{"id":1632,"date":"2014-08-26T23:10:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-26T23:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.damne.net\/?p=1632"},"modified":"2026-01-19T23:26:59","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T23:26:59","slug":"e-misferica-11-1-decolonial-gesture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.damne.net\/?p=1632","title":{"rendered":"e-misf\u00e9rica 11.1: Decolonial Gesture"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"e111_main_cover_440x570\"<\/a>Jill Lane, Marcial Godoy-Anativia and Macarena G\u00f3mez Barris<\/p>\n

Volume 11 | Issue 1 | 2014<\/a><\/p>\n

What decolonial gesture is<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cListen Winka…!\u201d<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is: saying \u201cListen winka…!\u201d whether or not the winka understand that they are being hailed.<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is: blood. Blood in 5 of 16 glass jars, that represent and preserve the Native Alaskan blood quantum\u20145 of 16 parts\u2014of the artist Erica Lord. The blood asks: does indigenous identity lie in these five jars, as the State insists, and not those others? In this work, Lord asks: what other jars or calculus could measure the indigenous memory, knowledge, and practices that tie people to land and to each other? Daniher asks through the artist: what is quantified and what is preserved in State practices that require \u201cdegree of Indian blood certification\u201d? What is partitioned, and what is forgotten?<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is: chi\u2019xi<\/em>. \u201cThe possibility of a profound cultural reform in our society,\u201d says Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, \u201cdepends on the decolonization of our gestures and acts and the language with which we name the world.\u201d Ch\u2019ixi<\/em> is one such word. It captures the Aymara idea of something that is and is not at the same time. Ch\u2019ixi<\/em> \u201cexpresses the parallel coexistence of multiple cultural differences that do not extinguish but instead antagonize and complement each other.\u201d Ch\u2019ixi<\/em> is the frame through which Cusicanqui critiques the extraordinary Spanish-German exhibition \u201cThe Potos\u00ed Principle\u201d: where the exhibition sees the exploitation of poor Indians who, powerless to stop the machine of savage capitalism, paint masterpieces of their misery, Cusicanqui sees in those same paintings \u201can active recombination of opposed worlds and contradictory meanings.\u201d Baroque ch\u2019ixi <\/em>is \u201ca dialectic that does not culminate in a synthesis but lives in permanent movement, articulating the autochthonous with the alien in subversive and mutually contaminating ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is: friendship. In San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Rebecca Belmore (Anishanabe) and Victoria Patishtan (Chamula) rehearse an act of friendship\u2014they spin wool, make beads out of chewed newspaper, tie the strings into an unbroken like\u2014interrupted by the incommensurability of their spoken languages. To Patishtan\u2019s repeated attempts at conversation Tzotzil, Belmore replies, \u201cNo, English\u201d\u2014an Anishanabe artist (Canada) and a Chamula artist (Mexico) bound by friendship and histories of resistance.<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is: metal. Scenes of the torture of indians first engraved by Theodore de Bry in the early 1600s are etched by artist Tom\u00e1s Ochoa into the metals for which those indians died by millions: silver and gold. Casting these primal scenes of colonial violence into precious metal and into valuable art, Ochoa\u2019s gesture illuminates the furious amalgamation of the two \u201chungers\u201d that drive the colonial project: as Barriendos puts it, the raw \u201chunger for metals\u201d and the ethnographic hunger for indigenous alterity fuels an extraction (of metal, of life, of labor). The gesture is, also, flesh: in \u201cMedieval Indians,\u201d Ochoa re-enacts the engraving by de Bry in which Indians hold a conqueror captive and \u201cquench\u201d his hunger for metal by pouring liquid gold down his throat; in this performance today\u2019s migrant workers are cast in the place of de Bry\u2019s \u201cmonstrous\u201d Indians. In the oscillating superimposition of colonial visual culture on the coloniality of present day imaginaries, says, says Barriendos, a territory opens for the possible decolonization of seeing, viewing, and imaging alterity itself.<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is: motherhood, Motherhood without documents, without sanction. An undocumented woman giving birth in the United States\u2014making a claim, and being claimed by us.\u00a0 Through Vera-Rosas, we learn that \u201cthe illegalities of the undocumented mother can be conceptualized as an ethical practice of the flesh, a corporeal politics of noncompliance\u201d\u2014 a breaking of unjust laws, a de-linking from a hegemonic system.<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is: cuir<\/em>. Transfeminist, Postpornographic. The textual shift from queer to cuir is, says Sayak Valencia, a gesture of \u201csexual dissidence and its geopolitical and epistemic displacement toward the south.\u201d Decolonial gesture is: CUIR FAT POWER!<\/em> with artist Alejandra Rodr\u00edguez, aka La Bala. It is Post-sexual<\/em> with artist Katia Sep\u00falveda, whose 2007 work of that name offers a silicone dildo in a frypan, melting very slowly over low heat. The challenge to patriarchy pictured is both radical and glacial: the image of the upright penis melting on a frypan\u2014a place of feminized domesticity par excellence\u2014images the demise of patriarchy and also insists on the very slow, continuous process of social change. Its praxis as image is confrontational, oppositional: a bold portrait of feminism\u2019s threat to patriarchy. Its praxis as durational performance is transformative: over time, the antagonism between patriarchy and transfeminism dissolves.<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is, then, \u00a1transmarikaputabollomestizxmigranteprecarix!<\/em><\/p>\n

Can we render the colonial gaze\/relationship laughable? Xandra Ibarra, a.k.a. La Chica Boom does. Ibarra \u201cfists pi\u00f1atas, plays with a Hitachi Wand vibrator in the guise of La Virgen de Guadalupe and splatters hot sauce via a strap-on onto tacos, made from corn tortillas and her lacy underwear.\u201d Patel explains that such performances\u2014that Ibarra names burlesque \u201cspictacles\u201d\u2014marshall gross exaggeration of stereotype toward \u201cdecolonial failure.\u201d In this failure, says Ibarra, there is \u201cno redemption, no rewriting subject, no re-performing the subject, there is only fucked life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is aesthesis<\/em>. For Walter Mignolo, Tanja Ostojic’s performance, Looking for a Husband with E.U. Passport<\/em> (2000\u201305)models a delinking from traditional\u00a0aesthetics\u00a0<\/em>in order to liberate an underlying\u00a0decolonial aesthesis<\/em>, a “vibration of the senses” that refuses the perceptual and discursive strictures of the sublime or the beautiful.<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is, now, an interruption. Listen winka\u2026!<\/em>\u00a0 The title of a seminal work of Mapuche historiography, \u00a1\u2026Escucha, winka\u2026! <\/em>interrupts the course of colonial historiography as usual and wedges another in its place. In the Mapuche language, winka<\/em> means \u201cforeigner,\u201d \u201cinvader,\u201d or \u201ccolonizer,\u201d and more commonly refers to non-indians. Listen Winka..! <\/em>is a bilingual interjection that opens space for another history, an alternate cartography, a refusal of the winka<\/em>\u2019s borders, maps, and place names; it is an interpellation into the memory of the Mapuche nation that was and is.<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is: enactment. \u201cEve will not emerge from Evo\u2019s rib!\u201d says Bolivian feminist Maria Galindo. \u201cWe make clear that the voices of women in the official constitution were mediated, brokered, censored, and measured by the political parties that legitimated only the liberal NGOs and the conservative voices of indigenous women who spoke for their men, for their sons, and for their churches and their dogmas of faith.\u201d Constituci\u00f3n Pol\u00edtica Feminista del Estado<\/em>, enacts, \u201cfor all those who are looking for the breaking point in society, the place of rupture and rebellion rather than the conciliation of silence and the comfortable complicity of our own subjection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is: pulse, a pulse \u201cin the break\u201d of black diasporic aesthetics. The large-scale paintings that comprise artist Julie Mehretu\u2019s Mogamma<\/em> (2011) transform the eruptions, circulations, and retractions of revolutionary potentialities of the African\/Arab spring into abstract linear form. Drawing on maps of multiple public squares, including Tahrir square in Cairo where the government building Mogamma is located, Mehretu captures the conflict between that solid, massive, ordered urban architecture and the potent energies\u2014pulse\u2014of peoples moving and thinking against the social order that architecture upholds. As Macarena G\u00f3mez Barris says, Mogamma renders this conjuncture, this \u201carchitectural breaking and falling apart,\u201d through an \u201cimprovisation of lines, breaks, angry marks and imaginative gestures\u201d that form alternate \u201carchitectures of meaning through sublime built environments that cohere into recognizable patterns just as easily as they drop off the canvas.\u201d In the break of black aesthetics, the art\u2014says Mehretu\u2014mirrors the \u201cbuilt environment in which it operates\u201d; it \u201cacts as a living force, never idle and continuously pulsing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is: opacity, the opacity of the undercommons. For Moten and Harney, decolonial gesture is the refusal of that which has been refused to you. The refusal to demand, plan, or call to order within the terms that otherwise shape the broken conditions in which we now live. The right to opacity. The refusal to see refusal as lack of action: when you stop making demands and requests, you can hear the noise of a change already taking place. When you don\u2019t call the classroom to order, you see the study already happening. When you leave behind the logic of critique, you may find your way to the \u201cthe undercommons of enlightenment,<\/em> where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s listen.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jill Lane, Marcial Godoy-Anativia and Macarena G\u00f3mez Barris<\/p>\n

Volume 11 | Issue 1 | 2014<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is: cuir. Transfeminist, Postpornographic. The textual shift from queer to cuir is, says Sayak Valencia, a gesture of \u201csexual dissidence and its geopolitical and epistemic displacement toward the south.\u201d Decolonial gesture is: CUIR FAT POWER! with artist Alejandra Rodr\u00edguez, aka La Bala. It is Post-sexual with artist Katia Sep\u00falveda, whose 2007 work of that name offers a silicone dildo in a frypan, melting very slowly over low heat. The challenge to patriarchy pictured is both radical and glacial: the image of the upright penis melting on a frypan\u2014a place of feminized domesticity par excellence\u2014images the demise of patriarchy and also insists on the very slow, continuous process of social change. Its praxis as image is confrontational, oppositional: a bold portrait of feminism\u2019s threat to patriarchy. Its praxis as durational performance is transformative: over time, the antagonism between patriarchy and transfeminism dissolves.<\/p>\n

Decolonial gesture is, then, \u00a1transmarikaputabollomestizxmigranteprecarix!
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