La memoria del agua (The Memory of Water), which was live-streamed on September 9, 2020, consists of an exchange between anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena and artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña. Vicuña’s concept of veroir and de la Cadena’s conceptualization of antropociego (the anthropo-not-seen) undermine the cultural beliefs that are only spoken by humans. Both participants have specialized in similar concepts that perform the intra-relations between humans, land, language, and water—what de la Cadena terms “disobedient grammar” and what Vicuña calls palabrarmas. These oral technologies allow the formation of alliances between environmentalists, Indigenous peoples, and artists questioning modernity’s insistence on the divide between nature and culture.

This is the third and final part of Cumbre Aconcagua (The Aconcagua Summit), a series of conversations, or confabulaciones (confabulations), that take the subject of water as its guiding thread. Conceived by guest curator Camila Marambio, the conference looks at the history of water management in the Americas through the interdisciplinary work of artists, theorists, historians, lawyers, ecofeminists, scientists, and local communities. It features artists whose work has such aquatic themes at its core to consider ways of conceiving of nature as an entity to be respected, rather than a resource to be exploited. 

Cumbre Aconcagua is the first of a series of conferences that the Cisneros Institute is dedicating to the study of the relationship between the arts and the environment in Latin America. You can learn more about the Cisneros Institute programs here.

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Extractivism is one the main causes of dispossession, exploitation, and even genocide and ecocide of the First Nations of colonized countries. Live-streamed on August 25, 2020, El robo (theft) addresses this issue through a conversation between Brazilian artist María Thereza Alves and scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva. Alves—who has devised an aesthetic research practice that “attempts to document as active agents those who are critically engaged with history”—has a longstanding commitment to the community of Mexico’s Xico Valley. Prevented from ecologically sustaining themselves, the Xico community’s struggle was first staged by Alves in a multimedia installation titled The Return of the Lake (2012), in which the artist elaborated upon a critique of the notion of “post-colonization” by investigating how colonial practices are still very much in place. Ferreira da Silva has written extensively on the ethical questions of the global present, and most recently she has begun experimenting with how to release the world from “the procedures and tools that presume that everything that exists or happens is an expression of the human.” Her poethical experiments with the elemental expose how colonial and racial violence is “vital to the accumulation of capital in its various (merchant, industrial and financial) moments.” By pointing to the objectification of personhood that leads to ecocrimes, Alves and Ferreira da Silva share a theorizing of racial power and of a politico extractivist model that oppresses the Indigenous, Black, and impoverished communities of the Americas.

El robo (theft) is the second part of Cumbre Aconcagua (The Aconcagua Summit), a series of three conversations, or confabulaciones (confabulations), that take the subject of water as its guiding thread. Conceived by guest curator Camila Marambio, the conference looks at the history of water management in the Americas through the interdisciplinary work of artists, theorists, historians, lawyers, ecofeminists, scientists, and local communities. It features artists whose work has such aquatic themes at its core to consider ways of conceiving of nature as an entity to be respected, rather than a resource to be exploited. 

Cumbre Aconcagua is the first of a series of conferences that the Cisneros Institute is dedicating to the study of the relationship between the arts and the environment in Latin America. You can learn more about the Cisneros Institute programs here.

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In a reexamination of the concept of EcoDomia—a combination of the aesthetic, the social, and the ecological that theorist Ignacio Valero has called “the aesthetic of the commons”—Digna Rabia and Moral Hazard aims to help construct a common oral architecture that envisions what awaits future generations. Live-streamed on August 11, 2020, this intergenerational dialogue between Valero and Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo revolves around making art and meaning on the basis of the complex cluster that is feeling-being-body today. It is grounded in a carnal history tied to Caycedo’s current research on the aesthetic of the first debt titles issued in the Americas, documents that attest to the subjugation of the Black body. Together, Caycedo and Valero, along with moderator Camila Marambio, reflect on how to halt the splitting of the body understood as territory, as water, as sensuality, as (labor) force, and as monument to enslavement. 

Digna Rabia and Moral Hazard is the first part of Cumbre Aconcagua (The Aconcagua Summit), a series of three conversations, or confabulaciones (confabulations), that take the subject of water as its guiding thread. Conceived by guest curator Camila Marambio, the conference looks at the history of water management in the Americas through the interdisciplinary work of artists, theorists, historians, lawyers, ecofeminists, scientists, and local communities. It features artists whose work has such aquatic themes at its core to consider ways of conceiving of nature as an entity to be respected, rather than a resource to be exploited. 

Cumbre Aconcagua is the first of a series of conferences that the Cisneros Institute is dedicating to the study of the relationship between the arts and the environment in Latin America. You can learn more about the the Cisneros Institute programs here.

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Let me explain why Pantera Negra y Yo (ii) (Black Panther and Me [ii]) is not a painting. 

Cecilia Vicuña’s Pantera Negra y Yo (ii) (Black Panther and Me [ii]) is a work of reproductive labor, the infinite poetic labor of keeping alive the multidimensionality of signs.

Pantera Negra y Yo (Black Panther and Me) first came into the world in Santiago, Chile, in 1970 as a painted object and typewritten paper. The paper that holds the words that explain the meanings of the pictorial figures is not an accompanying wall text but rather a form of wordplay that extends the scope of the painted image outward toward dimensions beyond its maker. Words become images, images become words, and this interchange weaves the mental field of interpretation within which the “I/eye” of the observer is acknowledged and invited to project its imagination. In this sense, the text does not follow the painting; rather, it is an incantation that casts the painting into the future of the collective imagination. 

As an afterimage of Black Panther and Me (ii), a sequence of suspended riddles tumbles into my mind and onto the page I/eye am writing on: How many bodies does one have? What do desiring bodies embody? Why does a desiring body threaten? Where do unmet desires lead?

In the wake of these questions, I speculate that Vicuña intuited that Pantera Negra y Yo would disappear as a result of the violent Chilean military coup of September 11, 1973. Tragically shifting the fate of a whole country, the dictatorship that took hold after the murder of Salvador Allende aborted the desires of a nascent collective body, el pueblo chileno (the Chilean people). Vicuña, who was living in England at the time, was forced into exile and immediately began rallying support against the human rights violations by initiating the collective Artists for Democracy and by publishing the book Sabor a Mí (Beau Geste Press, 1973), which included a black-and-white reproduction of Pantera Negra y Yo. The “original” had been left in Chile, and though it may have traveled to London, it eventually disappeared, along with the whole series of works of which it was part—a series that Vicuña has referred to as “pintura mala,” or “bad painting.” The reference to bad painting is not an act of self-deprecation but an allusion to the mischievous quality of the work: “For me, painting poorly was a rebellion against the colonial standards that we, the colonized, were expected to submit to. I conceived of these paintings as continuations of the indigenous subversion of European attempts to erase our culture by imposing European Christian images and techniques, such as oil painting. I adopted the very techniques and styles perceived by the elite as bad painting, or poor imitations of European art, as a way of turning around our condition.”¹ Paired with the “intentionally crude depictions,”² the text “Explicación de: Pantera Negra y Yo” is an essential feature of the spiritually materialist indigenous technologies that characterize Vicuña’s body of work.³ In 1978, while living in Bogotá, Colombia, Vicuña re-created the painting Pantera Negra y Yo from the memory of the text. This is the version now owned by MoMA.

I’ve never seen the painting in the flesh, only on the luminescent screen of my computer, three years after having seen it for the first time reproduced in color in the 2015 reedition of the book Sabor a Mí (Galería Patricia Ready). After an almost fifty–year time lapse, this mysterious transdisciplinary, transtemporal, transvestite entanglement titled Pantera Negra y Yo vibrated outward again, requesting renewed attention beyond its historic context.

Look at the staircase to the left of Vicuña’s single-headed, twelve-limbed, three-hearted, four-breasted, double-cunted nude body. Allow what floats just outside the painting to creep in, to descend into the pictorial plane, to animate it. The possibility of animation is the gift that Vicuña’s skilled artistry offers the beholder. 

Precariously weaving the unspun wool of universal threads, Vicuña’s dream-state amalgamation of past, present, and future signs returns in 2019 to remind the observer that unfathomable cosmic forces reign over planet Earth—and that only if we sacrifice individuality by calling on the companionship of the ghostly, the animalic, and the plantal will we be able to continue to inhabit the future. Like most of Vicuña’s work, Pantera Negra y Yo is a knot along a sight line that invites the union of image and word, sound and texture, to occur somewhere in the heart of the reader. 

Pantera Negra y Yo is not “simply” a painting but also a siding with indigenous temporalities’ “other” forms of world making.

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