The Gaze of the Lizards

Terremoto talks to Duen Sacchi—guest editor for the past year—about his editorial vision, processes, priorities, themes and concerns about the writings, collectivities and artistic practices of the region.

During the last year (2021-2022), our guest editor and curator Duen Neka’hen Sacchi—selected through an open-call—has been in charge of leading the printed and digital contents of Terremoto and proposing an intersectional and anti-racist view of the region’s artistic practices. During three printed issues and a diversity of reports, videos, interviews and opinions, he sought to generate a space for the construction of collective thinking that would allow us to see the complexity of the cultural agents while making a small cartography of formal genealogies of our common spaces, prioritizing the epistemologies of critical resistance to the colonial and neoliberal processes that haunt the continent.

Terremoto: Can you tell us how you thought the last three issues of the magazine? What is The Gaze of the Lizards about?

Duen Sacchi: When I started with the project, I did not know that these would be the last issues, now looking back they acquire a different tenor. The Gaze of the Lizards was born from the reading of El vendedor de pasados [The seller of pasts] by the Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa. There is an extraordinary character there: it is a small lizard that narrates its dreams and the particular point of view of its body at the level of objects. With its non-transferable experience of not being able to speak and, at the same time, that its speech is an almost human laughter—where the adverb almost is inescapable—, it is a character who wakes up with “ants grazing between its toes”, flees into the darkness and is attracted by the scraps of voices in the house; into the pages of books. A protagonist who is fascinated with the strategies of stealing mangoes and guavas, with the sound of birds, with the river’s back and the stars. The philosophy of Agualusa’s lizards is a small treatise on the effects of power in the practices of memory where the lizard wonders about the order of fiction in the construction of reality, and about the structure of dreams as a way of understanding wakefulness. This lizard-perspective is what permeates the entire project, but instead of a single voice, I appeal to enable a lizard-community of creation and thought that experiences from different visual and writing practices our imaginaries about the poetic word, artistic work, contemporary politics, form and visual matter, affectivities and corporealities, eroticism, criticism, fantasy. The gaze of the lizards is ultimately an invitation to invent multiple cosmo-aesthetic diplomacies among its participants.

T: Can you roughly tells us what each issue is about: Radiant, Dark Matter and Head of Earth?

DS: The Gaze of the Lizards as a project proposed to establish dialogues to think together practices of emancipation, genealogies situated on the body, sexuality and pleasure and to reflect on the traumatic effects of violent death in the region. A journey that is unclosed and inconclusive, but rather the beginning of a mutual conversation. The titles of each issue were born from the reading of texts and conversations with writers, artists, co-workers, friends, poetic references, songs, dreams. Each issue holds within it not only the possibility of the next one, but also a conversation among its contents. It is not a linear edition, even if it is established in an ascending numerology, but a spiral one, which deepens and resonates.

The first edition, Radiant (because I understood that each text had been created with the heart in mind, dazzling as the poem Illimani by Óscar Cerruto) started from a series of questions: what are the ways in which freedom concerns us? How to encode freedom for life, to build communities and worlds, not only “sustainable”, but of racial, social, environmental, economic, corporal, poetic justice where living together with other ontological furnishings is not a constant threat to life? Is it possible to resignify the freedom that is copied for accumulation, of aggressive, totalizing reaction, that freedom too close to the domination of things, where in turn “things” acquire such value that they make people suffer? What are the practices of emancipation that we are invoking?

The second issue, Dark Matter (which makes up almost the entire universe, an insistent reference to South America’s eco-centric punk poetics) invokes the possibility of thinking about our erotic relations with the past. Thus, a series of profane genealogies for the history of contemporary art in the region, such as the punk bands of the nineties, the aesthetic practices not recognized by the Westernizing canon, anime, fashion, popular music, the bodies marked by trauma, appeared as a possibility to think if it is possible to invent an erogenealogy of our America and if we have a common erohistoriography on colonial trauma and the pleasures of resistance. The answers located in the region gave an account of the particularities of our fantasies, our struggles and our fluids and corporealities.

Finally, Head of Earth (which takes as a reference Idjahure Kadiwel’s conceptualization of colonial necropolitics and affective resistances) focuses on a fundamental question to build a common future: How did we get here? What do we do with the common trauma of violent death? So, I proposed to get together 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 tell us about the multiple forms of dislocation and resistance to our economies and fantasies of violent death, and our ceremonies of healing, insurgency and mourning.

T: In the history of Terremoto we had never had an artist as editor, that changes a lot the relationship we have with images. For the first time contributions such as comics, poetry or photonovels are more prominent. You made the texts much more visual; can you tell us about your experience with this and what kind of explorations you want to make around the image?

DS: I was interested in the complexity of the work on images that we artists, writers, thinkers of the region do. It seemed important to me the multiple epistemological furnishings that inhabit and inhabit us and how these impact what we create and what we imagine as matter, form and image. I also wanted to enable the mutual recognition of the different artistic genealogies from which we draw, and specifically to account for the discussions, tensions and interpellations that exist in the continent in relation to Westernizing, patriarchal, cisnormocentric, ableist, colonial, racist academic classifications. It seemed to me that it was a beautiful opportunity to propose an interregional, transdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogue on artistic practices, its actors, referents, inquiries in the region. I am interested in the image and its genealogies located in the territory, as a material insurrection, as a revolutionary subject, as the flesh of a poem, as glitch, as futurity.

T: How was it navigating between your commissions for the print magazine and all the digital content for the online platform? Can you tell us about the highlights of the online content?

I relied a lot on my friends and colleagues from different fields of art and teammates to be able to think of relationships between the printed content and what appeared online. I think the online action was tentacular, dialogued, and tried to move away from the ideas of margin/center and somehow echo what was happening in the printed magazine. In the beginning when the blog was still around it was really an opportunity to map the scene in the region and enter into conversation with multiple agents of the scene. On the other hand, in each section I allowed myself to experiment with content and formats, we managed to put in motion and touch some art spaces, voices, images that generated conversations that exceeded the networks and platforms.

T: This year the Western art world was full of biennials and fairs, such as documenta or the Venice Biennale, how did you approach this, trying to think about it from a Latin American point of view? How did you approach everything that happened outside the Americas?

DS: One of the objectives of the project was to propose the possibility of imagining spaces of legitimacy located, to give relevance to the local scenes of our region, so the “outside” I was spinning it in relation to a critical reflection on how these spaces affected the look, participation and practices of artists, critics, curators in the “interiority”. I was interested in maintaining dialogues with art agents that are part of the diaspora and migration, but I understood that this had been worked on in depth in previous issues, so I insisted on a situated look and on the account of the effects of those Western art spaces on local artists and spaces of discussion. I wanted to invite to disrupt the univocal (colonial) conversation that the continent maintains with Europe on the one hand, and the North/Center/South, Pacific/Atlantic relationship of the continent with its structural (racist) inequalities, its nodes of symbolic (economic) legitimization in relation to contemporary art and to propose other continental and intercontinental interlocutions that were barely sketched but that it would be fundamental to continue creating.

T: This last issue has a very particular aesthetic, which evokes the aesthetics of the fanzine or punk, can you tell us what is behind this decision?

DS: The project of the gaze of the lizards begins to unfold within a history and an already established format that the magazine had, from the beginning I knew that proposing some transformations would take time, so the last issue is linked to the inquiries that I was making throughout my transit through the magazine: revisiting common genealogies, ways of doing, aesthetic appropriations, and political reappropriations. And finally, to propose a situated object -working in company with Surya Son in each of the editions- where the futures, contradictions, limits and interruptions of doing under the pressures of colonial capital, the consequences of western technologies of exploitation -racist- of paper and lithium extraction, the community of thought, critical creation, poetic and political irreverence, the marks of trauma and the happiness of meeting each other can appear.

T: Finally, in the three covers we can also find your work as an artist. How do you articulate these pieces, your writing and your process as an artist with editing a magazine?

DS: The possibility of having to two cover images allowed me to articulate a series of ideas shared by Elian Chali, Rafaela Kennedy and Carbon. Artists with whom the conversation and the complicity of research accompanied me in different moments of my life and of the process of The Gaze of the Lizards. They are covers in companionship. My practice focuses on the continuities and disruptions between the textual plot, the image as an indentation in the matter, the word as a material remainder and the memory as a common, dialogic, processual object. Also guided by the question: Who portrays what? Who is portrayed? Therefore, who or what can be a “cover”, in my case I invent the mythology of the lizards as a familiar origin and I portray them. At the same time, I open the interpellation of those portraits with other artists who also wonder in one way or another about what or who remains in the common affective visual memory. In this sense, the editorial practice was for me the possibility of proposing a series of collective written objects.