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The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one aspect.
—Jorge Luis Borges
Like other ancestral communities, the Tohono O’odham people living in the Sonoran Desert have constructed their cosmovision of the universe around the four elements, each of which is endowed with great significance. At the center of their cosmos is the Earth, which unfolds horizontally along the four cardinal points, with priority given to the east-west axis, over which the Sun reigns. The collective narrative of the origin of the world is passed from old to young, while the desert people weave their baskets. The concentric knot that begins the pattern positions the subject before the chaos of the world; the spiral, a symbol of the complexity of earthly and subjective experience, soon becomes interspersed with different colors as the weaving progresses. The designs that characterize the weaving map possible pathways. There exists an intrinsic relationship between each cosmic direction and a color—the east is represented by white, the west by black, the north by yellow, and the south by blue. The cartography of the desert people can be found in these containers; their map-objects reveal a conception of space that reflects their vision of the world. This cosmovision implies a relationship to Earth that revolves around bodily movement. Step by step, walking becomes a practice of spatial (re)cognition.
White (East)
Walking along the spiral, we come across the signs of the environmental crisis and its global impact. Despite the essentially unanimous idea that humanity is responsible for the destruction of the planet, only a few voices are denouncing the role capitalism plays in this process. According to Jason Moore, “the Capitalocene is a geopoetics for making sense of capitalism as world-ecology of power and re/production in the web of life.” Within this framework, thinkers have begun to question the idea that all humans bear equal historical responsibility in the collapse of our world, taking into consideration how capitalist machinery promotes the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Not all communities contribute to the deterioration of the Earth with equal intensity and violence. The term Anthropocene, on the other hand, tends to locate the blame on humanity as a whole, obscuring those victims of capitalism who have been subjected to exploitation, violence, and poverty, and preemptively closing off further investigation into the effects of capitalism and the ruins it leaves behind on Earth.
We are inhabiting a planet in ruins. The material relics of the past present themselves as objects to be preserved, testaments to a harmonious world impervious to time. Not just any old patrimonial vestiges, this refuse testifies to the unstoppable advancement of progress. This displacement hides the fact that these ruins are nothing but fetishized debris. Looking at it another way, we discover that this debris, that material waste and subjective testimony of different collapses, extends everywhere around us. Debris is the materiality of the Earth. How many spaces were (re)constructed with it? Identifying the destructive forces of collapse, we focus our attention away from ruins as objects to the processes that sediment layers of imperial debris around the Earth. Thus, let us look to the east. Following 1492, the civilization-barbary binary came to constitute one of the central pillars of the Capitalocene, based on the premise of “dispossessing human beings of their humanity.” The search for this palimpsest of debris makes visible one of the longest histories of domination, sustained through other forms of violence relating to class, race, and gender. Although paradoxically, this history is where our ideas of progress and modernity come from.
Yellow (North)
Like in Ursula K. Le Guin’s story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973), once the secret that upholds the system is uncovered, many will ignore the truth in order to continue on as before. We’re heading north. We suspect the questions and answers about what the Earth is going through will come from there. Like man’s first steps on our planet, walking is a recurrent human practice in the search for subsistence, as when we first explore a new world or discover how much we don’t know about the collapse of an old one. Passing out of the phase of subsistence, walking acquired a symbolic dimension, inextricable from what it means to inhabit a place. With their tireless journeys, the first humans created a sophisticated and fragmentary tool, with which they were able to produce fleeting maps of familiar territories through which they repeatedly traveled by foot. This practice doesn’t substantially impact space, but for the walker, it gives meaning to everyday places.
These ephemeral maps that humans have constructed through walking have combined with other forms of environmental knowledge. Through their wanderings, hunter-gatherers discovered a range of ecological relationships, including the natural histories of certain species and associations of species that emerged in specific locations. This activity problematizes the ontological gaze separating “nature” and “culture.” Nature-culture hybrids integrate the landscape surrounding us, without any divisions. These socio-ecological ensembles (human-nonhuman) germinate together along with their socio-spatial processes, the effect of situated historical developments. In this sense, perhaps the greatest cultural confusion stems from the idea that humans are an autonomous and self-sustaining species, whose development of socio-spatial processes has remained constant. As Anna Tsing proposes, an interspecies hermeneutic framework permits another interpretation of the diverse networks of domestication in which humans have remained trapped. In this counter-reading, it was not humans who dominated agriculture, but rather the sowing of cereal grains that made them sedentary. Viewed through the lens of this inversion, man’s superiority over other species gives way to other interspecies connections that foster the proliferation of all life-forms inhabiting the Earth. However, we must not forget that the development of these socio-natural frameworks contains contradictions, the effects of which are never neutral. In this light, the sophistication and dissemination of multiple crops allowed Europe to conquer the Earth and/or begin its collapse, the deepening of which has been unstoppable since the expansion of capitalism and/or its imaginary of progress.
Black (East)
Following the spiral and walking over Earth, we return to the west of Abya Yala—the phrase the Kuna community of Panama uses to refer to America, which has been adopted by other groups across the continent. From there, we receive knowledge about the collapse spread by certain knowledge that came from the east, and which expanded from the north. Some of these discourses have taken root and consolidated a form of rationality that justifies power, oppression, and submission to Western society and its global expansion. This project of a single world determined by individuality and the market, where the many existing worlds are unified, destroys the diversity of native communities and consumes their imaginative possibilities. However, the continuous struggle of (Latin) American ethno-territorial grassroots movements has deployed tactics of resistance, protection, and development of their territories that promise the continued survival of these other worlds. With these emerging views from the west, perhaps the challenge is to outline new pathways that continue to enable dialogue between native knowledge and established knowledge, to investigate how the spatial constructs of (Latin) American communities could generate new contributions to critical thinking and consolidate a global paradigm where all existing worlds meet.
In the face of Eurocentric and universalist worldviews, Latin American conceptions of land take into consideration the plurality and diversity of the social subjects that constitute them. Native (Latin) American worldviews focus on a variety of spaces that come together simultaneously and multivalently, rejecting the unidirectional, temporal imaginary that has dominated the modern-colonial worldview. Abya Yala appeared on a continuum of struggle between hegemonic domination with its repressive-materialist power and a subaltern resistance with its alternative-symbolic power. The search for a decolonial conception of power that takes into consideration the peripheral-economic as much as the ethno-racial and gendered relations that constitute Latin American coloniality would transform spatial power relations for the construction of a new territory. The incorporation of this collective dimension of the multi- or transterritoriality of Abya Yala also fights against the imposition of any predetermined future, ensuring a space-time that will be constantly evolving and reconstructed.
Blue (South)
As Aby Warburg suggests in his book The Serpent Ritual, looking at the stars constitutes both a kind of hope and punishment for humanity. Contemplating the sky gives us perspective on our place on Earth, where the order of the space we inhabit is imposed. If the stars are above, we are below. Our need to channel the chaos around us has led to the creation of a system of universal rules about the relationship between subject and space. However, these spatial conventions are based on an abstraction and as such are mutable. In order not to get lost, maps have become devices for knowing and demarcating the environment, networks woven with the worldviews of the environment and community that produces them, where there is no single way to represent space. Like the desert people, each society finds its own way. This multiplicity of worlds subverts and explodes established spatial order. We leave the north and walk towards the south, “because in reality our north is the south,” and we continue the spiral to stay on the path.
Again and again, we follow the spiral, interrupting the linearity of time and apprehending the materiality of space. Again and again, we return to the west, where dawn is created and the Sun rises for the Tohono O’odham. Again and again, the footprints of the Earth’s inhabitants unleash its collapse. Trapped in this eternal cycle, the threat of the planet’s annihilation brings with it a threshold of enlightenment plagued by innovations to rescue it. Life on Earth questions us. Perhaps artifice only needs us to stop to appreciate, explore, and allow a dreamlike perspective on interspecies relations and the multi-transterritoriality of this star to unfurl, while we walk in harmony with its beauty.
The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one aspect.
—Jorge Luis Borges
Like other ancestral communities, the Tohono O’odham people living in the Sonoran Desert have constructed their cosmovision of the universe around the four elements, each of which is endowed with great significance. At the center of their cosmos is the Earth, which unfolds horizontally along the four cardinal points, with priority given to the east-west axis, over which the Sun reigns. The collective narrative of the origin of the world is passed from old to young, while the desert people weave their baskets. The concentric knot that begins the pattern positions the subject before the chaos of the world; the spiral, a symbol of the complexity of earthly and subjective experience, soon becomes interspersed with different colors as the weaving progresses. The designs that characterize the weaving map possible pathways. There exists an intrinsic relationship between each cosmic direction and a color—the east is represented by white, the west by black, the north by yellow, and the south by blue. The cartography of the desert people can be found in these containers; their map-objects reveal a conception of space that reflects their vision of the world. This cosmovision implies a relationship to Earth that revolves around bodily movement. Step by step, walking becomes a practice of spatial (re)cognition.
White (East)
Walking along the spiral, we come across the signs of the environmental crisis and its global impact. Despite the essentially unanimous idea that humanity is responsible for the destruction of the planet, only a few voices are denouncing the role capitalism plays in this process. According to Jason Moore, “the Capitalocene is a geopoetics for making sense of capitalism as world-ecology of power and re/production in the web of life.” Within this framework, thinkers have begun to question the idea that all humans bear equal historical responsibility in the collapse of our world, taking into consideration how capitalist machinery promotes the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Not all communities contribute to the deterioration of the Earth with equal intensity and violence. The term Anthropocene, on the other hand, tends to locate the blame on humanity as a whole, obscuring those victims of capitalism who have been subjected to exploitation, violence, and poverty, and preemptively closing off further investigation into the effects of capitalism and the ruins it leaves behind on Earth.
We are inhabiting a planet in ruins. The material relics of the past present themselves as objects to be preserved, testaments to a harmonious world impervious to time. Not just any old patrimonial vestiges, this refuse testifies to the unstoppable advancement of progress. This displacement hides the fact that these ruins are nothing but fetishized debris. Looking at it another way, we discover that this debris, that material waste and subjective testimony of different collapses, extends everywhere around us. Debris is the materiality of the Earth. How many spaces were (re)constructed with it? Identifying the destructive forces of collapse, we focus our attention away from ruins as objects to the processes that sediment layers of imperial debris around the Earth. Thus, let us look to the east. Following 1492, the civilization-barbary binary came to constitute one of the central pillars of the Capitalocene, based on the premise of “dispossessing human beings of their humanity.” The search for this palimpsest of debris makes visible one of the longest histories of domination, sustained through other forms of violence relating to class, race, and gender. Although paradoxically, this history is where our ideas of progress and modernity come from.
Yellow (North)
Like in Ursula K. Le Guin’s story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973), once the secret that upholds the system is uncovered, many will ignore the truth in order to continue on as before. We’re heading north. We suspect the questions and answers about what the Earth is going through will come from there. Like man’s first steps on our planet, walking is a recurrent human practice in the search for subsistence, as when we first explore a new world or discover how much we don’t know about the collapse of an old one. Passing out of the phase of subsistence, walking acquired a symbolic dimension, inextricable from what it means to inhabit a place. With their tireless journeys, the first humans created a sophisticated and fragmentary tool, with which they were able to produce fleeting maps of familiar territories through which they repeatedly traveled by foot. This practice doesn’t substantially impact space, but for the walker, it gives meaning to everyday places.
These ephemeral maps that humans have constructed through walking have combined with other forms of environmental knowledge. Through their wanderings, hunter-gatherers discovered a range of ecological relationships, including the natural histories of certain species and associations of species that emerged in specific locations. This activity problematizes the ontological gaze separating “nature” and “culture.” Nature-culture hybrids integrate the landscape surrounding us, without any divisions. These socio-ecological ensembles (human-nonhuman) germinate together along with their socio-spatial processes, the effect of situated historical developments. In this sense, perhaps the greatest cultural confusion stems from the idea that humans are an autonomous and self-sustaining species, whose development of socio-spatial processes has remained constant. As Anna Tsing proposes, an interspecies hermeneutic framework permits another interpretation of the diverse networks of domestication in which humans have remained trapped. In this counter-reading, it was not humans who dominated agriculture, but rather the sowing of cereal grains that made them sedentary. Viewed through the lens of this inversion, man’s superiority over other species gives way to other interspecies connections that foster the proliferation of all life-forms inhabiting the Earth. However, we must not forget that the development of these socio-natural frameworks contains contradictions, the effects of which are never neutral. In this light, the sophistication and dissemination of multiple crops allowed Europe to conquer the Earth and/or begin its collapse, the deepening of which has been unstoppable since the expansion of capitalism and/or its imaginary of progress.
Black (East)
Following the spiral and walking over Earth, we return to the west of Abya Yala—the phrase the Kuna community of Panama uses to refer to America, which has been adopted by other groups across the continent. From there, we receive knowledge about the collapse spread by certain knowledge that came from the east, and which expanded from the north. Some of these discourses have taken root and consolidated a form of rationality that justifies power, oppression, and submission to Western society and its global expansion. This project of a single world determined by individuality and the market, where the many existing worlds are unified, destroys the diversity of native communities and consumes their imaginative possibilities. However, the continuous struggle of (Latin) American ethno-territorial grassroots movements has deployed tactics of resistance, protection, and development of their territories that promise the continued survival of these other worlds. With these emerging views from the west, perhaps the challenge is to outline new pathways that continue to enable dialogue between native knowledge and established knowledge, to investigate how the spatial constructs of (Latin) American communities could generate new contributions to critical thinking and consolidate a global paradigm where all existing worlds meet.
In the face of Eurocentric and universalist worldviews, Latin American conceptions of land take into consideration the plurality and diversity of the social subjects that constitute them. Native (Latin) American worldviews focus on a variety of spaces that come together simultaneously and multivalently, rejecting the unidirectional, temporal imaginary that has dominated the modern-colonial worldview. Abya Yala appeared on a continuum of struggle between hegemonic domination with its repressive-materialist power and a subaltern resistance with its alternative-symbolic power. The search for a decolonial conception of power that takes into consideration the peripheral-economic as much as the ethno-racial and gendered relations that constitute Latin American coloniality would transform spatial power relations for the construction of a new territory. The incorporation of this collective dimension of the multi- or transterritoriality of Abya Yala also fights against the imposition of any predetermined future, ensuring a space-time that will be constantly evolving and reconstructed.
Blue (South)
As Aby Warburg suggests in his book The Serpent Ritual, looking at the stars constitutes both a kind of hope and punishment for humanity. Contemplating the sky gives us perspective on our place on Earth, where the order of the space we inhabit is imposed. If the stars are above, we are below. Our need to channel the chaos around us has led to the creation of a system of universal rules about the relationship between subject and space. However, these spatial conventions are based on an abstraction and as such are mutable. In order not to get lost, maps have become devices for knowing and demarcating the environment, networks woven with the worldviews of the environment and community that produces them, where there is no single way to represent space. Like the desert people, each society finds its own way. This multiplicity of worlds subverts and explodes established spatial order. We leave the north and walk towards the south, “because in reality our north is the south,” and we continue the spiral to stay on the path.
Again and again, we follow the spiral, interrupting the linearity of time and apprehending the materiality of space. Again and again, we return to the west, where dawn is created and the Sun rises for the Tohono O’odham. Again and again, the footprints of the Earth’s inhabitants unleash its collapse. Trapped in this eternal cycle, the threat of the planet’s annihilation brings with it a threshold of enlightenment plagued by innovations to rescue it. Life on Earth questions us. Perhaps artifice only needs us to stop to appreciate, explore, and allow a dreamlike perspective on interspecies relations and the multi-transterritoriality of this star to unfurl, while we walk in harmony with its beauty.
