24.06.2019 - 23.09.2019
Co-edited with Lorena Tabares Salamanca
In light of the complexities of the body in action, nothing can be taken for granted. In the vastness of the field of art related to the live body—performance, action art, live arts—presence is embodied through the artistic exploration of the gesture, whose existence is unfolded in the momentary simultaneity of the here and now. In a nutshell, movement is presence. Today, embodying is an act that corresponds to a plural universe of practices and coexistence. While this universe corresponds to the composition of community, it forces us to question the possibilities of the gesture itself.
We started this editorial work from a paradigm, that of a reflection that goes beyond the centuries, a phrase so powerful that it wraps around itself and conceals its own inwardness in contemporaneity: Spinoza’s question What can a body do? is still a nuclear reference in artistic practices that take form and body as its subjects. In this volume, we present a dialogue and a point of correlation from the opacity implicit in the live body to the possibility of disrupting it—the Gunpowder Body, referring to the echo of inventive power and the expansion of the limits that we take for granted.
Modernity came to de-territorialize and de-erotize the body, from the basis of science, where knowledge appears as a form of control and domination. Nevertheless, in this scenario of correlation with life, between repletion and difference, “power is not [Cartesian] knowledge.” This is why we attach ourselves to poetics and the play of language, beyond questions of rhetoric, to talk about the expansive power of gesture as a possibility of the common.
In this geography invented America, a region of multiple regions, we inhabit a contradiction: we are, but we have never stopped discovering ourselves. In the sociocultural realm, the individual has been pierced through by corporal and semantic participation as a strategy to rebuild the social threads broken by so many dictatorships and entangled by so many development projects. Reacting to the imposed limiting traps—decisive when talking about the internal circumstances in time and space that affect the collaborators of this volume—the body becomes memory. This way, a body always implicates other bodies: communing.
In this issue of Terremoto, we ask ourselves: Does a possibility of communing exist in the poetics of expansive presence? Is the power of the body a detonator for the re-signification of language and memory? Does the archive of the artistic practices of the live body—performance, action art, live arts—enable a questioning of the symbolic and cultural capital of a society?
15
2019
Luis Garay, "Fisicología", 2013. Image courtesy of the artist
15 2019
24.06.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Santiago Villanueva, Luis Garay
From a personal analysis of the stages of training to the relationship of the university, the street, and the theater, artist Luis Garay presents a personal analysis of the scene around performance and institutions in Buenos Aires, in conversation with curator Santiago Villanueva.
15 2019
01.07.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Cracky Rodríguez
The artist Cracky Rodríguez reflects on his collective practice in El Salvador, in which he uses art as a tool to question and redefine the Salvadoran imaginary of conflict through different forms of expression.
15 2019
08.07.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Javier Payeras
Writer Javier Payeras revises the conformation of the poetic action in Guatemala, proposing the intersection between text and artistic gesture as an attitude of resistance to face the complex situation of the Guatemalan: their isolation, fragmentation, memory, and cultural contradictions.
15 2019
15.07.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Víctor del Moral, Isaac Olvera
Artists Isaac Olvera and Víctor del Moral talk with Diego del Valle Ríos about the potential for dislocating the certainties created by language. If the constructs of a system that denies the possibility of otherness reside in the word and the text, what is left for the body to subvert of the languages that organize it?
15 2019
22.07.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Francisca Benítez
Artist Francisca Benítez writes about how her performance practice questions the limits of hearing/oralist communication in conjunction with communication methods employed by Deaf communities in order to open up new collaborative possibilities.
15 2019
12.08.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Hanna Novak, Cori Kresge, Liz Magic Laser
Basándose en la investigación de Liz Magic Laser, Cori Kresge y Hanna Novak sobre las prácticas actuales de “biohacking,” movimiento extático y retiros corporativos que expanden la mente, Cori Kresge, intérprete y curadora, guía a nuestrxs lectorxs a través de una serie de ejercicios de respiraciones dinámicas, visión y tacto que pueden realizarse en casa.
15 2019
19.08.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Minia Biabiany
Building on the encounter between the body and Caribbean imaginary as forms of sensitive and corporeal interpretation for the building of other perspectives outside the colonizing and capitalist format, the artist Minia Biabiany sketches pedagogic reflections on projects she has led, such as Semillero Caribe and Plataforma Doukou.
15 2019
26.08.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Sofía Carrillo
Curator Sofía Carrillo reflects on the archive and the document from territories of displacement, «occurrence», and the politics of the activation of memory derived from approaches discussed in the conference «Archivos fuera de lugar» [Displaced archives].
15 2019
02.09.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
FERNANDO ESCOBAR, Helena Producciones
Curator Fernando Escobar converses with the collective Helena Producciones about the strategies and operations that activate the archive created by the Cali Festival of Performance and the Escuela Móvil de Saberes (The Mobile School of Knowledge) in relation to its distribution through graphic reproduction and the media.
15 2019
09.09.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Calixto Ramírez, Abril Zales
Curator Abril Zales and artist Calixto Ramírez converse about the body as a tool for art and resistance, the impact of the daily gesture, and the power of the singular within a body-collective.
15 2019
16.09.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Lorena Tabares Salamanca
Lorena Tabares, co-editor of this issue, recaps ten performances that took place in Mexico between the 1990s and the first decade 2000s. Here the first part.
15 2019
30.09.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Lorena Tabares Salamanca
Lorena Tabares, co-editor of this issue, recaps ten performances that took place in Mexico between the 1990s and the first decade 2000s.
15 2019
30.09.2019
Issue 15: Gunpowder Body
Pilar Villela
From a set of perplexities that for the writer and artist Pilar Villela involves the invitation to this issue, the author points to certain areas of tension and conflict of three aspects of the artistic that survive in the transition from the modern to the contemporary.