SCUM MANIFESTO Echoes 74

resistance that is concurrent to the contemporary art market (as were the mouvements in which Roussopoulos and Seyrig were en-gaged). Some of these voices now present an international reach. Although Solanas’s text is not directly performed, its complexi-ty resonates within some of these works, notably those question-ing the third neutral gender that has been recognized by the In-dian Constitution, like Tejal Shah’s piece What are you? (2006) 16. This double screen installation presents animated and fixed imag-es shot by the artist while she was working on LGBT rights during video workshops with the Hijra community of Mumbai and Ban-galore over a period of two years. While Delphine Seyrig was read-ing Solanas’s Manifesto that proposes the Scum revolution, here the transsexuals read out articles from the Constitution regarding their rights and cannot help but laugh at the absurdity of the sit-uation, given the contrast between the harsh reality and the legal promise. The “framing-cutting” device is also very powerful with images of chapped skin, evoking arid land (the Urdu term Hijra comes from the Arab word meaning exil). The montage is jerky, with heterogeneous images of fragments of bodies and places that are more or less identifiable, and sounds that are just as scattered, between metal shocks and humming voices. Through repetition, the film editing proceeds to the serialisation of the Hijras’s bod-ies, who head towards the camera to present themselves individ-ually with a “Hello” or a “Hi”, which sounds like an “I”. “Voice is an incredibly powerful vector of identity… Video gives a unique space of mobility, fluidity” and resonance to it, in a correlation between the typewriter and the camera, as proposed by Roussopoulos and Seyrig. 17