Tetes

TETES (Tits) is a text to be read aloud. It is a Frankenstein text made of flesh and gut pieces from other texts and simultaneously exists by itself: it is. It gushes blood and milk from its stitches. To breastfeed is to be inevitably female. Andrea Long Chu claims that everyone is female and everyone hates being so. To breastfeed involves milk coming out from your tits and this milk feeds a mouth that sucks on demand; it is a relationship of symbiosis, an exchange of fluids and emotions, a mess of meat and guts and milk.

TETES originates from the recent experience of motherhood, an experience that although we may think summarises the different axes that traverse the body – the social, the political and the emotional – primarily goes beyond them. Ariadna Guiteras’ work displays a constantly critical relationship with what it investigates: it aims to reveal what often remains unseen in a queer sense, like a political act of resistance and criticism. It provides a counter-narrative from vulnerability, from radical opening, from openings per se. In this case, breastfeeding as a moment of symbiosis, the exchange of fluids and emotions with another body that still depends so much on the mother that it is hard to believe it is another body. Ariadna Guiteras deals with this link and does so by seeking the ways in which this relationship has been treated in our society in history as much as in the present-day, the technologies that have managed it and the myths surrounding it. Technologies and myths that often seek to break this bond and of course control and medicalise this relationship, as well as erasing the ancestral memory of bodies that have been breastfed since the origin of the species.

TETES is built and destroyed; it is updated daily, erased, contradicted and expanded. On this occasion, it has been developed as a web platform in which the text is also hyperlink, image and fragmented narration. Inspired by the hyperfiction of the 1990s, ooo.tetes.ooo is open and allows you to enter inside her.