Excerps to the text Territorio incorporado. Ejercicios de soberanía visual | Embodied Territory. Excersices of Visual Autonomy.

Images of the exhibition. Soberania Visual | Visual Sovereignty. Miguel Rojas-Sotelo & Miguel Rocha-Vivas. Producction Rodrigo Rojas. April 11 to May 10, 2018. Arango Building Exhibition Hall. Javeriana University. Calle 40b # 5-37 Bogota, Colombia

The modern/colonial visuality erased the ability to read the material production of first nations, which did not have the concept (A)rt of the West, or the archive (the basis of the modern/colonial episteme), endogenous forms of representation - stelae, fabrics, ceramics, ideograms, petroglyphs, situated material culture and architectures were lost in translation. Many of the native communities base their archival practices on incorporated forms, not necessarily through orthographic writing (which goes directly to the individual and social body), they continue with the use of orality and a visuality based on production practices of material culture - ceramics and fabrics that are ideographic and functional in nature.

Craig reminds us that “in mainstream culture, the Indian intellectual term is an oxymoron. Yet we have produced intellectual texts written for centuries, not to mention that indigenous-based intellectual knowledge is such an important part of oral tradition ”(1999: 14). Visual Sovereignty presented a number of cultural exercises, from the visual arts; productions of the aesthetic frontier in relation and tension with ancestral knowledge and critical historiographies, where other forms of inscription and archive are present. Visual Sovereignty is built on the basis of a number of intercultural-visual dialogues regarding issues such as identity, gender, geography (territory), power, representation, popular arts, nature, the human, and the non-human, among others. Most of them seek to be in relation to the territory (s), the body (s), the economic frontier (extractivism), and cultural resistance in search of individual sovereignty as well as of the social body.

Visual Sovereignty took place (Sala Arango, Edificio de Artes, Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá / Bacatá, Colombia) in the spring 2018. To the east of the city (and the building) is the Chingaza National Natural Park, a natural and cultural treasure of central Colombia, the magic of its mountains holds secrets and thoughts inherited from the Muiscas and Guayupes, indigenous peoples who protected this territory, as well as from peasant communities that they have inhabited the region for centuries. Currently, it is a strategic water reserve for ten million people, and is present in eleven municipalities, seven in Cundinamarca: Fómeque, Choachí, La Calera, Guasca, Junín, Gachalá and Medina, and four in Meta: San Juanito, El Calvario, Restrepo and Cumaral. Its predominant ecosystems, high Andean and sub-Andean forests and moors are a refuge for majestic frailejones and landscapes full of fauna and flora.

In his series of cold natures, charcoal on cotton paper, ceramics, and installation, Jeisson Castillo not only recreates this geography with imagined forests of frailejón, he also builds narratives where scientific illustration and economics collide.

In front of Chingaza, and representing the west (west) was Maíz (1994-2018), one of the most representative works of Carlos Uribe (1964). This piece in its simplicity is a conceptual bombshell. Five tons of yellow corn also refer to a bargaining chip during colonial times. European conquerors took control of territories on the continent and kidnapped the crops of the original inhabitants. In a sort of colonial Russian roulette, the comuneros had to pay with a measure of gold (a small mountain) or a thousand, for the grain that would guarantee the survival of the town (Ramos, García 2010). Archaic forms of tribute were added to the brutal forms of repression via physical and cultural violence through the evangelization of peoples.

Earth, seed path - femininity

The landscape moves, walks, is transported in memories and the body - the territory lives in exile, but is not uprooted. From the south of Colombia, but trained in the west (Medellín), the work of Tirsa Chindoy (Inga) from Putumayo, graduated from the art school of the University of Antioquia, is a continuous intercultural navigation. She remembers how "the reflection on the traditional aspects that were part of my identity as indigenous, allowed me to understand that the new world I was exploring affected me in one way or another" (Chindoy 2008). This experience gave him the possibility to embrace other ways of thinking without neglecting the knowledge inherited from his grandparents. Chindoy finds a bonding element in the fabric.

..."The photo installation consists of an image of my feet clinging to the grass as if embracing small white flowers, the photo is abruptly interrupted by a horizontal cut that is connected by means of a white thread to a circular fabric of shades, purple, black, gray , brown and that later moves towards the ground drawing on it a circular figure that comes and returns to the fabric arranged on the wall ”(2008: 42).

Thanks to the care of the exhibition hall guard, the seeds left by Tirsa, during the assembly of the work, and which contained the potential of plant life that sustains her community in forms of food autonomy (sovereignty) in Putumayo, germinated. It is in this way that a feminine-collaborative dimension occurs in the piece.

The situated, ritual, incorporated and inscribed drawing is present in the work of Rosa Tisoy-Tandioy (Inga, Putumayo). His work in general is located in an intermediate space where the image establishes a process of self-knowledge and where what was previously hidden, under the traditional clothing and the multi-layered protective “chumbe” is made public. The chumbe as guardian of fertility not only has an individual, intimate purpose, it is at the same time communal, it protects the social body both physically and symbolically (its writing keeps the secrets of the culture that passes from generation to generation in the hands of the women). On the other hand, Tisoy uses photography in a process of self-documentation of social and cultural portraiture. The use of photography in the indigenous world has been criticized for its exotic, ethnographic, marginal, and museographic character. Being appropriated by indigenous artists, new paths are established. The Seminole artist, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (2009) calls this practice “visual sovereignty” - hence the title of this proposal.

Tsinhnahjinnie defines it as “a particular type of awareness rooted in trust that is exhibited as a force in cultural and visual presence (2009, p. Xxiii). Explains how, “visual sovereignty does not ask for permission to exist, but [...] it requires the responsibility to continue (2009: 10-11). Those who participate in this practice should not limit themselves to specific areas, since responsibility must always include an innovative and peripheral vision at the same time. These acts of visual sovereignty can be understood as individual or collective where spaces of self-definition and determination are created through multiple modalities of the visual (Rojas Sotelo, 2017). Tisoy-Tandioy decides to establish a Suyu (a place in the Inga language), a geography where image and meaning find a new medium, her own body.

This recognition of the relational is made explicit in communal practices of the world Indigenous today, for example, we see it present in the diversity of chagras and milpas (lots of cultivated land) that sustainably preserve one of the strengths of these communities, food sovereignty and traditional medicine. In his pieces Kalustrurinda, Tinii and Tiagsamui (2014-2016), Tisoy-Tandioy uses botanical products, plants, natural dyes and aromas, thus developing a work that recognizes and recovers the tradition of the chagra as a space of knowledge, resistance, autonomy and in your case as part of your artistic practice.

Young urban artists such as Daniel Vaca, explore body drawings, tattoos, as direct inscriptions on the skin (white and soft) as an intercultural discourse that, on the one hand, recognizes that there is other knowledge, and that partly functions as an expiatory act for the damage caused for centuries to native peoples. In this case Vaca, a series of "weeds" is tattooed, in a double allusion; young rebels or insurgent communities referred to as weeds that in the stories of repression are victims of state or para-state violence (phenomena of supposed social cleansing) repeated in national histories in southern countries. On the other hand, it refers to the plants that are victimized for their illegal use within economies of scale (extractive) that are part of the trafficking and mafia business directed to the cultivation and production of drugs. Among them we find plants such as coca, marijuana, poppy, drunkenness, and ayahuasca.

Visual Sovereignty recognizes how the production of material culture is part of the process of social construction of the Amerindian world. Thanks to the generosity of the Tropenbos foundation, a number of exquisite everyday objects from Amazonian communities were presented in the exhibition context. Two large anacondas become a number of carved benches that are also used by children and adults in the community while they listen to the stories of their grandparents in the maloca. Fish traps and illustrations of forest cycles, woven and made by Mogaje Guihu (Don Abel Rodríguez Muinane) one of the last members of the Nonuya people, become soft sculptural objects that float in space, like clouds, that remind us that in those stories the grandparents name the three rivers that make up the Amazon (the one that flows on the surface, the climate system in the atmosphere, and the one that flows underground), those three planes are where the original stories take place .

As Don Abel himself present it in the company of the anthropologist María Clara Van der Hammen and the biologist Carlos Rodríguez, “The Amazon rainforest has an enormous wealth of plants and their knowledge has been a challenge for the natural sciences. Many disciplines and sub-specializations have focused on unraveling this complex web of vital relationships that keeps the rainforest going. Indigenous peoples approach this world of plants from an extensive and elaborate mythology, the definition of classification systems and local taxonomies ”(Rodríguez, Van der Hammen, Rodríguez 2016).

This knowledge and these specialties are related to the creation and use of material culture; For example, the specialist in the elaboration of manguarés (ritual drums) that were in the sample, may be linked to rituals that involve the use of this instrument as an aid in the communication between the worlds during the taking of yagé. The fabrics, made with multiple materials, are possible thanks to botanical knowledge and also present representations and abstractions of plants and animals, situated forms of creation and use in domestic life. In the Nonuya tradition, drawings in yanchamas, or "cloth", made with the bark of certain trees, used to carry children on their backs when they are small, are decorated for baptism rituals with abstractions that represent different beings. But in other elements of material culture, such as balayes (woven baskets) and woven sieves or low wooden benches "for thinking", and even on the walls of the great maloca (longhouse), different figures may refer to the colors or markings of animals, their tracks or their teeth. However, these abstract representations are not intended to be realistic representations (2016: 6). In relation to forest management, there are holders of knowledge of the plant world, also about terrestrial animals, monkeys and frogs. This is the case of Mogaje Guihu (Don Abel Rodríguez Muinane), which in the Nonuya language means "hawk of bright feathers.”. The Nonuya are part of the Uitoto people, "people of the middle", others that make up its linguistic nucleus are the Andoque, Bora, Miraña, Muinane and Resígaro. These are identified by consuming ambil or tobacco and coca paste in the form of mambe. These groups suffered the holocaust of the rubber trade and ended up dispersed being expelled from their territories of origin. In the case of the Nonuya; The demographic and cultural impact of the exploitation of rubber was so great that the few survivors are now settled on the Caquetá River in the Colombian Amazon (in Muinane territory or in Bogotá and Ibagué), they practically lost their language and grew up together with the Muinane and Andoque adopting their language and part of their cultural heritage. Mogaje is known as the notary of plants, he learned in a situated way (ritual and contextual transmission of a family type, father to son, shaman to apprentice) in the maloca and in the forest. He dominates hundreds of tree species of the tropical forest, in addition to their names, he also recognizes their anatomical characteristics, their architecture, the distribution of branches and leaves, the types of bark, flowers and fruits and their ecological relationships with the different animal species (2016: 4). In the last decade, Mogaje's scientific illustration work in the urban context has taken him to the highest seats of art and the Colombian art market (Rojas-Sotelo 2017).

Interstitial spaces

Taita Domingo Cuatindioy belongs to the Inga people of San Andrés Alto Putumayo in Colombia, he has practiced ancestral medicine since he was 15 years old, his teacher was Taita Francisco Piaguaje of the Siona people of Lower Putumayo. Domingo is also a visual artist, his empirical training was completed with a season in Ireland and Great Britain where he was able to train as an engraver. Currently, he is a traditional doctor, painter and sculptor of great recognition in the region. Through his visual work, painting and wood carving, the taita recounts the power of yagé in complex constructions of a geometric type of great color. The taita describes his work this way, “Ayahuasca is a healing master Sacred Plant, the key to a door that opens the interdimensional world. Those who have consumed ayahuasca affirm that they have experienced spiritual revelations about the nature of the Universe, and about its purpose on Earth ”(2020).

Benjamín Jacanamijoy Tisoy (Inga) is one of the most important exponents of the indigenous rebirth in the arts in Colombia. He was born and raised in the Sibundoy Valley, with his brother, the also artist Carlos Jacanamijoy, under the protection of his father, Taita Antonio Jacanamijoy, and his mother Mercedes, the influence of yagé medicine (Carlos the sixth, Benjamin the eighth of thirteen children ). As a designer and theorist of Inga design, he has produced multiple research works that recover the feminine traditions of weaving (Jacanamijoy-Tisoy 1993; 1995; 2017). In his work as a visual artist, he uses multiple media: drawing, digital constructions, painting, appropriation and, object base intervention (on boats, canes, benches, among others), video, multimedia, and urban intervention. Starting with his work on the Chumbe, a tradition that remains active in the narrative processes through weaving, Benjamín has managed to make visible this living heritage of his people, which passes from mothers to daughters. Thanks to this practice, the girls of the community have a place of learning that is decisive for their identity, because in the fabric there is a relationship with the territory that is mediated by symbolic and material knowledge. The representations of the mountain, the tree, the corn, the corn and coca leaves, the sun, the moon, and the stars, are fundamental in the continuity of the indigenous imaginary of Putumayo. These representations condense a poetic and gender practice that grants subjectivity and relevance to women in their passage rituals (the girl begins her chumbe when she becomes fertile). With these, the balance and recognition of the territory are maintained. After giving birth, the Inga and Kamentsá women bury the placenta and put the umbilical tissue in the hearth, in an action called "obligar." This practice is an anchor that supports the community in relation to the territory (Rojas-Sotelo 2019). With the chumbe he realizes the cycles (kutey) of life, the figures also represent the bosom of a family composed of fathers and mothers, their sons and daughters and their husbands and wives, and finally the children of those marriages. The Inga community has had a very particular urbanization process in the past thirty years because it is located in a place of contact, the Sibundoy Valley, this beautiful place was not only considered the apothecary of the Amazonian foothills, it was also a place of the spread of Christianity since the colonial era.

Chumbe-Landscape, 2018, 60 x 50 cms. Digital printing on photo paper

Chumbe-Landscape II, 2018, 60 x 50 cms. Digital printing on photo paper

Rio Chumbe, 2018, 60 x 60 cms. Digital printing on photo paper

Benjamín Jacanamijoy-Tisoy (October, 2015). Kaugsay Auaska: Fabric of Life - Auaska Nukanchi Yuyay Kaugsaita: Fabric of Its Own History [Exterior lighting system, Torre Colpatria, Bogotá]. He obtained the Honorable Mention in the VIII Luis Caballero Prize. Courtesy of the artist.

Violence, autonomy, healing and de-colonial erasure

During the last decades in Colombia (1995-2016) in the north of the country, paramilitaries / drug traffickers and local guerrillas have implemented an “agrarian reform” from below exacerbating historical land tenure problems. Today, the old and new landowners (three percent of the national population) own more than seventy percent of the arable land, while 57 percent of the farmers barely survive on less than three percent of the land ( Oxfam, 2017). The distribution of land was one of the crucial points during the negotiations between the Santos government and the FARC guerrillas and is at the center of the country's violence and historical inequity. The land law (Law 900, June 2018) was signed to make this distribution more equitable (unfortunately progress is minimal and it will take many decades to reverse what was done). A commercial crop is replacing the diversity of the rainforest in the coastal regions of the northwestern Pacific and the Colombian Caribbean and the eastern plains. The oil palm (or African palm), which also emerged in the political arena as the crop of the future: the oil is easy to harvest and transport and is marketed well, as an ingredient in the food production chain and as a "biofuel cleansed". Thus, with a firm hand and a big heart, the land usurpation policies were promoted for more than a decade by the Uribe administration (2002-2012), creating stories of massive displacement and in its wake a new monster, the so-called BACRIM (bands organized crime). The African palm is being planted in the traditional territories of the Afro-Colombian and indigenous groups of the Pacific in Chocó and especially in the Atrato river basin. The Afro and Emberas communities displaced by the Urrá hydroelectric megaproject, now live in the poorest areas of the urban centers of Medellín and Bogotá, while the mafias have democratized / legalized their businesses, from drug trafficking to illegal mining, controlling not only land and its products, also informal economies of urban centers (2012). The work of Colombian visual artist Juan Obando sends a clear message during the post-conflict period, that this war has not ended. His work is backed by the media and geared towards propaganda. Using radio, video, online actions, active live presentations, sound, and visual designs, Obando raises radical political and social questions. On the one hand, his work is informed by the recent history of cultural change and acculturation processes in Colombia. Obando maintains that his work focuses on an aesthetic of decolonization. "My work aims to expose and question the role of cultural consumption within the so-called global economy, while challenging preconceived ideas about (inter) national identities" (2011). It is a decolonizing practice that encompasses endogenous cultural formations that , erased, are now re-inscribed through interaction with the colonial matrix of power A narco-economy has infused the tourism, agro-industrial and financial sectors, producing a narco-aesthetic that is widely produced and consumed.

These phenomena of national construction in the midst of neoliberalism are becoming clearer in countries in the north of the continent, directly affecting the native peoples who today rise up in resistance. Mexico is a country on the edge, its northern border is its yoke, which puts it on the brink of collapse, between miracle and ruin, complex and simple, rich and miserable, and still diverse. Cornelio Campos is a Mexican-American artist, of Purepecha origin, born in Cherán, Michoacán. Cherán is one of the autonomous indigenous peoples in Mexico today, it got tired of state abandonment, and thanks to the financial help of thousands of its children (Purépecha in exile, workers, and migrants in the northern giant) it was able to break with ties of corruption and violence to which he was subjected. The most important thing about this autonomy is not that it is a response to the "mountain tombs" that open the extractive frontier in the mountains of Michoacán for the green cartel to arrive, the avocado growers (a showcase of the drug cartels and traffic in general), is also a response to Mexican cultural effacement that since the revolution, and its mestizo declaration - that of Vasconcelos with the Cosmic Race, flattened all possibility of indigenous autonomies while celebrating an imperial past. Cornelio is not only Purepecha, he is also a self-taught migrant who lives in Durham, North Carolina (where he lives from his work as an electrician). Campos immigrated to the United States as a teenager, a journey and process that now influences his work as an artist. Vibrant, iconic colors and geometric patterns of pre-Columbian origin combine American symbols in a duality that at times becomes monumental - a reference to Mexican muralism becomes one in his work. Through his paintings, he illustrates some of the harsh realities of immigration to the United States. However, for Soberanía Visual Campos he produces pieces loaded with Purépecha iconography in celebration and solidarity with his people.

There are three aesthetic characteristics or strategies that cut across and connect the political and popular themes (of crafts) that Campos identifies in his work. And although they are aesthetic choices that intersect and mix in a kind of kaleidoscopic effect that impacts and complicates the situation, they are also connected to their content. These are: repetition, uprooting and politics. (Garrigan, 2018: 39-40)

Healing the colonial wound

Benvenuto Chavajay-Ixtetelá. Maya Tz’utujil, Guatemala in Visual Sovereignty. Back his work, Doroteo Gamuch, 2014, 100x160cms. Digital printing / Tattoo. Visual Sovereignty. Exhibition hall. Javeriana university. 2018.

“The tattoo is a certificate of (citizen identification) of Doroteo Guamuch Flores, runner and winner of the 1952 Boston Marathon. It turns out that a gringo photographer could not pronounce his name and named him Matero Flores. The government of Guatemala in the 60s gave that name (Mateo Flores) to the national stadium and not the real name of that running hero. For having indigenous blood, all my life I carried the weight of racism, humiliation, exclusion, etc. He never used the name Mateo Flores.

The idea of ​​tattooing the ID of Doroteo Guamuche was part of a request to the government authorities to change the name of the Mateo Flores National Stadium to the real name of the winner: Doroteo Guamuche. This is another way to heal a colonial wound. " Benvenuto Chavajay-Ixtetelá

Benvenuto Chavajay-Ixtetelá (Maya Tz’utujil, Guatemala) reflects on definitions, uses of language and the actions of the colonial matrix of power in his experience as a contemporary indigenous artist, producing in a contextual and situated way. As a producer of meaning, he recognizes the value of his own; as an observer, he hones his critical discourse. Thanks to his interaction inside and outside the art world, Chavajay makes his position clear regarding the colonial wound and his own containment strategies. In this way he confirms his annoyance with basic concepts such as art or literacy, which were imposed on the original communities of the continent. Chavajay-Ixtetelá refers to the hegemony of alphabetic language and the construction of universal history and in particular with the Western aesthetic of a rational / sublimated court based on the experience of the West - the Kantian aesthetic.

And just as the word Art has no translation for the Tz’utijil communities (and many of the original peoples), this void is an opportunity. This annoyance not only refers to the use of concepts, texts and languages, it also refers to the places of enunciation of these, the supposed centers of production and circulation of culture. For Chavajay, as an individual, artist, Latin American, Central American, Guatemalan and indigenous, these themes have become an obsession. He has chosen to work from a perspective of return, as he identifies it - from a we (plural) - situated from a relational / situated position.

Annul, suspend, erase and freeze, the Peace Accords, signed on December 29, 1996 in Guatemala, 2013 - 2018, 7 sheets of watercolor paper, lime and salt. Installation / Performance. Visual Sovereignty. Exhibition hall. Javeriana university. 2018.

This action, which allows the executive summary of the peace accords to be read, signed on December 29, 1996 in Guatemala and later erased by Chavajay-Ixtetelá, could be considered a poetic / iconoclastic act. The critical act not only stops at the content of the text, but also the use of the alphabetic language, Castilian, as the official language in a country where the majority is indigenous, and emphasizes the silence of the communities in the implementation of the agreement; it also recalls the popular consultation necessary to approve the constitutional changes. When the consultation was finally held on May 16, 1999 to ratify the peace accords in Guatemala, the violent NO campaign dominated the national scene. The enthusiasm of the social organizations failed to fill the gap that separated the peace process from the racist dynamics, and the politics of fear, of the majority of the white and Ladino population. Only 18% of Guatemalans voted, a little more than half of them voted NO to the constitutional reforms.

In Colombia, after more than half a century of internal conflict, the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) signed an agreement that ended the conflict between the two forces (September 25, 2016). On October 2, 2016, during the ratification of the peace accords, via popular consultation, something very similar to the case of Guatemala happened. The NO campaign used strategies of fear and lies that managed, by a small margin (0.4%), to defeat the endorsement, with the aggravation that 63% of voters did not exercise their right to vote. On October 7, 2016, the Nobel Peace Prize committee recognized Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in support of the process. On November 28, 2016, after a new round of negotiations, the agreements were ratified by the Colombian Congress. The indigenous communities convened for October 12 a great march in support of the process and the signed agreements, giving a new meaning to the celebrations of this date, turning it into a great celebration for life and diversity. A post-conflict process begins after a long negotiation process with limited participation of representatives of indigenous communities, Afro-descendant communities, and peasants (the bulk of the victims of the internal conflict). In the final agreement there is a so-called “ethnic chapter”, in which it is assumed that to a large extent the forces in conflict disproportionately victimized these communities. Regarding the participation of the arts and in particular of artistic practices from indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, there is no clear agenda. There is talk of a culture of peace, or for peace. What is clear to those of us who work with, in and from these communities is the fact that many of the leaders are also cultists, and that the cultists are also leaders and are under the watchful eye of weapons that try to silence them. It is important to identify how symbolically both the violent peoples and those who have been in resistance have built peace; Among others are NASA in the north of Cauca and civil organizations, such as La Ruta Pacifica de las Mujeres, the People's Congress, ASODEMUC, which have cultivators who are also leaders in their communities.

The entire text will be published by Universidad Javerian Editons on late 2021.

More information. Miguel Rojas Sotelo. Duke University.