el destello de algo más

Faced with the collapse of this earth, which are the presents that escape the light? This curatorial prelude takes the form of a time capsule as a memory-making strategy. A memory that speculates on the latent presents lurking in the colonial eye, in whose spaces of possibility, the unthinkable may unfold.

November 18 – December 16, 2023, Laguna, CDMX 

Artists: Seba Calfuqueo (CH), Derzu Campos (MX), Valentina Díaz (ARG), Fibra Colectivo (PE), Alan Hernández (MX), Día Muñoz (EC), Ventura Profana (BRA), Chaveli Sifre (PR)

Curated by: Helena Lugo y Ana Gabriela García

el destello de algo más is the 10th edition of the exhibition program La Postal, launched by Terremoto in 2018, created to investigate curatorial devices around archival materials. After a couple of years of pause, we resume this initiative as a prelude to the thoughts and feelings stimulated by Interplanetary Simulations –the first research residency launched by Terremoto through its transdisciplinary project Travesías–, which seeks to delve into the possibilities around utopian strategies of world-making beyond the hegemonic future.

Faced with the collapse of this earth, which are the presents that escape the light? This curatorial prelude takes the form of a time capsule as a memory-making strategy. A memory that speculates on the latent presents lurking in the colonial eye, in whose spaces of possibility, the unthinkable may unfold.

Time capsules are devices that have accompanied our ways of historicizing as well as our policies of forgetting. They are traces of the evolution of life forms throughout History; fossils that inaugurate a certain nostalgia for the future. Seen from the modern Western history, the time capsule has served as a Wunderkammer, perhaps more hermetic, that allows a specific subjectivity to be safeguarded and nurtured—just as an institutionalized archive would later do– legitimizing the bending of the arch of time towards progress.

The stories contained therein do not escape hegemonic narratives of exclusion. However, it is in these processes of renunciation and shelter where the creation of fictions occurs. The vitality that lies in the imaginative potentialities around the construction of time and language brings with it a critical review of the processes of capital accumulation, the relationship with the spaces we inhabit and our places of enunciation. In what way can we play in our favor the discordant links between memory and history that dominate the modes of production, their dissemination and, consequently, their ability to envision the future?

The capsule allows reassembling the rupture between times: in the spiral of History, a cluster of non-hegemonic narratives shine to claim the life contained within them. It escapes the present and introduces that which could have happened: the possible flashes as potentiality. Thus, in this (a)temporal display, the voices of artists overflow with a practice that weaves moving fibers to resist oblivion and in turn, activate other ways of making world.

The works contained here whisper alchemical spells that allow us to heal capital drives and embody ancestral knowledge. They glimpse the astral latitudes that give new meanings to the earth. They tell us about the power of the mycelium to appropriate the modern vestige and remind us that everything has been pulverized. Despite this, the insubordination and transformative power of the spore permeates: in the face of the imminent catastrophe, can the machine celebrate life? Other pieces involve unusual flowers that sparkle like poems in dialogue with other works where the code and its writing, whether analog or digital, long for the warmth of a body and the strength of a language traversed by affection.

Seen from here, el destello de algo más operates in an undetermined time and space, like an emitting source of impossible messages that cast us into the discontinuities of linear time. In that brief moment when the message has no receiver or resonance, the capsule becomes a portal. What we find inside is a memory that shines and has slipped away from the colonial gaze. A fabric of memory becomes visible to communicate its message from a broken time. Only then can we close our eyes to lose ourselves in the seductive nature of its possibilities and feel the texture of that earth we once imagined.

Public Program

1. Intergallactic allies: Crusades of science fiction cinema in Latin American shamanism, November 23, 2023

Film-conference curated by Itala Schmelz that traces the relationships between Latin American ancestral knowledge, chamanism and science fiction films produced in Mexico during the second half of the 20th century and today. The selection proposed by Itala seeks to analyze the progress promoted by the West and claims the right to think and imagine a future from here.

2. As this ground crumbles, November 30, 2023

Guided tour with curators Ana Gabriela García and Helena Lugo within the exhibition to discuss the time capsule, its artistic proposals and present the objectives and strategies that will be carried out during the first volume of Travesías Terremoto: Interplanetary Simulations.

3. A connects with her blood and B leaves closing the curve, performance by Valentina Díaz, December 16, 2023

In a spiral route, 2 figures dialogue through repeating elements generating a cycle. The relationship between what shines and what is hidden makes the image appear. A mechanical metronome evokes the pulse of the conversation by pacing the time.

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This edition of Terremoto La Postal has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Ayarkut.