about it.

Use your passion to solve a problem and bring awareness to it.

Every bit of time spent to love on someone makes a difference.

Homelessness is not an identity, it is an experience.

Relationships are necessary to form our own identities. In other words, we are responsible for one another.

Creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

As individuals, you can never determine meaning in and of yourself. If it doesn’t require some sort of outside structure to give meaning to your life, it does require relationships.

One of the great values of our age – especially to millennials – is authenticity. Because we have the ability to create our own meaning, that means we have to make authentic choices within our lives.

What I want to urge you to do is to take a little risk and to open up to your circle of friends and family, and to try and share some of the painful stuff that you’re going through.

Too often I’ll be too critical of my actions or I’ll beat myself up that I haven’t done. You wouldn’t like someone like that in your life as a friend, so why would you let that voice live inside your head?

Don’t be a dick to yourself.

As a creative person we have tools at our disposal that other people don’t have.

Because of the pace of modern life, it’s getting more and more important to seek out silence in our lives.

As a creative person you’re often doing creative things for other people and you need to remember to do that stuff for yourself.

If you’re not willing to love yourself than how can you expect anyone else to.

If your soul is invisible you need to feed it invisible things like love, laughter, joy, silence and compassion. That is what your soul is craving.

Know that you’re not alone and that stuff will get better over time however painful it is at the moment.

It was kind of like my behaviour started to shift and that the depression had become a trigger and a way for me to explore a new side of my personality.

That feeling of depression is so hard to put into words. I feel like it’s a kind of silent scream inside you that’s eating you up. It’s just nibbling away bits and pieces of you, and suddenly there’s a huge chunk of you missing.

At Viva Erotica our audience may not be masturbating in the cinema but they are hopefully finding themselves in dialog and discovering keys that unlock the possibility of being shameless and being free.

By investigating our taboos rather than turning away from them, we might find keys to parts of ourselves we didn't know were locked. We don't have to fling the doors open, but it's good to know what's inside.

Our Taboos they mediate the access we have to ourselves, and so in order to understand ourselves we really have to learn to understand them.

I would argue that we have to allow our erotic desire to become intricate part of the body of stories we tell about ourselves, or else, I think we are at risk of loosing out on really interesting personal insights and sources of inspiration.

And I find that in my own fiction writing the more I pay attention to my erotic fantasies, who features in them, the power dynamics in play and so on, the more I sensitive I am to why I'm writing what I'm writing. And this certainly does not exclusively apply to when I'm writing about the topic of sex but also how I'm writing and thinking about people and the dynamics of relationships in the world.

In addition to the provocative framework, the trigger, I now look at this fantasy as a way for me to sort of take my temperature. How I fantasize tells me about how I'm feeling about myself and how I feel in the world at any given point. And I think this kind of increase sits alongside things like dream interpretation or psycho analysis, you know, places where you go in your life to discover new things about yourself.

So what does this solitary, anti social experience mean for our fantasy lives? I think, how we consume porn has changed our relationship to it. And because it's ubiquity it's much easier to treat it purely as a tool, a trigger and not much more. And as triggers, I don't think we really... If you are just going to something as a trigger, I don't think it needs to be of a particularly good quality. I think you just need a provocative framework that kind of does it for you... And I'm just talking from a personal experience.

Now days, I think most of us consume our porn all by our selves, with the rare exception of a festival like this or Cinekink in the States or the Porn Film Fest in Berlin - places that ask of the audience to consider the art of the sex film, not just it's utility.

When something is taboo there is a lot of baggage to contend with before we can start asking the really interesting questions. Taboo is, in the way we are talking about it today, a hurdle and apprehension, something that keeps us from communicating honestly and openly. And it can lead to us censuring ourselves.

When we think about those days, I think there is a sort of discrete social element to porn you had to know where to get it, you had to create a network of sharing, and you had to find a safe space to consume it in. Because of the conditions needed for watching a pron film - space and discretion, you might have had to share the experience. And however covert, this was a social process of discovering.

As soon as someone tells me not to do something that's exactly, exactly, what I want to do.

It shouldn't be about the dark side of things all the time.

Everything that I care about is what inspires me. And everything that I hate is also what inspires me.

Everybody's the same when you're covered with pudding.

Being proud of yourself should not be taboo.

If comedy, if humor tells the truth about people, it helps people and society deal with taboo.

The humor walks holding hands with taboo.

The taboo can be a positive form of social rebellion.

If we follow social norms, the taboo has a confined space in the backstage.

This is a disease, an addition, we need to do the right thing.

We cannot arrest our way out of this.

If we are ever going to beat this disease and really challenge it, and really look at this, I think we need to destigmatize this and have open discussions and have people who are in recovery say it was really difficult but I’ve made it through.

Everybody that is in the film is identifiable to everybody.

You are forced to look at them as a human being in a real story.

I really wanted to make the choice of going outside that box by showing people as they are today.

I wanted to make the audience really like and to know these people and their stories and know them as people because I think that’s the first way of breaking that stigma.

I wanted to tell real people’s, real stories and a lot are in recovery and some of them are not. I wanted it to have that really personal feeling.

It’s sons, daughters, friends, people that you know and people that you don’t expect.

Every headline in every newspaper was about Heroin.

Most of the time a taboo is just something we can't talk about.

Taboos are these unwritten rules that hover above us that govern what we do. Most of us don't know where they came from or who put them there. They exert incredible control over our daily lives.

The mantra I like to live my life by, instead, is that everyone poops.

This fear and this inhibition to actually get started with something, because we feel like it's not reinventing the wheel.

We live in 2017—it's the 21st century—what could I possibly be adding to the conversation that hasn't already been said?

Hot Chicks with Big Brains started about two and a half years ago, as this like real weird little pokey project, where I was convincing successful women to let me into their homes.

Hope trumps despair.

Say hello to people. It sounds daft, but that actually does really make a difference.

...The chances are if they love what they do they'd love to do what they love to do for something good.

...I came away from from it just feeling quite heavy, just realizing it's such a big thing. I was hoping to basically bottom homelessness and solve it within the meal but it turn's out it's actually a bit more complicated than that.

There is a time to call it quits, but you guys, this is not it.

If your soul is invisible you need to feed it invisible things like love, laughter and joy.

Just question: what does art do to a militarized city like San Diego?

Hope trumps despair

There is this enormous potential and creativity as we age. As long as we're willing to question taboos.

There are a lot of taboos that limit us. They tell us who we can be and who we can't be, they limit our choices.

What we try to achieve with the museum: to find a bridge above every different singularity. We have different identities, but we have cultural values that we share above our singular identities.

It was more like the idea of a music concert: if they don't come for the artist, at least they can come for the people!

At the time I understood words to be about shock and power and trying to use taboo to my advantage. I wasn't authentic to how I communicated, who I actually am as an artist or a person. And I grew into my authentic creative voice.

This poem is my newer attempt at finding language for anger and also allowing myself to explore what I once thought of as taboo, or what I once perhaps used as a weapon, and now I'm using with more thoughtfulness.

It took me a long time to feel ready to give myself permission again to write angry poems. . . . I have a lot more reasons to be angry than I used to. When I was a kid I had to drum up that anger, and unfortunately these days, I don't have to drum it up quickly; it's there.

What you think of as being edgy or taboo can change pretty dramatically and quickly, but also, what feels true is often something that outlasts where it is in the moment, or it may be true again at another time.

Alternative facts didn't just suddenly appear. . . . I live in a world where there's been lies told all of my life.

We are firm believers in that you can’t make equality without breaking a few taboos

Whatever we do, we try to at least push the world into a little bit more equal place

It’s not a matter of who we are; it’s a matter of who we can be.

You need the relationships between people in space to actually create choreography.

Dance is a community thing; you want to dance with people and for people.

For me climbing is a dance in stone.

If you wake up and you don't like what you're doing, do something else.

We didn't know what we were doing. We still don't have any idea what we're doing. But it was our thing...so we said 'why not?'

Suddenly, the artists realized they are in Molenbeek

At its simplest form, 'advocacy' to me is making sure that the system has the information it needs to work as well as it can for as many as it can.

The systems that we build are only as good as the people who manage them and the information they have to work with.