Guillermina Bustos, artist and researcher of Latin American Contemporary Art, submitted a text to our quarantine ‘anecdotario’ based on new forms of intimacy and physicality mediated by the virtual nature of our lives during this period. It’s a great questioning of how the limits on physical closeness and sexual affection are being dealt with on an everyday basis. Thank you to Guillermina for proposing this reflection on these new possibilities of sexual expression.
In this situation I’ve begun thinking about degrees of materialisation of sexuality in virtual relationships. What are the limits that define sexual practices? And alongside that, the limits of sexual-affective relationships?
I feel that I‘ve experienced virtual sexual relations on different levels, from discourse on shared memories with another, to the narration of fantasies to be carried out, physically or virtuality.
It’s also something that has materialised in my exhibitionist desires, in the care I take in the deliberate composition of a photograph, with its choice of clothing, use and arrangement of elements; in the composition and script of a gif or video; and in the sequence of a conversation, of a sexual, virtual interaction mediated by screens. Added to this is the fantasy of what we’re going to provoke in others, and the satisfaction induced when reactions coincide with imagination. Amateur untidiness takes second place, because it’s offset by the desire of the voyeur, who anxiously awaits the material, who anxiously awaits to feel their emotions activated as a spectator, in order to later narrate them.
Along with those emotions that run riot through the body, that physically pass through us, we experience a feeling of confidence and complicity, when we feel like unique, privileged spectators; And as these actions are repeated, we’re able to better specify and request more of what we like and expect.
