24.10.2022 - 23.01.2023
A few months ago I was leaning towards the earth to sow as a sign of mourning, recognition, and transformation. My brother, a few steps away, told me that this body composition that I performed when leaning towards the earth to sow was a form learned in the plantations and he wondered how this choreography had reached my body and continued to be sustained there.
Sylvia Wynter states that history, “these things that happen to us”—on the plantation—are fiction. A fiction written, dominated, controlled by forces external to itself. Great fictions created by the emergence of the market economies that have bewitched ouramerica—and have us under their spell: the plantation as machine, extinction as threat, disappearance as ontological horizon, developmentalism as civilizing value, cleanliness and service as labor force and moral imposition, and lack and debt as material and spiritual continuity of colonization. Pain as a promise. Ouramerica not only has open veins, but we have been dispossessed and turned into communities dependent on commodity by-products—sugar cane, soy, coca, coal, lithium, gold, copper—so we work for the necro- and narco-affective support of objectual fantasies that dispossess us. We grew up on a pile of battered, dismembered bones, a pile of faces hungry for justice. Why? How did we get here?
Sylvia says that only when a community or others reveal themselves against those fictions, and their writings, when we snatch the pen with which they write us, only then do we enter the temporal course, we become time. That is why we know that what we tear, draw, move with our bodies, our skin, and our eyes filled with pain and hope, is not a novel. It is the way to tell the stories of those without history, to read the writing of those without rest, the march of grandmothers and mothers looking for their children in the street, the dance of travestis surviving in prisons, the wish to wake up enchanted, raising a fist, gathering saliva, weaving braids, conjuring stars, talking to mushrooms, singing.
The gaze of the lizards comes to an end.
In the preceding quiescences, we invoked the possibility of an emancipation other than that of mere survival and we wondered if we could give ourselves a common erogenealogy on colonial trauma and the pleasures of resistance. In this last blink of an eye, we invite you to listen: Will it be possible for us to account for the particular way in which the politics of death traverse the field of affects—of art, the commercialization of the symbolic, of the “body of work,” with the artist’s own body? Will we be able to talk about the pain, rage, and helplessness produced by the imperatives of celebration, beauty, and happiness? Is violent death only conjured by narratives of overcoming and wellbeing?
We gather here to reflect on the specific modulations in relation to the suffering of the individual and collective body: disappearances, torture, dismemberment, exile, genocide, servitude, erasure; to recount the multiple forms of dislocation and resistance to these—our—economies and fantasies of violent death, and our ceremonies of healing, insurgency, and mourning.
In the heart of my world my brother and I planted agaves, and the stalk will bear fruit.
They only need to forbid us to cry
to tear us down to the heart
scream with me2
24
2022
24 2022
14.11.2022
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Carbon
Identity is elusive. Identity is political. Identity is situational – especially if we want to stay safe.
24 2022
21.11.2022
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Rosa Rabiosa
24 2022
28.11.2022
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Tiziano Cruz
If war is a trade, who will be the lucky soldiers who will finish off our bodies?
24 2022
05.12.2022
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Raza Sosa
Raza Sosa on Andy Medina’s work and post-gore capitalism
24 2022
12.12.2022
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Danka Herrera
From the legacy of Hija de Perra, Danka Herrera looks at the politics of the bodies of sexual dissidence: to write in order to live.
24 2022
19.12.2022
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Antonio Villa
We chatted with La Chola about many things, reviewing her performance work. We went back to germinal landscapes. We talked about the supposed professionalization of an artist, about those drifts. Here is a snippet of the end of our conversation. The chat takes place in her studio, an old house that used to be a palace. She is painting some watercolors and there are bread masks hanging on the wall. We drink maté.
24 2022
09.01.2023
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Elton Panamby
”Where to bleed? Why to bleed, and what for? Where to bleed?”
24 2022
16.01.2023
Issue 24: Head of Earth
María Regina Firmino-Castillo
In a descent into the underworld of forced disappearances, María Regina Firmino-Castillo talks about the constant battle against oblivion and the challenge of necropolitics present in Lukas Avendaño’s work.
24 2022
23.01.2023
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Laura Castro
From Haiti, Daphné Menard shares the process of YO, which in Creole means them, a work that revolves around the history of the massacre to define other ways of sensitive reflection on the issues of forgiveness and the collective need to heal.
24 2022
30.01.2023
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Lior Zisman Zalis
Subtly spinning the fibers of oral sources, Lior Zisman Zalis tells us about “Terecô”, in the region of Codó, Brazil: beyond being a religion or “cultural phenomenon”, it is another way of conceiving the agency and intransigence of beings, challenging in turn the scope of westernized instrumental reason.
24 2022
06.02.2023
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Eduardo Carrera
Artistic pratices that locate stars. An approach to the artistic work of Juan Carlos León
24 2022
13.02.2023
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Luisa Villegas G.
Grief, Resistance and Living Memories in Medellín
24 2022
20.02.2023
Issue 24: Head of Earth
Idjahure Kadiwel
”Healing the forest, healing the earth, healing the body.”
