THE INTEGRATIVE LOOK (To make the invisible visible)

Why talk about an integrative look...? To integrate is the same as to join, but not to join people or things one after another. To integrate is to weave with them such a complex mesh as the matter may request. This type of joining is to place reason and emotion, formality and intuitiveness, mind and body ... in a same territory.

To integrate, from this perspective, means to take into account the elements which are apparently antagonistic, to install communication between those we have called “contraries” for a long time: inside and outside, truth and uncertainty, global and local, masculine and feminine…

There is an integration that interests me especially, because it brings back to life “the invisible ones”, elements, people, phenomena, which, in our society, are dulled at first sight. Thus, the objective is to achieve the integration of their invisibility by putting their leadership in scene, telling the story of their existence and awarding the value they receive by their own merit.

Invisible is whatever is there but is unseen, whatever, even remaining, is not recognised. Paul Klee, in a very beautiful expression, told us that Art consists in “making visible the invisible”.

Thus, the integrative look pretends to take into account the invisible ones, to grant them visibility. It pretends to integrate them in our universe of perceptions, in the sphere of matters that worry society, in the ethics of a world that needs to rescue the value of small things, of decentralised things, of goods produced without going through the market… All of them are so little evident, so relegated by that other look, the “commercial look”, the one that judges and grants value in terms of the economic cost-benefit and leaves far from reach what is really important for life.

In some of my books and articles I have talked about the “invisibility of Nature”, because I believe there is no other name for the way in which natural goods are treated by the economy in our societies. Invisibility which, linked to its gratuity, lays in the origin of phenomena such as the extinction of species; the contamination of oceans, seas and rivers; the deterioration of the ozone layer; the erosion and deforestation and many others.

Working for many years defending the “visibility” of Nature, lead me to recognise that the same phenomenon of occultation and devaluation was taking place concerning the works carried out by women in domestic areas, in life reproduction and production works, involving care. The same that happens with the activities carried out by the ecosphere, these are also essential for the development of our societies and, nevertheless, lack the social and economic recognition they should have.

My last book, “THEM, THE INVISIBLE ONES”, was born from this verification. It collects the stories of twenty-four women from the North and the South of the planet. They are fighting women (but pacific fighters) that hope to have a place in the world, to change their environment without losing the values and the attitudes that distinguish them, and without destroying the others.

It is not a coincidence that on this occasion I have used the artistic language to tell the stories that give sense to this search for visibility. Because Art helps to “make visible”, I wanted to bring into light, through the story language, the intimate and deep lives of a wide selection of women that are trying to be themselves, to be recognised in their own identity, and finally, to be seen.

The book has been very well received. Several presentations have taken place and while I write these notes, the publisher prepares a second edition, which is sign of “good health”. I know it is being used by some groups of women as text to read prior to debates, and what I like best is that I have received some letters from women who have read the book, stating that they have recognised themselves along its pages. This was, undoubtedly, the first “visibility” I was looking for, their own look onto themselves, which is the beginning of any further recognition from others.

I am now working, together with my Italian colleague Francesco Tonucci, on a book concerning another type of “invisible ones”: children (boys and girls, obviously). These beings arrive into the world with a huge offer, but also with the demand to be seen and accepted as people who need to be happy then, in their present time, and not only as “projects of adults”. We hope to be able to make the value of childhood visible. This value, because it is not quoted at the Stock Exchange, is not taken very much into account by this globalisation society. Society which is full of children-soldiers, of ill-treated children, of children who live in extremely poor conditions, children who work fourteen hours per day, or children who simply seem to have everything, but whose interior life is ignored. If everything goes well we hope to be able to offer this text during 2004.

Them, the invisible ones.