Looking After the Future: On Queer and Decolonial Temporalities

Ausgabe #8

Dealing with questions of queer of color temporalities and black futures in dystopic times the Queer Frequency Modulation Collective interviewed Kara Keeling for a podcast. Her reflections echoed for quite a long while, which is why the collective chose to engage with the echo’s frequency and fashioned a sound installation. The radios the collective use in the installation refer back to Sun Ra´s technotopia of transmitting his philosophy of Astro-Blacks through sound.

Haciendo Caras/Making Faces: Connecting Identity, Resistance, Art, and Spirituality

Ausgabe #8

‘Looking Back Forward_Quip Nayr’ is based on the Aymara concept of time and space called ‘qhip nayr’. As the Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui refers to it, ‘quip nayr’ is a way of looking into the past to orient your path to the future. I use this concept to reflect on processes of change, concerning language, identity and place. Expressing identity on fabric recuperates my ancestors’ tradition from the Andean region in Abya Yala (Latinamerica). The layering of textiles is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa, who uses fabrics as a synonym to talk about the construction of identity in her concept ‘Haciendo Caras’.

Why the Pictures Had to Come from Black. Looking with Myra Greene at Character Recognition

Ausgabe #8

With her photographic series Character Recognition (2006–2007) U.S. artist Myra Greene examines historical constructions of race and racist ways of looking from a perspective that undermines the assumed neutrality of photography. She transforms the old ambrotype technique and encourages to reflect on the power that visual technologies hold over the representation of race and identity. Greene recalls yet disobeys nineteenth-century ethnographic visual practices and looking instructions, creating a technical and metaphorical deferral of the past into the present and of the present into the past. Her photographic practice unveils the ongoing violent effects of nineteenth-century scientific racism on present-day bodies and embodied ways of looking. At the same time, Character Recognition gives new life to the archives of visual colonialism and experiments with photographic representation and body memory as tools for decolonial options of non-normative (visual) spaces.

The Path of Conocimiento, 2018

Ausgabe #8

In this work, I relate to the path of conocimiento, a concept developed by Gloria Anzaldúa, which is a form of spiritual inquiry/activism, reached via creative acts—writing, art-making, dancing, healing, teaching, meditation, and spiritual activism. In writing and drawing, I weave lines to different realities: the rural upbringings of the women who raised me, my migration from the Third World, the meaning of home and belonging, and my connection to all that exists on the planet as political consciousness.