Traversing is a movement that confabulates with time

We are thrilled to announce Travesías Terremoto; a residency program for Latin American artists designed to create spaces for collective research and reflection throughout the Americas and the Caribbean.

It seems the world as we know it is not enough. Beyond all the collective or individual losses, the world itself is vanishing¹. There is a lack of meaning and an incapacity based on the human paradigm to preserve and hold us accountable for the common world. The contemporary crisis led by global warming, neoliberal capitalism, the colonial logics that shape life and the incapacity to assume the failure of our utopias announce that the horizon has become opaque: we inhabit futureless imaginaries. How to enable something different? What paths and routes can allow us to envisage the possibility of other confines? How do we stimulate the imagination and allow ourselves to continue creating tools for the future?

If it’s true that the world at large has lost its ability to keep society together, disassociating us from ourselves, the environment and the others, the main challenge would be to traverse a common world. Yet these commonalities must not be grasped from an homogeneous perspective, but from acknowledging its differences. Gloriza Anzaldúa defines a left-handed world; an inaugural act of a we that grows as a force to oppose the world of exclusive reason, patriarchy, heteronormativity and chrononorm. Her left-handed universe is the ability of marginal subjectivities to unite and challenge the established order as a vital and common wager.

During the last couple of years—a time of much turmoil and uncertainties—, Terremoto has undergone a process of transformation that aims to keep our practice in tune with the artistic community, but foremost, to create a left-handed world with common places to resist, reimagine, and rethink together. We developed a new artist-oriented program that aims to create critical spaces for research and thought and provide artists with intriguing landscapes and topics of research to keep developing our anti-patriarchal, decolonial and antiracist focus under new strategies. Yet, we insist on discussing urgent artistic and curatorial practices across our geopolitical and affective realities.

Therefore, we are thrilled to announce Travesías Terremoto; a residency program for Latin American artists carried out in collaboration with Ayarkut designed to create spaces for collective research and reflection throughout the Americas. Divided into yearly iterations, each volume will be framed in a specific territory across the continent and unfold a particular research topic to articulate our concerns and interests. This will allow us to map and explore extensively decentralized territories in the Americas, giving the opportunity for Latin American/Latinx cultural practitioners to travel, dialogue, write and research with fully-funded programs. Thus, every volume will create dialogues with communities, environments and contexts to grapple with the complexities of a place. Furthermore, in order to connect the editorial core of Terremoto with the tangible experiences of the residency, each artist will have a space on our website to commission texts, expanding their current interests and practices around the central theme of the year’s volume, permeating our platform transversally.

The first four volumes of Travesías seek to think about another types of relationship with our environment, and to initiate critical-reflexive investigations around human/non-human narratives, magical thinking, nature, planetary and interplanetary remedies. Through multidisciplinary and speculative research we seek to encourage residents to investigate possible alliances, resistances and complicities capable of challenging the hegemonic system that haunts us from a sensitive, experimental and radical perspective, but above all, with an imaginative gaze. We are certain that imagining has always been a strategy to exist within utopian worlds. Making speculative gestures, despite being unrealizable, is precisely where the construction of the future begins. It is enough to remember that the first trip to the Moon in 1683, the first utopia mapped in 1516 or the incredible technological improvement of submarines in 1800 were not suggested by science, but by fiction.

Travesías Terremoto seeks to generate conversations and fabulations where a common ground is sustained. Spaces that trigger conversations, encounters, refugees and dialogues in the face of the disenchantments of the world, enabling routes that allow us to glimpse the possible; there where doubt lies, but also the power to unleash the potentialities of the could be. This program is a testing ground that uses radical imagination to expand and challenge our relationship with history. It seeks to slip through the cracks of an already fissured world and open the possibility of conceiving intermediate, fantastic and improbable places that allow us to rediscover a common place beyond uncertainty.