Apology of the Bathroom and the Revolution.

About a gender performance in the Social Science Faculty, University of Buenos Aires, April 2009

By Syd Krochmalny


Baño Revolution is an artistic project designed to change the sexual division of men and women’s restrooms into universal, genderless restrooms. The small yet ambitious objective was inserted into the course of daily life in the Marcelo T. de Alvear campus of UBA’s Social Science Faculty. This type of practice refers to the art-life relationship, and its references could be read from those experiences of Oscar Wilde from the end of the 19th century until the nowadays experiments of relational art. Baño Revolution could be thought of as a sociological experiment that uses the multimedia tools of contemporary art. Additionally, the event had its own political significance, in correlation with its function as an action that aims to transform daily life. It didn’t attempt to revindicate sexual liberties, nor to go along with them but to try to practice them in a natural way. In this sense, while well intended but conservative, the oppositions that could be read in the article published in Pagina/12 last Tuesday are worth some considerations. It is important to emphasize that the initiative was made with the aid of the sociological field, artists, professors and students. It was never opposed to further political articulations, in fact, by fueling the reconstitution of social ties within the university space, and, though it incorporated languages made possible by new technologies, the performance was “criticized” by its supposed “anchorage in the sixties”. The reaction against this intervention was reminiscent of a famous statement made by Professor Klimovsky in 1966 in regards to the experiences with mass communication media and contemporary forms called happenings. The claims were similar: elitism, exoticism, etc. But these actions, that were referred to as “trivial experiments,” culminated in Tucuman Arde, situated within the timeline of the politicization of arts that preceeded the Cordobazo. Perhaps, experiences like Baño Revolution, contextualized within a strategy of joy, contribute more to strengthen the repertoire of actions for the political-cultural fight to come, while a supposedly progressist rhetoric can not separate itself from a solemn, repressive and kind of nostalgic conception.

Baño Revolution is close to the relational art experiments that operate over social material with multimedia instruments, generating fruitful intersections between sociology and art. The idea is to try to question the uniformity of social sciences and to practice sociology with methods and tools that can can go past the always essential rational argumentation and the contrast of hypothesis and incorporate the performative, sonorous and visual dimensions of contemporary language

The critics to the experiment discursively opposed the experience against problems such as the redistribution of income, the reactionary offensive towards constitutional guarantees, the drugs, etc. This rhetorical strategy –to confront one small, external fact with the big problems that bleed our country day by day- is not only an crude result, but that it acts as a tranquilizing and exculpatory mechanism for those who refuge themselves in abstract declamations and the bureaucracy of knowledge like trenches for hiding their imposibility to propose new social forms capable of projecting a utopic dimension. These people, rooted in the bureaucracy and feuding amongst themselves about academic conduct, end up angering themselves over (almost) everything instead of imagining new links between sociologic knowledge and people.

There is not an inside (university/restroom) nor an outside (society), but creases, and the restroom is a nodal space in the house, like the fire, the bed, the library and the workshop, the sites of the origin of social transformations. If we believe that we have the posibility to elaborate discourses and practices that research and transform extended society, we should be apt to do it ourselves within our own space (Lenin dixit).

*Sociologist, visual artist, author of Baño Revolution