THE GUARDIANS WAS A COMISSION BY THE LOUVRE MUSEUM & CITE INTERNATIONALE DES ARTS TO STABLISH RELATION WITH ONE PIECE OF THE COLLECTION OF THE LOUVRE MUSEUM. THE CHOOSEN PIECE WAS ‘LE YUCCA GLORIOSA’ A 1844 PAINTING BY ANTOINE CHAZAL, A NATURALIST AND BOTANICAL RENDERING CONTRASTING WITH HOW FROM ABYA YALA PERSPECTIVES, WE RELATE TO PLANTS AS MEDICINAL BEINGS AND NOT AS PASSIVE ELEMENTS OF OBSERVATION, BUT THROUGH AFFECTIVE, SENSUOUS, AND EMBODIED RELATIONSHIPS THAT EVEN QUESTION THE REGIME OF THE VISUAL ITSELF. WHERE CLASSICAL ART OFTEN POSITIONS THE VIEWER IN A MODE OF DISTANT CONTEMPLATION, MY WORK IS CONCERNED WITH CREATING DREAMING DEVICES, AS THIS MASKS, TO BECOME INTERFACES BETWEEN THE PLANTS INSIDE THEM, AND OUR BODIES, WHEN NATURE DOESN’T EXIST ANYMORE, BUT A NETWORK OF SENTIENT INTERACTIONS. THE REPRESENTATION OF YUCCA GLORIOSA IS EMBLEMATIC OF A BROADER DYNAMIC -HOW THE WEST HAS OFTEN ENGAGED WITH SOUTHERN AND INDIGENOUS EPISTEMOLOGIES IN A DISTANCED OR FOLKLORIZING MANNER, EVEN WHEN IT BELIEVES ITSELF TO BE CELEBRATING THEM.

Dreaming Technologies/Political-poetical incantation in le Louvre

What would it mean
to imagine
a museum without museum?

If the master’s tools
never dismantled the master’s house,
what then of the territorial matrix
of our gatherings?

The questions to the stolen guardians,
today vitrined
as multicultural treasures,
as signs of racial integration,
as patrimonies of the nation,
as prides of identity.

Each display
a justification of the discipline
that contains them,
and in containing,
forgets
what they were guarding.

We seek to weave ourselves as an assembly of peoples and arts
We seek to weave ourselves as sentient infrastructures
As cosmomorphic legislations