14.02.2022 - 02.05.2022
Disenchanted
perpetually dazzled Illimani
—Óscar Cerruto
The metaphysics inherited from the different nations and Indigenous peoples of Abya Yala—still current today—account for the fact that animal species and other species are conceived as many types of persons, peoples, societies; that is, as political entities. In this sense, a lizard that wonders how the perfume exuded by the great battles emanating from the pages of books ignores the arduous walk of insects, animals, and their trail of crumbs on its pages, is a political question. Lizards have an extraordinary peculiarity: they are always spatially located. Although temporality is not elusive to them, reverie, sleep, or a siesta are lizard-conceptualizations of space: to quiet down, to escape. Although dreams powerfully bind the effects of truth and reality, a profound instance of knowledge and emancipation, it is the exceptional territorial astuteness of lizards, their slight but profound trace upon the land that summons us to their gaze. The lizards’ gaze is a line of inquiry that will vibrate through the next three issues of Terremoto, to be published in 2022. This inquiry is a ploy against the western specular imposition in which sameness and otherness become persecutory forms: instead of mirrors we propose material and spiritual thinking and practices that serve as an invitation to mutation, to the critique of mono-technological and mono-cosmological fantasies, to question the desire for the future as apocalypse. The gaze of the lizards aims to instigate multiple cosmoaesthetic diplomacies among its participants.
In this first stillness on earth, the lizards’ gaze, immersed in the sweet greenery of the yunga, where the fiber-optic connection does not resist the high temperatures, the cables melt, the signal comes and goes and thus interjects small disruptions into the imaginary of invisibility, ubiquity, non-mediation of neoliberal freedom. These untimely disconnections allow us to talk softly with one another on the hillsides, under the curious gaze of the toucans, and ask ourselves about the apparent impossibility of thinking about practices for emancipation other than just being free—freeing ourselves— from helplessness, despair, fear, precariousness, violence— economic, racial, gender, and so much more—that is, just the freedom of survival. Between the breath of the trees, the thundering of insects’ footsteps, the bursting of fruits, the lizards’ gaze wonders: How does freedom concern us? How to encode freedom for life, to build communities and worlds that aren’t only “sustainable” but racially, socially, environmentally, economically, corporally, poetically just, where living together with other ontological furnishings is not a constant threat to life? Is it possible to redefine the freedom that is co-opted for accumulation, of aggressive, totalizing reaction, that freedom too close to the domination of things, where “things” in turn acquire such a value that they make people suffer? Nothing is certain here; these texts have been written by opening the petals of uncertainty, dazzled from the confinement, sifting and fleeing, creating imaginary villages from the effervescence of a small insect, building a world of bricks with no heritage beyond the act of mud itself. Erring once again, failing, creating a trance of pain, inventing much more than survival on the skin of our deserts. Word-binding, singing, freestyle, sound and baguala: the writing here is overthrown, by dance, sweat, and siestas. These texts have been written with a radiant heart.
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This edition of Terremoto was possible thanks to the support of the Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales (SACPC), through the program “Fomento a Proyectos y Coinversiones Culturales (FPCC)” 2021.
22
2022
22 2022
28.02.2022
Issue 22: Radiant
raquel salas rivera
raquel salas rivera tells the story of a plant, the mimosa púdica. how is it possible to surrender to the touch of an uncertain world? in this poetic gesture, the intelligence of the plant skin mints the right to life as a caress.
22 2022
07.03.2022
Issue 22: Radiant
Nohora A. Arrieta Fernández
Nohora A. Arrieta approaches the work of Brazilian artist Tiago Sant’Ana with a question: what does it mean to be free, to be, completely, and thus being to open infinite horizons for our practice as critics or artists or writers?
22 2022
14.03.2022
Issue 22: Radiant
César González
Writer and filmmaker César González writes a chronicle on the aftermath of confinement where he explores the relationship between merchandise and the prison system. Who benefits from the “crime industry”?
22 2022
21.03.2022
Issue 22: Radiant
Joseph M. Pierce
Dayunisi is the protagonist of a myth of Cherokee origin, Joseph M. Pierce proposes this little beetle, capable of navigating between worlds, as an ancestral guide to understand our queer/cuir/cuyr and dissident becomings
22 2022
28.03.2022
Issue 22: Radiant
Andrei Fernández
Andrei Fernandez constellates, from Ogwa’s work, the powers of indigenous art despite the history of Western art, to reveal an autonomy of representation that explodes into all that time can be.
22 2022
04.04.2022
Issue 22: Radiant
América Canela
With ink, with light, with words, on T-shirts, on networks, in classrooms, on paper and walls, Ame Canela engraves the images we are missing, the brown memory of our streets, faces, and lives to make a new furrow where other possible memories shine.
22 2022
11.04.2022
Issue 22: Radiant
Doreen A. Ríos
From the trenches of digital practices, Doreen A. Ríos, with Legacy Russell’s work in hand, reflects on the tactics of glitch feminism, which in the cracks, pixelations and distortions, generates errors that dynamite the inertia of power.
22 2022
18.04.2022
Issue 22: Radiant
danie valencia sepúlveda
A banner with the phrase “Wounded Desert” produced under the context convened by the Laboratory of Graphic Arts of the Atacama Desert (LAGDA 2021) motivates researcher danie valencia sepúlveda to ask themself about the relationship between capital, freedom and mental health: What if life is not useful?
22 2022
25.04.2022
Issue 22: Radiant
Elian Chali
From the wounds that mark the body, artist Elian Chali shares a network of possibilities regarding political spaces and aesthetic agency that make the flesh’s vulnerability vibrate.
22 2022
02.05.2022
Issue 22: Radiant
Nancy Rojas
On the border, between the Great Outside and the Great Inside there are fissures that detonate fixed categories, Nancy Rojas addresses these liminal spaces within language from the transforming insurgency of trap.
22 2022
09.05.2022
Issue 22: Radiant Peru
Gisselle Girón
Curator Gisselle Girón opens her family archive and follows her grandmother’s dance steps to reflect on the desires that move us: belonging, enchantment and mourning make our bodies move, we dance to their rhythm.
22 2022
16.05.2022
Issue 22: Radiant
Gabriel Chaile
In the midst of a siesta Gabriel Chaile and Duen Sacchi talk about the histories of fragility, the genealogies of forms and the possibility of inventing new meanings that mobilize symbolic and material transformations, appealing to the political commitment of the artists.