My aim with this work is to generate a plane of immanence where all bodies can be open to encounter, and to a way of empathy that exists outside of language and discourse, but that becomes present from skin to skin and in the space between each body. I am interested in opacity as a way to disrupt the hierarchy of vision and erase any notion of horizon. Instead, I position against identification, against categorization and against History.
Reggaeton is a syncretic music that was born in the 1980s in the Caribbean and Central America. Intertwined with the flows of capital, labour, displacement and a vast array of musical traditions, it erupted as a volcano, full of energy from the disenfranchised youths and ready to swallow everything: Salsa, Disco, House, New Age, Techno… everything could fit within the Jamaican Pounder and its unapologetic joy, sexuality and presence. Many cultural practices in Central America and the Caribbean function in this syncretic logic, aiming for opacity as a way to avoid identification and destruction; and negotiating its materialization by re-codifying the meaning of symbols and language, rejecting any notion of purity, and instead embracing composition. Nothing is literal and meaning is diffuse.
But the colonial project (and its totalitarian pursuit of building a Westernized monoculture) continues to destroy forms of life that don’t adhere to its productive model. The result of this extractive process is a generalized malaise, a burden of the spirit; and alienation, displacement and loneliness are treated as pathologies to be dealt with through the judicial, psychiatric and medical apparatus.
So this theory begins with one question: can we, collectively, experience a joy that exceeds the dispositions of the neoliberal regime? And subsequently, can this joy bring us to a plane of immanence, of pure existence that frees itself from the concept of “future”, that avoids the capture of language, productivity and assimilation, and make us be present and in complete pleasure? Can this joy make us strong? Can it make us friends?
Vol.1 was presented at XXII Paiz Biennial Guatemala, curated by Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer and Alexia Tala, in collaboration with three Guatemalan dancers: Sandra Tol, Mayra Galeano and Ingrid Bonillo.
Vol. 2 was presented in the 6th Ural Biennial, curated by Çağla Ilk, Assaf Kimmel and Misal Adnan; in collaboration with Olya Simakova. (Симакова Ольга Васильевна) Lydia Koshurnikova. (Кошурникова Лидия Андреевна) Maria Filyar. (Филяр Мария Сергеевна) Polina Alexandrovna. (Зуева Полина Александровна) and Claudia Vladislavovna (Бывальская Клавдия Владиславовна)
