October 12: Far from Tenochtitlan

Thesis 75: The radical nature of the contingency asserted by materialism implies recovering the idea that destruction and annihilation can exist without any counterpart, without any compensation; it is about recognizing that there are absolute losses that will never be recovered, events without any consequences, civilizations and entire peoples annihilated and lost in the nothingness of History without leaving any trace, like those great rivers that disappear in the sands of a planetary desert. The idea that in the world there are a number of things, objects, subjects, events, flows, lives and events that will be absolutely annihilated and not recovered, the reality of that idea, we say, manifests the abrasiveness of the vast machinery of annihilation that inhabits the desert of the real.

Thesis on the Audiovisual, Colectivo los Ingrávidos.

This unleashing deploys an intermittent and glowing interrogation that spans centuries through time, reaching us in an extremely current moment of danger and perplexity; the aforementioned Mesoamerican spell prompts us to ask What land is this?

The origin of the question lies in the astonishment that the mercenary and later chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo expressed when entering an “unknown” land; In the heart of an “unknown” and “unnamed” America, the European Díaz del Castillo made clear the crisis of his colonial somnambulism, fusing his astonished perception with the intermittent glow of a non-European reality; here what the Europeans really discovered was the perplexity of their own ignorance.

His ecstatic question crossed the destructive centuries of colonialism and European barbarism to be taken up, among others, by the writer Juan Rulfo, who recovered it from abandonment in the wasteland and the devastated lands left behind by five centuries of civilizing excess.

Now we can recover the question, not only from perplexity and wasteland but from trance and cinematic rapture. Thus, from an intermittent and glittering land, we also have the trance as “images of relation.”

We may recall that the “letters of relation” were the way that Hernan Cortés informed the Spanish Crown about the “progress” of his ominous conquest. Let us therefore recover the form of the “relation” as a report intended to in-form, but as the un-formed found in multiple “images of relation”.

Thus, through audiovisuals we seek to think, articulate, integrate and connect the historical absence of reconciliation entailed by the arrival of Europeans to the land later known as America as well as the destruction of Tenochtitlan in 1521.

Five centuries after these events, we assert the Aesthetics of Trance and Shamanic Materialism as forms of multinaturalist resistance that move us to re-appropriate, transfer and transform the ominous corrosive process induced by that historical and asymmetric clash between radically different worldviews and which brought about the birth and development of modern nation states in the Americas with their resulting violence and problems that have still not been reconciled today.