With the Music Inside

A decolonial reading of the 26^th National Visual Arts Biennial in Santo Domingo[i]

Only a few of the works participating in the current edition of the Biennial use the sound. However, the exception that pays tribute to the rule is significantly represented in three of the seven prizewinning works, which –through a video-installation format– give nuances to the my hypothesis. It’s all about listening in this sonorous absence the rhythm of the modernity/coloniality model, its internal tensions, its bet on the re-existence[ii] and the self-celebration from the Otherness in some of the works participating in the contest, which, in my opinion, add a very-Dominican wink to that Caribbean "certain-way", to pay tribute to Benitez Rojo, to imagine and materialize such model.

First of all, I’ll briefly introduce the beginning of the modernity/coloniality theoretical analysis perspective ascribed to Anibal Quijano[iii] and, afterwards, I’ll go deep into his recent articulation on visual arts as Decolonial Aesthetics.

In 1996, Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano was invited North American counterpart, Immanuel Wallerstein, to the State University of New York. They had been recognized for their work back in the 1960s, Quijano as a member of the group of Latin American thinkers related to the “dependence theory”, and Wallerstein as the founder of one of the most innovative models in the Western sociology in that time: the system-world. The Coloniality Working Group was founded during this visit, along with Kelvin Santiago, Ramon Grosfoguel, Augustine Lao-Montes and Sylvia Wynters, recognized for her work on colonial legacy. Later on, this group was joined by philosopher Enrique Dussel, one of the founders of the liberation philosophy and semiologist, Walter D. Mignolo, who had recently published The Darker Side of the Renaissance.

In 1998, during the World Congress on Sociology, in Montreal, Edgardo Lander organized symposium Alternativas al eurocentrismo y colonialismo en el pensamiento social latinoamericano (Alternatives to the Eurocentrism and colonialism in the Latin American social thought), with the participation of Anibal Quijano, Arturo Escobar, Fernando Coronil and Walter Mignolo. This foundational meeting gave birth to the group’s most acclaimed publication: La coloniality del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales (The Coloniality of knowledge: Eurocentrism and social sciences) (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2000).

The continuous meetings among these intellectuals brought aboutnew theoretical approaches related to the coloniality of power and geopolitics of knowledge. They were also joined by theorists Zulma Palermo, Freya Schiwy and Catherine Walsh; as well as Michael Ennis, Lewis Gordon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Javier Sangines and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, one of the most important theoreticians in the World Social Forum. During the 2006 edition of this Forum, held in Caracas, the modernity/coloniality group organized three panels under title Decolonialidad del saber: saberes otros, revoluciones otras (Decoloniality of knowledge: other knowledge, other revolutions).

The "Decolonial Aesthetics" term was first published in 2009, in a book edited by Zulma Palermo,[iv] in Argentina, with the collaboration of Adolfo Alban-Achinte, who used it in 2003. The concept was restored in the summer of 2009 during the seminaries of PhD on Cultural Studies in Simon Bolivar Andean University, in Quito. Pedro Pablo Gomez (director of Calle 14 magazine, Bogota, Colombia) was the main instigator of the conceptualization of Decolonial Aesthetics, and requested an essay written by Walter Mignolo, who first theorized on the matter in 2010. An academic event was organized in November of that very year, including the publication of two volumes Calle 14 magazine, accompanied by exhibition Decolonial Aesthetics, organized by the ASAB (Bogota’s Superior Academy of Arts). This exhibition was commissioned by Pedro Pablo Gomez, Maria Elvira Ardila (curator from Bogota’s Museum of Modern Art) and Walter Mignolo.[v] This event was expanded on, in May 2011, with a workshop and exhibition titled +DECOLONIAL AESTHETICS, organized in Duke University by the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities. The exhibition was inaugurated at the Fredric Jameson Gallery and the Nasher Museum of Art with artists from Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as the Afro diaspora in the United States and Europe; and it was commissioned by Walter Mignolo and co-commissioned by Marina Grzinic, Guo-Juin Hong and myself.

But, what’s the basic premise that connects the coloniality/modernity model with the artistic practices enunciated as Decolonial Aesthetics? The decolonial option, presented as a model and not as a unique interpretation way, as an access way, not as a dogma, questions the very notions of “universality” and “civilization”, I mean, the “universality of civilization”. Modernity’s rhetoric of “progress” is always accompanied by a secret weapon that operates through the expropriation, exploitation and, as a last resort, genocide: coloniality. When expressing the inseparability between modernity and coloniality, the decolonial thought establishes that there is no “European autonomy of modernity”, or the so-called “postcolonial condition”, since the colonial matrix of power (term coined by Aymaran intellectual Felix Patzi-Paco in 2004)[vi] continues applying the same logic since its beginning to date. Within this status, subjects that have been exploited, deprived, enslaved and terminated by the coloniality have played –and still do– a leading role in the creation of a modernity, not only defining it, but literally “feeding it”.

Decolonial Aesthetics allude to present artistic practices that respond to and come off that dark side of modernity and imperial globalization: coloniality. Just as the Decolonial Aesthetics Manifest establishes: “(this concept)...looks forward to recognizing and opening options for senses liberation. This is the field in which artists around the world question the legacy of modernity and its present embodiment in postmodern and alter modern aesthetics.”[vii]

According to Walter Mignolo: “Word aisthesis, which comes from ancient Greek, is accepted without modifications of European modern languages. The meanings of the word spin on terms such as ‘sensation’, ‘perception process’, ‘visual sensation’, ‘gustative sensation’ or ‘auditory sensation’. That’s the reason why term synaesthesia refers to the intertwining of senses and sensations, and it was taken as rhetorical figure in the poetic/literary modernism. Since the 17th century, the concept of aisthesis got restricted, so the meaning was ‘sensation of the beautiful’. That’s how the aesthetics was born as a theory, as well as the concept of art as practice. A lot has been written on Immanuel Kant and the importance of his thought in the reorientation of aisthesis and its transformation into aesthetics. Ever since, and in retrospective, the history of aesthetics was written and its origins were found not only in Greece, but in the prehistory.”[viii]

This preeminence of the so-called “autonomy of art” was solidified as a consequence of the bourgeois revolutions from the late 18th century, what entailed the appropriation, or colonization, of artistic practices and their epistemic spectrum as exclusive and unique field of aesthetics. So, one of the primary searches of Decolonial Aesthetics is precisely freeing the senses from the manipulation of the sensorial experience imposed by Western aesthetics theories.

And what’s that rhythm of modernity/coloniality that I heard in my aisthesis colonized in the spaces of our ineffable Museum of Modern Art? It’s exactly for this auditory and sensorial mission, which demands the constant volume readjustment in my memory, that I offer this fortuitous and juxtaposed reading, a friend of digression, just like the sound in my interior of my grandfather’s narrative, Don Yoryi, university professor, philologist, orator and journalist, and the order is interchangeable, of course.

Thanks to the impeccable work of Carlos Acero, a “medium” between the decisions of the selection jury and the awarding one, a clever and brand-new modality in the organizational scheme of the Biennial, Gerardo Mosquera and I advanced without setbacks at a paused and consistent rhythm through the museography of the exhibition. Two external installations questioned the (non) making national from the land and from the water– Michelle Ricardo, Retorica de isla (Por tu gran culpa) and Diogenes Abreu, Naturaleza Muerta–, two elements that could be distilled to invade our emotions and unleash the project of senses liberation and the way we describe them. There is no subtlety in the works I mention, there is no “sophistication”, nevertheless, they challenge me to question that so-colonialist parameter, universalizing, imposed by the critic I practice in the Western with one foot dancing ballet and bolero in the other... They weren’t “awardable” works, but I was touched, I have the great task of decolonizing my aisthesis.

In the first floor, painting and photography were combined with large scale works. One of the recognizable labyrinths of Monica Ferreras (Dos ventanas, dos ilusiones), was submerged in the Junguiana enunciation that characterizes her career, but this time with an underlineable aquatic attribute. And, after a tripartite photographic scene created by Polibio Diaz (207 St.) in Quisqueya Heights...Jung and migration without census, a global formula decolonized in my primitive recollection, by virtue of its double conscience, of simultaneously populating as many realities as colmadones[ix]. And I contemplate a univocal pulsar that is apparently irreconcilable with the awareness of the blessed Cartsian dogma, we exist without thinking, or at least that’s what the people who make policy want, the people that rule us as shown in the work of Guadalupe Casasnovas and Mayra Johnson (Disolucion al 4%). And I keep on asking myself, why do Dominican artists insist on the denunciation and/or introspection will, instead of producing indulgent and marketable works? What kinds of aisthesis liberation propose these attitudes for the modernity/coloniality model? Although the answer turns out to be self-explanatory, I take a dodecaphonic divertimento, so here you have twelve apostolic possibilities on this certain way, so Biennialist, of creating by thinking, while a prize is searched and the money has been borrowed to finance the work and/or pay the rent:

You begin smiling.
You continue talking and smiling.
You continue talking, doing and laughing.
You continue talking, doing without light and laughing.
You continue in silence, doing, with light and smiling.
You continue in silence, talking, doing, without internet and laughing.
You continue in silence, doing, laughing and crying.
You continue talking, sending the work to ... and laughing.
You continue becoming indignant about the Biennial, the critics, curators and juries, and laughing.
You continue yielding to the need for the prize and laughing.
You continue planning what’s to be paid with the prize and laughing.
You continue laughing and crying and laughing...

I’m already in the second floor; we looked at six performances in the first one, very different according to my universalizing parameters. I resign myself to my aesthetic colonized limitations and continue the peregrination. Ah! The less awardable work of all and one of the funniest, the portraits of Sobeyda (Josefina Garrido, Toda Ella). It seems that twelve proposals were analyzed and turned down by the selectors. One of the most dazzling rhetorics of the modernity is that, by following the requirements of the capitalist production method, becoming modern individuals, we are save from the curse of poverty. The illegality of drug dealing, which is so profitable for those who run the show (and the reference not only targets politicians, but those who make business and financing policies), is the most visible prove of the inconsistence of this gospel. Actually, we see how an alternate society is built with its own values, it ethics of ostentation and its blin-blin aesthetics, and suddenly the mirror denies the “alternate” side. This is the society, with its broken banks and its accomplices and petrified politicians in their self -importance. The coloniality demands more than a settling of scores with the modernity, a re-existence that without abandoning the notion of collective good and social inversion promotes a new epic; heroines and heroes, prototypes not to be admired in terms of musculature and sexual deed or congressional vainglory, but the ability of critically thinking, laughing, if it’s possible and deserves it. Sobeyda, the favorite lover of a drug dealer, can be imagined as Sister Juana and Mother Teresa... Sobeyda could have devoted her millions to the communitarian good, wasn’t it so?

The “progress” can’t be kept away from criminality, and on the insular space this dictum seems to compete for truthfulness millimeter by millimeter en media and colloquial narratives. Like in so many colonized geographies, the naturalness of violence is a reflection and adornment of the forced friendship between modernizers and resistant, between those who succeed and the residuals. What distinguishes them? What separates them? Bars, naturally. Only those who have something to protect can afford the bars system that has practically become a symbol of status; even where bars are unnecessary they show off about their ubiquity, creating a sinister panorama, not only because they annul their own visibility with their proliferation, but because they also augur a “beautified” future due to its multiple formal and utilitarian possibilities, just as it’s announced in Engel Leonardo’s work (Sin titulo). In this installation, from the telephone to the air conditioned are behind bars, and are the tip of the iceberg. I just remembered that I’ve seen some air-conditioned equipment under bars since I can tell, and telephones with padlocks too. They are like the ugly sister of Cinderella, the bars. The Cinderellaof ones and zeros asks us for a key to gain access to all of our virtual activities. And the “real” stepsisters don’t let us touch our own everyday life unless we go through the damn bar! We have fed our affinity with the bars, with a consistence as symptomatic as exasperating. That’s the reason escapism may not be a so-despicable solution after all. Julianny Ariza Volquez’s installation (Solo mientras sueño me encuentras) immerse in a paper paradise, speaks volumes on the will of re-existence of an emerging generation that optimizes the precariousness with a level of unavoidable poetry. Once again, the parameters of Western aesthetics stop me from awarding this fragile and powerful work, it needs some “polish”, but I use this space to pay tribute to its seriousness and freshness.

I’m running out of water for my endless crossing, I listen to the juxtaposed scores of Francisco Rodriguez’sMi-Muro, the video-art Charo Oquet’s installation (En un abrir y cerrar de ojos) and Eliu Almonte (La Casa) and I feel profound and expanded satisfaction.

The inversion of paradigms that identify “the national”, one of the bloodiest and most sterile legacies of the shared coloniality, not to call it massacred, between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, are conjured in these works with symphonic precision. The color of Dominican voodoo sublimate a la Calder in the magisterial floor of Oquet’s installation, the notes of Haitian and Dominican national anthems juxtaposed in a projection of demolishing minimalism in Rodriguez’s video-installation, and Sara Hermann’s voice initiating the Himno a la Escuela as coda to Eliu Amonte’s work... I close my eyes and listen: modernity/coloniality, coloniality/modernity... ad infinitum... A brief light is added to the insular horizon, is like a silence accompanied by the waves: in the Caribbean even the silence can always be heard, outside... and inside.