GRAPHITE 12
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GRAPHITE 12
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EDITOR’S LETTER How can we unravel the perceptions, assumptions, and belief systems that guide whom and what we pay attention to? In GRAPHITE 12: Attention/ Atención, contributors interpret, complicate, and expand the definitions of attention, and explore how living attentively can bring about transformative artistic, spiritual, and/or political results.
trace these glittering “tendrils” across space and time, through Los Angeles, California; Charlottesville, Virginia; Popocatépetl, Mexico; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; the Jeju Islands, Korea; the West Coast of Madagascar; New Jersey nightclubs; the baseball field; the battlefield; digital infrastructures; and fictional realms.
In GRAPHITE, attention works as a magnifying glass (see Clayton Schiff, pg. 93), allowing us to “zoom in” on or illuminate what is often hidden in the cultural and political entanglements that make up contemporary life. Underneath our everyday working and emotional lives, we are all reliant on a constant flow of physical goods, capital, and data. These flows compose an intricate web that has become so far-reaching it feels beyond human comprehension. In Dark Shimmers: A Politics of Oscillation (pg. 24), contributor Boz Deseo Garden describes this web as “histories and encounters between environments, their captives, and the tendrils of racial-extractive-capitalism that shimmer, vanish, bind, and detach across time with us and without us and within us.” GRAPHITE contributors
GRAPHITE features mysterious items: a tower of pickles, a floating sheet, a throne made of mops. Many sculptural works in the issue follow the logic of what Ramona Gomez deems “the ecology of remixing” in her essay of the same name (pg. 72). In our globalizing world, garbage, flora, fauna, and other materials can be clues that tell us of humanity’s interdependence and expose the delicate systems at play. Gomez proposes that by remixing, we can reclaim the meaning and value of materials. Take Ruben Ulises Rodriiguez Montoya’s sculptures (pg. 11). In them, the artist elicits our attention through the strategies of remixing and “Rasquachismo.” Born out of the Spanish word rasquache, used to describe something “tacky” or “cheap,” Rasquachismo has become a framework to
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NOTA DEL EDITOR ¿Cómo podemos desenredar las percepciones, suposiciones y sistemas de creencias que nos orientan a quién y a qué prestamos atención? En GRAPHITE 12: Attention/Atención, los colaboradores interpretan, complican y amplían las definiciones de atención, y exploran cómo el hecho de vivir atentamente puede producir resultados artísticos, espirituales y/o políticos transformadores. En GRAPHITE, la atención funciona como una lupa (véase Clayton Schiff, pág. 93), que nos permite “acercarnos” a o iluminar lo que a menudo está oculto en los enredos culturales y políticos que conforman la vida contemporánea. Debajo de nuestras vidas laborales y emocionales cotidianas, todos dependemos de un flujo constante de artículos, capital e información. Estos flujos integran una compleja red con un alcance tan amplio que parece estar más allá de la comprensión humana. En Dark Shimmers: A Politics of Oscillation (pág. 24), el colaborador Boz Deseo Garden escribe esta red como “historias y encuentros entre entornos, sus cautivos y los zarcillos del capitalismo racial-extractivo que brillan, se desvanecen, se unen y se desprenden a través del tiempo con nosotros,
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sin nosotros y dentro de nosotros”. Los colaboradores de GRAPHITE rastrean estos “zarcillos” brillantes a través del tiempo y el espacio, a través de Los Ángeles (California), Charlottesville (Virginia), Popocatépetl (México), San Juan (Puerto Rico), Puerto Príncipe (Haití), las Islas Jeju (Corea), la Costa Occidental de Madagascar, los clubes nocturnos de Nueva Jersey, el campo de béisbol, el campo de batalla, las infraestructuras digitales y los reinos ficticios. GRAPHITE presenta objetos misteriosos: una torre de pepinillos, una sábana flotante, un trono hecho de trapeadores. Muchas de las obras escultóricas del número siguen la lógica de lo que Ramona Gómez considera “la ecología de la remezcla” en su ensayo del mismo nombre (pág. 72). En nuestro mundo globalizado, la basura, la flora, la fauna y otros materiales nos pueden servir de pistas que nos hablan de la interdependencia de la humanidad y exponen los delicados sistemas en juego. Gómez propone que, mediante la remezcla, podemos recuperar el significado y el valor de los materiales. Por ejemplo, contemplemos las esculturas de Rubén Ulises Rodríguez Montoya (pág. 11). En
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describe the art making and world building of working-class Chicano communities. This aesthetic manifests itself in Montoya’s sculptures. As mariachi sombreros, toothpaste, socks, cowhides, trash, Juül pods, and silicone casts of black beans melt into each other, they are given new meaning. Inspired by Nahuales—mythical witches and shamans who use ancient Aztec abilities to convert into animals— Montoya’s sculptures depict how the Nahuales magical shape-shifting has been interrupted by pollution, land exploitation, and crisis on the border of Mexico and the United States. Yet the works feel celebratory. Through the ecology of remixing, shape-shifting, and Rasquachismo, the materials become imbued with newfound historical, cultural, and mystical value. Mythical beings of a different kind also grace the pages of GRAPHITE. The issue is haunted by ghostly forms, “ensembles of bacteria, blooms, ghosts, and story [that] oscillate in and out of shared attention” (Boz Deseo Garden). In The Ghost in the Club, Tyler Cala Williams (pg. 48) considers the legacies of Black life that can be heard and felt through the sampling and remixing of New Jersey nightclub music. In Heesoo Kwon’s photos (pg. 105), fantastical ghost-like creatures appear to embrace unaware family members. And in Joshua Zamuido’s photo-essay, the artist documents the recent passing of his family members due to complications from COVID-19. In one of Zamuido’s photos, his mother paints on a wall, “I love you, Trauma.” At once violent, epic, cathartic, humorous, and heartbreaking, these
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works can also be life-affirming. “I love you, Trauma.” As GRAPHITE concludes its twelfth year with this issue, we’ve drawn a larger circle around us, encompassing a wide collective of people. This is the first GRAPHITE issue featuring texts in both English and Spanish. This bilingual approach reflects the needs of our audiences and members. More than thirty University of California Los Angeles student readers dedicated their time and vision to work on GRAPHITE’s editorial and curatorial projects. On behalf of all of the GRAPHITE members, we’d like to extend our thanks to our wonderful community of artists for their incredible contributions. With their participation, and the phenomenal mentorship of Hallie Scott, Amy Quon, and Theresa Sotto of the Academic Programs office at the Hammer, this issue has been made possible. - Haley Penn
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ellas, el artista atrae nuestra atención a través de las estrategias de remezcla y “Rascuachismo”. Nacido de la palabra española rascuache, utilizada para describir algo “chafa” o “corriente”, el Rascuachismo se ha convertido en un marco para describir la creación artística y la construcción del mundo de la clase trabajadora de las comunidades chicanas. Esta estética se manifiesta en las esculturas de Montoya. Cuando los sombreros de mariachi, la pasta de dientes, los calcetines, las pieles de vaca, la basura, los Juül pods y los moldes de silicona de los frijoles negros se funden entre sí, adquieren un nuevo significado. Inspiradas en los nahuales, míticos brujos y chamanes que utilizan antiguas habilidades aztecas para convertirse en animales, las esculturas de Montoya representan cómo el cambio de forma mágico de los nahuales se ha visto interrumpido por la contaminación, la explotación de la tierra y la crisis en la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, las obras transmiten una celebración. A través de la ecología de la remezcla, el cambio de forma y el Rascuachismo, los materiales adquieren un nuevo valor histórico, cultural y místico. Seres míticos de otro tipo también adornan las páginas de GRAPHITE. El número está encantado por formas fantasmales, “conjuntos de bacterias, flores, fantasmas e historias [que] oscilan dentro y fuera de la atención compartida” (Boz Deseo Garden). En The Ghost at the Club (El Fantasma en el Club) Tyler Cala Williams (pág. 48) considera los legados de la vida Negra que pueden escucharse y sentirse a través del muestreo y la remezcla de
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la música de los clubes nocturnos de Nueva Jersey. En las fotos de Heesoo Kwon (pág. 105), criaturas fantásticas parecidas a fantasmas parecen abrazar a miembros de la familia que no se percatan de ello. Y en el ensayo fotográfico de Joshua Zamuido, el artista documenta el reciente fallecimiento de los miembros de su familia debido a las complicaciones causadas por el COVID-19. En una de las fotos de Zamuido, su madre pinta en una pared: “Te amo, Trauma”. A la vez violentas, épicas, catárticas, humorísticas y desgarradoras, estas obras también pueden ser una afirmación de la vida. “Te amo, Trauma”. Con este número, GRAPHITE concluye su duodécimo año y hemos dibujado un círculo más grande a nuestro alrededor, que abarca a un amplio colectivo de personas. Este es el primer número de GRAPHITE que incluye textos tanto en inglés como en español. Este enfoque bilingüe refleja las necesidades de nuestro público y de nuestros miembros. Más de treinta estudiantes lectores de la Universidad de California en Los Ángeles dedicaron su tiempo y su visión a trabajar en los proyectos editoriales y curatoriales de GRAPHITE. En nombre de todos los miembros de GRAPHITE, queremos manifestar nuestro agradecimiento a nuestra maravillosa comunidad de artistas por sus increíbles aportaciones. Este número ha sido posible gracias a su participación y a la fenomenal tutela de Hallie Scott, Amy Quon y Theresa Sotto, de la oficina de Programas Académicos del Hammer.
- Haley Penn
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TABLE OF CONTENTS CONTENIDO 011
RUBEN ULISES RODRIGUEZ MONTOYA Sopa de Ostión, 2020. Mariachi sombrero, white polo, toothpaste cap, vaping cartridge, Topo-Chico cap, hair, black bean silicone molds, silicone, 25 x 15 x 8 in. Nosferatu in a bat state: patient zero of Spanish Influenza, 2020. 13 x 6 x 4.5 in. Oct. 23, 2019: Florida man busted feeding iguanas in jail zoo, 2020. 16.5 x 10 x 5.75 in. Araceli23220, 2020. Mariachi sombreros, cow horn, horn tips, black boots, white T-shirt, white socks, cow hide, silicone, twine, lint, poly-fil, trash, clothes rack, 63 x 37 x 18.5 in.
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ADRIAN KISS Untitled (Durva kocsi), 2020. Polystyrene foam, tile adhesive, polyurea resin, household, paint, automotive fabric and paper on wooden panel with metal plate, bricks and water, 290 140 213 cm. Altar (detail), 2015. 3D textile on metal structure with fluorescent lights, 240 x 60 x 60 cm.
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BOZ DESEO GARDEN Dark Shimmers: A Politics of Oscillation. Text.
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LAUREN QUIN Chain-Meal with Blind Spots (detail), 2020. Oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in. Induced Weaving, 2019. Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in.
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MELANIE LUNA Butcher’s Corner, 2021. Acrylic and ink on canvas, 48 x 60 in.
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Dance Ritual, 2020. Acrylic and ink on canvas, 5 x 6 ft. Untitled, 2021. Acrylic and ink on faux brick, 48 x 48 in.
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CHRISTIAN SANNA Moraingy, 2016. Photo series.
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ALBERTO KEOSSIAN Red Stains Deeper Than Blue, 2020. Claymation video stills, 00:02:17, 1920 x 1080.
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FELIPE BAEZA Untitled (So much darkness, so much brownness), 2016-2018. Ink, collage, and embroidery on paper, 36 x 48 in.
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TYLER CALA WILLIAMS The Ghost in the Club (The Blackness Within Jersey Club Culture). Text.
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ANDREW ROBERTS Isla, dinos tu nombre, 2019. 4K video, digital and 3D animation, color, sound, 6:00 min.
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ANDY SEUNGU CHOI Tourist Infrastructure and State Terror on Jeju Island: Tourist Facilities, Militarization, and the Jeju Massacre. Text.
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YOAB VERA Pa(i)sajes Hibridos: Varieties of Presence / Hybridscapes: Variedades de Presente, 2020. Concrete, oil-stick on canvas, 77.16 x 69 in.
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KIANI WISH Jacumba, CA. Photocollage.
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RAMONA GOMEZ The Ecology of Remixing. Text, mixed media / photocollage.
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CAROLINE YOO who, where, 나, 2020. Archival Print, 14 x 20 in Gentrified, 2019. Archival print, 36 x 24 in.
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SAYRE GOMEZ 7th & Los Angeles, 2019.
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ÉTIENNE BUYSE Marguerite. Photography, 1080 x 1080. Puppet. Photography, 1080 x 1080. The Little Green Boy. Photography, 1080 x 1080. Black Bird. Photography, 1080 x 1080.
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NICHOLAS CONSTANT Predator/Protector, 2018. Text, photo series.
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HYANGSOOK KWAK Blue, 2019. Digital photography. Watching, 2019. Digital photography.
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PETER POLACK All Roads Led to Rogan. Text.
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CLAYTON SCHIFF Fresh Find, 2017. Oil on canvas.
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VERÓNICA FERNÁNDEZ Wrestling In The Living Room (Angry When I’m Thirsty), 2020. Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in.
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GABRIELLE GARCÍA Untitled. Text.
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ISABELA MIÑANA LOVELACE Un Edredon para los Turistas, 2020. Comforter, tarp bag, beads, canvas thread, produce nets, 75 x 53 x 1 in.
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MIA JOHNSON Working Hands, 2020. Latex, hydrocal, wooden broom, iron, ironing board, vacuum cleaner.
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HEESO KWON Premolt, 2019. Photography.
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JOSHUA ZAMUDIO Men Also Feel / Los Hambres Tambien Sienten, 2020. Text.
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SAVANNAH SMITH be comfy, creature. Text.
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KELLEN HATANKA Heat, 2020. Acrylic on paper, 23 x 35 in. Midnight, 2020. Acrylic on paper, 20.25 x 16.25 in. Safe at Home, 2020. Acrylic and ink on paper, 45 x 35 in. Gold Rope, 2020. Acrylic on paper, 18 x 24 in.
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KEITH CLOUGHERTY Kennedy Preserves, 2020. Mixed media.
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JASON YATES How I Became One Of The Invisible, 2020. Mixed media, 99 x 107 x 30 cm. Cancel Everything, 2020. Mixed media, 183 x 213 x 30 cm .
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EMMA STERN Jess2 - Res300. Oil on canvas. Fiona (shit_s bleak). Oil on canvas. Josie. Oil on canvas.
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ESTEFANIA PUERTA GRISALES Mija, 2020. Cotton fabric, canvas, dye, acrylic, spray paint, oil, mop heads, walnut ink, soil, plants, water, fishtank, cholla plant, epoxy, porcelain, wax, thermal sand, 32 in x 10 ft x 40 in. Enrejada, 2020. Plaster pulp, steel, beeswax. Synthetic hair, dried flowers, rhinestones, cotton fabric, latex, epoxy, turmeric,
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cumin, onion power, other spices, nylon, steel, brass, silicone, 69 in x 89 ft x 18 in.
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MAYA WHITE never mind the date. Text.
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WENDELL GLADSTONE Soft Landing, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 84 in. Visitor, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 39 x 39 in.
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NURIA ORTIZ / MS. YELLOW Feeling the Heat, 2020. Drawing. I Am Resilient, mural.
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CHRISTAL PÉREZ AND KARLA EKATHERINE CANSECO A Donde Se Fue, 2020. Video stills & transcript, 10:45 min.
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LARISSA ROGERS Ode to Soil, 2020 - ongoing. Performance.
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BRENDA BARRIOS Healed Intestine, 2020. Textiles, wood, PVC, 6 x 4 ft.
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MINAMI KOBAYASHI A Butterfly and a Spider, 2019. Egg Tempera on cotton, 12 x 12 cm. A Family Show in The Hurricane, 2018. Egg tempera on cotton, 18 x 18 cm.
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MICHAEL KYEI BOATENG The Banana Boy. Text.
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MATEA FRIEND [Be]coming to Terms, 2020. Audio Visual Installation.
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RUBÉN ULISES RODRÍGUEZ MONTOYA
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ADRIAN KISS
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DARK SHIMMERS: A Politics Of Oscillation
And it appears to you in a shimmer. A quiet threat. Or a method. A line of spider silk at the base of an apple tree whose limb and leaf are veiled in a thin film of fungicide that you cannot see. Or at the flower head of a reedmace whose roots have been tasked with the filtration of excess fertilizer that should not be there. Or from your hand. Sticking to you. Lifted from the edge of a chain-link fence that borders a clearing for sale, and that you do not remember lifting. But you hold it there and witness it respond to a wind you cannot sense. You are stilled by the ensemble, which elides your attention. Your regard. But that regards you still and all. And so you let yourself dissolve into that brilliant swarm until what you thought was the limit of you becomes an estuary for immense noticing. A dense cloud eclipses the sun and you go invisible too.
I want to think of the spider silk line as a narrative familiar that can be a vector upon which we can imagine alternative modes of storytelling and witnessing. The current position from which we work, which is to say the one that holds power, is, I’ll argue very briefly in this text, one that slips into logics of spatial and visual conquest that are constitutive of colonial power in the very way literal position-in-place is the assumed prerequisite for witnessing. So I mean to ask, what of that which we
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“cannot” “witness”? More specifically, what happens in our linking of that which is visible/ready-to-be-witnessed with that which is illuminated? What of those vanished from view through bio/ necro-political uses of light, shadow, and a spectral in-between? And how do we produce attention with the violences that go in and out of material and symbolic visibility, that (subsequently) slip from our attention and trouble our definitions of witnessing and who can be a witness? I want to propose
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a politics of oscillation, a commitment to a different mode of (de)positioning ourselves as a practice of refusal against our present plots (both spatial and narrative) of capture. In his recent book Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human, Joseph Pugliese references Daniel Wildcat, Euchee member of the Muscogee Nation, as naming a practice of “attentive living,” which can be thought of as “a modality of being-in-the-world that is acutely responsive to and respectful of ‘the relationships and relatives that constitute the complex web of life.’”i I want to bring this idea into the fold before I continue, for two reasons. The first is to recenter indigenous cosmo/ eco-epistemologies that are already committed to a thinking of/through “the web”; what I hope to achieve here is learning from what is already familiar to these frameworks. The second is that it offers a more productive passage to imagine different modes of response to and engagement with the haptic-optic histories of everything around us than does the talking point (recently co-opted by right-wing discourses) that seeks to ensnare us in the event-horizon contradiction of social/political critique through colonial materials, e.g., reading anticapitalist texts on an iPhone. However, I do not mean to do away with the critical attention this contradiction can require in different contexts—the most relevant (in relation to the community most likely reading this) of which are the proximity certain art institutions have to military and prison expansionii, university exploitation of student and
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non-student workers, iii and housing displacement in the wake of gallery or student housing constructioniv—but rather to warn against a commitment to that contradiction to a degree that ignores the everywhere-ness and every-now-ness of racial-extractivecapitalism. Becoming our first disappearing act (a motif I’ll return to in the following paragraph) presents itself as the ultimate discursive blockage on our way toward experiments in critical response and attention. With that said, let us perform a set of exercises in mycelial attention (borrowing from our fungal kin) as we work to decenter you, the reader, and oscillate into different narrative points of view. Let us think about the conditions by which this text has made it to you. If you are reading this via screen, then it is through assembly, shipment, pixel, color, and light. But more important, it is through carceral/corporate supply chains, prison labor, mineral extraction, stolen time, and slow death. Which is to say through the histories and ongoing presents of environmental devastation, global dispossession, and exploitative labor.v The colonial projects that make this reading possible necessitate a performance on the part of the object as one that allegedly bears no vestige of production ancestry. In a post–Retina Display world, where the standard metric for screen resolution is indiscernibility (the smoothing out of the “pixel staircase”), it is not difficult to imagine how the disappearing act the screen performs is conducive to a kind of death-dealing neoliberal in/ de-attention. While these truths may
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already be familiar and popular, I think it’s productive to start this exercise in narrative/spatial repositioning at the means/medium of engagement: the screen, an immediate example of a surface that conceals its multiplicity through de/over-illumination. Which functions as my first referent in asking: How do we respond to or produce attention with invisibilized or deluminated histories, pedigrees of human and other-than-human labor and their under- or overexposed violences? Let us think of where you are reading this. Perhaps illuminated by a bedroom, living room, or kitchen light that operates on the same electrical circuit that charges your device, disappeared by walls. All of which are connected to the street lamp just outside your window that adds to the heavy muddle of light pollution, or that is also referred to as light trespass, which disorients bird migration patterns, the biological clocks of coral reefs, and the nightly foraging practices of bats.vi The growth rate of the gray bat that occupies much of the (so-called) US South has been suppressed by a troubled emergence and/or foraging commute that is delayed by light trespass—they are unable to sense the incoming dusk and so do not know when it is time to eat.vii Similar to the quelling affects of illumination that animate the screen, another disappearing act is performed — this time of the night-day cycle on which different ecologies rely for variant life/death ways. And what of the land these false (electrical) roots spread throughout? The ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples and land theft are constitutive of the shadow the
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built environment casts (symbolically and materially by the presence of artificial light). This problem of illumination comes into thick and direct intimacy with the processual killing of indigenous peoples when we consider the (un)livability of reservations. This can be seen with the Diné people who presently suffer from the lack of working energy infrastructureviii and whose lands, between 1967 and 2006, had been excavated by coal-mining operations that, through a slurry pipeline, transported coal to water supply and electricity plants in Phoenix, Tucson, and Los Angeles.ix This excavation is also responsible for the desecration of burial sites and the exportation of remains and artifacts, some of which have since been stolen or left to degrade within the collections of the University of Illinois.x Simultaneously without light, both electrical and narrative, and desecrated through exposure, indigenous lives are among the many darkened or violently illuminated lives that I mean to briefly attend to in this text. Let’s go deeper and take the inside of your kitchen cabinet where the rat or roach—categorized as pests—might find refuge. Or to the outside of your apartment or home, that perhaps really isn’t yours, where unhoused people might rest under the cover of a tarp or tent. And I couple these two consciously, to bring attention to the affective associations private property produces that require threats for the maintenance of its narrative or jurisprudential legitimacy. Which is to say that descriptions of pests, contaminants, and toxins that threaten to decrease the value
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and fidelity of the property line (a practice of liberal humanism) have worked to include queer indigenous and/or black (non)subjects into the category of the other/more-than-human where we share descriptive residence with the rat, the roach, mold, and weeds. Most, mind you, are nocturnal or do not require light; their flourishing often elides our notice—sprouting and becoming whether we do or do not bear witness. Or, as Mel Chen notes in their analysis of the racialization of lead, a contaminant “deterritorializes, emphasizing its mobility through and against imperialistic spatializations of ‘here’ and ‘there.”’xi I’ll return to this in my second reading of Pugliese’s work. I’d like to turn away from the secondperson narration and begin a more explicit process of “considering with” that moves away from the power dynamics of just considering something, which runs the risk of abstracting the subject into a reducible object of study through a kind of colonial grammar. I see the inclusion of “with” not as an equalizing of conditions but as a move toward decentralized entanglement that implies that these agents are considering us in return. With that, I’d/ we’d do well to consider with those reading this who know, speak, and move with these conditions of property dispossession and civic dereliction. To consider with those who recognize private property to be our permeant principle of capture and have been the subjects or subjected to the technologies of capture—particularly capture via de/over-illumination. And so what of the places that have weaponized illumination through ex-
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cess use or removal? And how are its captives disfigured by the grammars those places of excess de/illumination produce? Let us think with those who know the street lamp as a technology of police surveillance, whose sleep cycles have been devastated by the ongoing presence of light, as was the case in 2016 (and, of course, across histories of US urban development and control) for a group of unhoused people in San Francisco whose encampments outside a PG&E yard were lined with bright light fixtures to attend to so-called security measures.xii Or those who are traumatized psychologically and physiologically from the effects of solitary confinement. We can come to Nicole R. Fleetwood’s work in documenting art making within prisons across the United States as she reports (with the help of Bonnie Kerness) that the effects/traumas that long periods of “extreme dark or light” produce in prisoners can present as “diminished vision, largely because they are unable to see a few feet in any direction [and also] what [Lisa] Guenther calls ‘dead time’: they struggle to keep track of days of the week and hours of the day.”xiii We might also think with the story of Tyreik Gilford, who was sentenced to six years in 2015 and transferred to an SHU (special housing unit) at the Upstate Correctional Facility in Malone, New York. He describes the “neon light that is forever glowing” in the middle of his cell and how he can longer “see the sun rise, set, or the moon at night.”xiv And with this, we must come to see two things. The first is how position is a faculty of the state; that one’s geo-
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social position is something the state can take away or grant — either through property, legal status, or conditions for livability — rendering you either positionless (stateless) or positioned (absorbed into the frameworks of the state), which determines whether or not you can be a reliable narrator for its story (in the gaze of both law and history). The second is that blackness or blackened life, to borrow from Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, is the force that legitimates this binary and that also precedes and exceeds it. This deathdealing relation, produced in the midst and wake of chattel slavery, is one that we must recognize as, to borrow from Jackson again, the “essential enabling condition of the modern grammar of the Subject.”xv Put differently, we may only know each other or ourselves through the positive terms of “I am here” and “I am human” because the inverse is always already occupied by the simultaneously fixed and “infinitely malleable”xvi figure of the black (non)subject. And so it is then that we only know ourselves to positively be in cartographic place if there are certain subjects that occupy a no-place. As Katherine McKittrick notes, “Traditional geographies did, and arguably still do, require black displacement, black placelessness, black labor, and a black population that submissively stays ‘in place.’”xvii I want to think about the imposition of black placelessness as integral to the question/grammars of un-visibility, de/over-illumination, witnessing, and narration. If we think with the lasting effects solitary confinement has on the vision of prisoners, troubling their depth perception, and through the way
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they lose track of time, we can see the material and physiological ways this no-place (and no-time) is embodied: a dissolution of the neurotypical abilities associated with witnessing within a confinement that renders them unwitnessable nonwitnesses. Producing attention is thrown into precarity by the black(ened) and/or incarcerated subject, which has been narrated by the story of the Liberal Human in such a way as to render that subject and its methods for telling story, illegible to state metrics for attention (which are always already ableist and anti-black) and to foreclose those subjects from reliable narration. This coextensively leaves the captive’s position, their position in an event, and whether it was an event at all, a set of statuses subject to state approval or negation. This instability enables the contradictory nature of Western methods of study that allows something to happen/be seen and then be completely written out of history. These black(ened) captives, and their (non)events, are imprisoned by the grammar of no-place (expressed physiologically and socially) that is produced through high visibility and/or maximum disappearance by way of carceral confinement and/or civic dereliction (often co-productive of one another). This brings me to Simone Browne’s idea of “black luminosity,” which she uses to describe a kind of boundary production and maintenance within the carceral operations of the state: BLACK LUMINOSITY, THEN, IS AN EXERCISE OF PANOPTIC POWER THAT BELONGS TO, USING THE WORDS
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OF MICHEL FOUCAULT, “THE REALM OF THE SUN, OF NEVER ENDING LIGHT; IT IS THE NON-MATERIAL ILLUMINATION THAT FALLS EQUALLY ON ALL THOSE ON WHOM IT IS EXERCISED.” PERHAPS, HOWEVER, THIS IS A LIGHT THAT SHINES MORE BRIGHTLY ON SOME THAN ON OTHERS. HERE BOUNDARY MAINTENANCE IS INTRICATELY TIED TO KNOWING THE BLACK BODY, SUBJECTING SOME TO A HIGH VISIBILITY, AS [RALPH] ELLISON PUT IT, BY WAY OF TECHNOLOGIES OF SEEING THAT SOUGHT TO RENDER THE SUBJECT OUTSIDE OF THE CATEGORY OF THE HUMAN, UN-VISIBLE.XVIII
What thinkers like Browne, as well as Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Katherine McKittrick, and an ensemble of others, have done is to allow/push us to think of un/visibility as a faculty of US empire synonymous with position and how its design secures anti-blackness as a host for what I articulated previously as our permeant principle of capture: property, whose afterlife we presently endure now that practices of chattel slavery have ended (but whose logics persist elsewhere). Moreover, they have pushed us to think critically about witnessing, being witnessed by, and becoming witness to that which we cannot see, that which has been overexposed by the light of state power to the point of un-visibility and/or relegated to no-places—otherwise known as the imposition of incremental death achieved through spatial and narrative condemnation. A dysselected status, in the words of Sylvia Wynter.xix So where do we go from here? There is a generative double frequency this work holds that we should name more explicitly:
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the acts of witnessing and being witnessed by make way for what I want to think of as an oscillating method of witnessing but which also implicates the language we might use when describing the rotation of gazes within surveillance regimes. An implication that asks we proceed with caution. If we are careful in our strategy, this can point to decolonial methods of producing attention outside of subjugating rubrics. If we are successful, we will come to see witnessing with (or considering with), in its ecological considerations, as a critical third, irreducible gaze that allows us to consider against our narrative/spatial captive positions. If we are not careful in the work of opposing the state’s methods for narrative/spatial capture, we run the risk of internalizing and reproducing those disciplinary logics in how we witness (or define/narrate) the other/ more-than-human world by appealing to metrics for jurisprudential legibility. Put differently, we will not win by asking to be witnessed properly or given status as reliable witness. I’d like to return to Pugliese, whose work focuses on a concept of forensic ecologies that critiques methods of forensic research deployed by the state that prioritize neutral measurement, logic, and empiricism and simultaneously perform an effacement of indigenous and other-than-human forensics. This effacement, as Pugliese explains, necessitates a deanimation of the otherthan-human world, which, he notes with critical importance, produces a: COGNITIVE CONTRADICTION THAT CAN BE RECONCILED ONLY THROUGH
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THE DEPLOYMENT OF A NUMBER OF DISCIPLINARY STRATEGIES, INCLUDING ANTHROPOCENTRIC ABLEISM PREDICATED ON THE DEFICIT MODEL OF DISABILITY (THE FORENSIC OBJECT IS RENDERED INTO A “MUTE WITNESS”); RHETORICAL EFFACEMENT (THE ANIMATING TROPES THAT CONSTITUTE THE FORENSIC OBJECT AS “WITNESS” MUST BE AIRBRUSHED); AND HUMAN-CENTERED INFLATION (ONLY THE SCIENTIST CAN BRING THE “MUTE” WITNESS TO SPEECH.XX
Shortly after, Pugliese attends to these problematics by reaffirming, with the guidance of David Mowaljarlai, Wandjina elder, that “forensic entities are not mute objects awaiting the animating intervention of the human subject; rather, they acknowledge the presence of the human subject . . . they speak and offer, in the idiom of their materiality, their own understanding of what has transpired through ‘their story.’” Through this critical refusal of state-sanctioned deanimation and visibility through a history of decolonial forensic practices, I am seeing Pugliese’s decolonial interventions as working in concert with the Afropessimist tenets alluded to previously. In that the unsayable language of the unwitnessable witness held captive substantiates histories through a language Western thought lacks the capacity to trace but ceaselessly works to efface. I want to push us to congeal these questions of witnessing, visibility, disappearances, and the politics of position(ing) as we are reminded of the ways in which the other-than-human world enacts their/our own methods of attention and witnessing whether or
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not we verify it with our nondisabled, anthropocentric methods. Dominant ableist prerequisites for witnessing appear not only in the assumption of a combined and working five, socalled primary, senses but also in the technologies and architectures where these senses find their prosthetics. All of which assumes a universal subject, body, or position that is purported to be the primary prosthetic for being, for witnessing, and that which all earthly happenings must pass through for substantiation. However, our work is to consider with that which substantiates differently, to consider with subjects and their methods for witnessing that have been darkened or blown out through narrative and material de/over-illumination, performing their own “forensic assessments” of or haptic-optic responses to ongoing violences. And I am thinking of haptic-optic responses as a kind of attention that is produced across time and through deep webs of living and dying on the part of the more-thanhuman (but that those outside of this category can produce with); which is to say that it is a kind of attention or witnessing that does not require proof to be brought before it but rather is a kind that enacts this through slow or sudden embodiments that exceed the limits of Western measurements of study. Because what might happen if we come to think with these sensory “deficits” and bodily disabilities, which the state would render as unsuitable for telling story, as different genres of witnessing? Speaking a different language of and responding to compounded histories of endless terror.
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And as a necessary extension of the politics this piece proposes, I want to make clear that these different genres of witnessing do not need the verification of nondisabled witnesses in order to be thought of as such. However, our work is to consider with that which substantiates differently, to consider with subjects and their methods for witnessing that have been darkened or blown out through narrative and material de/ over-illumination; performing their own “forensic assessments” of or hapticoptic responses to ongoing violences. And I am thinking of haptic-optic responses as a kind of attention on the part of (but that those outside of this category can produce with) the morethan-human that is produced across time and through deep webs of living and dying; which is to say that it is a kind of attention or witnessing that does not require proof to be brought before it but rather is a kind that enacts this through slow or sudden embodiments that exceed the limits of Western measurements of study. Because what might happen if we come to think with these sensory “deficits” and bodily disabilities, that the state would render as unsuitable for telling story, as different genres of witnessing? Speaking a different language of and responding to compounded histories of endless terror. And as a necessary extension of the politics this piece proposes, I want to make clear that these different genres of witnessing do not need the verification of non-disabled witnesses in order to be thought of as such. Let us consider with the story of many witnesses in North Carolina who are not subjected to an explicit light or
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shadow but a spectral in-between. Elsie Herring, who lives in Rocky Mount, says, “It feels like it’s raining.”xxvii René Miller, who has lived in Dublin County for generations, says that the farmer always sprays it on Sundays, after church, and even during the funerals of her loved ones.xxiii The smell of it attaches to everything and they cannot open the windows because of it, cannot hang clothes out to dry because of it, have not seen distant loved ones in a long time because of it. The false rain that Miller and Herring refer to is the invisible mist sent into the air from pipes responsible for maintaining the levels of hog waste and urine of nearby lagoons. North Carolina is the second largest pork producer in the country, with deadly waste management systems that are concentrated in areas populated by black and Latinx communities xxiv These communities, through the inhalation of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and endotoxins, have developed compounding sinus conditions, asthma, depression, and fatigue. And this extends to ecologies beyond, to the Gulf of Mexico, where nutrients from animal waste sites have been identified as contributors to a hypoxic “dead zone” of seven thousand square miles that cannot support most aquatic life.xxv The decaying bodies on the ends of each thread of the story sense one another through haptic-optic witnessing across time without human intervention. Not through proof but through the wind and water that carry the carcasses and waste-filled aerosols within the grasp of their currents. Through shared stolen breath: the excess pig culled by carbon dioxide
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gassing and whose carcass may be thrown into the lagoon with its own waste; the mussels attached to the sea floor who suffocate in place as their oxygen levels dissolve in the hypoxic bloom; and the black body—which is punished endlessly in endless ways just for and by breathing—comes to know a slow death through that which is already dead. Morris Murphy, a hog farmer in North Carolina, in a 2018 video interview, challenges someone (presumably other hog farmers practicing different methods of waste management) to come and “point to me and prove to me that what I am doing is bad for the environment before I feel like I need to change it.”xxiv The camera cuts to the pipe system shooting a continuous flow of hog wastewater into a horizon concealed by trees. He cannot see the black life beyond the shroud, cannot see the current that lifts the aerosol into an overcast sky, making it so that the aerosols are without their microscopic glints from sunlight that would otherwise make them visible, so that we might point them out to Morris. But he cannot see the lung or lymph node, either, within which these toxins find residence. And so his and the state’s challenge becomes sunken because there is no place for the relations and entanglements that exist in a no-place. Additionally, the state benefits from the spectral nature of the aerosol, as it can evade blame through a so-called placelessness of (non)evidence, which is always figured through the placelessness of blackness. Returning to Chen, these relations deterritorialize, troubling a sense of “here” or “there,” witnessing one another through a linked, connective, and on-
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going relation that troubles our definitions of historicity, the position from which an event is witnessed, where an event is imagined to be happening and its anticipated afterlives. Because while they are present, the traces of their unfolding speak a multiplicitous tongue that refuses epistemic captivity. There is no scientific method for calculating the suffering René, Elsie, the pig, and the mussel are subjected to. So perhaps we cease our appeals to the scientific. And so our narrative familiar oscillates back into view. The line of spider silk that shimmers into presence and va-nishes into a no-place troubles our assumed prerequisites for witnessing and positioning. A silk line threaded across the corners of your room from a spider you do not remember inviting in—because it did not need your invitation. It points to a method of producing attention and telling a story that embraces the earthly unfoldings that we can sense in oscillation, outside of our present programs for producing and relating knowledge. Histories and encounters between environments, their captives, and the tendrils of racialextractive-capitalism shimmer, vanish, bind, detach, and reattach across time with us and without us and within us. It is a method of “attentive living” that reconstitutes the care that attention produces as one that refuses an epistemic capture and instead embraces a kind of epistemic surrender. It calls forward the resignation of the centered Human and its Western limits for story and sensing that spell iterative annihilation for black/indigenous/ queer/disabled subjects and the other-
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than-human lives with whom we share spatial and narrative status as dysselected. Which I am thinking of as a vector of possibility and poesis that allows us to imagine the disappearance of those limits presently expressed through the property line. These lines violently disappear and render certain lives and certain deaths by disallowing them their/our natural oscillations or narrations—breathing in and out, waking and resting, seeing the sun rise and set—and perhaps even disallowing them from ever really living or ever really dying. Most notably, however, this oscillatory method is about contending with the ways in which we do in fact witness these happenings but through grammars of delayed emergence, sudden dispossession, and thick entanglement at the biologic, geographic, sociologic, and symbolic levels. As such, these grammars will produce evidence not always immediately knowable to us in the ways we think we come to know something. Through this, we can work toward the abolition of Position, the place weaponized by the state through a seductive tale of an always-incoming livability, the place at the center of the Story from which the Western Human, and all of its attendant disciplinary agents (police, military, academia, and/or court), calls out only that which it “sees” and only permits the account of an event from those deemed useful for the reproduction of its power. But it is the Western Human that has never been a reliable narrator. Only a deadly misdirection. So let us attend not only to the tidal knowledges that flow before us to wet our feet but also to the ones that ebb out into invisible currents that evaporate to be embodied across time,
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across positions whose subjective sensoria we may not know but that we might witness differently with different story-telling/sensing methods. Because we do not Become as state-sanctioned purified narrators fixed in legible place, but as messy ensembles of bacteria, blooms, ghosts, and story that oscillate in and out of shared attention.
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LAUREN QUIN
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MELANIE LUNA
040 ATTENTION!
041 ¡ATENCIÓN!
042 ATTENTION!
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CHRISTIAN SANNA
044 ATTENTION!
045 ¡ATENCIÓN!
046 ATTENTION!
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ALBERTO KEOSSIAN
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FELIPE BAEZA
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THE GHOST IN THE CLUB (
THE
BLACKNESS
WITHIN
“That bitch think she can run this circle? Na, I run this circle!” Every time I hear this self-reassuring chant in the Jersey club song by DJ King Tiger-Z, I imagine times when I would lunge myself into the center of a dance circle. While there I’d probably tut my arms into some stiff robotic-ish, angular shapes, then of course I would’ve flexed how fast I could make my feet disappear by hitting the running man. Shit, I might’ve just stood completely still. Slightly beyond my little adrenaline-induced fifteen seconds of narcissism is usually a feeling of ownership. The circle was mine at that moment, and I could add whatever I wanted to it, just until I gave it to someone else or someone managed to snatch it away from me. Jersey club culture’s promiscuity, in addition to its here-in-the-present mo-
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JERSEY
CLUB
CULTURE
)
ment mentality, is what makes it black. Jersey club music’s blackness goes beyond its roots in dark basement parties and functions at community centers; it seeps deeper past the pulsating bass sequence carried in each song’s DNA; it is embedded in its apparatus. It is black in its movement from one person to the next. During YouTube’s more formative period, when subcultures hid among the numerous videos of babies biting fingers and white preteens covering one of the Top 25, many marginalized groups were able to move without notice. Congregating in the shadows and in the underground, these groups (specifically black YouTube groups) could feel free from surveillance; they could use their own vernacular and shift it at will. The feeling of vulnerability was permitted regardless of those
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who watched the videos because the viewers were in the same circles. These spaces, these black spaces— as for the majority of black spaces throughout history—in their skinlessness are caught off guard by the spotlight of neocolonialism, then mantled and consumed globally. Blackness continues to be subjugated into its unacknowledged role as the foundation of Western pop culture—a position it has filled before the internet age and continues to. This co-opting is outlined chronologically by Aria Dean when she reflects on how “we have found ourselves where we were in the 1920s with jazz, in the 1950s with rock ’n’ roll, in the ’80s with both house and hip-hop.” This is no new process of digestion; even after there is nothing but bare bones left, its mouth still drools for more, scrambling for bits, and gnawing mindlessly in hopes of just getting a taste of any marrow. Similar to many other countercultures, Jersey club culture became victim to this. What once existed in the underground, living in the unexcavated parts of YouTube, soon became popularized as internet dances such as the “Running Man Challenge” and as TikTok video background music. Like all black things existing, Jersey club music’s blackness can be considered beyond its actual content. Blackness can be perceived as more than the historicity a subject or an object (or considering the black body itself, both subject and object) carries, more than the actual black person. This blackness is almost a movement, constantly shifting, only to be noticed during the present moment, visible in the moment when
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someone listens to a Jersey club song for the first time and perceives it according to their subjective reality. It exists in the passing of things, only to ontologically endure in this outreaching of the hand. This movement was once described by Fred Moten as being only what we hold in our outstretched hands. This moment of passing things from one awareness to another, where something similar but new is formed, is the action where true blackness lies. The inconsistency, this actual liminal position of interminable change, is what makes blackness a THING. The original becomes a vestige, no longer of use, now a deadweight whose only purpose is to reiterate how evolution is taking place. What once was no longer is. Self-conscious of its predecessor it moves forward, becoming during its middle passage, still carrying the blood, characteristics, trauma of its origins as it floats along the waves of the now. Zora Neale Hurston attests to the concept of blackness being “the exchange and re-exchange of ideas between groups” in “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” where she speaks on how black folk can’t help but to adorn, embellish, reinterpret, and enhance THINGS (things meaning anything that has ontological properties). Hurston points out how we (the negro) have “modified the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine, and most certainly the religion” of this country. She goes on to mention how in music we’ve modified white music and “whites’ musical instruments, so that [the black person’s] interpretation has been adopted by the white man himself and then re-interpreted. In so
TYLER CALA WILLIAMS
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many words, Paul Whiteman is giving an imitation of a Negro orchestra making use of white-invented musical instruments in a Negro way. Thus has arisen a new art in the civilized [white] world.” A circle is inevitably formed the second a black person creates, one that does not exclude non-black people. Content is constantly circling back on itself with a slightly new aesthetic to it. It is black in its survival tactics, in its way of dropping lyrics, as in scat and trap music; we rely on improvisation to keep us alive. In rock music—which I shouldn’t have to mention is very black in its essence—an artist like Little Richard, for instance, had to improv numerous songs of his, such as “Long Tall Sally,” to push back Pat Boone’s (a white “rock” singer) cover of the song. The more Richard performed it, the faster the pace of it became. Little Richard began to make work that aesthetically acknowledged the violent appropriation of black labor, which in turn manifested a new form of rock music. The attention black content received altered the content itself. Innovation might as well be black livelihood seeing how deeply it is embedded in our existence. The way we have to instinctively shift to the new is apparent in the short attention span of pop culture as a whole, but for now I will focus on the defensive qualities that developed many carcinogens within Jersey club music. Tumors of sorts progressively grow on Jersey club culture the more the internet accelerates it across and through its networks of connections, causing it to morph into
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something other than its previous self. In the past decade, Jersey club music has taken on numerous forms. Current Jersey club music is a response to/result of the habitually syphoned content it creates as a counterculture within pop culture, thus the murder of its authenticity. In addition to looting content, the velocity of the internet easily appropriates Jersey club remixes like Kyle Edwards and Dj Smallz’s “Fun–We Are Young” for theme songs to trends like the “Now I’m Mad Challenge” on Vine, which is later readapted by Jersey club culture as the “The Fuck It Up Challenge” in a faster cadence, to recently find itself becoming a pop song by Ciara as “Level Up.” We can follow the snail trail back to its origins, but instead black folk in Jersey club culture decide to accelerate their own creations faster than its predecessor. It comes back with gut-punching boosted bass, highpitch saturated deep-fried vocals, and competitively racing beats that echo the subversive qualities of Jersey club culture’s kindred countercultures (e.g., rock, hardcore, hip hop, hardstyle, trap music, free jazz, etc.). So we find ourselves repeatedly pushing back at capitalism’s greedy ass by also feeding it. In a never-ending loop of production and consumption is where we find ourselves, is where we find blackness. So we continue to make remixes like “My Boo” that are appropriated into the “Running Man Challenge” to find themselves being recycled into a modern TikTok re-remix as a song, a dance, or even archival videos of the original challenge reused to be juxtaposed with its iteration. Things deteriorate in its blackness,
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accelerating at a frequency where everyone (literally everyone and anyone) is able to manipulate it with their awareness. An ontological black THING tagged up, warped, smudged, engulfed with grimy fingerprints can be paused in its hyper movement to be identifiable only by its less fucked-up residuals . . . that is, if it can even be recognized. This blackness isn’t new. It carried folklore language and our lives way before we stepped off them ships and was dubbed as individuals. At that moment blackness solidified and became opaque, capable of having a singular meaning. That is the blackness assigned to us, branded by our skin color, but not the wholeness— or I would say the endless no(thing) ness, as Fred Moten attests to in his trilogy series Consent Not to Be a Single Being—that we simply carry as descendants of the African diaspora.
mades” and “found object art”) to create something new is a part of black life; it is a mode of expression and survival. When listening to the collage of samples that adorn a Jersey club mix, one can almost hear the presence of the collective black voice. Chants from past artists who may have died, moan and groan snippets of throwback R & B slow jams, Baltimore club 808 hi-hats, snares and bass birthed to articulate the lives of black folk—the list of identifiable black content within this club culture is expanding at this very moment. These qualities are what we feel we need to protect at all cost, to preserve the culture from being whitewashed. I won’t say I don’t feel partially defensive about these ideas; I’m simply hoping we can think of what it means for something to be black outside of the white gaze, in other words, creating a new black aesthetic, a nonaesthetic.
Now there are definitely more glib associations of Jersey Club culture’s blackness that are undoubtedly valid in its own historic sense. Characteristics like the ancient black artistic/spiritual tradition of call-and-response that is heard in black churches in relation to the congregation and the pastor, to the choir director and the choir. It even goes far back to traditional African drum ceremonies. Among the cocktail of black traits, Jersey club culture carries a more apparent manifestation of blackness that corrodes from its nonontological, undefined, organic form. The action of sampling is another part of black tradition. The usage of archival material and what is already available to us (before the conception of modernism / minimalism’s “ready-
Living in and observing with a clinical eye something so black, black to its core like Jersey club culture, I have found that these numerous black characteristics aren’t absolute. The only thing absolute is change, and that in itself is the blackest, darkest shit ever. Regardless of who alters it (anyone nonblack/white), they contribute to blackness. This means every edit— being false or true, pure or grotesque, simple and general to complex and nuanced—is accounted for in the acceleration of blackness.
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All I’m expressing is being said on the shoulder of artists and thinkers who’ve been articulating this nonontological blackness for generations and devoted livelihoods to discern what precisely
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makes black-ish objects and subjects black. These artists examined Southern folklore, African American (black American) language, artifacts, black music, and even contemporary internet meme culture. All these things that exist are not just contingent on their endless evolution but are also testimonies to their past situations and acknowledge the countless people who, as Hito Steyerl specifies, “cared enough to transfer, reformat, and convert over and over again,” continuing to be a shared owner and holder of this circle. The blackness cycle. So now when I listen to Jersey club music, when I think of the black aesthetic as a whole, I accept the anger, violence, and resilience that was shaped into this blackness, this single condition of an actively overgrowing crowd.
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Now my teeth clench while listening to the jagged distortions and pixelated sampled songs that are now absent of time—not throwbacks, not oldies, not even that new shit; it’s just sounds that carry heavy emotional baggage from their manipulation. These aren’t just endorphins. I want that signature five beat to move faster, faster, faster; I need the momentum to increase, accelerating until all that’s left is a piercingly aggressive cacophony of screams. I can’t and won’t ever fully know where it originated (and could not care less to find out), but I can most certainly sense the abandonment that was imperative to its placement in my hands. I’ve become the holder of the circle. Now will I hand it off or get it snatched out from in front of me? Either way I know it always comes back in some way.
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057
ANDREW ROBERTS
058 ATTENTION!
059 ¡ATENCIÓN!
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Tourst Infrastructure and State Terror on Jeju Island: TOURIST FACILITIES, MILITARIZATION, AND THE JEJU MASSACRE
Jeju Island sits fifty miles off the southwestern coast of South Korea, a popular honeymoon destination and one of UNESCO’s “New 7 Wonders of Nature.”1 Considered the most romantic place in South Korea, it is also the site of a fiercely opposed naval base used by the United States, one of many struggles between the native population and US imperialism.2 In 1948 the South Korean government launched an anticommunist massacre (called the 4.3 Incident in Korea) that extinguished local opposition to the right-wing military dictatorship installed by the United States over the southern half of the peninsula.3 An estimated thirty thousand Jeju Islanders were killed by the South Korean right-wing forces, representing a significant portion of the island’s population.4 This essay describes how the growth of tourist infrastructure and other development projects aimed at collecting either mainland/foreign capital coincides with the growth of military projects in these areas. Furthermore, this growth is in close proximity to numerous massacre sites dispersed across the island, posing a situation of post-massacre development fundamentally different
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from the rest of the country. Tourist, instead of outright military, infrastructure is what cements coloniality in Jeju. Moreover, the tourist industry, like efforts by the South Korean government of censorship and textbook revision,5 becomes part of the process of erasure of the massacre from the island’s image and its collective memory.
HISTORY OF JEJU ISLAND AND THE JEJU MASSACRE Jeju Island formed around 1.8 million years ago through volcanic activity centered on Hallasan, the highest mountain in South Korea. Humans first settled Jeju Island during the Paleolithic Age.7 In around the third/second centuries BC, the ancient kingdom of Tamna unified Jeju’s island society under a settled ruling system independent of the Korean Peninsula. Tamna was anannexed by the Goryeo Dynasty in the twelfth century, and with the exception of a period of Mongolian rule remained part of the Korean central government through the Joseon Dynasty.8 Japanese colonial rule began in 1910 on Jeju Island through the annexation
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of Korea. It was met with resistance from the people of Jeju Island, notably from the haenyeo (female sea divers), who formed the largest women’s anticolonial movement in all of Korea.9 Throughout the period of colonial rule, Jeju Island experienced a wealth of socialist/communist organizing, which was the basis for the organization of people’s committees on Jeju after liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945.10 These committees were the de facto government of the island during the early period of USAMGIK (US Army Military Government in Korea) rule, which put Jeju Island along with the southern half of the Korean Peninsula under US control.11 On April 3, 1948, armed rebels from the People’s Army, a communist guerilla force in the island’s interior, attacked rightwing organizations and police boxes throughout the island, calling for reunification, national liberation, and an end to oppression from the police and right-wing associations.12 The April 3 Uprising (the namesake of the Korean name for the massacre) spurred a group of fanatically right-wing youths (called the Northwest Youth League) along with the South Korean police/ military to conduct a counterinsurgency against the People’s Army. Under US command, the Northwest Youth and South Korean security forces launched an extermination campaign against all those suspected of being associated with the guerillas.13 An estimated 30,000 people, representing 10 percent of the island’s population, died in the ensuing violence, although other estimates put the number far higher. The violence was so widespread that oreums, small volcanic cones number-
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ing in the hundreds across the island, are not only popular hiking destinations today but are also often massacre sites.14 Additionally, government forces burned down 70 percent of all villages on the island. For decades the South Korean government imprisoned authors who wrote about the incident, and only in 2003 did they apologize for the government’s actions in the massacre.15 The mass exodus of Jeju Island people to Japan during the massacre, along with the demographic reduction of the native population due to the massacre, meant that the island’s unique identity became compromised in the decades after. During the Park Chung-hee regime, the use of Jejueo, the indigenous language of Jeju Island, was prohibited from all official capacities, and today it is critically endangered, with all its speakers over the age of seventy.16 More recently, around 20,000 people have made Jeju Island their home each year, and the air route between Seoul and Jeju is the busiest in the world.17 In a matter of decades, Jeju Island has transformed its image from the site of some of the worst massacres in modern Korean history to a “romantic paradise” visited by millions of tourists each year.
JEJU’S TOURIST FACILITIES AND MILITARIZATIONS The rapid issuing of development permits by the Jeju Provincial Government has led to the rapid growth of tourist infrastructure on the island. Golf courses raze the endemic gotjawal forest (a location that refugees of the Jeju
ANDY SEUNGU CHOI
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Massacre used to hide from right-wing forces), endangering the island’s water table, and a second airport is set to be built on the eastern side of the island. 18 All this development hasn’t come without military complexes also being established under the guise of aiding tourist development. n January 2011, construction began on a billion-dollar naval base on the coast of Gangjeong Village on the south of Jeju Island. The South Korean navy billed it as a “new attraction for beautiful Jeju” in the face of widespread resistance to the base’s construction.19 The base is built on top of a UNESCO-designated biosphere reserve and is seen by the residents as a base built so the United States can pressure China: a situation that could quickly devolve into a regional Cold War–type conflict.20 The struggle against the construction of the base culminated in the deployment of thousands of riot police against protesters (a move by the South Korean government reminiscent of the deployment of mainland security forces to Jeju during the Jeju Massacre) and the enclosure of the construction site with barbed wire and barricades.21 In a referendum in Gangjeong, 94 percent of voters voted against the naval base, which was ignored by both the central and provincial governments.22 The removal of people from land that they are spiritually connected to, the destruction of protected archaeological sites, and the endangerment of one of the only soft-coral ecosystems in Korea seem inexcusable, especially given the fact that the area is protected by UNESCO. However, considering the amount of money I
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that the South Korean government gives to the organization in donations and membership fees, UNESCO has ignored the destructive militarization in Gangjeong.23 Unlike other regions of South Korea, however, the excuse of “national security” seems inexcusable for Jeju Island because of its aesthetic value. This is why coupling these military complexes with the tourist industry is necessary to install the infrastructure of militarization so ubiquitous in the rest of the country. The naval base at Gangjeong is billed as the “Jeju Civilian-Military Complex Port.” Although it was in use since 2015, the first time a civilian passenger ship used the port was in 2019.24 Compare this to the fact that US and Canadian warships docked at the port in 2017—the first time a US destroyer had been at the island since the April 3 Uprising.25 The reappearance of a US military presence in Jeju harks back to the period of USAMGIK rule, and because of the extensive, permanent presence of the US military on Korean soil, shows how “tourist” development becomes the way that Jeju experiences coloniality, in the same way that former residents of Daechuri and Doduri in Gyeonggi Province experience coloniality through their displacement to make way for Camp Humphreys.26 Another example of tourist development making way for the militarization of Jeju Island is the planned second airport on the eastern side of the island. Set to be constructed in Seongsan-eup on a stretch of rural farmland, the airport has been met with fierce resistance from local residents.27
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Tourist-oriented development such as convention centers, retail complexes, golf courses, and casinos are expected to fill the surrounding area, and the airport is estimated to bring twenty-five million people into the area each year.28 This airport will also very likely be an air force base, as authorities have yet to confirm that the airport will be purely civilian, and air force usage of the airport has been in planning.29 This is how (as in Gangjeong) authorities can cite the economic incentive of tourism to build development that will integrate the construction of military complexes. Additionally, the fact that the ROK-US Mutual Defense Treaty ensures that the United States has the right to use this military development cements the experience of coloniality for the people of Seongsan-eup.30 The displacement of Jeju Islanders, the paving over of their ancestral land, the military use of the ensuing development by forces of coloniality all point to a complex interplay of space that is informed by the economic incentives of the tourist industry. The desacralization of this space away from its spiritual/ecological dimensions to become sterile sites of transaction both in financial/military capital is reminiscent of the subjugation of the April 3 Uprising, in which large swaths of land on Jeju Island were cleared of all people (through evacuation, burning, and/or massacres) and turned into “lost village” sites where there are no traces of previous inhabitation. The link between spatial subjugation today and that of the Jeju Massacre is clear through the experience of occupation in both situations.31
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JEJU’S TOURIST FACILITIES AND THE SITES OF THE JEJU MASSACRE On Jeju, 78 percent of villages suffered deaths of thirty or more people during the Jeju Massacre, and there are around 134 “lost villages” scattered around the island.32 The rapid tourist development throughout the island often impedes upon, or sits directly upon, former massacre sites. This unsustainable development is part of the Disneyfication of Jeju, not only through the numerous all-inclusive megaresorts that litter the island but also the fact that the island’s image is advertised, commodified, and sold through everything from package tours to water bottles.The memorialization of these sites themselves has been commodified through their billing as “dark tourism,” in which visitors can “experience” the horrors of the massacre as part of their itinerary on Jeju Island.33 Jeju’s tourist development impedes not only physically on sites of the massacre but also on the memory of the massacre through the sanitization (and subsequent erasure) of its history. Jeju International Airport is where most visitors to Jeju Island arrive. Built as a military base during the Japanese colonial period, an estimated seven hundred people were executed and buried under the current runway of the airport.34 Excavations of this site have been complicated by the heavy traffic of the airport and by decades of concealment by the South Korean government.35 Similarly, the Jeju Agriculture School was the base camp for the Ninth Regiment, which held in
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detention some of the most prominent members of Jeju society.36 Inmates would be tortured and taken to Bakseongnae Stream to be executed. Today the site lies along Cherry Blossom Street where the annual Cherry Blossom Festival takes place, and about two to three blocks away from the Jeju KAL Hotel, operated by Korean Air and home to the MegaLuck Casino. The Oriental Development Company Jeju Distillery’s warehouse site was used as a detention center in the spring of 1949, and many people died due to the severity of the torture they experienced there.38 Today the site lies across the street from another entry point to Jeju, the island’s domestic ferry terminal. Spatial overlap between larger development projects scattered around the island and massacre sites is evident. On November 13, 1948, soldiers killed every inhabitant of Wondong Village they could find, from toddlers to elders, executing them en masse regardless of the fact that no rebels had been found in the village.39 Less than a mile away from the site is the LetsRun Park Jeju, a horse-themed park with a mini pony museum, pony riding, and curiously an “exclusive room for foreigners” during horse-racing tournaments.40 Although not aimed at tourists, the Jeju Free International City Development Center strives to attract foreign capital to the island, with projects such as the Jeju Global Education City and the Jeju Healthcare Town proliferating around the island.41 The Jeju Global Education City is home to several international schools, including the North London Collegiate School and Branksome Hall
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Asia, among others. The complex, along with the nearby Osulloc Tea Museum and the Shinhwa Theme Park, is built close to two lost villages: Mudeungyiwat and Sambat Corner, along with a refugee site, Keunneolgwe Cave. In November of 1948, the military’s scorched-earth policy was carried out in Mudeungyiwat Village (which had 130 households) and Sambat Corner (which had 46), in which villagers were dispersed throughout the area and then hounded by the army.42 One hundred twenty villagers hid in Keunneolgwe Cave, although they were later caught and executed. Others who went to Hallasan were found and killed near Jeongbang Waterfall, which today is a popular tourist destination as well.43 The Jeju Healthcare Town is a 1.54-millionsquare-meter site with a planned Wellness Mall and Well-Being Food Zone near the lost village site of Youngnam-dong, where the only slashand-burn agricultural field on Jeju was destroyed.44 In Seongsan-eup, the location of the planned second airport and home to the famous Seongsan Ilchulbong peak, the remains of the Northwest Youth base can be found behind the local Kmart, and the Northwest Youth routinely tortured and massacred local residents in the area.45 Even the Jeju Peace Park, built to commemorate the massacre, seeks to “promote Jeju as an island of peace and human rights” and is dwarfed by the two surrounding golf courses.46 It would be impossible to list every massacre site and the surrounding tourist development on Jeju Island. The spatial overlap between the two
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seems clear, but this is a consequence not of the premeditated choices of developers but of the ubiquity of these sites across the island, especially in the interior. As space runs out for development along the coast of Jeju Island, tourist development has concentrated on the interior, and thus intrudes on these historical sites with more frequency. The entire island carries the scars of the Jeju Massacre so deeply that, spatially, encountering them is unavoidable. The scars of colonialism due to the US operation command of the South Korean military during the Jeju Massacre is thus reflected by the coloniality of the militarization of Jeju, in which tourist facilities thread the line between impeding on the past and being the basis for militarization in the present and future.
JEJU TOURISM AND THE ERASURE OF THE JEJU MASSACRE Collective memory around the Jeju Massacre has marked differences between the Zainichi Korean population in Osaka and Koreans in South Korea. The Korean community in Osaka, largely derived from former residents of Jeju Island who witnessed the Jeju Massacre, sees the April 3 Uprising as an anti-American, anti-Rhee protest movement, the repression of which was characterized by extreme violence and the sadism of mainlanders against Jeju people.47 In South Korea, however, as censorship and the threat of detention and torture loomed over victims in the decades after the massacre, information around the massacre has only emerged for the public since the
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early 2000s, and thus is convoluted.48 Even as the Jeju Massacre has been integrated into South Korea’s national history, anyone involved in resistance activities is regarded as a “non-victim” of the massacre and their records are removed from the Jeju Peace Park.49 Thus, the South Korean government picks and chooses which deaths to recognize in their “reconciliatory” actions toward the victims of the Jeju Massacre, creating an official narrative that erases the deaths of those who opposed South Korean forces. The government-organized commemorative ceremonies for the massacre are thus boycotted by the families of those placed in the “non-victim” category of the Jeju Massacre.50 Jeju Island’s tourist industry relies on this erasure/manipulation of collective memory to preserve the island’s image. The Jeju Tourism Organization calls the incident a “gale that swept over Jeju” and describes how “Jeju has since become an island of tourism and world peace.”51 This is despite the fact, according to a 2015 survey of victims and their families, that 50 percent of those interviewed exhibited symptoms of depression requiring medical treatment, and around 40 percent of those interviewed were at high risk for post– traumatic stress disorder.52 Additionally, many victims and their families live in economic hardship, and there have yet to be reparations made to these victims.53 The Jeju Tourism Organization website excludes all mention of government culpability for the massacre, refusing to name the force behind the tragedy it commemorates, which is also the case for the websites of
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VisitKorea and VisitJeju.54 By treating the Jeju Massacre as a “closed” tragedy from which the people of Jeju have fully recuperated, the tourist industry dissociates the incident from the Jeju of today, erasing the psychological and economic ramifications it continues to have on the people of Jeju Island. The depoliticization of this incident, along with the encouragement of tourist organizations to incorporate visiting these sites as part of their “tourist itinerary,” desensitizes the impact of the Jeju Massacre and allows the South Korean government to absolve itself of culpability. This is at the same time that the government of Jeju Island has worked tirelessly to create an image centered on nature and the environment. In 2011 government officials in Jeju spent the equivalent of 20.3 million dollars in international phone bills to have Jeju become part of the “New 7 Wonders of Nature.”55 Products from Jeju Island enjoy a reputation of being of “pristine quality.”56 This includes the thousands of tons of water that are pumped out of the island’s water table, bottled, advertised as untouched, and exported around the world.57 By presenting Jeju as “pristine” and “untouched,” the horrors of the Jeju Massacre can conveniently be wiped off the island’s image, as it seems impossible for such an event to take place when pictures of lush verdure and unspoiled natural resources are brought to mind. A similar situation of erasure through the creation of a “pristine nature” narrative of sites of human-forced removal and suffering is the US national park system and the displacement of indigenous peoples
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to create “wild” spaces for non-native recreation.58 The aesthetic/recreational aspects of nature thus whitewash the history of the massacre through the island’s depiction as being “pristine” and “unaltered,” even as it witnessed the worst massacre in modern Korean history within the last century.
CONCLUSION The Jeju Massacre and militarization of Jeju continue to be fiercely debated in South Korean politics, dividing the left and right. Both have political implications for the peninsula: in the case of the Jeju Massacre, of its bloody past; for militarization, possible conflict in the future. The Jeju tourist industry’s efforts at altering the collective memory and contributing to the erasure of the Jeju Massacre coincide with the way it aids the current militarization of the island. The implications of this are grave: on the one hand, a lack of understanding about the brutality of imperialist conflict, and on the other, the potential for such a conflict to take place again. The true memory of the Jeju Massacre must be presented without government interference, the sites of the Jeju Massacre must be respected, and there must be reparations for the victims and their families. To ensure that such an incident will not be repeated there must be an immediate halt to militarization and the beginning of an era of peace not only on Jeju Island but across all of Korea. Only then would the April 3 Uprising’s goals of reunification and national liberation be possible.
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THE ECOLOGY OF REMIXING
I pull my box of ladybugs from the fridge and lay it on my patio floor. A magnitude of little bugs springs from the box and scatters for the closest vegetation, seeking refuge. In midcity Los Angeles, this greenery is rather sparse. What remains in the box are the ladybugs that didn’t survive the postal journey from the farm in Santa Barbara. I collect their little carcasses and place them on a tray to photograph. Later, in Photoshop, I use the scissor tool to cut each ladybug out of the image. I center the now freestanding
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bugs around a photo I took of a pair of children’s butterfly wings on the Western Avenue freeway overpass. The wire frame covered with baby blue nylon had been mysteriously placed to decorate the fence. The details of glitter on the wings shone in the sun, and through the nylon I could see the chainlink fence and the cars rushing through the city on the highway below. In Photoshop, I merge the images of butterflies and ladybugs in front of another image I took of a clearing in a grove in the mountains above Altadena. Together, the multiple layers come together and create something new; my “god-like”
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hand invented a new environment of flora and fauna of disparate origins that would never have coexisted otherwise. Things we don’t pay attention to are a part of systems at play and hold value as artifacts that can recall a cultural memory, an environmental history, or a personal significance. In this way the works are about life, death, conception, and cycles, drawing the lines between the life of a plant, animal, or human and the life of an object. This process of exploring, examining, collecting, and documenting has led me to consider the urban ecosystem of Los Angeles and the role humans play in how this ecosystem was created and functions, whether we are aware of the effect of our actions or not. Every day, we inadvertently contribute to this remix ecology, unintentionally spreading seed and debris alike. The thought process and field of study that accompanies my work is called the ecology of remixing. This philosophy begins with noticing and grows into an interconnected web that retracts dependence on capitalist notions of exponential growth and progress, and operates on a value system based on retrieval and transformation. Through this field of study we can experience the compounding of past, present, and future, as our attempts to move humanity forward have sent the geological clock backward. Living in this technological era in which we consume as well as produce works that utilize appropriating and remixing, we as artists can use this skill to find the possibility and potential through the endless combinations of flora, fauna, elements, cul-
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ture, and content that without our existence were unlikely to ever meet. To live in Los Angeles in 2021 is to experience multiple realities at once. With the clashing of people, cultures, environments, and animals, the city becomes uncanny and whimsical. This phenomenon can be experienced through paying attention to the flora: the citrus trees brought from China by the Spanish in the nineteenth century, and the palm trees brought to the city in the 1930s as a beautification project for the Olympics. The myriad cultural enclaves, from Koreatown and Highland Park to Little Armenia and Thai Town, are the result of rapid industrialization, globalization, and importation of labor. In Hollenbeck Park in East Los Angeles, fir needles fall into the human-constructed lake and mix with the accumulated debris that includes fake flowers, Barbie dolls, apple juice cartons, and caution tape, to name a few found items. Humans traverse the lake in the company of swans, mallards, and cats. Flocks of red-crowned parrots, originally from South America, fly overhead, their squawking a chaotic din. We are simultaneously experiencing the debris manufactured elsewhere, imported, and discarded; plants introduced through a long legacy of colonialism; and animals brought along with humans by intention or accident. From this vantage point of viewing all these components of the urban environment in this particular composition, we experience both their origins and their current position. This phenomenon, of an increase in local diversity but inevitable global
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are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent, what some biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangea.”1 Once we open our eyes, the New Pangea phenomenon in Los Angeles cannot be missed. It’s clearly a catalyst to the current urban ecological structure. Given the huge hand that humans have played in shaping this structure, how can we shift from being passive players to taking agency and learning about this ecosystem we’ve created? Through living in the technological era and experiencing the world through our phones, surely we have developed a literacy for experiencing people, art, objects, news, trends, and images globally. Can we use this literacy of the conceptual Pangea we experience through our screens to experience the “everything at once” phenomenon in our physical surroundings?
extinction patterns, is one that biologists have tracked since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Biologists have coined the term “New Pangea” to explain the phenomenon, which was popularized by journalist Elizabeth Kolbert in her 2014 book The Sixth Extinction, in which she investigates the anthropocene. Kolbert explains, “The drifting apart of the continents . . . is now being reversed . . . humans are running geologic history backward and at high speed. . . . By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we
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Through this act of noticing and paying attention, perhaps we can use the ecology of remixing to shift from being passive ingesters of products and information to understanding our effect on all that is around us. In Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, the protagonist Lauren proclaims, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”2 The dystopian, ecologically damaged, and politically corrupt world Lauren Olamina lives in in Southern California, sometime in the 2020s, is jarringly similar to the one we occupy now. In our own version of dystopia, perhaps we can shift our consciousness to understand the “god-like” power we have in our world around us, and the role
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we play as remixers. On an individual level, we each do play a god-like role, but we are operating in the larger structure of postcapitalism and postcolonialism, which have gotten us to this moment, but are threatening a demise to our ecology. Capitalism and the environment are in direct conflict with each other. Capitalist economic systems rely on infinite exponential growth to sustain themselves, while the environment is a diminishing finite resource. In 2020 alone we saw the effects of capitalism and the environment working against
each other and threatening our vitality: a pandemic, the worst-ever fire season on record, a particularly dry winter. With the two so intertwined yet at odds with each other, and reaching a crisis point in sustainability, what does the future for the two actually look like? Can we continue with this economic system and heal the environment enough to safeguard our livelihoods and futures? In her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein talks with climate scientist Kevin Anderson, who claims that to see [or: ensure] a livable future, wealthy countries need to see that their greenhouse gas emissions experience an eight to ten percent drop every year, which is “virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal.” In fact, cuts above one percent per year, “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval.”3 Raised and conditioned by this system, we as consumers find that “changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.” So we experience either economic or environmental collapse. In 2020, with the biological disaster of the coronavirus, which then triggered an economic collapse, we are experiencing both. The ecology of remixing helps us filter this phenomenon of two truths and acts as a framework to conceptualize futures and life after this end of the world as we know it. What do we do when systems collapse is inevitable either way? To transform the systems, we must first transform
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ourselves. I propose the ecology of remixing as a form of study that we can adopt to pay attention to the delicate systems in play all around us. Through this study, we can learn to shift our mindsets away from profit and growth, to see ourselves as parts of a network, or web. Every action we take affects those around us—the people, the plants, the air. Through this act of noticing and paying attention, we can empower ourselves, shift our sense of self away from being a victim, a consumer, a passive player, to playing a role in an urban organism that relies and depends on the jobs we do to keep it healthy and functioning. Researcher and biologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing speaks of this mentality change in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Tsing reflects on how our coal-powered society operates on a chronological timeline and revolves around ideas of the development of society and technology, whereby we feel as humans that we must always be making “progress” and moving forward into the future. But Tsing poses a challenging question. What if there is no future? Tsing uses the matsutake mushroom, a Japanese delicacy found only in disturbed forests, as a lens to view her philosophy. As she explains, “When its singular asset can no longer be produced, a place can be abandoned. The timber has been cut; the oil has run out; the plantation soil no longer supports crops. The search for assets resumes elsewhere. Thus, simplification for alienation produces ruins, spaces of abandonment for asset production.”5 More and more of the world is experiencing abandonment
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and ruin, and pristine natural sites for resources are increasingly rare. So what do we do when all that is left is the ruins of capitalism? Tsing continues: “Global landscapes today are strewn with this kind of ruin. Still, these places can be lively despite announcements of their death; abandoned asset fields sometimes yield new multispecies and multicultural life. In a global state of precarity, we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin.”6 The ecology of remixing practice posits itself around these concepts. What if we ceased to seek out the new, but began to find the beauty and utility in what is left? The art of remixing is not about newness and oldness, but about scavenging and transformations. How can we use our artistry and alchemy, not to birth and create, but to retrieve and transform? As consumers in this capitalist system, we are conditioned to view the objects and lives around us for their monetary worth. We are obedient to this value system. However, as the foundations of this system crumble under their own rot, we comprehend the many ways it no longer serves us. Under the ecology of remixing philosophy, the objects around us are transformed from capitalism’s excess into things of emotional, historical, cultural, and folkloric value. Becoming scavengers instead of consumers, we build our own things, trade with one another, invent new value systems, create a localized economy, and establish an autonomous network of dependence.
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ÉTIENNE BUYSE
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Exploring the evolution of the battlefield and various forms of distance, Predator/Protector contemplates particular developments that may change the future of warfare (UAV/Drone warfare) and what this means not just for the victims but the perpetrators as well. Using Sontag's idea of how war imagery on TV and internet distance us further from the actual happenings as we relate these scenes to the cinematic, Predator/Protector attempts to combat this by showing that these issues materialize and take action from our space and in our time. Adopting a similar aesthetic to that of British landscape painters, then directing the camera towards the romanticized landscape and all the too common industrial estates, Predator/ Protector aims to contrast these idealistic and unintrusive view with the reality of what is taking place in these locations to show that they are part of the ever-expanding 'battlespace' in the information age. These images are combined with representations of aspects one cannot photograph, due to restricted access (the drones themselves and the operating rooms), that show interesting parallels that would not be achievable photographing these subjects under investigation.
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RAF Menwith Hill can be seen as the NSA’s British base. According to files released by Edward Snowden, the base has 2 main spying capabilities, FORNSAT (uses radars contained in these white golf ball-like domes to eavesdrop on communications being beamed between foreign satellites) and OVERHEAD (uses US satellites to locate and monitor wireless communications on the ground, such as phone calls
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and Wi-Fi traffic). The location is used for intelligence gathering that directly corresponds to the U.S’s highly controversial targeted killing program, selecting targets to be put on a ‘kill list’ to be taken out by drones. This is disputed against, as there have been cases where people are being falsely put on this kill list as the program only operates on the data it collects.
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The Hermes 450 is an Israeli drone produced by Elbit. The Hermes 450 and 900 have both been used predominantly in the Gaza conflict where independent journalists claim the Isreali forces failed to take all feasible precautions to verify the targets were combatants. Elbit has worked with Thales to produce the British drone the ‘Watchkeeper’ which is based off the Hermes drone. Hermes is a Olympian God known for being a traveller and messenger. He is also known for being a trickster and escorting the dead. To name an unmanned aerial vehicle controlled from miles away after a God says a lot about the perception of these weapons.
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The MQ-9 Reaper is arguably the most notorious drone around the world. It is produced in the US and is described as a ‘hunter-killer’ drone that can fly at a high altitude and is designed for long endurance missions. The UK has 10 of these drones in their fleet already, and will soon swap these for the new Predator drones which they will be renaming the Protector drone. The name of the Reaper drone hints to how sinister it is with naming it after the personification of death, a being that cannot be affected by those who encounter it but is a harbinger of death.
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(Government Communications Headquarters) is the UK’s equivalent of the US’s NSA (National Security Agency) which is an intelligence and security organisation that provides signals intelligence and information to the government and military. Since the invention of the computer, which is where the inception of GCHQ stems from the activities at Bletchley Park, information gathering and assessing has been a crucial aspect to any military program. In files that Snowden had released it shows that GCHQ and the NSA had been involved in hacking Israeli drone feeds operating in Syria and Lebanon. This shows us that the information aspect of warfare has rapidly evolved and has brought us further away from the front-line where the locating, tracking and killing of a target can be done thousands of miles away, begging the question whether we are living in a ‘battlespace’.
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Ferranti is one of the 4 Elbit factories I have visited in the UK. Elbit is Israel’s largest arms manufacturer that describes its drones as being “the backbone” of the Israeli drone fleet. Ferranti is believed to produce guidance systems for the drones. Their website describes the work they do as being “Suppliers of engineering, manufacturing and product support solutions for Aerospace and Defence markets”.
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The Brimstone missile is manufactured in MBDA’s factory in Lostock. It is considered to be the most accurate missile in their arsenal recently awarded a £400 million contract from the UK for its future development. In the UK’s battle against IS, 486 have been fired from jets and the US bought Reaper’s costing £100,000 or more for each missile. It is said that they will be used for the UK’s new Protector drone. The UK continues to insist that none of their airstrikes have killed of harmed citizens and the US only admit to killing around 841 whereas independent news suggests a minimum of 6,259 civilians have been killed by the coalition.
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HYANGSOOK KWAK
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ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROGAN
It is becoming common to take for granted that social media platforms like YouTube contribute to reactionary political views. The radicalization pipeline, that conspiracy of algorithms that pushes viewers toward more extreme content, is decried for directing our attention, appropriating it against our will for the benefit of ideas we may have never considered otherwise. But the theory of radicalization pathways on YouTube paints over, with
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broad strokes, the experience of using the platform. YouTube's content environment does not appear to be unilaterally directed—every rabbit hole leads to another one, and there is no bottom. We encounter less of a directed pathway or pipeline than an intermixing of special-interest topics, some of which appeal to us more than others. If algorithmic filter bubbles have a goal besides the optimization of attention and profits, it is not to orient people
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toward particular views, but to provide them with content that resonates with their existing values and dispositions. In the case of politics, this is content that substantiates subjective values and refutes others that oppose them. This type of content manifests most visibly through the language of "common sense." Common sense reasoning captivates a large, apparently active audience, like on popular channels like Joe Rogan's. It is apolitical by its very nature; that is, to whoever already shares its political presuppositions. If YouTube algorithms have an influence on political rationality, it is through delivering content that appeals to a viewer's specific sentiments, such that it can manifest as common sense. From this perspective, insulation and inculcation isn't an effect of the algorithm itself, so much as the appearance of its application to a politically fragmented world. Rather than prisoners inside of filter bubbles, we find partisans that weaponize them. The filter bubble gives them the opportunity to smash the like, frequently, and with as much emotional intensity as possible. The alt-right political figure of modern consternation is less a radical, pushed into extreme views by algorithms, than a sophist. This is a person obsessed with collecting rhetorical arguments and statistical examples that support their views. They have little regard for other ways of being, thinking, and acting that are illegible to the logic they already consume. For this sophistry, an appeal to rationality and a definitive truth is not the enemy, but its bread
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and butter. This is evidenced by the popularity of "gateway" channels to otherwise radical content: they display a strong commitment to "facts and logic" that refute opposing values. We should interrogate this language of "common sense," as well as how the form of the filter bubbles leverages— and is designed to support—its aesthetics to captivate an audience. The idea of a radicalization pathway presupposes a spectrum of left and right political values, skewed to either extreme. But YouTube's algorithms are much more effective at demonstrating to viewers the utility of sophistry. They do not need radicalization pathways to do this; they simply help viewers collect arguments that support their views. It is not controversial to say that political media takes advantage of its viewers' dissatisfaction, resentment, and confusion to gain their attention. But social media's real innovation is to tailor this mechanism to multiple political perspectives simultaneously, driving all viewers to content that supports their views. Here there is some truth to the consternation that social media foments political polarization. But that is less because people have forgotten how to talk to each other, than because recommended content has made them too good at doing so. Pick-up artist tutorials on YouTube provide us with a clear illustration of this logic. These videos, often disseminated through ads, leverage the viewer's insecurities and frustrations to provide them with rhetorical and behavioral strategies for improving their
PETER POLACK
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circumstances, ostensibly on the way to overcoming their sexual dissatisfaction. Here the intent to persuade is more candid than in "common sense" language—which must, in order to appear as such, act as if no persuasion is taking place. But the aesthetics taken up by pick-up "artists" are the same: providing viewers with objects of attack, serial offensive rhetorical techniques, and a focus on the effects of language instead of empathy. The idea of radicalization pathway is still useful for theories of deliberative decision-making, which assume that exposure to diverse arguments and fora for discussion is the substance of advanced political thought. That way, algorithms can be at fault for denying us alternative perspectives. But if people already gravitate toward views that support their material and affective interests, then a diversity of views does little to introduce them to new ways of thinking. And an algorithm that appears impartial to this way of thinking will be decried; which is to say, it will be politicized. The trick is that an algorithmic recommendation system can be impartial to a left-right political divide, while still amplifying particular political aesthetics that influence this divide, even when they transcend its dichotomy. The strategic entertainment of conspiracy theories by Russia Today and China's "50 Cent Party" of online commentators attest to the ability of alternative views to undermine confidence in a political position. But while these methods can be seen to frustrate political perspectives at the margins, they also radicalize
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political views at the norm, which manifest as the only salient ones. As long as the algorithm appears responsible for driving viewers to extreme content, there is no need to challenge this content in the first place; instead the solution to enforcing democratic values lies in algorithm design. This works out such that both progressives and conservatives view YouTube as partial to the opposing side. In response, the algorithm should simply be designed to uphold free speech— with the routine exception of targeted censorship—which works to its financial advantage. To this end, any promising solution would lie in reframing the way we conceptualize the influence of algorithms. One way would be to acknowledge YouTube as a repository of tailormade ideas instead of a system for homogenizing them. To contest its effects, we have to acknowledge the opportunities for thought it provides to people by responding to their dispositions, rather than locating the origin of this thought in the platform itself.
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CLAYTON SCHIFF
096 ATTENTION!
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VERÓNICA FERNÁNDEZ
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¡ATENCIÓN! KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK! BANG, BANG, BANG! On the morning of January 31st, 2021, my tia’s landlord banged on the apartment windows my mom and her shared for over fifteen years. He demanded to be let in. He needed to change the locks today. My tia died on January 13 from COVID. Not even 28 days later, her landlord forced an eviction via intimidation and harassment on my mom. Nevermind this is illegal, nevermind that we are still grieving. The death of my tia Olga. The death of mi abuelita Juanita in August of 2020. Nevermind that my mom took care of three generations of women in that apartment. Nevermind that there is a moratorium on evictions due to the pandemic. Nevermind that she spent years taking care of that apartment. Nevermind that she was legally considered a tenant when he accepted money from her. How to fight it? A lawyer, a tenant union, filming for documentation. Time. Resources. Money. Mental energy. Things we just do not have at the moment. It seems every day, there is a new FOR SALE sign in Lincoln Heights. A new large-scale development eating my neighborhood’s people and memories. But still, my mom, who had not slept from working graveyard at her CNA shift at a nursing home, cleaned and packed on Sunday afternoon. My revenge is slow. I use love and words. I tell stories. I don’t let people forget.
¡ATENCIÓN! Jugábamos lotería en la cocina. Tomando café con leche y pan. A veces usamos frijoles, a veces centavos. Pero siempre, a las seis. My tia Olga and my abuelita Juanita were honest. The kind of honesty that was biased towards their favorite. Me. I could tell them anything. How I didn’t like my cousin Eric because he made fun of me in front of my friend. My abuelita said that he had big ears.
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Tenía siete años, y tu, setenta y seis. Abuelita Juanita called out each card with her own twist. “LA CHICHONA!” she said. “Abuelita, ¡es una sirena!” I said. I put my tongue on my front two crooked teeth, stained from candy they let me eat instead of finishing my pan. There were pots clanking throughout the apartment building. Crickets by the window. Pans echoing in the staircases. My big eyes watched your hands with great interest. I didn’t understand how they could be so warm, but so wrinkly. The gossip was methodological. There was a rhythm to the chisme. My abuelita had a smooth whisper, and my tia Olga had a high pitched snarl. Ellas peleaban mucho.
¡ATENCIÓN! Mija, you have to pay attention. I’m going to be working today and your abuelita might have an accident. If she does, you just try your best OK. My dad said on the phone. “OK Dad.” In my entire life, of 26 years, I had never changed a baby’s diaper before, so it was kind of a surprise that my first diaper change was my grandma's. I was scared. I said sorry. The first time, I got really angry and I called my brother. And I said, why do the women have to do this? Where are you? Why is it me? I stood in the apartment hallway and looked at the tiles. And then I heard my abuelita scream. My tia Olga, in the living room, snarled and told her to be quiet. Abuelita was nervous. The dementia confused her every day. “OK Dad.”
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GABRIELLE GARCIA
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In my entire life, of 26 years, I had never changed a baby’s diaper before, so it was kind of a surprise that my first diaper change was my grandma’s. I was scared. I said sorry. The first time, I got really angry and I called my brother. And I said, why do the women have to do this? Where are you? Why is it me? I stood in the apartment hallway and looked at the tiles. And then I heard my abuelita scream. My tia Olga, in the living room, snarled and told her to be quiet. Abuelita was nervous. The dementia confused her every day. So I got over it. Right then and there. I cleaned grandma, and I changed her pants. I put some music on. Vicente Fernandez. I asked her questions. I was scared of hurting her. I tried to be as gentle as I could, but thorough. It was important to me to leave her comfortable and clean. Abuelita, ¿te acuerdas de nuestros juegos de lotería? Abuelita, te quiero mucho.
¡ATENCIÓN! Pay attention to your parents, I tell myself. Stop scrolling. I will, but I just have to read this article really fast. OK, I will, I just want to see this video really quick. Oh look, it’s a video of a family! Oh how heartwarming. Oh look, this one is a car accident. Oh look, wow this one is a public argument. Oh man, I can’t believe that singer got pregnant. Is her career on hold? Pay attention. PAY ATTENTION. Ok, ok, I will right now — I just have to finish thinking. Once I finish thinking, I can start. I’ll start in five minutes.
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Disasters are not short-term; they are long-term, society-changing events. On Wednesday, September 20th, 2017, Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico. The destruction forced my maternal family in San Juan to temporarily relocate and the island struggles to regain a steady state. The blue bag sewn to the comforter in “Un Edredón para los Turistas” emulates the blue tarps in Puerto Rico, implemented by FEMA as temporary roof replacements after the hurricane. Now, three years later, FEMA still has not replaced the blue tarps with solid, permanent roofs: another broken promise from the US government to Puerto Rico. Flying over Puerto Rico, one can see the bright blue rectangles scattered below. Puerto Rico's dependence on US aid is a product of imperialism and a colonialist legacy
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that extends to Puerto Rico's tourism industry, an extractive tourism rampant throughout the entire Caribbean. Tourists are often treated to the commercialized parts of the island, while devastation remains out of view, recovery efforts minimalized. Hotels in San Juan, the main tourist hub, were some of the first buildings to regain consistent power and water after the hurricane and have private generators, unlike many of Puerto Rico's residents. Through my work, I want to bring attention to the violent relationship between the US and Puerto Rico and its ongoing recovery while people travel there as an “escape.” The bright blue body on top of the cliché tropical print is inescapable. I am giving tourists one option: to pay attention to the sea of blue tarps in their so-called “island getaway.”
ISABELA MIÑANA LOVELACE
104 ATTENTION!
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105
MIA JOHNSON
106 ATTENTION!
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107
HEESO KWON
108 ATTENTION!
109 ¡ATENCIÓN!
110 ATTENTION!
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JOSHUA ZAMUDIO
112 ATTENTION!
113 ¡ATENCIÓN!
114 ATTENTION!
115 ¡ATENCIÓN!
116 ATTENTION!
117 ¡ATENCIÓN!
118 ATTENTION!
119 ¡ATENCIÓN!
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be comfy, creature If you’re out ‘there’ Or wherever, however, souls go on to be (at?) Hey! We miss you, Brother! How’s it goin’ ... out... ‘there’ ? Vast sea expanding ever outwards Deepening with the groaning weight of grey Pressure building, squeezing/tight|air|smaller! Stahp! No! Please! Not him! Not that one, no, please, Dear God! Take the thunder out of the sky! How dare it rain today My last memory: him eating soup at our mother’s table I found out: eating soup from the same batch.
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¡ATENCIÓN!
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Or was it him pacing cooly around me in the library Tan, thick leather jacket with bead embroidered roses Me: quietly excited for his public display of our sibling-hood. I. How lovely it is for the caterpillar To find a second womb And emerge Victorious Wet Butterfly B. Sleeping sweetly after the pieces were all rearranged The ring of a gunshot No longer Lingers. It is but a faint whisper, Weak, really, withering away in innerspace Farting faintly further from fragile phenomenon: His soul, both a forming fetus and a caterpillar in a cocoon, Entering into the deep hibernation of repurposing... The second womb... *cue lighter atmosphere* Luke, my dude, don’t do that again, Kapeesh? There’s no guarantee you’ll come back as a human around this time. In fact, I think it might be nice if you had the chance to chill out as water or air or vegetation for a while. Remember how you told me that you would like to be buried under a redwood tree so that you could become a part of the forest? I want that for you, too. I’m sorry we burned your last body instead. Luke.
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SAVANNAH SMITH
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Dude Ma Man How do I hear you better? Is it possible or just silliness? Would you like to join me for a weekly gelato date? I’ll get a gelato and sit and watch the dolphins and if you want, you can send me intuitive messages. Hope you don’t mind that I babble like I do, endearingly, if I must say so... jejejeje. Luke... I know you’re serving as a guide in awesome galactic dragon form. I bet my true form is sentient aurora borealis that is primarily magenta, but, of course, also contains a great deal of the full color spectrum. Ok, the hyper peeps are callin’ You know? My inner parts? The ones that live in my personal sphere? Great, you know them well. Ah. I did not know that you are homies with my core-fire, Primordia. Luke, Sleep well, little one, with your Woah, can’t recall what happened to your most precious stuffed animal. I’ll take care of that. See you next week. Sav-ster. Edit: Pookie. Misa made you a felt bear named Pookie. It was a delightfully scary bear.
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123 ¡ATENCIÓN!
124 ATTENTION!
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KELLEN HATANKA
126 ATTENTION!
127 ¡ATENCIÓN!
128 ATTENTION!
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KEITH CLOUGHERTY
130 ATTENTION!
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JASON YATES
132 ATTENTION!
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133
EMMA STERN
134 ATTENTION!
135 ¡ATENCIÓN!
136 ATTENTION!
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137
ESTEFANIA PUERTA GRISALES
138 ATTENTION!
139 ¡ATENCIÓN!
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nevermind the date
Fuck dates. The Gregorian ones. I fancy the Medjool ones, though I find consuming too many, serially, makes me tum grumble. I used to eat Tums semi-religiously to perform many a duty. And she was writhing while she wrote. And now: a word to the wise, from a crone. When one commits one’self to Broadway histrionics, while living off Broadway, one may find one’s self costumed in a hospital gown. The least dignified of costumes. Not that the infirmed are inherently deprived of dignity. False. The costume is rather drafty. Far too drafty. To say the least.
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¡ATENCIÓN!
¡ATENCIÓN!
We should be taught that lyrics are best kept in melodies. When extracted from song and taken to the stage of life, lyricism becomes a melodrama of DSM V proportions. Histrionics are historically not tolerated by the Libra scales of life. Be careful. Bathe regularly, wash between your scales my mer-brethren. Write in a spiral, but aim to walk straight. Back erect or bowed, it doesn’t matter.One foot before the other if bipedalism is your thing. I mean, if you have two feet. Not everyone has two. I would love to meet a fellow with three. And don’t look back lest you crave sodium iodide. Looking forward peppers one’s life with joyous surprises. Buy a spice you are pretty sure your mother never used to cook with. Be a spice person. Sporty, Freaky, Adobo, Whatever. Write out your wildest thoughts. Commit them to paper, spare yourself. I speak from experience.
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MAYA WHITE
142 ATTENTION!
¡ATENCIÓN!
143
WENDELL GLADSTONE
144 ATTENTION!
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145
MS. YELLOW (NURIA ORTIZ)
146 ATTENTION!
147 ¡ATENCIÓN!
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A DONDE SE FUE (
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TRANSCRIPTION
)
¡ATENCIÓN!
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[ [
faint muffled
airplane car
sounds sounds
] ]
I want to put on the dress that you wore. I want to have the same reflection of the river, reflect back on my face. And I try to think of what it used to be like, to be you. A la mejor, así te conozco If I wear your clothes is that sick? ¿Estoy mala? How did the rocks get here too? To this little town… What were you like? What did you hear when it rained outside? What did you think about… when you walked alone? [
muffled
car
sounds
Tus secretos me dices en Español. [ indistinguishable singing There’s this search for it… [ indistinguishable singing just a poetic gesture
]
] ]
[ indistinguishable singing ] or act on the behalf of perhaps a body that isn’t in a place it considers an origin. And as a result, I just feel like a wanderer. A wanderer that…. So, a person drawn to something familiar, that it's somehow a reference to something you know… but it’s not that thing.
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PERÉZ & CANSECO
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[ sound of guitar strumming and man singing ] where cultures collide [ sound of guitar strumming and man singing ] and somehow become enmeshed [ sound of guitar strumming and man singing ] and so you’re able to recognize multiple things happening, [sound of guitar strumming and man singing] you’re familiar with what is there… [ sound of guitar strumming and man singing ] and how it’s almost a mirror, a reflection of what is happening within. [ sound of guitar strumming and man singing ] Within your own body, within your own history… [ sound of guitar strumming and man singing ] this enmeshment, this collision, this...maybe mixing, I don’t know. [ sound of guitar strumming and man singing ] There is this continuous search, this ricochet, like a back and forth and not just in one direction, not just back and forth but away and towards and under and over. [ muffled car sounds ] Doesn’t just live in the physical [ car
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muffled sounds ]
I don’t find myself just wandering between places I long to call home, it doesn’t just happen in this physical realm. It happens in different places, it happens within one’s own body. [ muffled car sounds ] I find myself searching for somewhere other than my own body
¡ATENCIÓN!
¡ATENCIÓN!
[ muffled car sounds and sounds of birds chirping ] because at times my body feels like it’s being occupied, [ sounds of birds chirping and faint sound of people ] it’s being taken over. [ sounds of birds chirping and faint sound of people ]
And so suddenly my mind begins to wander, [ sounds of birds chirping and faint sound of people it escapes my body. [ sounds of birds chirping and faint sound of people It’s under attack in its own place of being. [ sounds of birds chirping and faint sound of people There’s a parallel that can be drawn from a historical point. [ sounds of birds chirping and faint sound of people
] ] ] ]
People who are from places… that they are also not from. [ sounds of birds chirping, faint sound of people, and a person asking, “¿A donde se fue?” ] Someone fluctuates between this being and not being, [ sounds of birds chirping and faint sound of people ] that also then occurs in the body simultaneously. [ sounds of birds chirping, faint sound of people, and wind ] I wonder the connection that they have… [ sounds of birds chirping, faint sound of people, and wind ] the wanderer, the one that can’t sit still, the restless one... [ sounds of birds chirping, faint sound of people, and wind ]
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as a dynamic being who is in a constant receiving, digesting, learning. [ sounds of birds chirping,
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faint sound of people and wind ] There is so much being processed… to feel embodied. [ sounds of birds chirping, faint sound of people, and wind ] The callouses that I have from looking for home, [ muffled car sounds ] from searching for my mother’s home, [ muffled car sounds ] from searching for. [ faint sounds of cicadas, dog barking, and child ] Just collecting in the body. [ faint sounds of cicadas, dog barking, and child ] [ church bells ringing ] [ church bells ringing ] So few things settle, and yet why do we long for home? [ church bells ringing ] We long for these idealistic notions of home. [ muffled car sounds ] We long for what home looked like in those pictures. [ muffled car sounds ] It’s like we get these glasses that give us all these blind spots, that’s what home is. [ muffled car sounds ] Y todavía tenemos corridos de casa, de regresar… de abrazos conocidos. Todavía nos mentimos. [ muffled car sounds indistinguishable singing ] [
muffled
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car
sounds
indistinguishable
singing
]
¡ATENCIÓN!
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158 ATTENTION!
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159
LARISSA ROGERS
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What would it mean to consider black aliveness, especially given how readily— and literally—blackness is indexed to death? To behold such aliveness, we have to imagine a black world . . . so as to surpass the everywhere and everyway of black death. —Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being
Ode to Soil explores landscapes and activates the soil in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Black life and histories have seemingly been erased. As I continue to explore ideas of amnesia and what it means to be surviving, I turn to the soil as a living archive, a method of Black resistance and breath. The performance begins by visiting my great-grandmother’s house in Madison, Virginia. I dig up her yucca, perennials, and resurrection lilies that have been planted in her yard since the property was granted to the family following emancipation. These resilient plants were commonly used in older African American and enslaved cemeteries to mark the graves of loved ones due to the expense of headstones. As the sun rises, I take the plants to Pen Park, a former antebellum plantation turned recreation park and golf course. Within Pen Park’s golf course lies a cemetery for the families who formerly owned the plantation. Surrounding the cemetery are fortythree unmarked slave graves. Without permission, I enter the golf course and plant my great-grandmother’s yucca, perennials, and resurrection lilies to mark each grave. With the plants, I then walk to the hanging tree in front
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of Farmington Country Club. I walk the same train tracks on which John Henry James, a Black man who was falsely accused of raping a white woman in Penn Park, was abducted before being lynched. I plant a yucca by the hanging tree. I do this in my grandpa’s old jean overalls. During the performance, I speak out loud about the hidden histories of the land. I talk about the yucca plant, my family’s associations with these landscapes, and vocalize the stories of my ancestors who lived and died on the soil. I talk about how the soil always remembers, even when it seems like no one else does. After I finish planting, I bless the soil, water the plants, and leave the space. As the act of planting has been passed down from my great-grandmother to my grandfather, my mother, and now me, I use planting to investigate ideas of labor, resilience, living memorials, and how culture and memory are preserved through intergenerational technologies. The plants offer an alternative version of a monument, one that creates life, while serving as a metaphor for the tendency of our nation to forget that it continues to grow on the institution of slavery and free Black and Brown labor (emotional and physical).
162 ATTENTION!
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163
BRENDA BARRIOS
164 ATTENTION!
165 ¡ATENCIÓN!
166 ATTENTION!
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167
MINAMI KOBAYASHI
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THE BANANA BOY
A warm light peering through the evergreen flora hits his face. For a moment, he wonders where the light comes from. Is this heat intrinsic to himself, an indivisible component to his being? He turns over. His sweat is dripping from his arms, trickling down his dark buttered skin. His thighs inch back and forth between the patches of light shining through the silos of the leaves. From his side, he sees a bright green-to-black caterpillar crawling in the cool dirt. Is it on a voyage of its own too? His eyes focus. His dark pupils take in the fluid symmetry of the unstructured ratio of lined colors.
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Feeling his toes start to fidget, the boy gets up and lays down his orange and yellow polka-dotted kente. He collects his things: one pair of worn-down leather sandals, a red pencil, and three sheets of paper from his exercise book. He hears the river flowing, it's singing a lullaby. His muscles relax to the tune that leads one to baby blue. He laughs to himself. He is amused by the silliness of his thoughts trying to explain things. His left thigh tightens for a second, a tingling sensation is felt, one leg, two leg, three leg, four leg, five leg, six leg, seven leg, eight leg. He looks down. There he sees Anasi. Breathing slowly, he cuffs the creature as gently as he can, despite the stiffness in his neck. Anasi obliges to his transportation, willingly crawling off his palm into a new direction. “E ye” the boy hears in his mind, the calming selfassurance of Baba-pan-gea. Through the tall evergreen trees, red-rock mountains, and cool Zephyr winds, Baba-pan-gea speaks. He looks back up at the sky, a pastel, watercolor blue, that befriends all. Twelve, he sees written on his paper. The caterpillar catching his eye again, also at the base of his task. He relieves the tree, pluck, pluck, pluck, wrapping his hand around each ripe, yet still firm fruit. He steps back. His head bowing slightly as if saying grace. ‘These will do.’ Stepping into the light, he slides his coconut oiled feet into his sandals, separating his big toe from the rest, soon to be reunited again at home.
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MICHAEL KYEI BOATENG
170 ATTENTION!
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171
MATEA FRIEND
172 ATTENTION!
173 ¡ATENCIÓN!
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ATTENTION!
ARTISTS ARTISTAS ADRIAN KISS (b. 1990, Miercurea Ciuc, Romania) lives and works in Budapest, Hungary. / ADRIAN KISS (n. 1990, Miercurea Ciuc, Romania) vive y trabaja en Budapest, Hungría. ALBERTO KEOSSIAN (b. 1994, Los Ángeles) is an interdisciplinary artist of Mexican and Armenian-Uruguayan descent whose practice and work engage as stimulants for discussions and contemplations surrounding “the humanbeing,” sociopolitical matters, identity, and personal health. Alberto received his AA in three-dimensional design and AA-T in studio arts from Los Angeles Valley College and will be receiving his BA in Art from UCLA (2021). He is a recipient of the 2020–21 UCLA Department of Art Undergraduate Scholarship Award and has exhibited his work locally at the New Wight Gallery–UCLA, 2019 Venice Biennale–Nomad Pavilion, CalArts, Avenue 50 Studio, FM+ xDirectory, and Los Angeles Valley College. / ALBERTO KEOSSIAN (n. 1994, Los Ángeles) es un artista interdisciplinario de ascendencia mexicana y armenia-uruguaya cuya práctica y obra se combinan como estimulantes para discusiones y contemplaciones en torno al “ser humano”, los asuntos sociopolíticos, la identidad y la salud personal. Alberto recibió su AA en diseño tridimensional y AA-T en artes de estudio de Los Angeles Valley College y recibirá su licenciatura en Arte de la UCLA (2021). Recibió el Premio de la Beca a nivel Licenciatura del Departamento de Arte de la UCLA en 2020-21 y ha expuesto su obra localmente en la New Wight Gallery-UCLA, en la Bienal de Venecia 2019-Pabellón Nómada, CalArts, Avenue 50 Studio, FM+ xDirectory y en el Los Angeles Valley College. ANDREW ROBERTS (b.1995, Tijuana) is a Mexican visual artist. His work begins with a historical exploration looking at the parallel development of war technology and the entertainment industry, analyzing the role of images as operational weapons in military conflicts and their poetic, political, and aesthetic ramifications in the production of capital and death. His practice takes on the form of multimedia narrative and speculative fiction, materialized across space through
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digital animations and immersive installations in the company of objects, actions, and essayistic writings. / ANDREW ROBERTS (n. 1955, Tijuana) es un artista visual mexicano. Su trabajo parte de una exploración histórica sobre el desarrollo paralelo de tecnología bélica y la industria del entretenimiento, analizando el rol de las imágenes como armas operativas dentro de conflictos militares y sus ramificaciones poéticas, políticas y estéticas en la producción capital y muerte. Su práctica toma la forma de narrativa multimedia y ficciones especulativas, materializadas a través del espacio mediante animaciones digitales e instalaciones inmersivas en compañía de objetos, acciones y escritos ensayísticos. ANDY SEUNGU CHOI is a high school student studying creative writing at the Orange County School of the Arts. His work explores themes of queerness, Koreanness, the internet, and everything in between. / ANDY SEUNGU CHOI es un estudiante de secundaria que estudia escritura creativa en la Escuela de Artes del Condado de Orange. Su obra explora los temas de “queer”, la coreanidad, el Internet y todo lo que hay en medio. BOZ DESEO GARDEN (they/them) is an artist, writer, and researcher studying the entanglements of black, queer, and multispecies worlds that unmake our normative modes of relating to history, place, and narration. They received their BFA in Photo/Media from California Institute of the Arts. / BOZ DESEO GARDEN (ellos) es un artista, escritor e investigador que estudia los enredos de los mundos negro, queer y de especies múltiples que deshacen nuestros modos normativos de relacionarnos con la historia, el lugar y la narración. Recibieron su Licenciatura en Fotografía/Medios de Comunicación del Instituto de Artes de California. BRENDA BARRIOS is a multidisciplinary visual artist from Pasadena, California. A first-generation, nontraditional art student with a disability at UCLA, she started as a fashion major and usually uses her sewing skills for her sculpture making. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she started making more digital art, including digital illustrations and videos. Brenda uses her Instagram account as a platform to sell her art and express her feelings about important social justice issues. She recently worked with Rock the Vote for the 2020 election and showcased her art in New York and London with Amplifier 2020. / BRENDA BARRIOS es una artista visual multidisciplinar de Pasadena, California. Es estudiante de arte no tradicional de primera generación en la UCLA, quien tiene una discapacidad y que habiendo comenzado a estudiar diseño de modas, suele utilizar sus habilidades de costura para hacer esculturas. Durante la pandemia de COVID-19, empezó a hacer más arte digital, incluyendo ilustraciones y vídeos digitales. Brenda utiliza su cuenta de Instagram como plataforma para vender su arte y expresar sus sentimientos sobre importantes cuestiones de justicia social. Recientemente trabajó con Rock the Vote para las elecciones de 2020 y ha expuesto su arte en Nueva York y Londres con Amplifier 2020.
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CAROLINE YOO is an artist and archivist performing history. Born to Korean immigrants in Kansas, Yoo explores in her work the boundaries between belonging, othering, and being—by unshackling, processing, and releasing. She strives to level platforms, seeing hierarchy for equality, in an attempt to inch toward alternate societal norms unbounded by binaries. By refabricating colonial narratives and archiving moments of the present, using her body as a vessel, she questions larger topics of power structures and embedded cultural norms in relation to race and gender. / CAROLINE YOO es una artista y archivista que interpreta la historia. Nacida de inmigrantes coreanos en Kansas, Yoo explora en su obra los límites entre la pertenencia, la alteridad y el ser desencadenando, procesando y liberando. Se esfuerza por nivelar plataformas, viendo como cambiar la jerarquía por la igualdad, en un intento de avanzar hacia normas sociales alternativas no limitadas por los binarios. Reproduciendo narrativas coloniales y archivando momentos del presente, utilizando su cuerpo como receptáculo, cuestiona temas más amplios como las estructuras de poder y las normas culturales arraigadas en relación con la raza y el género. KARLA EKATHERINE CANSECO and CHRISTAL PÉREZ are an interdisciplinary collective based in Los Angeles. Their work explores themes of memory, the body, and history. Through a means of deconstruction, they attempt to understand how their identity is framed as one that is dependent upon myths, migration, and technological networks. Karla received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from CalArts in 2019, and Christal graduated from UCLA in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in art. / KARLA EKATHERINE CANSECO y CHRISTAL PÉREZ son un colectivo interdisciplinario de Los Ángeles. Su trabajo explora temas de la memoria, el cuerpo y la historia. A través de un medio de deconstrucción, intentan comprender cómo se enmarca su identidad como una que es dependiente de los mitos, la migración y las redes tecnológicas. Karla recibió su Licenciatura en Bellas Artes de CalArts en 2019 y Christal se graduó de la Universidad de California en Los Ángeles en 2019 con una Licenciatura en Artes. KEITH RICHARD CLOUGHERTY is an Aries settler of Irish descent born and raised on Miami Beach. His artistic, organizing, and storytelling practices are oriented toward the universal satisfaction of human needs without destroying Earth. For the last decade he lived on Massachusett Nation territory around Boston, taking care of his Great Auntie and working with communities in a variety of self-determination struggles. / KEITH RICHARD CLOUGHERTY nacido bajo el signo de Aries en Miami Beach, donde se crió, es descendiente de inmigrantes irlandeses. Sus prácticas artísticas, organizativas y narrativas están orientadas hacia la satisfacción universal de las necesidades humanas sin destruir la Tierra. Durante la última década vivió en el territorio de Massachusett Nation, en los alrededores de Boston, cuidando de su tía abuela y trabajando con las comunidades en diversas luchas por la autodeterminación.
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CHRISTIAN SANNA (b. 1989) is a native of Madagascar, where he lived until 2009, when he moved to France. In 2016, after three years of photographic studies at ETPA in Toulouse, Sanna won the Grand Picture Prize and started showing his projects. Since then he has been living between France and Madagascar, and working on photography. In 2016 he exhibited at the Festival Manifesto in Toulouse, where he also had an artist residency in 2017. Also that year, his project Moraingy was selected and exhibited during the 11th edition of “Rencontres de Bamako”(African Biennale of Photography) in Mali. / CHRISTIAN SANNA (n. 1989) nació en Madagascar, donde vivió hasta 2009, cuando se trasladó a Francia. En 2016, tras tres años de estudios fotográficos en la ETPA de Toulouse, Sanna ganó el Gran Premio de Fotografía y comenzó a mostrar sus proyectos. Desde entonces vive entre Francia y Madagascar y trabaja en la fotografía. En 2016 expuso en el Festival Manifesto de Toulouse, donde CLAYTON SCHIFF (n. 1987) lives and works in Queens, New York. He received his BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. He has recently had exhibitions at Real Pain Fine Arts in Los Angeles and at 56 Henry in New York. / CLAYTON SCHIFF (n. 1987) vive y trabaja en Queens, Nueva York. Recibió su Licenciatura en pintura en la Escuela de Diseño de Rhode Island en 2009. Recientemente ha expuesto en Real Pain Fine Arts en Los Ángeles y en 56 Henry en Nueva York. EMMA STERN’s work deploys her formal background in traditional oil-on-canvas painting to achieve a kind of contemporary portraiture made possible by 3-D software. By using tools intended for game developers to create the virtual females that serve as her subjects, she emphasizes and exacerbates the apparent inclination toward pornographic (or at least porn-adjacent) representations of virtual female bodies in 3-D communities and gaming culture. / La obra de EMMA STERN despliega sus antecedentes formales en la pintura tradicional al óleo sobre lienzo para lograr un tipo de retrato contemporáneo por medio del uso de software 3D. Al utilizar herramientas destinadas para desarrolladores de juegos para crear a las mujeres virtuales que son el objeto de su obra, subraya y exacerba la aparente inclinación hacia las representaciones pornográficas (o, al menos, cercanas a la pornografía) de los cuerpos femeninos virtuales en las comunidades 3D y en la cultura de los juegos. ESTEFANIA PUERTA GRISALES works in sculpture, painting, writing, and performance and is deeply invested in the web created by working in multiple forms that do not have a fixed center or hierarchy. Her practice is rooted in world making, border crossing, Spanglish, societies that do not fit into bodies, and creating an emotional language to these excessive shape-shifting experiences. / ESTEFANIA PUERTA GRISALES trabaja en escultura, pintura, escritura y performance y está profundamente involucrada en la red creada por el trabajo en múltiples formas que no tienen un centro o jerarquía fijos. Su práctica se basa en
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la creación de mundos, el cruce de fronteras, el spanglish, las sociedades que no encajan en los cuerpos y en la creación de un lenguaje emocional para estas experiencias excesivamente cambiantes. ÉTIENNE BYUSE lives and works in Belgium. He takes photographs of everyday life, of things that go unnoticed, of things that do not matter, examining what happens when nothing happens, except for time, people, trains, buses, and clouds. A reflection of Flaubert’s somehow drives his work: “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it for long enough” (“Pour qu’une chose soit intéressante, il suffit de la regarder longtemps”). / ÉTIENNE BYUSE vive y trabaja en Bélgica. Toma fotografías de la vida cotidiana, de las cosas que pasan desapercibidas, de las cosas que no importan, examinando lo que ocurre cuando no pasa nada, excepto por el tiempo, las personas, los trenes, los autobuses y las nubes. Un reflejo de Flaubert impulsa de alguna manera su trabajo: “Cualquier cosa se vuelve interesante si se mira durante el tiempo suficiente” (“Pour qu’une chose soit intéressante, il suffit de la regarder longtemps”). FELIPE BAEZA (b. 1987, Guanajuato, Mexico) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His practice examines themes of memory, migration, and queerness to situate fugitive bodies within the social and historical context of cultural practices. He uses collage and printmaking techniques to create densely layered paintings that process his personal narrative and transport viewers through past experiences and liberatory futures both real and imagined. He received a BFA from the Cooper Union in New York and an MFA from Yale University. / FELIPE BAEZA (n. 1987, Guanajuato, México) vive y trabaja en Brooklyn, Nueva York. Su obra examina temas como la memoria, la migración y el queer para situar los cuerpos fugitivos en el contexto social e histórico de las prácticas culturales. Utiliza técnicas de collage y de grabado para crear pinturas de capas densas que procesan su narrativa personal y transportan a los espectadores a través de experiencias pasadas y futuros liberadores tanto reales como imaginados. Recibió su Licenciatura en Bellas Artes de la Cooper Union de Nueva York y obtuvo una Maestría en Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Yale. A daughter to immigrant parents from Durango, Mexico, GABRIELLE GARCÍA is a writer dedicated to storytelling through various mediums. She identifies as a Mexican-American from Lincoln Heights. Gabrielle is a creative director and storyteller through various mediums. / Hija de padres inmigrantes de Durango, México, GABRIELLE GARCÍA es una escritora dedicada a contar historias a través de diversos medios. Se identifica como mexicano-americana de Lincoln Heights. Gabrielle es una directora creativa y cuentacuenos que utiliza distinto medios. HEESO KWON is a visual artist and anthropologist from South Korea and is currently based in the Bay Area, California. Kwon initiated an autobiographical feminist religion, Leymusoom, in 2017. The Leymusoom project mines the depths
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of personal cosmologies and Korean shamanism to sculpt a virtual confessional space of deep introspection. / HEESO KWON es una artista visual y antropóloga de Corea del Sur y actualmente reside en el Área de la Bahía, California. Kwon inició una religión feminista autobiográfica, Leymusoom, en 2017. El proyecto Leymusoom extrae las profundidades de las cosmologías personales y del chamanismo coreano para esculpir un espacio confesional virtual de profunda introspección. HYANGSOOK (SOOKIE) KWAK (b.1996, New York) is a Korean-American multidisciplinary artist (currently) based in Seattle. She studied fine art and sociology at UCLA, graduating in 2018, and is interested in making works through video, photography, drawing/painting, and writing. / HYANGSOOK (SOOKIE) KWAK n.1996, Nueva York) es una artista multidisciplinaria (actualmente) coreana-estadounidense que reside en Seattle. Estudió Bellas Artes y Sociología en la UCLA, graduándose en 2018, y está interesada en realizar obras a través del vídeo, la fotografía, el dibujo/pintura y la escritura. ISABELA MIÑANA LOVELACE was born and raised in Los Angeles. She recently graduated from Brown University with an AB with Honors in visual art and an AB in geological sciences. Her work is heavily influenced by disasters, as her family was directly impacted by the earthquakes and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the mudslides and fires in California, and the current COVID-19 pandemic. / ISABELA MIÑANA LOVELACE nació y creció en Los Ángeles. Recientemente se graduó de la Universidad de Brown obteniendo una Licenciatura en Artes Visuales con honores y una Licenciatura en Ciencias Geológicas. Su trabajo está fuertemente influenciado por los desastres, ya que su familia fue directamente impactada por terremotos y el huracán María en Puerto Rico, los deslizamientos de tierra y los incendios en California, y la actual pandemia causada por COVID-19. LA-based artist JASON YATES’s central approach is the subversion and denaturing of the American readymade. The artist exhumes the nation’s collective unconscious by way of its neglected keepsakes. Through radical chromatic contextual recontextualization, Yates pursues an index of longing and an anthology of forgetting. / El enfoque central del artista JASON YATES, residente de Los Ángeles, es la subversión y desnaturalización del Americano pre-fabricado. El artista exhuma el inconsciente colectivo de la nación a través de sus recuerdos olvidados. Mediante una re-contextualización contextual cromática radical, Yates persigue un índice de añoranza y una antología del olvido. JOSHUA ZAMUDIO is a 28-year-old Compton native and first generation Latino. For 9 years Zamudio has been using the tool of photography to record what he sees. In his own words photography helps him “understand the intricacies that defines our experiences” in order “to cope, heal, progress, and improve as a human being.” / JOSHUA ZAMUDIO es originario de Compton, tiene 28 años y es
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latino de primera generación. Desde hace 9 años Zamudio utiliza la herramienta de la fotografía para registrar lo que ve. En sus propias palabras, la fotografía le ayuda a “entender los entresijos que definen nuestras experiencias” para “sanar, progresar y mejorar como ser humano”. KEITH RICHARD CLOUGHERTY is an Aries settler of Irish descent born and raised on Miami Beach. His artistic, organizing, and storytelling practices are oriented toward the universal satisfaction of human needs without destroying Earth. For the last decade he lived on Massachusett Nation territory around Boston, taking care of his Great Auntie and working with communities in a variety of self-determination struggles. / KEITH RICHARD CLOUGHERTY es un colono Aries de ascendencia irlandesa nacido y criado en Miami Beach. Sus prácticas artísticas, organizativas y narrativas están orientadas hacia la satisfacción universal de las necesidades humanas sin destruir la Tierra. Durante la última década vivió en el territorio de Massachusett Nation, en los alrededores de Boston, cuidando de su tía abuela y trabajando con las comunidades en diversas luchas por la autodeterminación. KELLEN HATANKA is an artist and designer from Toronto, Canada. He has worked with a variety of clients, including Nike, Casper, Wall Street Journal, 7D8, Polaris Music Prize, The Walrus, Drake Hotel, Sid Lee, Bruce Mau Design, Frank and Oak, and Absolut Vodka. / KELLEN HATANKA es un artista y diseñador de Toronto, Canadá. Ha trabajado con diversos clientes, como Nike, Casper, Wall Street Journal, 7D8, Polaris Music Prize, The Walrus, Hotel Drake, Sid Lee, Bruce Mau Design, Frank and Oak y Absolut Vodka. KIANI WISH is a senior transfer student in the UCLA Design Media Arts department. Their work revolves around the Southern California region and explores the way humans interact within their mental and physical environments. / KIANI WISH es una estudiante de intercambio del último año en el departamento de Artes Mediáticas de Diseño de la UCLA. Su trabajo gira en torno a la región del sur de California y explora la forma en que los seres humanos interactúan dentro de sus entornos mentales y físicos. MATEA FRIEND is a new-media artist working in video and photographic installation. She creates immersive environments that use the medium of light to simultaneously collapse and expand our experience of time. Through layered conceptual installations her work distorts the perception of reality and challenges traditional notions of gender, identity, and the environment. Friend is interested in experiential design and creating intangible worlds through light, sound, and ephemeral materiality. / MATEA FRIEND es una artista que utiliza medios nuevos que trabaja en vídeo e instalaciones fotográficas. Crea entornos inmersivos que utilizan el medio de la luz para colapsar y ampliar simultáneamente nuestra experiencia del tiempo. A través de instalaciones conceptuales en capas, su obra
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distorsiona la percepción de la realidad y desafía las nociones tradicionales del género, la identidad y el medio ambiente. Friend está interesada en el diseño basado en la experiencia y en la creación de mundos intangibles a través de la luz, el sonido y la materialidad efímera. MAYA WHITE lives, works, and studies in Los Angeles. Working in her primary medium, painting, she interrogates skepticism ingrained in us by higher education and secularism as a culture. Using astrology and tarot as a gateway for understanding the astral and eventually coming to God, White hopes to bring the loving, positive side of religion (particularly Christianity and Christian themes) through painting. By borrowing Christian iconography, as well as symbols found in tarot and astrology, White creates a spirituality, which suits her and makes sense for her and the world in which she navigates. The hope is that through her work, she will be able to encourage her audience to engage in this semantic/ image play in their own lives as a means of access into these, oftentimes intimidating, religious narratives and discourses. By creating one’s own meaning and purpose for commonly known and accepted icons, one may finally be able to access the life-breath which invigorates and constantly reinvigorates the life we lead. God is love, energy and so much more. In her own words, “to have faith in something is to admit to one’s own vulnerability, and to have found righteousness in this vulnerability.” Amen! / MAYA WHITE vive, trabaja y estudia en Los Ángeles. Trabajando con su medio principal, la pintura, cuestiona el escepticismo que nos han inculcado la educación superior y el secularismo como cultura. Utilizando la astrología y el tarot como puerta de entrada para entender lo astral y eventualmente llegar a Dios, White espera traer el lado amoroso y positivo de la religión (particularmente el cristianismo y los temas cristianos) a través de la pintura. Valiéndose de la iconografía cristiana, así como los símbolos que se encuentran en el tarot y la astrología, White crea una espiritualidad que le va bien y tiene sentido tanto para ella como para el mundo en el que navega. La esperanza es que, a través de su obra, pueda animar a su público a participar en este juego semántico/de imágenes en sus propias vidas como medio de acceso a estas narrativas y discursos religiosos, a menudo intimidantes. Al crear un significado y propósito propios para los iconos comúnmente conocidos y aceptados, uno puede finalmente acceder al aliento vital que vigoriza y revigoriza constantemente la vida que llevamos. Dios es amor, energía y mucho más. En sus propias palabras, “tener fe en algo es admitir la vulnerabilidad propia, y haber encontrado la virtud en esta vulnerabilidad”. ¡Amén! MIA JOHNSON’s practice examines identity within political and social structures of the uniform. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economic history at Barnard College, Columbia University, and was selected to participate in the Artist Mentor Program at Santa Monica College, where she was included in group shows at the Barrett Gallery and the Santa Monica Airport. She has over ten years experience organizing both free and ticketed events in music, art, conversation, poetry, dance,
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and experimental practices at major venues such as Lincoln Center, the Theatre at Ace Hotel, and MAP Design Lan. / La práctica de MIA JOHNSON examina la identidad dentro de las estructuras MICHAEL KYEI BOATENG’s goal as a writer is to create short stories and novels that his younger self would be proud of—stories with African mysticism that Boateng longed for, or fluidity of sexuality that he searched for, or immigration and cultural commonalities that he looked for, these are the inspiration for Boateng’s career as a writer. As a first-generation immigrant, raised in several countries and class systems, he has seen the nuances of character and aims to bring light and dignity to each experience he writes about. / El objetivo de MICHAEL KYEI BOATENG como escritor es crear cuentos cortos y novelas de los que su yo más joven se sentiría orgulloso: historias con el misticismo africano que Boateng anhelaba, o la fluidez de la sexualidad que perseguía, o la inmigración y los puntos comunes culturales que buscaba, son la inspiración de la carrera de Boateng como escritor. Como inmigrante de primera generación, criado en varios países y sistemas de clase, ha visto los matices del carácter y pretende brindar luz y dignidad a cada experiencia sobre la que escribe. MINAMI KOBAYASHI (b. 1989, Japan) is a Japanese artist who is currently based in London. Her figurative egg tempera and oil paintings combine intimacy and mystery through their depictions of ordinary people, animals, and places that seem vaguely surreal and ever so slightly off-kilter. / MINAMI KOBAYASHI (n. 1989, Japón) es una artista japonesa que actualmente reside en Londres. Sus pinturas figurativas al temple y al óleo combinan la intimidad y el misterio a través de sus representaciones de personas, animales y lugares ordinarios que parecen vagamente surrealistas y un poco desequilibrados. With an interest in the spectacle of modern warfare, NICHOLAS CONSTANT explores spaces in which conflict occurs. He is particularly interested in the indirect effects on war, how they surface in the everyday, and how these issues are dealt with in the absence of mainstream media. Using a simple, nonintrusive approach to many of the projects, Constant attempts to make invisible subjects visible through the use of landscape and context. / Interesado en el espectáculo de la guerra moderna, NICHOLAS CONSTANT explora los espacios en los que se producen los conflictos. Le interesan especialmente los efectos indirectos de la guerra, cómo afloran en lo cotidiano y cómo se tratan estos temas ante la ausencia de los medios de comunicación convencionales. Utilizando un enfoque sencillo y no intrusivo en muchos de los proyectos, Constant intenta hacer visibles a los sujetos invisibles mediante el uso del paisaje y el contexto. MS. YELLOW (NURIA ORTIZ) is a self-taught Mexican-American muralist, artist, craftswoman, and teaching artist. For twelve years she has dedicated her time to the creative development and empowerment of the community, working
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closely with schools, community centers, and more to develop workshops, murals, and mentorship for the youth. Her artwork and murals have been displayed in museums, galleries, and streets throughout the United States and around the world, including Egypt, Haiti, Japan, Spain, France, Australia, and Mexico. Her work centers on themes of culture, folklore, sisterhood, education, unity, love, and social justice. / MS. YELLOW (NURIA ORTIZ) es una muralista, artista, artesana y enseñante autodidacta mexicana-americana. Durante doce años ha dedicado su tiempo al desarrollo creativo y al empoderamiento de la comunidad, trabajando estrechamente con escuelas, centros comunitarios y más para desarrollar talleres, murales y tutorías para los jóvenes. Sus obras de arte y murales se han expuesto en museos, galerías y calles de Estados Unidos y de todo el mundo, incluyendo Egipto, Haití, Japón, España, Francia, Australia y México. Su obra se centra en temas de cultura, folclore, hermandad, educación, unidad, amor y justicia social. PETER POLACK is a designer and PhD candidate inthe Department of Information Studies at UCLA. His work and research address how technical systems are designed to inform our perception, and the role of artmaking in illustrating what technology makes perceptible. This focus is informed by his background in game design and data visualization, and by his work analyzing the social impacts of police surveillance systems. / PETER POLACK es diseñador y candidato a obtener un doctorado en el Departamento de Estudios de la Información de la UCLA. Su trabajo e investigación se enfocan en cómo los sistemas técnicos se diseñan para informar nuestra percepción, y en el papel que juega la creación artística en ilustrar lo que la tecnología hace perceptible. Este enfoque se basa en su experiencia en el diseño de juegos y la visualización de datos, y en su trabajo analizando los impactos sociales de los sistemas de vigilancia policial. RAMONA GÓMEZ is a mixed-media artist based in Los Angeles. She earned a BA in fine art and urban planning from UCLA in 2020. Through documenting forgotten landscapes and objects, her work addresses the manifestation of femininity, fantasy, and desire in the hidden pathways and backroads of Los Angeles. / RAMONA GÓMEZ es una artista de medios mixtos que reside en Los Ángeles. Obtuvo una Licenciatura en Bellas Artes y Urbanismo de la UCLA en 2020. A través de la documentación de paisajes y objetos olvidados, su trabajo aborda la manifestación de la feminidad, la fantasía y el deseo en los caminos ocultos y rutas secundarias de Los Ángeles. RUBÉN ULISES RODRÍGUEZ MONTOYA calls attention to our bodies in proximity to toxicity: how that presents itself and where it comes from. Montoya advocates for learning to ground ourselves in past and present mythologies coded in truth, so as to be better suited for hostile environments. / RUBÉN ULISES RODRÍGUEZ MONTOYA dirige la atención hacia nuestros cuerpos en la proximidad de la toxicidad: cómo se presenta y de dónde viene. Montoya aboga
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por aprender a enraizarnos en mitologías pasadas y presentes codificadas en la verdad, para estar mejor preparados para los entornos hostiles. SAVANNAH NOEL SMITH is a performing artist from Santa Cruz, California. Her poem is dedicated to the spirit of her beloved brother Luke. / SAVANNAH NOEL SMITH es una artista escénica de Santa Cruz, California. Su poema está dedicado al espíritu de su querido hermano Luke. SAYRE GOMEZ (b. 1982, Chicago) holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His works are held in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Arsenal Contemporary, Montreal; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. He lives and works in Los Angeles. / SAYRE GOMEZ (n. 1982, Chicago) es licenciado en Bellas Artes por la Escuela del Instituto de Arte de Chicago y tiene una maestría en Bellas Artes del Instituto de Artes de California (CalArts). Sus obras forman parte de las colecciones permanentes del Hammer Museum en Los Ángeles; el Museo de Arte del Condado de Los Ángeles en Los Ángeles; la Fundación de Arte Marciano en Los Ángeles; Arsenal Contemporary, Montreal; y la Colección de la Familia Rubell en Miami. Vive y trabaja en Los Ángeles. TYLER CALA WILLIAMS is an American artist based in New York and New Jersey. They were born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey. Williams graduated in 2020 from Parsons/The New School, where they received their BFA in photography. Williams creates surreal self-portraiture and imagery charged by their community and culture by using digital software like Photoshop to address appropriation in Western traditional art movements and the nuances of the subjugated Black. / TYLER CALA WILLIAMS es un artista estadounidense que reside en Nueva York y Nueva Jersey. Nació y creció en Trenton, Nueva Jersey. Williams se graduó en 2020 de Parsons/The New School, donde recibió su Licenciatura en fotografía. Williams crea autorretratos e imágenes surrealistas cargadas por su comunidad y cultura utilizando software digital como Photoshop para abordar la apropiación en los movimientos artísticos tradicionales occidentales y los matices del Negro subyugado. VERÓNICA FERNÁNDEZ (b. 1998) is a painter who manipulates personal memorabilia, using her own experiences as a canon for exploring the relationships between people and their environments. She explores [or: examines] the various ways we perceive our ever-fluctuating memories over time, as well as the atmospheres around us, and how those factors can influence the indefinite roles we can take on in the world at any moment. On colorful, varying-sized canvases full of an eclectic array of textures, Fernandez uses paint as an expressive vehicle to highlight themes of disconnection, impermanence, reconstruction, and the complexities of the spaces our bodies live through. / VERÓNICA FERNÁNDEZ
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(n. 1998) es una pintora que manipula los recuerdos personales, utilizando sus propias experiencias como canon para explorar las relaciones entre las personas y sus entornos. Explora [o: examina] las diversas formas en que percibimos nuestros recuerdos siempre fluctuantes a través del tiempo, así como las atmósferas que nos rodean, y cómo esos factores pueden influir en los indefinidos papeles que podemos asumir en el mundo en cualquier momento. En lienzos coloridos y de tamaño variable, llenos de una ecléctica gama de texturas, Fernández utiliza la pintura como vehículo expresivo para resaltar los temas de la desconexión, la impermanencia, la reconstrucción y las complejidades de los espacios que habitan nuestros cuerpos. Over the past decade, WENDELL GLADSTONE has produced figurative paintings that evoke dreamlike spaces, free from the logic that typically governs traditional representation. He uses allegory and metaphor to examine a wide swath of cultural references—from art history to contemporary politics and personal experience—and allows his subconscious to guide the narratives. / En la última década , WENDELL GLADSTONE ha producido pinturas figurativas que evocan espacios oníricos, libres de la lógica que suele regir la representación. YOAB VERA is currently an MFA candidate in painting at UCLA. He mainly works with Lari Pittman and Silke Otto-Knapp, as well as Monika Baer, Darby English, Rebecca Morris, Anna Sew-Hoy, and Rodrigo Valenzuela. He holds a BA in art and art history from Hunter College in New York (2008–13), where he studied modern and contemporary Latin American art and researched works and monuments with Lynda Klich and Harper Montgomery. / YOAB VERA (b. 1985, Coyoacán, Mexico) actualmente cursa el tercer año del programa de pintura de la Maestría en Bellas Artes (MFA) en la Universidad de California en Los Ángeles (UCLA). Durante los tres años de posgrado, sus mentores principales son los artistas Lari Pittman y Silke Otto-Knapp, así como Monika Baer, Darby English, Rebecca Morris, Anna Sew-Hoy y Rodrigo Valenzuela. Es licenciado en arte e historia del arte por el Hunter College en Nueva York (2008–13), donde estudió arte latinoamericano, tanto moderno como contemporáneo. Realizó investigaciones de obras y monumentos bajo la tutela de Lynda Klich y Harper Montgomery.
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REFERENCES REFERENCIAS DARK SHIMMERS: A POLITICS OF OSCILLATION / BOZ DESEO GARDEN I. Joseph Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 18.
XII. Laura Waxmann, “PG&E Turns the Lights on SF Mission Homeless,” Mission Local, October 22, 2016, https://missionlocal.org/2016/10/pge-turns-the-lights-on-sf-mission-homeless/.
II. Alex Greenberger, “I Am Not the Problem”: Whitney Vice Chair Responds to Open Letter Calling for Action against Him [Updated], Artnews, December 3, 2018, https://www. artnews.com/art-news/news/not-problem-whitney-vice-chair responds-open-letter-calling-action-11454/.
XIII. Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 198.
III. Nina Agrawal, “UC Graduate Students Threaten More Strikes as Movement Grows,” Los Angeles Times, March 7, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-07/ graduate-student-movement-at-uc-gains-momentum-with-faculty support-demonstrations-and-pledges-to-strike. IV. Jillian Billard, “Art & Gentrification: What Is ‘Artwashing’ and What Are Galleries Doing to Resist It?,” Artspace, November 30, 2017, https://www.artspace.com/magazine/ art_101/in_depth/ art-gentrification-what-is-artwashing-and-what-are-galleriesdoing-to-resist-it-55124 V. Reed Albergotti, “Apple Is Lobbying against a Bill Aimed at Stopping Forced Labor in China,” Washington Post, November 20, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ technology/2020/11/20/ apple-uighur/. VI. International Dark Sky Association, Life on Earth Needs the Natural Rhythm of Light and Dark (Tucson: International Dark Sky Association), https://www.darksky.org/wp-content/ uploads/bsk-pdf-manager/Wildlife-Brochure-FINAL2_32.pdf. VII. E. G. Rowse et al., “Dark Matters: The Effects of Artificial Lighting on Bats,” in Bats in the Anthropocene: Conservation of Bats in a Changing World, ed. Christian C. Voigt and Tigga Kingston (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016), 188–91. VII. Laurel Morales, “For Many Navajos, Getting Hooked Up to the Power Grid Can Be Life-Changing,” Morning Edition, May 29, 2019, NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/healthshots/2019/05/29/726615238/for-many-navajos-getting-hookedup-to-the-power-grid can-be-life-changing. IX. Leslie Macmillan, “Black Mesa Mines: Native Americans Demand Return of Their Ancestors’ Bones,” The Guardian, December 10, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/10/black-mesa-mines-native-americans-demand ancestral-bones-navajo. X. Macmillan, “Black Mesa Mines.” XI. Mel Y. Chen, “Lead’s Racial Matters,” in Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 167.
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XIV. Ed Pilkington, “Life in Solitary: ‘I can’t see the sun rise, or the moon at night,’” The Guardian, May 9, 2016, https://www. theguardian.com/world/2016/may/09/life-in-solitary-i-cant-seethe-sun-rise-or-the-moon-at-night. XV. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in Antiblack World (p. 50). essay, (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 50. XVI. Jackson, Becoming Human, 3. XVII. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 9. XVIII. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 67–68. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 9. XIX. Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). XX. Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human, 20. XXI. Pugliese, 20-21. XXII. Amy Goodman, “North Carolina Hog Farms Spray Manure Around Black Communities; Residents Fight Back,” Democracy Now, May 3 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyAFNV4Afgw&t=779s. XXIII. René Miller, “How Swine in North Carolina Affects Real People,” Lifted Gift, September 15, 2017, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=QqXxwYEkF1s&t=193s. XXIV. “Why North Carolina Can’t Solve Its Hog Poop Problem,” Vice News, October 12, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=KKyGdf2v6vw&t=179s. XXV. Anthony E. Ladd and Bob Edward, “Corporate Swine and Capitalist Pigs: A Decade of Environmental Injustice and Protest in North Carolina,” Social Justice 29, no. 3 (2002): 28–29.
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TOURIST INFRASTRUCTURE AND STATE TERROR ON JEJU ISLAND: TOURIST FACILITIES, MILITARIZATION, AND THE JEJU MASSACRE / ANDY SEUNGU CHOI
1. “Jeju Island,” New 7 Wonders of Nature, October 14, 2016, nature.new7wonders.com/wonders/jeju-island-korea-south/. 2. Heo Ho-joon, “American Nuclear Submarine Enters Jeju Naval Base,” Hankyoreh, November 24, 2017, english.hani. co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/820635.html.
20. Daniel Broudy, Peter Simpson, and Makoto Arakaki, eds., Under Occupation: Resistance and Struggle in a Militarised Asia-Pacific (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). 21. Broudy, Simpson, and Arakaki, Under Occupation.
3. Erin Craig, “The Bloody Past of Korea’s ‘Honeymoon Island,’” Atlas Obscura, May 11, 2018, www.atlasobscura. com/articles/dark-past-jeju-island-korea.
22. Imok Cha and Pyeong-Yoo Hwang, “Preserving Jeju’s Ancient Relics,” Korea Policy Institute, September 22, 2011, https://www.kpolicy.org/post/preserving-jeju-s-ancient-relics.
4. Choe Sang-hun, “Memories of Massacres Were Long Suppressed Here; Tourists Now Retrace the Atrocities,” New York Times, May 28, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/ world/asia/south-korea-jeju-massacres.html.
23. Cha and Hwang, “Preserving Jeju’s Ancient Relics.”
5. Bae Ji-sook, “Left-Leaning Textbooks to Be Revised,” Korea Times, September 22, 2008, www.koreatimes.co.kr/ www/news/nation/2016/11/113_31438.html. 6. “Discover Korea’s World Heritage: Jeju Volcanic Island and Lava Tubes,” KBS World Radio, world.kbs.co.kr/special/ unesco/contents/excellent/e8.htm?lang=e. 7. Kyung Sik Woo et al., Jeju Island Geopark: A Volcanic Wonder of Korea (Berlin: Springer, 2016). 8. Woo et al., Jeju Island Geopark. 9. Woo et al. 10. Michael Hauben, “People’s Republic of Jeju Island 1945–1946,” Columbia University, www.columbia.edu/~hauben/Korea/peoples-republic-jeju.txt. 11. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). 12. The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, 2014. http://www.jejupeaceacademy.com/report.pdf. 13. Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun. 14. Jung Hee Song, “Islanders Still Mourn April 3 Massacre,” Jeju Weekly, March 31, 2010, www.jejuweekly.com/news/ articleView.html?idxno= 657. [confirm order of author name; on the website it is listed as Song Jung Hee] 15. John Pike, “Military: Jeju Uprising / Jeju Massacre,” GlobalSecurity.org, www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/ war/jeju.htm. 16. “South Korean Language Policy and the Erasure of Jejueo,” Learning & Teaching Languages, University of Canterbury, December 31, 2016, latllab.canterbury.ac.nz/ south-korean-language-policy-erasure-jejueo/. 17. Ben Jackson, “Pretty and Polluted: Jeju Overfilling with Tourists,” Korea Exposé, December 5, 2017, www.koreaexpose. com/jeju-pretty-polluted-overfilling-tourists/. 18. Jackson, “Pretty and Polluted.” 19. Choe Sang-hun, “Island’s Naval Base Stirs Opposition in South Korea,” New York Times, August 18, 2011, www. nytimes.com/2011/08/19/world/asia/19base.html.
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24. “Gangjeong Village Story: US Coast Guard in Jeju,” Save Jeju Now, April 4, 2019, savejejunow.org/gangjeong-village-story-february-march-2019-issue/. 25. Huh Ho-Joon, “USS Destroyer and Canadian Naval Warships Make First Docking at Jeju Naval Base,” Hankyoreh, June 21, 2017, english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/799649.html. 26. Grace M. Cho, “Eating Military Base Stew,” Contexts 13, no. 3 (2014): 38–43, https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504214545759. 27. “South Korea: Second Jeju Airport Resistance Intensifies: Protest Camp and Hunger Strike,” International Alliance of Inhabitants, October 31, 2017, www.habitants.org/news/ inhabitants_of_asia/ south_korea_second_jeju_airport_resistance_intensifies_protest_camp_and_hunger_strike. 28. “South Korea: Second Jeju Airport Resistance Intensifies.” 29. Hoi Seung-Hee, “Why the 2nd Jeju Airport Project Is Suspected to Be an Air Force Base?,” Save Jeju Now, February 24, 2019, savejejunow.org/why-the-2nd-jeju-airport-projectis-suspected-to-be-an-air-force-base/. 30. “Mutual Defense Treaty Between the United States and the Republic of Korea; October 1, 1953,” Avalon Project, Yale Law School, avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/kor001.asp. 31. Huh Ho-joon, “The Quest to Rediscover Jeju’s Lost Towns and Villages,” Hankyoreh, April 3, 2020, english.hani.co.kr/ arti/english_edition/e_national/935577.html. 32. Huh, “The Quest to Rediscover Jeju’s Lost Towns and Villages.” 33. Choe Sang-hun, “Memories of Massacres Were Long Suppressed Here; Tourists Now Retrace the Atrocities,” New York Times, May 28, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/ world/asia/south-korea-jeju-massacres.html. 34. Koh Yu Kyung, “Bloody History Buried under Jeju International Airport,” Jeju Weekly, March 26, 2011, www.jejuweekly. com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1383. 35. Koh, “Bloody History Buried under Jeju International Airport.” 36. The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report. 37. The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report. 38. “Jeju 4.3 Sites,” Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation, jeju43peace. org/site-visit-tour/ora-village-jeju-4·3-trai-2/.
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39. The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report. 40. “LetsRun Park Jeju,” Visit Jeju, m.visitjeju.net/en/detail/ view?contentsid=CNTS_000000000019539. 41. Yun Suh-young, “Turning Jeju into Free International City,” Korea Times, December 30, 2012, www.koreatimes.co.kr/ www/news/nation/2013/08/113_128015.html. 42. “Jeju 4.3 Sites.” 43. “Jeju 4.3 Sites.”
50. Kim, Routledge Handbook of Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia. 51. “History of Jeju,” Jeju Tourism Organization, www.ijto. or.kr/english/?cid=27. 52. Ñusta Carranza Ko, “Truth-Seeking for Jeju and the Debates on Compliance,” S/N Korean Humanities 4, no. 2 (2018): 67–93, https://www.snkh.org/include/download_files/ v4/2_67-92.pdf. 53. Elizabeth Shim, “South Korea Jeju Massacre Victims Seek Reparations Ahead of Anniversary,” United Press International, April 1, 2019, www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2019/04/01/ South-Korea-Jeju-Massacre-victims-seek-reparations-a head-of-anniversary/6571554122095/.
44. “Jeju 4.3 Sites.” 45. “Jeju 4.3 Sites.” 46. “Jeju 4.3 Sites.” 47. Sonia Ryang, “Reading Volcano Island: In the Sixty-Fifth Year of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, September 7, 2013, apjjf.org/2013/11/36/Sonia-Ryang/3995/article.html.
54. “Jeju 4.3 Peace Park (제주4·3평화공원),” Korea Tourism Organization, english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/ATR/SI_EN_3_1_1_1. jsp?cid=2012011; “Jeju 4·3 Peace Park,” VisitJeju, www.visitjeju. net/en/detail/view?contentsid=CONT_000000000500535#. 55. Jackson, “Pretty and Polluted.”
48. Ryang, “Reading Volcano Island.”
56. Jackson, “Pretty and Polluted.”
49. Mikyoung Kim, ed., Routledge Handbook of Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019).
57. Anne Hilty, Jeju Island: Reaching to the Core of Beauty (Seoul: Korea Foundation, 2011).
THE GHOST IN THE CLUB (THE BLACKNESS WITHIN JERSEY CLUB CULTURE) / TYLER CALA WILLIAMS I. Aria Dean. II. Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristic of Negro Expression”. III. Hito Steyerl.
THE ECOLOGY OF REMIXING / RAMONA GOMEZ I. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York, Henry Holt & Company, 2014), 208. 2. Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 1993). 3. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2014), 87.
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4. Klein, This Changes Everything, 89. 5. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6. 6. Tsing, The Mushroom at the ENd of the World, 6.
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GRAPHITE 12 COHEADS
READERS (CONTD.)
Haley Penn Louise Buckley Michelle Kim
Sophie Huang Talia Markowitz Yuting Liu
READERS
GRAPHITE Interdisciplinary Arts Journal is published with support from the Hammer Museum. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced. Designed by Amy Fang. Printed by Typecraft. / La revista interdisciplinaria de arte GRAPHITE Interdisciplinary Arts Journal se publica con el apoyo del Museo Hammer. Todos los derechos reservados. No puede reproducirse. Diseñada por Amy Fang. Impresa por Typecraft.
Abby Kim Andrea Wold Audrey Harrison Christine Kim Crista Abarca Dario Apodaca Eric Urena Francisco Garcia Genevieve Nollinger Grace Xu Haiqi Zhou Jester Bulnes Lucia Santina Ribisi Nina Jean Klein Moses Mascuch Samantha Manuel Shari Wei Sofia Chang
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