Merida T'Ho_MX: Todo en silenco

todo está en suspenso, todo tranquilo, todo inmóvil, todo apacible, todo silencioso, todo vacío, en el cielo, en la tierra.

Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, interview, October 2008, Santa Cruz, California.

"I have decolonized myself in order to begin the construction of the space. I have created discourses with artists whose conceptual work is inspired by Cildo Meireles and the dialectic of the 'disappeared" and the uspoken stories of 'uncharted regions"-- notably, the Coca-Cola project of 1970. The coke bottle project involved insertion and removal processes and then recirculation--exploring 'to register informations and critical opinions on bottles and return them to circulation.' (Cildo Meireles). The curatorial project becomes a collaborative art piece "always growing a matrix, in which not only the curators participate, but also the artists. Together, they create variable geometries." Reflecting on Cortázar,'having in our own histories those who are part of our cultural territory-- we had to bring back these histories, our cultural practices: we are now colonized by new media theorists; neo-conceptual spaces re-shifts when in the Latin American space, as we bring in through it our own concepts and issues...The omnipresence of the English language in new media meant that 'English was nominating, scripting, programming." The effect was a de facto prejudice, "we are not interested in non-English speaking artists. You couldn't be a new media artist in the late nineties" without dealing with this prejudice. This was'technopatriarchy-even though we were immersed in this transformative territory, this cross-section of disciplines, we were creating new knowledges but these served as but a fetish to the machine, to imperialist surveillance and the control of essence...such was the nature of the internet at that time (the late nineties)." We were breaking from the Cartesian model of scientific rationalism; we were concerned with the fundamental insight of [Mayan culture] of landscape as a data space. harks back, for Raul, to Rudolf Arnheim, whose empiricism was the foundation of knowledge- gained through all the senses via deep systems of metaphor underlying all the senses. Essentially, Raul argues for the primacy of direct observation and indigenous understanding-- that values and meanings arise from this matrix of sensing/perceiving/observing in a participatory context; these are his 'variable geometries" which make pathways of understanding and life-connection outside dominating systems of control.