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MUJERES EN LOS TIEMPOS DE BORGES Y KAFKA
Tamara Moura Costa
#creativeCoding
#generativeArt
#feministAndAntiracistActivism
Introduction
Mujeres en los tiempos de Borges y Kafka (Women in Borges and Kafka’s times) is a generative poem created in Processing, an open source programming language. The goal is to make evident and visible the construction of repressive meanings through literary pieces. Specifically, in this Women Project, the intention is to highlight the elaborated image that male writers made towards women, always inventing a weak, unbalanced character and as an object of consumption and bribery.
The Recipe

The current context in Argentina and Latin America, allows the work to be imbued with a sense of value that would not be the same in another time or space. The interpreter is associated with certain speeches or representations that function in a given society and energizes the adjudication of senses.

By using the texts Del infierno y del cielo (Of Hell and Heaven) (1960), Jorge Luis Borges and y El proceso (The Process) (1925), Franz Kafka; all the sentences containing the word “woman” or “women” are extracted from them, and a prose poetry of six verses (three of Borges’ book and three, from Kafka’s) is generated by randomly combining them.
“Woman/en” appears at the beginning of each verse which gives it a literary structure and rhythm, thus creating an anaphora. The poem is automatically renewed after a certain time - calculated - with a new combination of random sentences that begin with the word “woman/en” and so on.



The entire project calls on society to question the use of the words chosen to express themselves, understanding the power they have to hurt. Language is not trivial, we use words as a form of construction of meaning and reality.
This work enables us to think in a different and updated way about the content of these texts and, this view is immersed in a context where feminist movements fight for their rights.


Q&A
What is the context or background that inspired your recipe?
Specifically, in Argentina in 2018, time and place where this Project is born, the project of Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy in Deputies and Senators was voted, without obtaining favorable results for feminist movements. Later in 2019, this law is enacted, and feminist movements can continue to fight for their rights.
Which community are you offering the recipe to?
I’m offering this recipe to the Feminist, BIPOC and LGTBQ+ communities, also to any community who is interested in making visible suffering from systematic repressions that they suffer.
How does your submission relate to intersectional feminism?
The political strategies that were used for the subtraction of the phrases of the texts of Borges and Kafka, come from the gender theory and feminism, from the ideological constructions naturalized by the patriarchal system and that have been reconsidered lately.
The purpose of this work is to make a complaint, through a literary piece, about the elaborated and intentional image that male writers made towards women.