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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