This reflection is an adaptation of a chapter from: Valeria Roberta González, Eduardo Molinari (2023) Becas a la Investigación Artística. Proyecto Ballena, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación. ISBN 978-987-8915-96.8

A constellated field

Imagen

The present text is a special adaptation for the Journal for Artistic Research of the original version I wrote for the book 'Becas a la Investigación Artística / Proyecto Ballena', which was publicly presented at the Casa del Bicentenario, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 7 December 2023. The aim was to share the theoretical background and the artistic tools and methods that, from my point of view, configure and strengthen a situated artistic research. The publication also included a foreword by Valeria Roberta González (then Secretary of National Heritage) and the voices of all the Fellows. The version I share here, on the other hand, seeks to build bridges of living intercultural knowledge between artist and non-artist researchers, between artistic, cultural and social institutions and organisations, and between popular and community culture and the academic world.

The call for applications for the 2021 Fellowships revolved around the axis of the image-word "E/earth". The concept refers to the problems of planetary habitability for all forms of life in the context of climate change and the Anthropocene1, on the one hand, and, on the other, to the contemporary conditions of land use and ownership, its concentration in a few hands and the hegemony of the neo-extractivist model. Its aim is to shed light on the disastrous social, environmental and health consequences of this situation, as well as on the forms of life that resist that model and embody the "Buen Vivir" [Living Well]2.

The Proyecto Ballena (Whale Project) presented its first edition in 2020 as 'a space for encounters between different referents of Latin American political and cultural life, in order to elaborate alternatives that help us think of a better present'. Organised by an alliance of the National Ministry of Culture, the National Heritage Secretariat and the Kirchner Cultural Centre (CCK), its name refers to the creatures (whales) that are fundamental to the biodiversity of the oceans, while Ballena refers to an emblematic hall of this public cultural centre in Buenos Aires, a 'symphonic meeting place and resonance board for all voices'3.

The commitment of the people involved and the conviction of the authorities of the Ministry, the Secretariat and the CCK about the importance and value of the fellowships in the current planetary situation –a global capitalism that demonstrates its disdain for life every day, except for those existences that it turns into resources and commodities–. My task was not only to be part of the Selection Jury but also to coordinate the subsequent development of all the selected projects, which were initiated when the traces of the COVID-19 pandemic were still omnipresent. At that time, it was not yet clear how this traumatic situation, for our society and for humanity, would develop. Those who were awarded the fellowships started their projects under those circumstances.

A series of tours and conversations allowed me to get to know the research projects and the places where they were being carried out personally, an experience that generates an enriching tension with what we know, in academia and ethnography, as "fieldwork"4. The encounters offered the possibility of following the traces that the projects were leaving in the geographical space and their resonances on their interlocutors. Going towards them implied making contact with the living knowledge that these artistic investigations created and put into circulation. Knowledge that, in all cases, implied incarnating, configuring and inhabiting spaces and times of micropolitical resistance.

Who are the protagonists of artistic research? In Chaco, it vibrates the dreamy music of the tireless guardians of a life to the full (Shipilaj): its vibrations make bodies-territories vibrate as they drift through swamps and wetlands, through the forest and the city. In Entre Ríos, the ideals of cooperative settlers return through the memory of one of their pioneers. His voice breaks the silence of the abandoned silos and questions us: Are the cooperatives defeated victors or victorious losers? Queer ants, dressed in flags, walk the streets of Posadas, Misiones, triumphantly; and build their nomadic tacurú [anthill] museum in the Triple Frontier to break the mirror of a colonial history. In Patagonia, the presence and persistence of the ancestors' voices reappears in each of the bodies of the Mapuche people: to be earth, to inhabit and walk the territory in search of the material with which to model the reparation and healing of the wounds that genocidal and extractivist violence has provoked and still provokes in Wallmapu5. Traditional fishermen, a collective of people marked by the reflection of the sun in the sea, bear witness to a communal present that curves towards a millenary past and a different future on the cliffs of Mar del Plata in the province of Buenos Aires. Inspired by the verdurazos6 in the streets of the city of Buenos Aires, two ears of corn –the directors of the Museo del NeoExtractivismo– allow themselves to be guided by the voice of food and the protagonists of the struggles in favor of agroecology, food sovereignty and a law of access to land for collective or communal use. From Abya Yala7 to the multiverse, a handful of migrant flying seeds keep each other company on the journey and share a trialogue between plant intelligence, artificial intelligence and human intelligence. In the Conurbano Bonaerense [suburbs of Buenos Aires], the special resonance of the landfills of José León Suárez invites us to listen to a communal culture that enlightens us with its splendors and its teachings of organization and grassroots environmentalism. An amalgam of earth, tides, seagulls, crabs, winds, ruins of seaside resorts, stars, reflections of petrochemical light, ships, and people form a single sensitive body that ventures into forbidden territories in Bahía Blanca; a group identity emerges as they camp there: reflected in a muddy-looking mirror, they encourage the recovery of the maritime culture and the amphibious existence of their community.

A thread, many threads

Walking, we ask questions.8

It is evident that in a colonial situation, that which goes unsaid contains the most meaning; 
words mask more than they reveal, and symbols take center stage.9

To crawl into a hole. To stalk an uncertainty. To look through a frosted glass or through a phantom. To go through an opacity. To pass through inaccessibility. To explore the hidden. To disobey the signs and follow the traces. Paying attention to omens. The desire, enjoyment, and suffering with being affected. To declassify things. To put a mutant potency in motion. To find something in order to lose oneself. To challenge the disciplinary epistemological authority of neoliberal culture.
A multicoloured thread resulting from the union of many threads. Of energies and knowledge transmitted by diverse beings and entities, with varied tones and textures, scents and flavors, coming from different spatialities and temporalities. A thread that is strengthened by its multiplicity and that seeks to tie itself together with more and more threads to weave a fabric in permanent reconfiguration. A multicoloured thread that invites each reader to assume it as their own in order to weave community and future with it. To weave shelter, fertility and abundance, which are not the same as development, progress, and wealth. Weaving with the unspeakable, the invisible and the inaudible.

Imagen

This text proposes to share the possibility of living, activating and transmitting two forces that, in our view, are associated with life (the cycle of life and death, so prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic) and with artistic research. I refer to the uncertain and uncomfortable dynamics that unfold in and from the stalking and the attempt. Movements and performativities in which (human and non-human) bodies bring into play potencies and sentipensamientos [sensing/thinking] that give rise first to cautious observation, and then to the pursuit and execution of a purpose. In both cases, without full certainty or assurance of achieving it. The distinguishing qualities of these embodied, incarnated energies –which in each experience can discover immaterial and/or spiritual flows and interact with them– are associated with the increasingly indispensable political activation of our sensitivity.

In a context of neo-extractivist, patriarchal, racist and classist violence that has transformed sensitivity into a new battlefield, the stalking and the attempt awaken our attention and prioritize care. Two dimensions that converge when it comes to thinking about the ecosystemic relationship of our bodies-territories with all the existing expressions of life. Finally, the attempt and the stalking guide us towards an evidential logic, a question about which forms of life interest us and which are the tools and methods of detection, creation, transmission, and activation of knowledge, information, and memories that will lead us to new possibilities. What kinds of knowledge will open spaces for experimentation and organization of emancipatory, collective and situated tactics and strategies, allowing us to inhabit instants and becomings, recognizing a propitious moment for a retreat, a stoppage, and a wait, or to go on the offensive? Can the blurring of the boundaries between praxis and theory –which artistic research proposes to carry out– provide us with tools and methodologies to strengthen social and communal ties, to organize ourselves and confront oppressive and authoritarian structures today? Can artistic research produce living knowledge, capable of being embraced, nurtured and cultivated by those sectors or social actors whose rights are being violated? What specific knowledge does art as research contribute?

We believe that the projects in this publication humbly bring us experiences of co-research, co-learning and co-teaching that bear witness to multiple ways of answering these questions. It is our wish that they may act as the aforementioned threads of a new social and cultural fabric, capable of uncovering what the violence of the neocolonial enterprise prefers to keep buried. But also that they may show themselves capable of a rebellious weaving, disobedient to accept reality "as it is".

There is no text without a context

It is an illusion to believe that one can escape History, the time in which one lives.10

What historical events do we consider ourselves the children of? Which ones have engendered us, and how? Furthermore, how do we inherit and prolong them (Stengers and Pignard, 2017)? I cannot get out of my mind the political representation crisis and the collapse of the neoliberal model that took place in Argentina in December 2001. Images that make it impossible to forget what happens when the peoples are abandoned and discarded by capital and by the State simultaneously. Images of repression and death intertwine in memory with those of the Twin Towers attacks, a lethal thrust to the heart of the American empire. The legacy of those days, that marked the end of a cycle (at least with features of the 1989-2001 period), has left us profound learning and profound questions. Some of them are still in force today.

Perhaps the main lesson learned from that experience, strongly linked to the collapse of party political representation (the cry of "Que se vayan todos!" [All of them must go!] always echoes), is that which marks with fire the centrality and importance of each political subject expressing themselves with their own voice. From piqueterxs [picketers] to cartonerxs11 [cardboard recyclers], from worker-controlled factories  to meetings of neighbors, from pensioners to human rights organizations, from neighborhood radio stations to artistic collectives, etc.: we wanted to listen to each one of these voices. We wanted to know what that other person or group, whom we had never encountered before and might never encounter again, felt and thought. It was about living in a listening and a conversation, also a debate and a discussion. For the hegemonic visual arts scene of the time, the new voices that were beginning to make themselves heard –the new imaginaries, new narratives and performativities– were a real discomfort. One of the challenges of this book-thread is to pick up that legacy and let the artists present themselves with their own voice.

It is important to point out that, from a strictly artistic perspective –inherited from modernity, in particular from the early 20th-century avant-garde and its influence on the social and cultural practices of the 1960s and 1970s– the concept of art in context refers to a set of inter-, trans- or extra-disciplinary creations and processes (Rolnik, 2007). This specificity is a first aspect to highlight in the artistic research projects included in this publication. Here, "context" refers to the set of circumstances in which an event is inscribed. Derived from the Latin contexere, which means "to weave with", the collective dimension of this practice is already present in its etymological origin. Contextual art blurs the boundaries between artistic and political practices, and attempts to break down the barriers of art institutions (museums, galleries, fairs) in order to strengthen the links between artists and a wide array of social actors. This type of practice encourages the activation of the "spectator's" subjectivity, and provokes a decisive interaction and participation in defining the dynamics of the artworks. The same tradition, that in Europe is known "art in context" and in the United States as "artistic public practices", is intertwined with the movements that, in the 1960s and 1970s, fought for the civil rights of black and Chicano communities, and to feminist struggles and those of various minorities and sexual dissidence. Simultaneously, it is linked with the processes of encounter (and disagreement) between the artistic and political avant-garde in our country and in the South American region during those turbulent decades, a period marked by military dictatorships and state terrorism.

A handful of extremely important questions arise when thinking about contemporary artistic and research practices: Art where? When? In what circumstances? Together with whom and for whom? What gestures, actions, movements, visions, sounds, voices, and rituals do we wish to collectively inscribe? What bonds and care do we want to reinforce? What kinds of knowledge do we seek to detect, create and transmit? The weaving present in and between the work processes of the Proyecto Ballena Fellowships for Artistic Research embraces investigative, pedagogical and artistic practices.

Every community establishes a series of relationships with the land. Through the inscription of a set of rhetorical operations (outlining, signaling, demarcating, appropriating, hierarchizing, among others) in the geography, this community establishes its existential home (Kusch, 1976) by leaving a testimony through a writing in the exterior space of its interior itinerary. It is a collective spatial creation that reveals its own worldview.

This social work of writing in space is developed in a specific historical context through different languages (verbal, bodily, auditory, visual, etc.). The reading of this textuality puts us in contact with another category of collective construction: time. Then, we can learn about a community's relationship with its past and its origins (deities, ancestors, memory works) as well as its links with the present (with other human and non-human groups) and, finally, its relationship with the future (longings, wishes, dreams, and with death).

It is necessary to pause here and make an assertion of utmost importance for our analysis of artistic research: every artistic practice produces some form of textuality, but there is no text without context. This statement links both terms, although it does not define them categorically and unequivocally. It is up to each researching artist to give them meaning. In a global context marked by accelerating environmental, social and health conflicts, in almost all cases resulting from the reproduction of political and economic models that are violent towards human life and biodiversity, models of accumulation and concentration of wealth, of militarization of territories and of monoculture, it is necessary to expand the political imagination exercises. Over the last twenty years, artists have Increasingly been inhabiting processes of creation rather than the production of single pieces. These processes, imbued with various forms of singular or collective performativity, are carried out in various temporalities, often in multiple locations and in collaboration with other artists or non-artists. Artists are also involved in managing, curating and writing about their peers’ practices. From this shift in the ways of making and thinking about art –also in the ways of self-recognition–, artistic practice is consolidated as research (García Navarro, Molinari, 2020).

Human groups possess the power or capacity to develop diverse languages. If languages are a potential, speeches are the act. Our speeches are the result of the social elaboration of language, of collective work that utilizes acoustic and sound, corporal and tactile impressions to generate signs and symbols. The set of social agreements on signs and symbols creates codes and/or codifications, which enable communication, always in a given historical and cultural context. Codifications are both fixed and changing systems.

For the purpose of analyzing the dynamics and objectives of speeches in artistic research, I am interested in asserting that art is a speech that inhabits movement; that is, it allows the unfolding of the potentialities that are lodged in the folds of the situated word-image or image-word relationships. The (intercultural) speeches of artistic research inhabit a horizontal and floating linkage between both types of signs, which we can identify with the neologisms of wormages or imagords. Thus, they expand their meanings, which provokes and activates a counter-power force: more or less lasting times and spaces of overflow and destabilization of dominant codes and automatism. Living texts of artistic research.

Imagen

 Flows and forces

If we understand the totality of time-space as the totality of flows and forces,
the cosmic totality from which the forms that constitute our perception and our imagination emerge, 
a territory would be just one of these perceptible, recognizable or imaginable forms (…) 
A territory is the definition, determination, or demarcation of a specific and limited set of flows and forces.12

There is a well known assertion present in most indigenous peoples’ worldviews: the land does not belong to us, we belong to it. A distracted reading of this maxim might lead us to understand it merely in material terms, related only to ownership and use of the land and its "resources", and to forget its proposal of care and respect, mutual nurturing and spiritual connection between human and non-human beings. In search of these deeper meanings, I propose to pay special attention to the splendor of this ancestral knowledge that glints in the various research projects.

What do we call "territory" in artistic research? Provoking a critical spatial turn (Soja, 2014) allows us to recognize that no territory is eternal, and to pay particular attention to the relationship between spatial categories, social relations and possible, imaginable or desirable ways of life. No space is empty and no one is completely free from the struggle for geography, which refers not only to expressions of military or economic power, but also to ideas, images, and imaginations. According to Robert Smithson –the North American artist, the main referent of Land Art– the land appears to us as a medium, capable of offering new philosophical, aesthetic and political categories (Careri, 2002).

As part of the aforementioned critical spatial turn, momentarily setting aside temporal categories (History) and focusing on the spatial categories in which we deploy our life experiences allows us to experiment with a multiscale vision. This vision is of special interest for artistic research, since it broadens our awareness to the places of passage in which macro and micro, global and local converge, spaces that complexify but also enrich our work. Thus, the notions of region or regional (erasing national borders) and glocal (linking local and global) allow us to transversalize the struggles of class, race and gender (Soja, 2014), providing new scales of social organization. The categories of geoculture (Kusch, 1976), geoaesthetics and geopoetics (Boyer, 2009) and psychogeography (Debord, 1958) also accompany artistic research, all attentive to the ongoing sensitive re-signification of our relationship with the land. These dimensions provide warmth and shelter as we traverse the streets of the increasingly gentrified cities, as well as through the sacrifice zones delimited in nature by the unlimited greed of neo-extractivism.

If it is possible to affirm that all art is political, we reformulate the phrase and specify: all art is geopolitical. Here, geopolitics doesn't refer to the classic science that studies the influence of geography on political thought and strategies but to the possibility of dwelling in an uncomfortable spatial dimension: the folds that bring our experience of the mapped world (with names and images) into contact with those other larval worlds that live under our skins (without names or images yet). These larval worlds are configured by the affects and percepts originated when our bodies are affected by the forces that shake the mapped world like a living body (Rolnik, 2016). It is only within this uncomfortable zone that destabilization, restlessness, discomfort occur. And only in that tension will our desire make way for the germination of those new possibilities.

Imagen

Artistic research explores the material qualities of diverse ecosystems, natural and/or artificial, rural or urban, as well as their immaterial dimensions. We then ask ourselves: What flows become present and magnetize the movements of researchers in artistic research work? What forces invigorate our investigative methodologies? What spectral entities appear to us, and which ones are reluctant to reveal themselves fully? Identifying under the influence of which forces or flows we are orienting ourselves (or getting lost) is one of the tasks of artistic research in the territories, whatever their material conditions.

To ask permission from Mother Earth. To inhabit the crossroads. To find as many entry points, pathways, and exit points as possible. To be in communion with our ancestors. To learn how to listen to, and interpret, the spirits. To traverse the cycle of life and death lovingly. To become vulnerable. To let oneself be affected. To nurture and germinate the seeds of the possible.

Incarnations

The cosmic particle that sails in my blood is an infinite world of sidereal forces.
It came to me after a long way of millennia, when, perhaps, I was sand for the feet of the air.13

What if bodies are neither together nor apart 
but are situated in another relational logic that we have not known how to think about? 
Beyond the unity-separation duality, bodies are in continuity.14

New ontologies for new epistemologies. New forms of life that share new ways of knowing the world. They make way for mutual nurturing, and establish a conversation and commensality with all living beings, without exclusions. They dissolve the hierarchical divide between the researching subject and the research object. In artistic research, the researchers investigate themselves when assuming their commitment as immanent to the situation (Benasayag, Sztulwark, 2000), allowing themselves to be affected by it and recognizing the ontological dignity of the events and interlocutors (Medrano, Pazzarelli, 2022) that inhabit it.

Whose world do we investigate? This question makes clear one of the main contributions of artistic research: the expansion of social sensitivity towards a multiplicity of worlds. The various perspectives on them and on the knowledge that comes from them. Research artists often interact with non-artistic fields of production, intertwined with other kinds of knowledge that give primacy to the use value. They generate collaborations with organizations, groups, institutions, communities, and people associated with multiple fields of knowledge, from astronomy or nanotechnology to social activism, from ecologists to shamans of native peoples. In this interaction, artistic research creates tools that enhance transculturality, develop new epistemological forms and mobilize social imagination (García Navarro, Molinari, 2020).

Using a botanical metaphor as an axis of analysis, I wish to distinguish four dimensions that coexist in the figure of the artist-researcher and that of their interlocutors: identity, subjectivity, incarnation, and phantom.

Imagen

If identity can be assimilated to the root of a plant (origin and memories) and subjectivity to its flowers and fruits (dynamic, unpredictable and disputed processes, the partial outcomes of mutations that we experience throughout life), from my perspective, the other two categories are especially linked to artistic research. Incarnation, whose vegetal image would be the unity made up of an exterior appearance (trunk and foliage) and an interior force (sap), on the one hand, refers to the capacity of the tissues of our living bodies to heal their wounds and, on the other hand, to the effect of incarnating; that is: a) to personify or represent some idea or doctrine, b) a spirit or idea that takes bodily form, and c) to interpret a character in theater or cinema (RAE, 2022). Incarnations, therefore, speak of relationships between bodies, ideas and ideals, of the individual and/or collective aptitude to accommodate, shelter and carry, in our bodies, the forces and energies linked to certain ways of perceiving, thinking and dreaming the world. Accommodating these energies (their representation or presentation, their living presence) engenders dynamics of empathy and contagion, but can also trigger antipathy and violence. Incarnating allows us to heal endured injuries and to resist, even though it often entails risking one's life. Lastly, the phantom (derived from a Greek word for ‘apparition’), the manifestation of supposed spirits or wandering souls of deceased beings, appears among the living and challenges our perception and senses. Phantoms, which we could associate with the subtle shifts and alterations of the material organization of the territory caused by plants and flowers with their scents or color vibrations, bring us closer to a very special knowledge, which arises from looking through. Phantoms teach us to see through them and through all things.

When studying the indigenous and popular thinking in the Americas, the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch finds a distinction between the way of referring to the existential condition in this thought and what the West defines as the "subject being [ser],"15 which implies a mutually-exclusive binarism: to be or not to be [ser o no ser]. In his studies particularly linked to the Andean worldview, he detects what he calls "the mere being [estar], only," a condition that refers to that which at the same time "exists, happens and affects us," occurs and changes, is and ceases to be [ser]: "to be-being or to be in being" [estar siendo o ser estando]. Kusch questions Western thinking: Is it possible to be [ser] without being [estar]?

Living knowledge

Dependency is not just about plundering resources. 
Its ultimate purpose is the induction of meaning in the production of knowledge 
and the place from where that meaning is thought.16

–You think you are so clever, because you write in such a way that nobody understands you. 
Why do you mix political ideas with poetic images?
–Because ordinary language is useless to us. Words work for power. 
We have to reinvent language to be able to say that we absolutely reject this society.17

What do the artist-researchers carry in their backpacks? What tools and methods do they employ? Trans(in)disciplined tools. To dwell in the paradox between what remains and what changes. The paradox of investigating (human and non-human) worlds that are being recreated while they are being investigated. To live within movement. To stop and dig in. To vibrate according to the alterations of the heart rhythm. To multiply slowness. To embody lightning and thunder. To listen. To reverberate and resonate. To converse with everything that appears and also with what has disappeared. To swim in the silence in extension and depth. To shout alone and together with others. To let gestures shape space and time. To touch almost everything. To look into the nose of fear. To go deep into. To caress. To embrace. To kiss. To say goodbye, until next time. To stop seeing and to see again. To intuit. To camp. To sleep without dreaming. To dream without sleeping.

We have spoken of the stalking and the attempt. Artistic research is by definition experimental and is nourished by the evidential paradigm of access to knowledge. Defined at the end of the 1960s by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, this epistemological model is inspired by the interpretation of apparently marginal traces, akin to the work of a detective and whose prototype is the hunting animal (human or otherwise) and the use of lower intuitions, such as smell.18

Imagen

Artistic research does not proceed by delimiting an object and hypotheses to be proved. It starts with a question or a problem it seeks to comprehend with artistic tools and methods, in dialogue and collaboration with other forms of knowledge. Its distinctiveness lies in its capacity to create a common space-time to inhabit situated experiences of co-learning and co-teaching. It locates the historicity of things by interrogating their material traces, and works with these documentary residues in an alchemical manner. The artistic hypothesis, when it exists, does not need to be unequivocal or to be verified. Unlike scientific hypotheses, it proposes open-ended forms. Therefore, knowing things by means of artistic tools makes it possible to open up knowledge, instead of closing it off (García Navarro, Molinari, 2020). This is living knowledge, which cannot be quantified as objects or data, and which resists the accumulative logic of capital. Living knowledge demands nurturing, cultivation and care (Calderón, Cervantes, Salazar, 2022). Undisciplined living knowledge creates lines of flight from the classificatory and commodified order of knowledge, and from the cultural "entrepreneurialism" of the anti-academic model within the current sacrificial and punitive version of neoliberalism.19

Lastly, artistic research questions what is traditionally known as "fieldwork", that is, a work of observation and data collection aimed at aligning certain theories with "reality". But… what qualities does "the real" acquire when, as we traverse forests, jungles, wetlands, mountains, lakes, communities, or city neighborhoods, we dare to adopt a methodological disposition to "let ourselves be carried away by the forces of the field and remain in the uneasiness of the uncontrollable" (Medrano, Pazzarelli, 2022)? To venture into places where diverse simultaneous temporalities and new and unpredictable directions open up. Crossroads make the field explode. Within these investigative methodologies, the field mutates into a constellated field –at once luminous and dark, natural and supernatural–, and allows us to become aware of the co-existence of a multiplicity of worlds and ways of inhabiting them. As with any constellation, it is neither relevant nor desirable to order and classify it, but to have the experience of joyfully inhabiting it, of navigating its multiple entrances, paths, and exits, in order to make sense of it, to read it and narrate it.

Counter-powers

In a recent report, the International Monetary Fund warned of the risk of people living longer than expected.20

If thinking differently requires feeling differently, 
the battle of ideas should be preceded, or at least accompanied, by a sensitive offensive.21

What can artistic research do against genocidal-terricidal thinking? What can it do within neo-extractivist, financial and semiotic capitalism? What forces and flows in the territories could reconfigure the magnetism of the bodies in continuity, those who do not give up because they do not want to fit into this world?

What weaving of living and sensitive knowledge can artist-researchers cultivate? What forces of counter-power can they compose together with their interlocutors and situational companions to liberate the powers that exist there (Benasayag, Sztulwark, 2000)? What forms of political (feminist, intercultural, eco-social, care and defense of biodiversity) sentipensamiento [sensing/thinking] and imaginaction (imagination + action) can provoke a sensitive offensive from artistic research?

The decolonizing cyborgs from Chaco are still searching for a life to the full. A documentary filmmaker prevents us from forgetting the beginnings of a struggle and, together with the ancestors of Entre Ríos, asks: What is agrarian cooperation today? A broken mirror breaks the silence of the siesta in Misiones, and bounces lights of dissident affection. Clay, the result of the encounter and union of the forces of many lands, heals wounds in Wallmapu. Fishermen from the cliffs of Mar del Plata invite us to let ourselves be touched by the sun, the wind, and the sea. In the streets of Buenos Aires, the voices of food and the struggles for food sovereignty and access to land, together with two corn cobs, carry out a performance in the Museum of Neo-extractivism. Flying humans and seeds from Abya Yala challenge artificial intelligence in search of new (cosmo)politics of time and scale. Voices, poetry, and music come from a suburban mountain of rubbish. The organization and popular environmentalism in José León Suárez share their memories and their living communal culture. From the territories that are banned to the population of Bahía Blanca, an amalgamated body of mud, seagulls, crabs, artists, and the sea insist on turning the invisible visible, on revitalizing experience, on revising the materialities of artistic practices and creating a community of knowledge, inside and outside the university.

Don't say what's behind that mirror, you'll have no power, no lawyers, no witnesses.
Light the lamps, for the sorcerers are thinking of returning to cloud our way.22

Let us artist-researchers not hesitate to tell what is behind the mirror. Let us not hesitate to bear witness. Let´s also face the challenge of giving thickness and consistency to the fabric of communal bonds and adding new tools for the defense of violated rights, for fighting against institutional violence. Above all, lets seek to raise awareness of the need for greater popular organization of micro- and macro-political struggles for a democracy with greater social, spatial and environmental justice.

I think it is very necessary to mention a second contextual circumstance (the first one was the pandemic), which conditioned the final part of this personal and collective experience. I mean the sharpening and radicalization of a degenerative political energy, increasingly linked to the celebration of death. A (bloodstained) handshake between genocidal thinking and terricidal action. A political force that we can identify as postmodern fascism and its "war-state", linked to the mutations of global neoliberalism, whose local roots we find in the policies forcibly implemented by the last military dictatorship (1976-1983) and the reforms proposed by the Washington Consensus (1989), adopted as their own by the governments of Menem and de la Rúa (1989-2001) and taken up again by Macri and his allies between 2015 and 2019.

Imagen

In a second text soon to be published in JAR, I´m interested in deepening the analysis of the relationships between: 1) the ongoing damage caused by colonial and neo-colonial wounds, 2) the exterminatory violence present in the genocidal and terricidal dynamics of the past and present, and 3) the centrality of the influence on contemporary artistic research of an Argentinean tradition of ways of doing, thinking and saying that blur the boundaries between artistic and political practice.

The vertiginous resorting to hatred and physical violence as political tools had expressions without historical precedents, such as the repeated waves of arson in several parts of the country, fires that devastated human and non-human lives with the purpose of further accumulation and concentration of wealth. But they were also expressed through the insistence and persistence of a sadly anti-democratic, anti-popular and anti-rights political practice, obsessed with the creation of an internal enemy to persecute and annihilate; the culminating episode (at least up to the moment of finalizing this text) was the attempt to assassinate the country's vice-president. This is also the situation of the E/earth today. What new knowledge can we learn from such an experience?

The evolution of Argentina's political, economic, social and cultural situation from that violent event to the present has meant that a 'new old' force has come to power through democratic elections. President Milei (an outsider to traditional politics) represents a new version of traditional liberalism. In his words: a mole who comes to destroy the state from within. Violence, cruelty, hatred and messianism are all part of his narrative. Seeing himself as a lion, 'talking' to his dead dog and wielding a chainsaw are some of his favourite symbols. Deregulation, privatisation, foreign debt are his tools. Planned misery is his plan.

Let us try to pull the strings that this article leaves in our hands, to see which one leads us where, to see which unions we wish to create together with whom. To see what fabric will give us shelter as we continue to move, in search of new traces, signs, and omens. Without spatial and environmental justice, there is no social justice.

Bibliography

Ardenne, Paul (2022) Un arte contextual. Creación artística en medio urbano, en situación, de intervención, de participación, Murcia, Cendeac.

Antuña, Jesús; Giordano, Verónica y Molinari, Eduardo (Comp) (2021) Comunidad, Territorio, Futuro. Prácticas de investigación y activismo en la convergencia de arte y ciencias sociales, Buenos Aires, Teseo.

Benasayag, Miguel y Sztulwark, Diego (2000) Política y situación. De la potencia al contrapoder, Buenos Aires, Ediciones de mano en mano.

Boyer, Amalia (2009) Archipelia. Lugar de relación entre (geo)estética y poética. http://www.scielo.org.co/pdf/noma/n31/n31a2.pdf [English edition available: Archipelia: A Place of Relation Between (Geo)Aesthetics and Poetics]

Calderón, Natalia; Cervantes, Abel y Salazar, Atzin (Coord.) (2022) Saberes vivos en la investigación artística, Xalapa, Instituto de Artes Plásticas Universidad Veracruzana, Códice Editorial.

Careri, Francesco (2002) El andar como práctica estética. Barcelona, Gustavo Gili. [English edition available: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice]

Debord, Guy (1958) Teoría de la deriva. https://centrito.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/teoria-de-la-deriva-guy-debord.pdf [English edition available: Theory of the Derive]

García Navarro, Santiago y Molinari, Eduardo (2020) La investigación artística, Buenos Aires, inédito.

Ginzburg, Carlo (1999) Mitos, emblemas, indicios. Morfología e historia, Barcelona, Gedisa.

Kusch, Rodolfo (1976) Geocultura del hombre americano, Buenos Aires, Fernando García Cambeiro.

López Petit, Santiago (2014) Los hijos de la noche, Barcelona, Bellaterra.

Medrano, Celeste y Pazzarelli Francisco (Eds.) (2022) Afectación. Estar en la trampa: Etnografías en América del Sur, Vicente López, Red Editorial.

Rolnik, Suely (2007) La memoria del cuerpo contamina el museo. https://transversal.at/transversal/0507/rolnik/es [English version available: The Body’s Contagious Memory. Lygia Clark’s Return to the Museum.]

--- (2016) La nueva estrategia de poder del capitalismo mundial integrado. https://laboratoriodesensibilidades.wordpress.com/2016/03/06/el-capitalismo-mundial-integrado-y-su-estrategia-micropolitica-de-poder-por-suely-rolnik/

Soja, Edward W. (2014) En busca de la justicia espacial, Valencia, Tirant-Humanidades. [English edition available: Seeking Spatial Justice]

Stengers, Isabelle y Pignard, Philippe (2017) La brujería capitalista, Buenos Aires, Hekht Libros. [English edition available: Capitalist Sorcery. Breaking the Spell]

Sztulwark, Diego (2019) La ofensiva sensible. Neoliberalismo, populismo y reverso de la política. Buenos Aires, Caja Negra.

Biography

Eduardo Molinari. Born, lives and works in Buenos Aires. Visual Artist. Bachelor in Visual Arts. Undergraduate and Postgraduate Research Professor at the Department of Visual Arts of the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA), Buenos Aires, Argentina. Walking as an aesthetic practice, research with artistic tools and methods and trans(in)disciplinary collaborations form a central part of his work.  In 2001 he created the Archivo Caminante / The Walking Archive, a visual archive in progress that investigates the relationships between art, history and territories. Together with Azul Blaseotto, he is a member of the collective La Dársena_Plataforma de Pensamiento e Interacción Artística. His artwork includes drawing, collage, photography, installations in public spaces and specific sites, performance, video, texts and publications.

• 1We understand the term "Anthropocene" to be the geological period marked by irreversible damage caused by human action on the planet. "Neo-extractivism" refers to the reformulation in the 21st century financial capitalism of the historical and asymmetrical model of primary exports from Latin America to the developed centers, based on the overexploitation of energy and raw materials in the hands of corporations with intensive technological capital, which provoke the irreversible destruction of non-renewable resources.
• 2"Buen Vivir" [Living Well] is a concept from the Andean peoples that don't believe in the destructive model of unlimited accumulation and instead propose a sustainable economy in search of reciprocity and harmony with the land.
• 3https://www.clacso.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/PROYECTO-BALLENA.pdf At the beginning it was a cultural and political discussion table made up of Valeria González, Martín Bonavetti, Liliana Viola and Javier Trimboli.
• 4I've made these journeys accompanied by Mercedes Fauda who, throughout the whole process, contributed her sensitive lucidity when it came to reading the politicalness of the events, the ways in which the links between the various local actors were expressed and, above all, their forms of organization and decision-making. I was also accompanied by Jimena Salvatierra and Daniel Duhau, professional photographers capable of locating and capturing the invisible in the visible dimension of the territories, of finding the material traces of what has just vanished before our eyes. Here I wish to express my enormous gratitude to all of them.
• 5With this Mapuzungun term, meaning ‘surrounding land’, the Mapuche people name their ancestral territories, preexistent to the national states of Argentina and Chile.
• 6[TN] Verdurazo, from verdura 'vegetable', is a performative form of protest in the public space, where an agro-ecological cooperative of farmers distributed vegetables at very low cost.
• 7Abya Yala, which means ‘ripe, living or flowering land’, is a term coined by the Kuna people from present-day Colombia and Panama, often used by indigenous and social movements to name the territories of the American continent.
• 8Zapatista sentence quoted in Holloway, John (2005). Cambiar el mundo sin tomar el poder. El significado de la revolución hoy. Caracas, Vadell Hnos. Editores, p.219. [English edition available: Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today]
• 9Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia (2010). Ch'ixinakax Utsiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. Buenos Aires, Tinta Limón, p.13. [English edition available: Ch'ixinakax Utxiwa: On Decolonizing Practices and Discourses].
• 10Buñuel, Luis (1982). Mi último suspiro, Barcelona, Plaza & Janés, p.197. [English edition available: My Last Sigh]
• 11Piqueteros: a social movement that, during the 1990s, fought privatizations and massive dismissal of workers by organizing piquetes and roadblocks. Cartoneros: unemployed workers and indigent families who, first autonomously (in the 1990s) and then organized in cooperatives, collect cardboard and paper from urban garbage and recycle it.
• 12Hinderer Cruz, Max Jorge (2020), Territorios y ficciones políticas (fuerzas, flujos y formas) en Antuña, Jesús; Giordano, Verónica y Molinari, Eduardo (2021) Comunidad, Territorio, Futuro. Prácticas de investigación y activismo en la convergencia de arte y ciencias sociales, Buenos Aires, Teseo, p.59.
• 13Yupanqui, Atahualpa (2012). “Tiempo del Hombre” en El payador perseguido, San Luis, Nueva Editorial Universitaria (UNSL), p.39.
• 14Garcés, Marina (2013). Un mundo común, Barcelona, Bellaterra, p.30.
• 15[TN] In Spanish, "to be" is expressed by two verbs, each with distinct meanings and contexts: Ser denotes inherent qualities or permanent states, while estar signifies temporary conditions or locations.
• 16Carrasco, Andrés (2015). La ciencia a la intemperie. Los Hornillos, Epuyén, Barracas, Tierra del Sur. P.38.
• 17López Petit, Santiago (2014). “Manifiesto del dinero gratis” in Los hijos de la noche, Barcelona, Bellaterra. p.182.
• 18Ginzburg’s original publication is “Spie. Radice di un paradigma indiziario”, in Aldo Gargani Ed, 1979, Crisi della ragione. Nuove modelli nel rapproto tras apere e attivitá umane, Torino, Einaudi. The evidential paradigm differs from both deductive reasoning and inductive conclusions in the experimental sciences and can be linked to the abductive procedure along the lines of Charles Peirce, the American theorist who legitimized the importance of the indexical sign in the field of semiology.
• 19“(…) Both regionally and globally, the logic of mercantile self-valorization tends to become generalized as the only parameter of merit and the fair distribution of resources, but also a militant anti-intellectualism that pathologizes all reflective effort and seeks to impose the inexorability of existing inequalities.”. Catanzaro, Gisela (2021). Espectrología de la derecha. Hacia una crítica de la ideología neoliberal en el capitalismo tardío. Buenos Aires, Cuarenta Ríos, p.166.
• 20López Petit, Op.cit., p.99
• 21Sztulwark, Diego (2019). La ofensiva sensible. Neoliberalismo, populismo y el reverso de lo político. Buenos Aires, Caja Negra, p.26.
• 22García, Charly. “Canción para Alicia en el país”, recorded by the rock band Serú Girán in their album Bicicletas (1980), SG discográfica.