11.05.2020 - 06.10.2020
Over the last few weeks, a fear of uncertainty has been weaved with endless reflections that try to explain what we are experiencing as societies. Globality in crisis: we again perceive the acceleration of anthropocentric history from the narrative tension that arise between the confusion resulting from confinement, and the speed of the media opposing the pandemic’s haphazardness. We then replicate a question asked by Donna Haraway: How can we think in times of urgencies without the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of the apocalypse, when every fiber of our being is interlaced, even complicit, in the webs of processes that must somehow be engaged and repatterned? Departing from this, we ask ourselves, what narrative displacements can artistic practices and thoughts propose in these circumstances for the intertwining of meanings fractured by the colonial logic that threatens with totalitarianism?
The global crisis confirms the power of now, so it is necessary to problematize the singularities that inhabit the damaged living worlds to collectively find ourselves in a trance state that results from the cessation of a material dimension of our lives. Inhabiting the not-knowing from feeling/thinking: displacing the universal all-encompassing and all-understanding reason as a starting point to accommodate the power of the senses that we embody from latent rage and urgency. Following Walidah Imarisha, we invite you then to unfold reflections that depart from personal intuition to recognize vulnerabilities that intertwine exercises of a powerful imagination of the forthcoming. We are not looking for futures, neither universal nor one-way, enunciated from the privilege of the “post-pandemic”, but rather astral journeys to multidimensional meetings of stories that reflect a multiplicity of urgencies, concerns, banalities, failures, and joys; a polyphonic temporality of those powerful possibilities despite capitalism. How do we arouse senses of collective urgency committed to the resistance of the reproduction of normalization and the articulation of dissident micropolitics from substantially planetary radical imaginations?
A constellation of forthcomings. From Passageways And Portals, it is, then, a call to feel/think together these strange days accompanying us through valuable self/reflections. Texts requested from authors from our community, outstanding contributions from the call we launched a few weeks ago, as well as translations of texts that it seems important to translate into Spanish, make up this issue. Like an incomplete blog, it is a reminder that we are sensible in darkness.
Image: Lucas Lugarinho, The Future, 2019. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 90 x 140 cm. Image courtesy of the artist
18
2020
Lucas Lugarinho, The Future, 2019. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 90 x 140 cm. Image courtesy of the artist
18 2020
11.05.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals
Paul Maheke
Traveling through time, in this prose originally published on Documentations.art, the artist Paul Maheke presents resistance embodied in vulnerability memories to question the systematic precariousness involved in participating in the art system, which is exacerbated day by day in the context of the pandemic.
18 2020
14.05.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Earth
Achille Mbembe
Drawing from the present pandemic and the sociopolitical context that precedes and accompanies it, philosopher Achille Mbembe unfolds a reflection that traces a path of possibility to motivate a common political movement, nourished by the awareness of that planetary capacity—often taken for granted—that makes life possible.
18 2020
18.05.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals
Ana Lucía Ixchiu Hernández, Maya Juracán
Building off the experience of the body in times of confinement, artist and cultural producer Ana Lucia Ixchiu Hernández and curator Maya Juracán, from Guatemala, problematize the social role of art in a time when art has relegated to the sidelines its potential to connect us communally to our bio-surroundings, to others, and to the body itself in the name of capitalism.
18 2020
21.05.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Chile
aliwen
Thinking about the implications of the intimacy that confinement brings, researcher and curator aliwen proposes a critical reading of the normativity inside the house based on the analysis of two performance artists, Lorenza Böttner and Hija de Perra, who “kuirized” the private to claim their dissident existence.
18 2020
25.05.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Europe, La Puna, Missouri
Duen Sacchi
In the midst of the pandemic, artist Duen Sacchi invites us to reexamine our corporality as a place of negotiation and encounter of oneself and others, instrumentalizing dreams in his critical research to deconstruct hygienist fantasies inherited from the Western colonial project.
18 2020
28.05.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals
Mariana Leme
Pinpointing whiteness as the umbrella under which artistic productions and their system of circulation have historically been upheld since the 17th Century, curator Mariana Leme carries out a historical review that questions the discourses of difference–emphasized by the pandemic– that instrumentalize otherness in the present.
18 2020
01.06.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Mexico
Lorena Wolffer, Ana Gabriela García
Drawing on the silencing of feminist movements in Mexico due to the health contingency, artist and activist Lorena Wolffer and researcher Ana Gabriela García insist on the urgency of collective organization and the implementation of micro-politics to disarticulate the hetero-patriarchal dynamics of a shunned “new normal”.
18 2020
04.06.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Ciudad de México, Utopía
Siobhan Guerrero Mc Manus
Researcher Siobhan Guerrero Mc Manus addresses the issues faced by sex workers during the health contingency, as well as the support networks that were (not) subsequently woven for trans * women, to question the effective scope of feminist utopia.
18 2020
08.06.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals
iki yos piña narváez funes
If the white and colonial pandemic has systematically denied the course and ways of non-white lives, artist iki yoss piña narváez funes calls, from poetics, on Black resistance from the expanded body.
18 2020
11.06.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals
Tiffany E. Barber, Reynaldo Anderson
Reaffirming the relevancy of Afrofuturism’s legacy and vision in the present, Reynaldo Anderson and Tiffany E. Barber suggest technology as a tool, albeit born of White Supremacy, to be “hacked” by global anti-racist movements in order to fight the agonizing hydra of Necrocapitalism.
18 2020
15.06.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals
Lucas Lugarinho
From the digital landscapes designed for the video game “Metal Gear Solid 2,” the artist Lucas Lugarinho opts for “ready-made truths” as strategies to play with images that, in face of fake news and capitalizable data, revise the fictions that are presented to us via pixels.
18 2020
18.06.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Colombia, Latinoamérica
Santiago Gómez
Among the high temperatures, resulting from global warming and dancing bodies (perreando), the artist Santiago Gómez speculates about reggaeton as a contradiction that, despite its negotiations with an industry that has capitalized on it, keeps in its forms the decoloniality that will allow us to dance through the end of the world.
18 2020
22.06.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals
Rafael Toriz
Through a journey, the writer Rafael Toriz articulates a prose that takes us to the deep jungle to evoke, from the opioid, the ancestralities that sustain the tropics while exploring the malleability of their languages.
18 2020
25.06.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Caribbean, Caribbean, Dominican Republic
Yina Jiménez Suriel
From the activation of the ancestral memory of the Caribbean contained in its artifacts, curator Yina Jiménez Suriel proposes a re-appropriation of travel and scape, against the colonial order, as other ways of world-making for survival.
18 2020
29.06.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals
Valeria Montoya
From the reformulations of the body in times of a pandemic, the researcher Valeria Montoya explores the traceable links between the personal and the common to rethink, from what separates us and from the body itself, how we articulate multiplicities shaped from difference.
18 2020
06.07.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Venecia
Laura Petrecca
One year after the 2019 Venice Biennale, Laura Petrecca rereads into the event as a dystopia that now echoes 2020’s realities.
18 2020
10.07.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Argentina
Nicolás Cuello
Ante un panorama donde el futuro pareciera haber fracasado, el historiador del arte Nicolás Cuello apuesta por temporalidades queer alrededor de la afectividad, la multiespecie y la fantasía de los futuros cancelados.
18 2020
13.07.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Mexico
Andrew Roberts
Following the excessive consumption of images, overwhelmed by these pandemic times, the artist Andrew Roberts wonders what ways of seeing trigger critical imaginations to face violence in moments of crisis.
18 2020
16.07.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Peru
Giuliana Vidarte
Through a review of three projects carried out at the MAC Lima before the confinement, curator Giuliana Vidarte reveals the effects that the pandemic has had on the environment and how the exhibition space can revitalize our links with the non-human.
18 2020
20.07.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Costa Rica
Gala Berger
Through film analysis and a review of science fiction, artist and curator Gala Berger wonders about the paradoxes involved in museums as a safeguard of history in view of the end of the world: where colonial, patriarchal, racist and binary structures sublimate the politics of objects.
18 2020
23.07.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Borderlands, Mexico, USA
Daniela Lieja Quintanar, Claudia Pretelin
Based on the curatorial research Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento, curators Daniela Lieja Quintanar and Claudia Pretelin, associate researcher and exhibition advisor, discuss how the curatorial process can become a collective tissue that responds to the urgencies of the present, particularly in light of migration policies and the histories that intersect there.
18 2020
27.07.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Chile, Mexico
Antonia González Alarcón, Sandra Sanchez
By way of correspondence, artist Antonia González Alarcón and art critic Sandra Sánchez share their views on the possibility of approaching artistic practice and the act of looking that mediates knowledge from affections.
18 2020
30.07.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Ecuador, Quito
Eduardo Carrera
If pandemic logics bring about a rupture in lifestyles, curator Eduardo Carrera reviews the relationship between the artistic and the political around pandemic milestones, such as SARS and HIV/AIDS, to question how we may dismantle social control over bodies and move towards a health system that allows us to take care of ourselves and others in fairer ways.
18 2020
03.08.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Abya Yala, Brazil
Walla Capelobo, Bruna Kury
In face of the social violence fueled by the pandemic, authors Bruna Kury and Walla Capelobo discuss the subversive work of a number of trans* artists to confront the colonial regimes that continue to marginalize dissident and racialized bodies.
18 2020
06.08.2020
Issue 18: Of Passageways and Portals Guatemala, Quetzaltenango
Diego Ventura Puac-Coyoy
Writer and curator Diego Ventura Puac-Coyoy contrasts Mayan knowledge with the forthcoming and memory projected in Guatemala’s landscapes: where artist Alfredo Ceibal dreams of painting as a healing exercise.