Marcela Torres on Artistic Violence

MARCELA TORRES WANTS US TO EXPERIENCE VIOLENCE

INSTALLATION IMAGE OF AGENTIC MODE. IMAGE CREDIT: JONATHAN BAGBY.

By RILEY YAXLEY

The first time I meet Marcela Torres, I make a complete fool of myself. For our interview, we meet at The Clayton, a cigar lounge in the West Loop. I have never been to a cigar lounge and feel overwhelmed following Marcela around the cramped, glass humidor. We stop to let a group of three businessmen squeeze in front of us and, after admitting that I know nothing about the various cigar options, she chooses one for me. We sit at a small, round table in the corner of the lounge and Marcela demonstrates how to properly light a cigar using the matches the host gave us.

“You want to hold it at a little bit of angle,” she says, and takes a drag from hers. I forget to regularly smoke my cigar during the interview, allowing the smoldering embers to die out, and attempt to relight it several times with my dwindling supply of matches. After the fourth or fifth time, Marcela graciously fetches a torch lighter from the host and offers it to me. “Here. This might be easier.”

A colleague invited me to attend Marcela’s second professional cage fight at Joe’s Live in suburban Rosemont in early March. I wasn’t able to make it to her fight, but nonetheless I was introduced to Marcela’s work and was intrigued by her use of martial arts as a way to explore the “mental space of fear” that makes violence possible.

During the past year, I have spent a significant amount of time writing and thinking about whether or not art can affect change, specifically as a way to achieve justice for marginalized communities.

Marcela has been performing Agentic Mode, a 45-minute movement performance incorporating Muay Thai martial arts, literature, and oral history, for the past two years. Most recently, she performed for EXPLODE! Queer dance: Midwest at Northwestern University, and she was scheduled to perform at the Rose Wagner Theater in Salt Lake City and at The Momentary in Arkansas this spring, until the COVID-19 pandemic upended public events for the foreseeable future.

When I ask Marcela about her process of recreating violence in a gallery setting and how she avoids removing violence from its very real contexts, she pauses before cautiously answering, “I do want people to have intense experiences, but I also want it to be a ‘slow consensual experience.’”