Issue 23

Dark Matter

11.07.2022 - 20.09.2022

We threaten to unleash the
furious gale of love
—Grupo Eros (1975)

I am simply Kino
—Kino no Tabi (2000)

Television screens flickered all over the continent, in towns, villages, shanty towns, middle-class homes, favelas, communities, and perhaps in the kitchens and bedrooms of the palatial mansions of gated communities. Children and young people of the last decades, of the last century, and the first decades of the 21st century watch a universe of animated characters, in groups, after school or just passing by the street, on the only TV in the neighborhood or alone in their own room with the bed made up by a maid. The world of adults is, in turn, moved by invasions, dictatorships, impossible debt, wars, strikes, revolts, soup kitchens, currency exchange, shopping malls, internet, computers, consumption and prepayments, infinite working hours, unemployment, inflation, and financial accumulation. The adult world does not pay much attention to a series of characters with colorful hair, superpower balls, missile tits, forests, motorcycles, talking monsters, and multiple transmuting existences. A world of little pocket monsters that will dwell among them, suspended and invisible even to their gaze, only to then become visible on their lithium battery phones. Could the adults from cyber-accessible social classes have been surprised when in the 2000s hentai, yaoi, yuri, futanai, and other images began to appear in their online pornography searches?

How did the relationship between the sexuality, consumption, and pleasure of these characters impact our bodies, struggles, and desires? Do Lady Oscar, Hello Kitty, Kare Kano, Sailor Moon, Robotech, Spirited Away, Lovely Complex, The Little Mermaid, Yasuke, and Super Mario Bros. have anything to do with imagining politics of resistance to conservative neoliberalisms and the creation of new modes of erotic emancipation and social trans-formation beyond—or more to the point of—Anglo-European queer identity politics? What happens to these imaginaries now that their beautiful incarnations are being pursued by the neoconservative movements of national security policies and economic austerity?

From a critical perspective, not only beyond the pleasure principle but also closer to queer somatopolitical practices, I wonder: What are our erotic relations with the past? Can we invent an erogenealogy of our America? Do we have our own erohistoriography of colonial trauma and the pleasures of resistance? Our incomplete bodies, which can’t, our ocular membranes overstimulated and tired, all the ancestors already summoned and eroticized, now that we already know that desire by itself is not even the only motor of our lives, and even less sufficient for a political project of transformation, now that we agree that Sade is an accountant of asses and equivalents, and that the world is not beautiful, therefore it is, what figurations are now our objects of pleasure, love, and revolution?

In this long and strange Westernized post-world: What new erotic surfaces of transmutation are we configuring? What is the relationship between image, performativity, and wealth? How are the erotics of money modulated in relation to the forms of economic production of contemporary art and its visual machines? What episode in the saga of deconstructing colonial love are we in?

23
2022

Rafaela Kennedy, Vaskes Eterna, 2019. Print cotton on paper. 105 × 70 × 4 cm

23 2022

23 2022

23 2022

23 2022

23 2022

23 2022

23 2022

23 2022

23 2022

23 2022

23 2022

23 2022

filter by

Category

Geographic Zone

date