21.10.2019 - 13.01.2020
Co-edited with María Elena Ortiz
We live in a present of eyes irritated by tear gas, by smog in the cities, by the ash of forests consumed by flames, by the excessive brightness of screens. When the neoliberal capitalist system, that oppressive abstract construction, appeals to the gaze, it is to wear it out, disorient it and overwhelm it. Its purpose is to control it in order to limit the possibilities of the imagination—that irrational expression of freedom.
Lowering the guard of the always-vigilant, domesticated eye, which maintains the pulse and flow of accelerated cognitive perception through our consumption, is to allow the oneiric to expand as a potent moment of vulnerability. To walk in the darkness of our eyes is to meet ourselves again, to inaugurate a process of autonomy. What does not encompass the certainty of a full, prefabricated and consumable image?
Finding ourselves in an ocular-centric world, in this issue of Terremoto we will arrest the voracity implicit in the gaze so that it may rest, stopping contemplatively and curiously on cryptic images, those blurred, camouflaged, secret images so difficult to evoke and which awake within us doubts that appeal to our fears and desires. Dreams, premonitions, spiritual manifestations, ancestral links, fantasies, all of these are powerful fugitive images; riddle-images that, when discovered in the reflection of our eyes, force us to rest, to blink, as a pathway to the irrationality that accommodates other possible realities. In a system that continually demands that everything be visible, how important are secrecy, opacity, and the cryptic as narrative possibilities in terms of the imaginative? Could we say that in them lies a power of the image as micro-micro-politics?
16
2019
Hulda Gúzman, "the nightmare" of the series "be kind to your demons", 2018. Acrylic gouache on cedar plywood, 68 x 68 cm. Image courtesy of the artist
16 2019
21.10.2019
Issue 16: Images Quiver in the Dark In the near future, USA
Micha Cárdenas
The artist micha cárdenas highlights the importance of rethinking the image projected by the concept of «the human» in order to dismantle the exclusion and control it exercises over marginalized subjectivities. Placing virtual image as a space of power that, from fiction, she gives room to alternate realities that imagine other possibilities of existence.
16 2019
28.10.2019
Issue 16: Images Quiver in the Dark Kongo
Jeffreen M. Hayes
Curator and scholar Jeffreen M. Hayes refers to the African Kongo cosmology to place the US American black visual culture as that space full of signifiers where the wishes of an entire community have been deposited, a space that—from the visual—stretches and expands to reformulate what we conceive as a future and encourage us to imagine other possibilities of it through self-recognition, meditation and healing.
16 2019
04.11.2019
Issue 16: Images Quiver in the Dark Río São Francisco
Davi de Jesus do Nascimento, Beatriz Lemos
Curator Beatriz Lemos speaks with artist Davi de Jesus Do Nascimento to highlight how that which moves through the body changes narrative and political concerns and generates alternative ways of experiencing memory through the realms of fantasy and imagination.
16 2019
11.11.2019
Issue 16: Images Quiver in the Dark Angola, Brazil, Congo, Costa da Mina, Fortaleza, French Guinea, Ghana, Guarulhos, Nigeria, Pachamama, Praia do Futuro, São Paulo, Umbanda
Cláudio Bueno
After situating Brazilian extractivism as the continuum of an intercontinental colonial order, the artist and curator Cláudio Bueno points to the imaginative power of contemporary artistic practices from the South that face the fallacies perpetuated by global technological infrastructures.
16 2019
18.11.2019
Issue 16: Images Quiver in the Dark Gran Chaco, São Paulo
Duen Sacchi
The artist Duen Sacchi dismantles the concept of «fetish» to point out how—from the colonial order inaugurated by the West—narrative senses are built around time, also determining the production and consumption of artistic objets, bodies, and subjectivities from the gaze. Starting from the Paranaguazu fire in Brazil, Sacchi reflects on the destructive power of what has been established so far.
16 2019
25.11.2019
Issue 16: Images Quiver in the Dark Azcapotzalco, CDMX, Chile, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Tijuana
Felipe Zuñiga, Sayak Valencia
A partir de un análisis de los regímenes escópicos de violencia en México y Latinoamérica, la teórica Sayak Valencia, junto con el arte-educador Felipe Zúñiga, constelan imágenes encriptadas como una respuesta a la asepsia instaurada por los imaginarios ultra-cosméticos producidos desde estructuras de poder.
16 2019
02.12.2019
Issue 16: Images Quiver in the Dark USA
Marco Antonio Flores
Based on the synergy between flesh and stone present in two photographs by artist Laura Aguilar, curator Marco Antonio Flores proposes a rethinking of hegemonic ways of seeing, while recognizing, through a queer poetic, intrinsic vulnerability of inhabiting and making bodies present.
16 2019
09.12.2019
Issue 16: Images Quiver in the Dark
Bruno Enciso Vargas, Alan Sierra, Diego del Valle Ríos
Artist Alan Sierra, philosopher Bruno Enciso and Diego del Valle Ríos, editor of «Terremoto», weave a network of interrogations around the instability of images. Amidst the hypervisibility that constantly over-saturates us, they begin to question the possibility of a pause: The blink lies as a power condition to critically look that which we gaze at.
16 2019
16.12.2019
Issue 16: Images Quiver in the Dark
Hulda Guzmán, Maria Elena Ortiz
Curator María Elena Ortiz—co-editor of this issue—talks with artist Hulda Guzmán to point out different aspects of Surrealism that echo in her artistic practice. Together, they underline that the oniric and the uncertain can still cope with the hegemonic imaginary that blur the intimate.
16 2019
06.01.2020
Issue 16: Images Quiver in the Dark
Mamadou Badiane
Scholar Mamadou Badiane reevaluates Suzanne Césaire’s figure as a fundamental axis for the study on Antillean cultural identity. Rendered invisible by history, her radical ideas regarding racialization as an expanding process were eclipsed by a sociopolitical context that in her place accepted other voices.
16 2019
13.01.2020
Issue 16: Images Quiver in the Dark
du monde noir
Through a selection of notations from diaries, poems and photographs of the du monde noir collective, a poetic and oniric survey is generated not only to remember the Afrosurrealist history of the city of Martinique, but also to reaffirm the Black existence as its spinal axe.
