Poetic Recodification of Collective Imagination

When A-Desk invited me to collaborate as editor, my main concern was, and still is, how to realise the map “Poetic Recodification of Collective Imagination” so that it doesn’t get plastered, so that it doesn’t become fixed in an object. Because, indeed, this is how it was shown in two group exhibitions in which it was not possible to activate the map as a relational process. Mainly because the exhibition apparatus tends to reify dynamic processes and, consequently, does not allow for their reconfiguration according to the unexpected relations that it incites. The process I’m starting this October consists of activating the map as a relational practice through conversations with collectives that, in my opinion, base their processes of collectivity on imagining poetic forms that allow us to better understand our action in the world.

“Poetic Recodification of Collective Imagination” responds to the urgency to imagine a horizon of hope in the face of the vertigo of the collapse of the modern-world-system. This nomadic cartography emerges not from the vertigo that precedes the apocalypse, but from the principle of extreme possibility to imagine and define a horizon of hope. “Poetic Recodification of  Collective Imagination” is a chaotic, decentred, non-hierarchical and non-totalising process; it is a device that invites us to imagine the potentialities of life in communality outside the utopia-dystopia binomial through what Édouard Glissant calls the Poetics of Relation^[1] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).]. Glissant offers the poetics of relation as the inheritance of the descendants of slavery who, on returning to their land (which is not necessarily a geographical space), not only do so as free entities, but do so as multiplicity in Relation ^[2] Édouard Glissant, Poetic Intention, trans. Nathanaël (Nightboat Books, Calicoon, NY, 2010).

My heritage as a descendant of European settlers who participated in the extermination of the Selk’nam community in Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego is that of the coloniser who reifies life in order to own and annihilate it. The abysmal mourning of this inheritance and its impossible reparation can only be assumed as a radical responsibility in the recognition of each specific form of difference in order to reclaim its future ^[3]Hema’ny Molina Vargas, Camila Marambio & Nina Lykke (2020), Decolonising Mourning: World-Making with the Selk’nam People of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego, Australian Feminist Studies, 35:104, … Continue reading. “Poetic Recodification of Collective Imagination” arises from this fundamental responsibility to elaborate a “culture of hope”^[4]Aníbal Quijano, Cuestiones y horizontes: de la dependencia histórico-estructural a la colonialidad/descolonialidad del poder (Issues and Horizons: From Historical-Structural Dependence to the … Continue reading that recognises itself as part of the complexity of the collapse of a historical process that has reified life for more than five hundred years. Without going any further, in A-Desk I feel preceded in the work of the culture of hope by the editorials of Pilar Cruz on “Dissident Communities”, Lorenzo Sandoval in “Collaborative Film Making“, Mela Dávila Freire in her editorial on “Collective work“, to name just the most recent ones. to name only the most recent ones.

The “Horizon of Meaning” and the “Poetics of Relation”

I have invited three groups to think in conversation ^[5]. “Thinking in conversation does not separate the intimate from the public and creates a political skin aimed at a project of ties.” Rita Segato, Contra-pedagogías de la crueldad … Continue reading.  about their processes of collectivity and I proposed to each of the collectives to start from a different concept of the map “Poetic Recodification of Collective Imagination”: Cosmology, Cosmopolitics and Cosmogrammatics. I consider these concepts as neither homogenising nor reductionist, but rather as opening horizons of meaning (Aníbal Quijano) that flee from the uneasiness and uncertainty in the face of the mutation of the collapse of colonial and neoliberal modernity in the destruction of the planet and the reification of life.

Aníbal Quijano proposes a new horizon of meaning ^[6] Quijano Idem as a space for unlearning Eurocentric hegemony and changing the way of knowing, understanding and explaining”. Édouard Glissant breaks down how to bring about this change through the poetics of Relation. Both Quijano’s horizon of meaning and Glissant’s poetics of Relation are conjectures of possibility that draw the map without fixing it because they do not presuppose any ideology of stability, but are based on the liberation of the poetic imagination as a force for a process of transformation based on Multiplicity.

We know that we cannot take for granted that the culture of hope can resist the violent reaction of those who feel threatened by it. I am also a daughter of the Chilean exile caused by the violent defeat of Salvador Allende’s socialist dream. The patriarchal, colonial and Eurocentric episteme is embedded in our subjectivity, in collectives, in communities and, of course, in cultural and educational organisations and institutions. There is no possible essentialism and it is necessary to continue working on the construction of a new horizon of meaning in order to promote a way of thinking that revolves around the imagination of another social order: these conversations are a reflection of this.

Thinking in Conversation

With two of the collectives, the conversation was audio-recorded and then the transcripts were edited together with the members of each collective. With the other collective, we had the conversation and then recalled it in an email exchange for reasons I explain below. The choice of this procedure responds to the intention of placing the conversation at the centre as a relational practice that invests more in the process than in the final product. The fact that the present moment of the voice is extended to a textual duration showed the enormous challenge of moving from spoken language to written text. In thinking in conversation ^[7] Segato Idem there is a vital force of bodies expressing as much as the articulated content of voices. Multiplicity is expressed in sounds that punctuate the meanders of thought in formation; an idea makes its way to get lost in the mist and re-emerge in another voice; phrases that impact like waves on the shores of perplexity; and the silence of radical listening sustains the weaving of ideas.

Orality is lost in the textual transfer to imitate a linear thought that wishes to recognise itself as coherent and that aspires to express the complexity of chaos with a transparent logic. The texts maintain a certain amphibious form between the oral and the written because, without taking the reader by the hand, it introduces them into the intimacy of conversational thinking. Each conversation surpasses all limits of length when transformed into a text because they resist being transformed into an archive-thing. The texts that will be offered here consciously take up these complexities.

Cosmopolitics – Iconoclasistas Collective

Iconoclasistas develop what Rita Segato calls the “counter-pedagogies of cruelty”^[8] Segato Idem .  In Segato’s words, “the counter-pedagogies of cruelty rescue the sensibility and the linkage that opposes the pressures of the times and, above all, allow us to visualise alternative paths”. Through workshops Iconoclasistas create the possibility of visualising collective knowledge and situated experiences by creating counter-cartographies that narrate alternatives to the normative fictions of Eurocentric, racist and extractivist rationality. Iconoclasistas open the space to share counter-pedagogies of cruelty as a call to join forces and further debate the politics of rootedness and community.

Our conversation became even more relevant when days later, in the Argentine presidential elections, another fan of petrosexoracial violence ^[9]“Without a large mass of subaltern bodies subjected to segmentations of species, sex, gender, class and race, neither fossil extractivism nor the organization of the capitalist world economy would … Continue reading was the most voted candidate in the primary elections. Iconoclasts poetically recode the collective imagination, making it possible to resist patriarchal, colonial and neoliberal violence.

Cosmology – To See The Inability To See Collective

To See The Inability To See could be one of the imaginary beings from Jorge Luis Borges’ book that inspired Foucault to write “Words and Things”. Foucault describes that “the history of the order of things would be the history of the Same”. The collective To See The Inability To See collect and cultivate Difference in their garden of the an-archive ^[10]“(…) the archive promises order and authority, and the ability to do many things, it does so at a sometimes heavy price. The anarchive promises a way out of systems, often from within, to … Continue reading I would describe the practice of To See The Inability To See as collectors of those exceptional moments of extreme porousness in which Relation is established with each of the different forms of the world, without forgetting even the smallest of them.

The conversation I had with the collective To See The Inability To See was not recorded due to a technical error and we started an exchange of emails. As there was no archive to capture the moment of the conversation, we could only fall back on our memory. To See The Inability To See collected, watered and fertilised the bifurcations of memory as a seed that is now part of their garden in the non-category “the conversation that wasn’t recorded”.

Cosmogrammatics – Fictopus Collective

The Fictopus collective has the particularity that I am one of their tentacles and our conversation is the continuation of many previous ones. With Fictopus, the fictitious ethnographic distance between the object and the subject of analysis is declared an aberration. In Glissant’s words, “in Relation, every object is subject and every subject is object”. Our indisciplinarity – not only in terms of language – is the indiscriminate transit between knowledges. Just as the octopus changes the colour of its skin in unexpected combinations, Fictopus reconfigures each unit to guarantee its multiplicity. And like the octopus whose brain is spread throughout its body, in Fictopus, whatever one of its members is willing to tell, it offers the others the pleasure of learning.