Únete al grupo más pequeño1.
GOETHE
Over the (undefined) course of a trip across Colombia's Eastern Plains, we found ourselves in Maní, a municipality in the Casanare department, at the time of the Casanare Bandola Festival and in the company of Carlos César “Cachi” Ortegón, a llanero (plains) poet who explained to us the importance of darkness for his culture. He claimed that the arrival of electricity had weakened it; the enigma suggested by the night is the creative support for much of the fantasy, mythology, poetry, and music that make up the llanero folklore. In electric light, everything we imagine disappears. Light becomes the antagonist to tradition by blinding the interpretation and knowledge of the one who sees, of the one who creates and transmits in the dark, of the one who experiences open spaces, of the people who build their own world because they understand that each individual is a separate universe unto itself.
An excess of light, which is the case in certain parts of the Colombian plains, came with the industrialization of these lands and produced countless ruptures, the most significant of which was a spatial rupture in the form of fences. People who once moved freely began to experience difficulty traveling through the territory. Distrust between neighbors grew with the physical delimiting of space, by fencing it. This phenomenon is a consequence, in part, of the arrival of outsiders, who came to solve the needs imposed by new economic activities, by conceiving space in a different way. Our gaze is our perception; impositions on the landscape are therefore social transformations that have a fundamental effect on the way we want to see, understand, and travel the world. The transformation of the gaze precedes all physical transformation.
Even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory does the opposite: it distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and non-communicating.[2]
GILLES DELEUZE & FELIX GUATTARI
This transformation of space affected the routes between travelers and damaged the social dynamics of their journeys, which, cemented in the hospitality of the llanero, or plainsman, frequently included cultural and creative exchanges. In this respect, the llanero culture oscillates between the nomadic and the sedentary, and any delimitation, intervention, or imposition on the plains landscape constitutes a modification of the gaze and implies the modification of several of its sociocultural dynamics. Industry began to encourage technical and scientific training in young people, which created a monopoly on subsistence, a majority control of stability and knowledge. I heard of one case in which a young woman who, despite her overwhelming vocation for music and her culture, succumbed to pressure to study industrial engineering because a local company offered to pay her studies, based on her school grades. It would be more appropriate for young people to choose an educational option based on their tastes, abilities, and socio-cultural context.
These types of ruptures currently occurring in different parts of the world affect social dynamics and limit cultural, intellectual and creative independence. Darkness, more than government, industry, academia, and what we call progress, has spawned cultural manifestations and knowledge that, if not for the shadows, would have disappeared.
Darkness as a multiple and independent possibility for knowledge has served as our starting point. It is the place where we want to be. It is the opportunity for different gazes to coexist. Darkness does not oppose the light, it contains it. This containment is presented here as an opportunity to rethink our gaze. It is not a question of hiding but of becoming a frame of reference that provides visibility to different kinds of ideas, counteracting the current hate speech, which goes hand in hand with visions of unity, equality, nationalism, and xenophobia allowing for only one gaze, one path, and, consequently, only one way to inhabit the world. Rethinking knowledge and transforming it, moving from exclusion to inclusion, means addressing the anti-intellectualism, academic isolation, and ideological intolerance prevalent today. It means strengthening self-determination, accepting the idea of darkness within any form of knowledge.
This magazine presents darkness not only as the subject of the edition, but as an open map of thought that will determine the course of the magazine from here forward without limiting its course, without limiting its uncertainty, upholding in thought, word, and deed, the belief that no form of creation should be based on convenience or despair. By taking responsibility for the ways in which we create, think, and live, we can take back the reins of our creative processes paralyzed by an excess of light. This means allowing ourselves to abandon pleading, dependence, and stigmatization.
In a more technical sense, this edition was constructed by stringing together a series of trips[3] –bearing in mind the etymological roots of this term–, their spatial implications, and, ultimately, their deeper spiritual connotations. This construction required a detailed analysis of the current situation of art in Colombia and a recognition of similarities with global social issues in order to structure a platform with which to counteract them. This attempt to reconcile different views within the same space led to the understanding that it was not a question of delimiting space and filling it, but of enjoying the opportunity to travel through different territories, simultaneously and infinitely.
Without necessarily having succeeded in all cases, discussions with various authors and forms of research enriched this edition, in which they took part, in a very special way. The magazine's physical construction and design were approached as a multi-tiered journey to be taken by the entire editorial team and aimed at escalating our vision. In search of an idea for the edition’s design and layout, we agreed to travel randomly, by car, through the Balkans. We designated Belgrade, Serbia and Sofia, Bulgaria, as our starting and ending points, respectively, but had no set itinerary, which allowed for a fluid physical and mental journey.
Bennu became linked with Osiris as a symbol of anticipated rebirth in the Underworld.
RODRIGO B. SALVADOR
Two weeks before leaving, a gas stove exploded and the flames burned a large part of my body. This event played a decisive role in the direction our journey would take, by establishing certain conditions for the trip; in addition to focusing on research and creation, the trip would be one of physical and mental recovery. The idea of fire, present in many of our previous conversations, took on even more power. The spine of this magazine is made of abrasive paper, which can be used to easily light any match. Fire as a mechanism to destroy and rebuild memory, of death and rebirth. In Egyptian mythology, the figure of Bennu, a bird that plays a leading role in solar myths, is linked to sun worship. As part of this worship, we were also welcomed by Ka, the spirit of eternal wandering, whose hieroglyph is represented by arms raised to worship the Sun, and who invited us to wander. And instead of traveling outwardly only, we began to inhabit our interior, a space that we had been avoiding.
My house was burning and I could save only one thing. I decided to save the fire. I have no place to live but fire lives in me. And it defends me discreetly from everything impure. My future is no longer important. Only the intensity of the moment counts.
JEAN COCTEAU
Two weeks later, we met in Serbia, where, after several days, we came across the Vlach tradition. Several academic articles by researchers in this region explore the reasons why Vlach magic has endured in these territories, as a response to precarious social conditions and gender inequality. These articles claim that the function of magic is to provide solutions to unmet basic needs such as healthcare, education, employment, and stability.[4]
And yet, despite the value of these investigations and their data, our own vision is different. Based on our experiences, and notwithstanding the conditions announced in the academic articles, most of the analyses victimize this community, distorting its cultural value. We witnessed legitimate forms of resistance and functional mechanisms that ensure the conservation of knowledge through oral tradition, as well as a profound spatial understanding of the landscape. One of the functions of magic was to serve as a tool to provide valuable and necessary communication in a society that was fragmented after the breakup of Yugoslavia, the death of Tito, and the subsequent Yugoslav wars. Magic also became a way of healing the psychological impacts of war. We found coincidences in the above with the Colombian conflict and with the precarious conditions that arise from wars, where ancestral and esoteric knowledge, known to play a role in military actions, is often recurrent yet cannot be fully understood. These investigations are problematic in that they provide only an account of what researchers can observe, or what is revealed to them, and protecting ancestral knowledge often means hiding it, or exposing it only at certain times and to specific people. The value derived from defending the self-determination of violated individuals, however, has not been considered. In this sense, the mechanisms of magic may be related to the ways of art, or considered as the same thing. This relationship becomes clearer when viewed within the framework of the following diagram based on the structural foundations of our trip:
The initiatory and ritualistic nature of this trip, the recurring dangers, and the chaos that characterizes the group's core, tested its very nature. Apparent during the twenty-two days on the road was a strengthening of our individual capacities to mediate with the physical and psychological characteristics of each context and their manifestations. This independence did not translate into individuality but, rather, into ways of grouping and caring for ourselves. Laughter and humor were our most powerful tools for mediation and resistance. We clung to them instinctively, and to our ability to project new narratives onto ourselves, which made it clear to us that the only function of visions of both darkness and light, when taken to the extreme, is to hide knowledge (the variation of grays that connects one side with another).
It would have been well for the world if Raphael could have given us at least one picture of a leper, of whom there were a multitude on the highways and byways of Italy. All the squalor, all the misery of the period goes unrecorded, and we have Madonnas repeated perpetually for the glorification of the wealthy and the leisure class.
ALGERNON SIDNEY CRAPSEY
The darkness, what is hidden, is presented to us as two antagonistic ways of seeing the world. The first is a form of protection and collaboration, in which knowledge, although shared, is hidden, to prevent it from disappearing. The second, in opposition to the former, consists of hiding knowledge, out of envy or greed (the idea of patenting or exclusivity), when retribution takes precedence over doing or thinking. The first category, being part of a holistic view of the world, is fully collaborative and works only through empathy. This form of proceeding is employed at what are considered appropriate moments and assumes the consequences of exposing the knowledge, developing an expertise over time in bringing to light and sharing knowledge.
- THEO: What?
- KARAMAKATE: You are nothing but a virakocha.
- THEO (annoyed): Your orientation system is based on the winds and stars. If you learn to use a compass, that knowledge will be lost.
These arguments fail to convince Karamakate, who becomes cross and, turning his back on Theo, starts rowing upriver.
- KARAMAKATE: You cannot keep them from learning. Knowledge belongs to everyone. But you cannot understand this because you are nothing but a virakocha.
Theo, upset, grows thoughtful. He strikes the edge of the boat.
Except from EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT
The above dialogue illustrates to a degree the second category, which is governed structurally by a need for subsistence, by insecurity, and by dependence. These two ways of seeing the world, although antagonistic, appear juxtaposed continually in contemporary life. This hybridization is the result of Western colonization of the rest of the world. It is worth making a distinction between art and knowledge in colonized territories such as our own, and European art and knowledge prior to modernism, as a way of addressing the bipolarity that governs us. In Europe, artists were dependent upon money and the Church (commissions), and although capable of subversion, structurally they were bound by these two chains. In America and Africa, the shaman fulfilled a ritual, social, and creative function in which the implications of his creations, the rituals of which he took part, were connected to the cosmosΔ. Only on very rare occasions did individuals emerge who, despite this paradox, found reasons to develop their knowledge and creations that were stronger than their fear of death or of not being acknowledged. In the art world, these individuals are the artists capable of producing unyielding, soul-piercing visions of the world.
The artist who makes what I'm not ashamed to call art is an urban shaman who speaks for the jailbirds, for the ex-cons and homeless, for the junkies and whores, for the kids in rotten schools, for the unemployed, even for the sick and tired and bored. Not to mention the intellectuals who can still get down. The artist shaman speaks for the magnificent human animals who see and hear and feel and dance and fuck magnificently, but who are without a place in a dead-end system… But despite the immense stakes in this contemporary art world, there are artists out there who don't want to clean up, who make art not to make the big bucks for the schmucks but to change the world or save their life or for obscure reasons of their own. Feral artists. Maybe the art world has become a big poker game, but some artists still run free and make their own rules. The game they play is their own invention.
GLENN O'BRIEN
These are the artists who contributed to this second edition of the magazine with their own ways of doing, creating, and burning up the world. They provide a new landscape, as in agriculture, when prior to planting a new crop, the land is burned to make it fertile again.Δ They have laid the foundations of this magazine, and of future possibilities. This journey was conceived as an infinite beginning. The only certainty is that all possibilities exist; fear is the only restriction. We were attracted to something entropic, to the entire universe and the possibility of traveling through several of its worlds. It was the sound of the cosmos, our animal nature traversing an immense territory, our fears of the unattainable. It was seduction dominating our aggressiveness.
A need for collectivity arises, to manage and channel the energy and see that it realizes its potential. Here, empathy and the group become essential, since they are the only means of escaping the restrictions imposed. For human beings, the worst punishment will always be isolation. Free of needs, we embark on this journey without prohibitions, without limits, without fear. Navigating light and darkness, as if walking a tightrope. But to fall is to allow our intelligence to touch the earth, to be human. Descent is the only possibility on this planet.
Dodecahedron – El universo.
To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality. Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black.
THEODOR ADORNO
Bibliography
1. Bennet, B. (1993). Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony. Chapter 1: The New Holy Scripture of Humanity (p. 55). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
2. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2002). Mil mesetas. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia. Valencia: Pre-Texts
3. Salvador, R. B. Egyptian mythology in the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona games. Journal of Greek Studies.
4. Košić, K. & Blešić, I. The Mystery of Vlach Magic in the Rural Areas of 21st Century Serbia. EEC, 18’ 2012, 61-83.
5. Crapsey, A. S. (1921). The Way of the Gods.
6. El abrazo de la serpiente (2015). Ciro Guerra (dir.). Colombia.
7. O’Brien, G. (2013). Just Because is Written Down Doesn’t Mean is True. Dash Snow: I Love You Stupid. Edit. DAP, pp. 12-28.
8. Adorno, T. (2004). El ideal de lo negro. Teoría estética, p. 80. Madrid: Akal editions.
Vulture guarding the entrance of the wildlife trade market
Al-Mashatel street, northern Baghdad’s Adhamiyah district
1 “Geselle dich zur kleintein Schar” (Join yourself to the smallest company). Perhaps the “kleinste Schar,” the smallest group, is just the individual alone; perhaps the combination of this idea with that of the social (“Geselle dich”) suggest the idea of asserting individuality as a social act, as an act (apparently “my” act) on behalf of the community, which, however, by being carried out, is revealed as the community’s act trough the individual, indeed as the very genesis of individuality, as a gestural enactment of the origin of an individuality that is in turn itself nothing but the community’s own self-developing gesture. “Geselle dich zur Kleinten Schar.” This is perhaps not only the scientific categorical imperative, but also a basic religious tenet, meaning, join the virtually universal human community by associating yourself voluntarily with its smallest, but still fundamentally communal, unit, which you might otherwise have experienced as your “own” individual being.
2 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1987. University of Minnesota Press.
3 The original text uses the Spanish viajes.
4 A rigorous reference for these academic approaches is The Mystery of Vlach Magic in the Rural Areas of 21st Century Serbia.
Δ This is evident in certain percussion instruments used by the shamans of the South and North American tribes.
Δ Bennu and, by extension, the Phoenix.