Territorio encarnado: ejercicios de soberanía visual. Visualidades, textualidades y estéticas situadas en la producción artística indígena en Abya Yala

Abstract

This text is the result of multiple reflections in which cultivators from the indigenous world of Abya Yala meet in intercultural dialogues. The text is plurivocal, multiple and collective. Its authorship is not unique but communal, It is not possible to write about these phenomena in isolation and, therefore, the body is also compromised, since it is in this way, active and participatory, from where these reflections are produced. It is an embodied, performative, participatory and, in a certain way, liberating reflection that tries to show the emergence of situated forms of cultural production in the indigenous world. With emphasis on visual, audiovisual and textual practices particularly in the Colombian territory, also in other territories of Abya Yala. My personal vision, being an Andean individual who works from an academic institution in the United States —in and out of the region—, particularly interested in the nexus between race, environment and the humanities, is to emphasize three areas overlapping: 1) holistic critical theory (a return to the humanities), specifically the marriage of critical natural and cultural studies; 2) critical pedagogy, particularly the fusion of natural and cultural studies pedagogies, including efforts to recognize teaching as action and expanding the classroom as a field of opportunity and decolonizing the classroom through intercultural encounters and education environmental; 3) cultural renaissance, the struggle for mother earth, cultural and natural conservation, including critical analysis of resource management, relationality, and life cycle assessment. The main task of this vision has been to encourage critical action on, in, of, from and within these three aspects equally. However, in the future, I seek to make an increasing effort to move from ecocriticism to ecoaction, to mobilize (radical) change “on the ground”, by reinforcing work on new and diverse sources of knowledge (the archive embodied), disseminate counter-narratives to the colonial matrix of power, allow human, non-human and beyond-human voices to express themselves openly, in the hope of (re)building communities and possible and dignified places for life. This, of course, is not a small company. In the indigenous worldviews of the Americas, the conception of linear time does not correspond to their vital and relational experience. For the Mayans of Mesoamerica, for example, what is in front is not the future, but the past (the ancestors), what is seen is the experience lived in long-term counts (each long cycle, the baktun is around 394.26 years, 144,000 days). Thus, the future does not exist in the same way that it cannot be seen from behind (Álvarez, 1997, p. 91). The Yucatecan Mayan writer and artist, Isaac Esaú CarrilloCan (1983-2017), in his performance Uj’ (2014), presents this dichotomy. At the start of the event, Carrillo-Can is dressed in urban clothing, makes a movement and with a song (in Mayan) begins to walk backwards, takes out what he carries in his pockets (passport, telephone, watch, money) and leaves a trail on the ground with them. Then, one by one, they abandon their clothing and with it all contact with the Western world. He walks slowly and in space demarcates the four cardinal points (east, lik'in; north, xamam; west, chik'in and south, nohol) while he sings, in Mayan, lullabies (those his grandmother sang) and tells origin stories.