Zona. Carga y Descarga . Minor Literature in a Penal Colony

Abstract

structural) forms. In several of his essays from Written on a Body, Sarduy takes advantage of this ambiguity in the word to signify a plane of existence (he calls it a “zone”) characterized by the flexibility necessary to maintain a certain tension, by the ability of this zone to sustain inversions, changes, and transformations. The motility of this zone is in contrast to the apparent rigidity of a fixed world of so-called reality, which appears to be a totality invested by terms such as “the economic,” “the political,” or “class struggle,” when it is in fact nothing more than an unstable surface for Sarduy. Indeed, for him, topology is another word for the zone of signification, for the plane of language whose lines of force between its parts, whose tension between its signifiers, whose amatory violence, he describes as “erotic” (Sarduy, Escrito 46). Sanchez turns this zone metaphorically described by Sarduy, first into the canvases of her “Erotic Topologies,” and then into the pages and general design of Zona. Sanchez’s Merversions Sanchez works from the seventies and early eighties materialize this erotic zone: the lines of force and the horizontal and vertical planes that intersect it and give it form, according to Sarduy. Sanchez’s “Topologies” series is defined by a minimal use of materials belonging to the visual arts and sculpture (canvas, acrylic paint, and wood). She stretches the materials out, up, down, and forward beyond the plane of an always frame-less modular form. Many of her works reach heroic dimensions, some of them standing vertically seventy-two inches tall, and stretching out to what is often a fine point from a flat surface (Cf., “Erotic Topology” from the “The Amazons Series” 1978, Fig. 1). The surface is stretched and extended to simulate folding, caressing, and touching feminine sexual body parts (highly abstract and stylized details that suggest nipples, labia, navels, vulvas, urinary tracts, anuses, clitoris, and the end of the urethra), which in turn project into, and enter, another space, both laterally and frontally, sending out imaginary lines or rays or even tendrils that seem to go in all directions, reaching and “touching” the contiguous canvas and the viewer. The colors of the works are muted, subtle shades of white, gray, and silver, but also radiant, as if meant to reflect blindingly the bright light of the Caribbean sun.10 When joined together, the modular pieces create 10 As if to underscore this reflective quality of her work, several photographs of her canvases from her catalogues are set on the beach and under the bright sun. Not