Debates

Worldmaking Practices: a Take on the Future

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Sara Garzón is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University. She specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American art focusing specifically on issues relating to decoloniality, temporality, and indigenous ecocriticism.

August 3, 2020

Notes for a Horizon-tality: Toward the Possibility of Becoming Together as an Assemblage is a project that responds to our multiple and seemingly multiplying emergencies. Since the growing uncertainty of living in a world in crisis seems to continuously threaten the possibility of the future, this editorial initiative seeks to contribute to the growing scholarship on this topic from the perspective of Latin American contemporary art. We hope that by providing a take on the future, the initial artistic and curatorial imaginaries gathered here can help counter the defuturing narratives that stagnate our mobilizing potential for constructing other ways of being and existing in the world. In the face of generalized pessimism, it is essential to remember that recent uprisings and social movements have opened the door to alternative imaginaries for thriving amid end-of-the-world scenarios. Especially as these imaginaries underscore the fact that looking back in time constitutes a powerful form of anti-colonial resistance. That is why in taking the future only as a provocation, this inquiry explores the construction of multiple worldmaking practices that can help us exist in the future. In that sense, this project is an invitation for participating artists, curators, and readers to contribute to the creation of other forms of the real that can yield new practices and orientations for becoming together as an assemblage.

This proposal for engaging in an assemblage against extinction, however, prompts two different albeit related questions namely: where is the future? And whose world are we to imagine? We invited an array of collaborators from Latin America to provide a multiplicity of answers so that together we can foster the beginning of what could be a collective imaginary for Horizon-tality. In the next few entries readers will find a variety of provocations: some propose other ways of telling time (past, present, future); others may incite us to follow new directions or assume new orientations; may offer imaginaries for what an indigenous, Black, queer, or feminist proposition for Horizon-tality would look like; additional ones may help us to think about what an interspecies Horizon-tality could entail, and lastly, they may altogether offer us an (aesth)et(h)ics for collaged and stitched-together assemblages for being and existing in the world outside of the modern-colonial world system.

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Debaters

The Blind Toucan

Patricia Domínguez

Calmly, the blind toucan looked at me with its left side and sensed me with its right side.

Kai oxi ch’abäl ke taq re' pe Chixot

Ángel Poyón Cali

We no longer know how to read the future.

Ways of Being In the World

Latin America must give up the Western concept of time so that inquiring about the past is...

Ayni/Trans-action

José Luis Macas Paredes

The Andean cultural matrix relies on systems of relationality...

The Futures Are Here

♪ We are all guests on mother planet Earth...

A Disobedient Body on the Horizon

Érika Ordosgoitti

The body is a battleground...

The World in Flames

Paul Rosero Contreras

The earth trembles in the Andes. The ground swells with a subtle...

Andean Futurism

Historical documentation on the Incas, Aztecs, and Maya...

Ahuecar

Sebastián Calfuqueo

Colonial extractivism obliterated bodies of water, land, lives...

Kab' ej

Sandra Monterroso

When my grandmother died, I felt that she was passing her breath on to me...

The World, a Broken Jug

Kiyo Gutiérrez

In the Meso-American worldview, Mother Earth is represented...

Archeo-loca-logy

Roberto Guerrero

Taken from his renowned play The Blacks, this quote...

On Being Black and Future

A black future is not an act of revenge!

Challenging the World from the Community

The term “g/local” opens up perspectives in today’s art criticism...

Unintelligible Lifeforms

While we find ourselves with a conception of the future...

Weaving (Un)certain Futures

Delmar Ulises Méndez-Gómez

To write about the future is to speak of something uncertain...

The Future Is a Space Station

The future is a kernel of corn that is planted...

There Are Worlds

Birds are chirping, and rain is falling in Brooklyn...

Notes for a Horizon-tality

Sara Garzón

"Notes for a Horizon-tality: Toward the Possibility of Becoming Together as an Assemblage" is an editorial project that responds to our multiple and seemingly multiplying emergencies More