Some time ago, I participated in an exhibition that received several reviews. This show had an intersectional perspective that unveiled the issues of mass consumption and the political implications of the bodies involved in these macroeconomic processes, and their impacts on people’s daily lives. The reviews mentioned relevant aesthetic or political aspects of the works in the exhibition but completely missed the intersectional perspective.
It made me realize the difficulty I have faced myself as an art critic in finding spaces to promote cultural processes that are non-heteronormative and whitewashed in their thinking.
The main problem I encountered is that while traditional art criticism is a discipline that requires professionalization, methodologies, and categorical systems have not been seriously reconsidered to visualize cultural productions created by bodies of colors other than white and/or non-heteronormative bodies. This is something that art history has begun to address (albeit perhaps timidly). María Lugones points out the need to “find better ways to say things,” referring precisely to the necessity not only to disseminate cultural productions but also to develop forms and structures that allow us to have conversations that were not had in the past.
In other words, if we use a tool produced within Western culture and heteronormative thought like art criticism, we need to rethink it in its structure as a discipline to be able to express and reveal bodies that have produced knowledge from completely different frameworks. We need to ask ourselves how cultural institutions and the art world are organizing, disseminating, and perceiving these productions that actually represent different systems of life.
Ines Magazine was born from this personal experience and is a platform that disseminates, makes visible, and articulates information, evident only by generating intersections that diverge from traditional ways of producing knowledge. In other words, transdisciplinary, intersectional, and decolonial work produces methodologies that can illuminate bodies, memories, and knowledge obscured due to conditions of race, social class, and gender, among others.
La Magazina is a device of war of positions (more than of maneuvers) that constitutes a daily revolution arising from infrapolitical changes. Our publications appeal to the permanent question of what controlling categories such as race, gender, and social class do and how material history allows us to understand an object, a circumstance, or an event.
Modern capitalist coloniality proposes a dichotomous hierarchization: man-woman, the non-man as inhuman. Different from this, the logic and ethics of a coalition-in-process lead us to understand each other by recognizing a fractured locus in common, allowing us to establish a sense of community based on resistance and the creation of tense and creative ways of inhabiting difference or decolonial fracture. Thus, ours is a multilingual publication with an imminently political character, where we believe that revolution must emerge from everyday infrapolitical actions in the relationship between intimate-private spaces and social macrostructures.
When referring to intimacy and privacy, it is not exclusively to the erotic-sexual (although it is worth asking who and how freely are allowed to live and experience pleasure) but also to concrete actions such as adaptation, rejection, adoption, integration, and non-regarding, as communal modes of resistance actively carried out, residing in a fractured locus. The coalition at the point of difference refers to the fact that to resist from a decolonial perspective, it is necessary to recognize that “one does not resist the coloniality of gender alone,” but rather, we are part of an entire complex fabric, in a way of community that involves two characteristics: exercising resistance from the intersection of systems of oppression and the impossibility of separating “communal flourishing” from cosmic balance.
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Yohanna M Roa
Editor
1 Lugones, 12
