A “bifid bookess” sent to the past as feminist-cuir/queer artistic practice
As part of the feminist-cuir[1]/queer art collective INVASORIX[2], I want to take the opportunity to share, on my own behalf, our most recent publication, called FUTURIX. A feminist collection of visionary fiction of artistic practices and creative writing (2022). I think it can be significant according the ideas that we have shared in the seminar.
INVASORIX is located in Mexico City. Here, we make songs and video clips, do collective tarot readings, self-publish, make performance presentations, conduct workshops, and lots more besides. In the publication FUTURIX. A feminist collection of visionary fiction of artistic practices and creative writing you can see some of the strategies and notions developed since 2013 in shaping such practices.
Through their extraterrestrial imagination, the collective allows itself to look strangely and curiously at human reality and its dynamics of inequality, violence, and precariousness, as well as to embody and embrace earthling forms and strategies to generate alliances, criticism, and protest.
In this case, INVASORIX understands the bookess[3] as a device that allows them to publicize their multi-temporal journeys; Thus, FUTURIX arises from the trip they made as extraterrestrial beings from Nepantla, to one of the possible space-time lines of the 2070 earthling year, and, in this way, they confirmed that the artistic practices carried out in Abya Yala, by cis and trans women and other gender and sexual dissidents, have the power to “alter the space-time continuum and divert us from ominous futures”[4]. Among many artists, they collected information about: Ailén Possamay (Argentina), Analú Laferal (Colombia), Histriónicas Hermanas Hímenez (Mexico), Maldita Geni Thalia (Brazil), Pachaqueer (Ecuador), Minerva Valenzuela (Mexico) and Primitiva Kutri (Chile).
INVASORIX follows the trajectory of American writers and activists Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, for whom visionary fiction[5] is grounded in real life experience and the different struggles that seek social justice, and therefore contributes to a critical and creative understanding of the world that surrounds us, to imagine other possibilities of existence and explore other ways of interacting with each other. Thus, according to the story that INVASORIX proposes to us, the bookess is sent to the past (our 2020) to praise and encourage the practices and ideas of artists who question the racist and colonial capitalist cisheteropatriarchal system, united in the common desire of change. In this sense, they highlight the importance these kind of practices have and especially their impact in the feminist artistic, cultural, and political seekings of the present.
Furthermore, FUTURIX has gathered texts from: Gabriela Damián Miravete (Mexico), We Will dream in the garden, Sara Garzón (USA), The Virus Manifesto, María Natalia Ávila Leubro (Colombia), Writing, a cheap machine to travel through time, Maya Dusenbery (USA), Dispatch from the post-rape future and Ángela Robles Laguna (Colombia), Healing Fictions. Art and imagination for times of crisis. All such texts propose visions of the future that allow us to display concerns and reflections on our present and thus rethink our actions.
In this way, the publication shows one of the transversal notions of INVASORIX’s work: the real and imaginary friends [lix amiguix realix e imaginarix], which refers to all the people who nurture and accompany their earthling (un)learning, experiences, knowledges, and practices, such as the artists and authors presented in FUTURIX. That is why INVASORIX in the bookess uses Love letters to real friends [Cartas de amortz para amigxs reales], and Action Dolls to Cut Out [Muñequix de acción para recortar], affection, and drawing to reimagine ways to display the work of artists and envision the scope of their efforts.
Correspondingly, through Transgalactic Conversations [Conversaciones transgalácticas] in FUTURIX, you can find the exchange of reflections, desires, and strategies that the artists involved have carried out to face the labor and professional dynamics of the art and culture in neoliberalism, with the aim to contribute to feel and think together about its logic of (self)exploitation and precariousness.
Finally, it is important to mention that the bookess is in Spanish, with its respective translation into English—it has dos lenguas. Understanding that no translation is objective, and that it can be a tactical and also a political exercise disseminate the contents and practices of Abya Yala which do not have the same possibilities of visibility and circulation, due to the epistemic basis of cognitive capitalism. This has happened not only because of its geopolitical location, but also because of the forms and trajectories of the artists’ and authors’ work, which, on many occasions, go beyond and/or confront the art and culture canonical apparatus. Thus, FUTURIX can also be understood as an effort that seeks to collectively embrace the work of others, to broaden concerns, questions, and common desires to transform reality and our human existence.
By: Unx Pardo Ibarra
Artists’ and authors’ contact:
@possa_alp
@laferal_
@aliasangelita
@gabrielintica
@hermashímenez
@idkebra
@maria_leubro
www.mayadusenbery.com
www.ladelcabaret.com
www.pachaqueer.com
@ tejidassubversivas
@sarisgarzon
@invasorix
[1] The Mexican philosopher Sayak Valencia discusses the impossibility of translating the term queer, which arises and develops in a specific geopolitical context, and finds the need to critically review the category to propose the displacement of the term queer to cuir, with the aim of providing continuity to decolonial and trans-feminist struggles. Sayak Valencia, “Del Queer al Cuir: ostranénie geopolítica y epistémica desde el sur glocal”, in Queer & Cuir. Políticas De Lo Irreal, comps. Fernando R. Lanuza y Raúl M. Carrasco (Mexico City: Fontamara, 2015), 19–37.
[2] INVASORIX, https://invasorix.tumblr.com.
[3] INVASORIX is constantly playing and twisting the grammatical use of words in Spanish, to destabilize the reproduction of patriarchal and binary language. Often, it is difficult to properly translate into English or other languages; however, this difficulty shows that the different languages are a human construction and therefore a field of dispute.
[4] INVASORIX, FUTURIX. A feminist collection of visionary fiction of artistic practices and creative writing (Mexico City, 2022), 12.
[5] adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, ed., Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (Chico: AK Press, 2015).
