Dreaming Technologies/Political-poetical incantation in le Louvre

To become jaguar has never been a metaphor
Necessary utopias
Imagination summons us to infiltrate into all the cracks
of our thoughts of systems
of all that stiffens, hardens
raises walls and borders
at the encounter with the other

There is a magical character in the paintings of Chiribiquete
or Lascaux,
where to paint a jaguar or a bison
is not to represent it
but to invoke the herd
calling forth the arrival of the following day

The matrix of drawing, like the matrix of language,
is an invocation of forms to come

To learn to fly from the eyes of a hummingbird,
through the particularity of a plant and its leaves
which teach you to connect with its flight
as a technical domain
that disregards the botanical classifications
of the plant in books
and of the animal in encyclopedias

But also of all those
Who leap toward elsewheres
Without questioning the here
The very near
For there is no such thing as our world
And those of the others
But All-World

We greet that place within us
that precedes the notion of identity,
a place resolved in a mestizaje
inherently racist,
inherently white,
patriarchal

Imagination is an incantatory act
which has the responsibility
to announce its dream
to summon other space-times
other stories
And in the midst of desolation
of tears and ruins
to sow, and that even under the rubble
Necessary utopias

The image upon which we have built “nature”
owes more to the botanical exhibitions of Humboldt,
to taxonomic classifications,
expeditionary logbooks,
and scientific definitions,

than to the forces and relations
upon which the traditional medicines
of the original peoples of Abya Yala
have, for millennia,
been building—and continue to build—
a world unknown to the West.

From our infrastructures
to the texture of our imaginaries
we are crossed by all these voices
all these elsewheres that always compose us


Whether we want it or not
all in all engaged
in the pluriversal symphony
of entanglement

So is it, then,
that from the territories of Abya Yala
we might open the spectrum
of what the political dimension
of technique can be?

Hostile clarity
Blinding light
In places that never cease to speak of themselves
Learn to pay attention
to silences

When the Indigenous system itself
proposes not to do research
as its own paradigm,
then the university programs
built on rational objectivity
slowly begin to realize
that reason alone cannot keep covering
what the plasticity of thought
is capable of

No relation
without first undoing oneself
without accepting to lose
to lose oneself


To return
to slow down
to deflect
to unlearn
and to come sit down
immobile
at the place where the cracked earth
once let us glimpse
that we were
other than ourselves


other than-
this great projection we had of ourselves

When colonization arrived in the territories
of Abya Yala,
what those who came down from the ships
did not understand
was that the original peoples of those lands
were not engaging through the logic of exchange


What they were building
was relation
what they were building
was friendship




Because of this,
in giving and giving of their riches,
the Indigenous leaders
were not concerned with commercial transactions.
Their logic went beyond value itself—
less absorbed in exchange and rationality,
and instead rooted in reciprocity


They understood that the creation of affections
was something that surpassed the need for monetary objects
And that was the world that died—
a world unknown to those
who only knew how to live through exchange.

It is the world we inhabit outside,
the imposed world that prevailed:
a world of non-relation,
in which we still live,
surrounded by objects

No relation without settling
into that space
equivocal
difficult
Where common sense is everything but common
and where that space itself

Fragile vulnerable
who does not understand
who does not know
is always to be privileged
over the one who thinks
over the one who knows

To return
to slow down
to deflect
to unlearn
and to come sit immobile
at the place where the cracked earth
once let us glimpse
that we were other than ourselves

Where our world
wants explanations
how to insist on not

-suffocating the silence

The crossing toward the other
is not voyage
is not conquest
it does not leap at its contact
above all it does not seek
-To remain intact

What we are not seeing is this-
when we dismiss the importance of knowing how to speak with coca leaves,
we also dismiss the possibility of a kind of thought
that could arise in no other way
but precisely in our dream-space

The fact that all non-human intelligences
have been hidden within our anthropocentric comprehension of forms
does not mean they are not resonating—
just as the forests still resonate,
and just as our brain operates
in relation to our symbolic thought

How can we activate our entities in resonance,
when they are trapped in the modern institutionalization
of objective dialectic?

How can we activate our minds,
when they are confined by the modern institutionalization
of objective dialectic?

How can we activate a planet,
when it too is caught in the modern institutionalization
of objective dialectic?

The crossing is transformation, becoming, crumbling of self
dissolution of the known at the edge of the unknown
acceptance of mystery


It is a collective archipelagization
of our imaginary


Liquid force
it dissolves the intransigence of our world
in its undulation


Feminine it is
-That which resists and that which persists

Nature does not exist.
Nature is a colonial invention

It is, at the very least, paradoxical
to hear from the very countries
that created industrialization
that the territories of Abya Yala
should be a little more ecological,
recycle a little more

The arrogance with which
the industrialized countries
continue to speak to the territories
that have resisted the impositions
of a world they themselves invented—
that arrogance must end

From humility,
they must begin with listening.
they must begin with understanding
that we have endured centuries
of their unidirectional forms—
hierarchical, self-absorbed—
before they can begin to see
that we do not need more of their human sciences,
their anthropologies


We do not need more
of their definitions.
of their institutions
of non-relation

We need instead
to begin to embrace ourselves with the wind

We need instead
affections,
and forms that are foreign
to self-enclosure—
the very enclosure upon which “progress”
keeps arriving in the territories of Abya Yala,
with the arrogance of believing
it already carries the answers.

Hostile clarity
Blinding light
In places that never cease to speak of themselves
And to write themselves
To learn to pay attention

to silences


Pushes us
to push-against
against our world
against our identity
against a world that would want to make us believe
that the sickness is empathy


Do we even know how to listen
to the artifacts enclosed in vitrines?

Have they been speaking all along,
while we—absorbed in reason,
in our careers,
our field studies,
our investigations,
our measurements—
have remained concentrated only in ourselves?

We have not known how to listen,
nor how to place ourselves in relation
with those worlds.

To flee, betray, lie, hide
sometimes betrayal
Is a necessary threshold to healing

Epistemologies of the South, ecology, decolonization—
all necessary and important terms
for the West,
but not for the peoples and territories
who already inhabit a matrix
that does not begin from Western problems
as its foundation

There are many worlds beyond
the represented image of “nature,”
and in that multiplicity lies
the force of the relations to come.

How to transmit
without translating
without absorbing
without reducing


How can we

together learn
to thicken silence


And from our depths
revive the fire
of this slumbering force
sensual
embodied
True power is an erotic force

Extractivism is not only a mineral operation.
It is also the imposition of external debt
upon the territories plundered
by the powers of the beautiful.

What we hold in our hands
is the possibility to re-dimension
the living and multiple form—
the living and multiple form
of politics to come

No longer caught in the dichotomy
of redefining the future political subject,
but in beginning to speak
what even aesthetics
has made us stop seeing

To push-against
to take the unexpected path
to create unexpected alliances
to learn to see oneself in clair-obscur
It is to have the courage finally
To look at oneself

Do we ask ourselves

what is the price
that others continue to pay
for our share of opacity?

Do not go search the distant
if that one is not also
the very near
If that faraway does not impel you
to radically
rethinkreformulate
Your way of being in the world and of making-worlds

To become
a state of variation
is the brave gesture

The challenge of institutionality:
an institution without institution.

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.

For to see that wound in you
is to see it in the world
and to tend your pain
you become medicine

Imagination is a vibratory act
incantatory
which forces us
to abandon ourselves
to the politics
poetics of relations

---

Las categorías identitarias are momentary tools of struggle
And a moment can be centuries
But in everything that calls me
We continue being a moment
And to protect this space in which I am I
But not only

It is a matrix from the colonial wound


From risk is born also that which saves
From risk is born also that which saves

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


Humans, but not only
Humans, but not only