A War Has Been Unleashed on Our Bodies

If war is a trade, who will be the lucky soldiers who will finish off our bodies?

Lucky because they will have in their hands ancestral and bastard blood. Because we, or at least I, am not a mestizo, I am a bastard. Because the merging was not horizontal, but forced, subdued, and clandestine.

I want to make it clear that for me, writing and thinking are typical activities of the upper middle class. Therefore, I assume the privilege of being able to write these lines,

because where I come from, thinking is only useful as long as it is a tool for day-to-day subsistence.

Allow me to generalize this statement, which is only intended to clarify one of the many realities faced by my region, where one is born, learns to speak an embedded language, with some luck is able to go to school, with more luck learns to read and write, then finds a partner in life, has a son, a daughter, almost as a conquest of one’s own, offers one’s body as cheap labor, and prepares to finally disappear—and thought only serves or functions to the extent that it can help sustain and/or support that structure, and not to write or generate a thought for a book or a magazine.

That is why my writing is always a desperate attempt not only to finish mourning my dead sister, but also, as if I believed it possible, at a reconciliation with the world.

I left my childhood home fleeing from poverty and violence, and although many would like this statement to be a metaphor, I always emphasize that there is none. I was born and raised in a town called San Francisco located in the Valle Grande Department, Jujuy, a province in the north of Argentina bordering Chile and Bolivia; in those lands which I ran through as a child there are nine aboriginal communities. There, poverty, violence, grief, loss, and social, economic, and cultural injustice are real; I also believe that this cruel reality is not only in my lands, which are no longer mine, but also in different towns on the outskirts of any capital city.

I am going to tell you about myself, because perhaps no one is interested in doing so. My life, which is what I think I know best, is now exhibited as merchandise on the gondolas of the contemporary art market both in Argentina and in Europe. I have placed myself at the service of the status quo that remains intact; my rotten and stinking life will try to sicken those bodies that devour me to satisfy the hunger at the banquets of art. I have biologically been given a body, and I take charge of it, I do not deny it, I assume myself as the old world which has been denied by the history of humanity, and in an art market that devours everything, my body is like those offerings I used to make with my mother when I was a child with water and corn flour.

I am currently working on a trilogy of family plays, an investigation of the roles of the father, mother, and siblings within a family structure. Undoubtedly I did this project in order not to die; once again there is no metaphor. My only sister, Betiana Cruz, was a victim of the medical and social negligence that exists in my country, where she was left to die at the age of eighteen, for being poor, for having aboriginal features, and for being pregnant at such a young age. Bodies like my father’s, my mother’s, my brothers’, and mine have always been in danger; we were born with iron daggers in our hearts, so much blood that I am absolutely sure it could stain the seas, because blood is always thicker than water.

Our bodies survive a society that longs to be white,

and it seems that against the desire of a physical or symbolic disappearance there is nothing we can do, but we stand up, for those who today, unfortunately, are no longer here, and we decide (I decide) to question and accept that we have been colonized by the narratives of a Eurocentric-Aristotelian theater, which have been embedded in our geography, have structured our cosmogonies, have made us immobile and without opportunity for change, like a museum piece. The biographical in my artistic practice takes the struggles of those people who walk the path of identity self-affirmation, self-knowledge, political positioning, because perhaps only in this way is it possible to propose a scene whose purpose is not only to be a work of art in itself, but that can contribute to generating scenarios of discussion about social exclusion, about a racist, homophobic, and aporophobic society.

This body, tired of being talked about, tired of the center always telling us how we think, feel, and desire.

We take the only thing we have, our body, and with our brothers and children, we will build an army—not to execute; we leave behind the idea that the extermination of the body of the other is the way out. We come here desiring a better world, and let it be clear: in our lives, where we do not live but survive, metaphor does not exist. These tired bodies will not come to claim anything from you, but to desire to mend a world damaged by the enormous violence on racialized bodies. In this struggle our armor will be embroidered with sequins detached from the sky itself.