[-empyre-] Re: Traveling on the marks of my body

["Heidi Figueroa" <hfiguero@coqui.net>]

Raúl, aren't you a little bit too fast setting up bridges between your 
particular oral history/story and believes and the histories/stories and 
believes of others? Interactiva 05 is a well grounded technological 
experience, built upon and through out  media technology in a very powerful 
ways. I think resistance got to be more plural than just the tech- free 
unpolluted corner that you just proclaimed.  Interactiva 03 was also a good 
example of the different ways in which power relations are continually 
developed in a tense spiral of dominance and resistance. The diverse 
readings of this spiral were possible thanks to media technology and 
communication networks, which mean closer and sometimes unexpected 
encounters between humans and machines.  I don't think it is a matter of for 
whom technology is or not central. I prefer to frame the question in terms 
of what it is technology for us and the many ways in which it is close to 
our complex nature either to embrace it and/or to contest it considering the 
social tissue that enables or precludes.



Heidi J. Figueroa Sarriera

http://teknokultura.rrp.upr.edu



----- Original Message ----- Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 17:29:55 -0500
From: Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet <rfbalanquet@cartodigital.org>
Subject: [-empyre-] Traveling on the marks of my body
To: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Message-ID: <a04320425be8dd6c84a10@[200.65.191.27]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed"

Amigos members of the Forum, McKenzie;,

In the last post, I forgot to mention that the Columbian artist
Andres Burbano is also part of Arte Nuevo InteractivA 05 and I would
like to thank him for his great input, solidarity and energy.

It is true that new media technologies are interested in people. The
sophistication of the mobile technology has become the most
irreverent interruption of the private space, the closer
contamination tank, as well as the most sophisticated surveillance
apparatus hooked to the big brother colonial matrix.

We also have to understand that views of the world and power does
varies from geo-historical postionalities, and that a lot of us do
not believe in the so called centrality of universal or imperialistic
power. Therefore, even though the power of biotechnology invades our
territories in search of the genetic codes of the plants, there are
places where they will never enter. We are not that stupid to give
out every thingS and if the one with money comes along and want to
pay, I assure you that we may take the money knowing that the
"foreign" doesn't not the complexities of our cultural territories or
our languages and for sure, we will trick the power. Resistance is
always with us, so is the understanding that the center of that
colonial power is not our center, therefore our existence doesn't
depend on that power and that knowing resides on our tribal memory
where no machine has access.

It is true that Marx mentioned the slave when he wrote about the way
in which the capitalist system tricked the people into believing that
"freeing the slave" was a charitable gesture and explained how they
became the paid worker of the capitalist world. But, from my
subjective historical view I see an erasure of the problematic of the
slave in Marx's Capital pointing out to slavery as something of the
past. A deeper analysis of the slave's condition would have brought
to the surface how most of the colonial independence wars, except the
one taking place in Haiti, were conducted by the national bourgeois
who at that time were brainwashed by the ideology of the industrial
revolution.

A deeper analysis of the condition of women would have shown how the
state and the church, understanding the amount of labor needed for
the "industrial progress", made a pact to frame the women "as the
makers of children who later become the workers" so there we have the
roots of the violation of reproductive rights, over population,
famine and the destruction of the forest in favor of the urban space.

Perhaps I asked too much from Marx, but the complexity of my
upbringing in Cuba, having his ideology hammering my head and not
satisfying the hunger I felt, forced me to question his ideology in
the historical context of my territories.


If it were not for the slave narratives, most written in one person,
I would have lived in the Marxist erasure and be co-opted by an a
lefty ideology that was, outside its national discourse, perpetuating
racialization, sexism, homophobia and spiritual segregation in the
name of equality.

No matter how I am attracted to technology and new media, I am rooted
on a network of interaction that is older than the industrial
revolution, older than the slave trade and the European invasion.
That network encompass a system of knowledge, data knowledge as we
may called that can not be storage on the information networks
operate by that " colonial power", therefore, I , as a son of Yemaya,
of Shango, of the trickster Elegba who at each intersection opens a
new road to decenter from oppression,  el ahijado de Kukulkan, dragón
que ilumina los cielos, as the bilingual person who transgress
linguistic codes y escribe en la lengua impuesta por los
colonizadores de Castilla y eclesiáticos que intentaron eliminar con
castigo brutales el conocimiento de los probladores de mis
territories, yo I --the subject who is not colonized by the
ideologies of written words that are never sacred, but are the
entrance to inquiry and growth--, understand that mediate technology
can not overpower my connection to the universe, the truly cosmic
energy fueling the transformation of everyday life and I am not
alone, there are many, many more of us for whom technology will never
be central.

Saludotes
--
Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet MFA
Curador Ejecutivo/ Arte Nuevo InteractivA
http://www.cartodigital.org/interactiva
interactiva@cartodigital.org


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End of empyre Digest, Vol 5, Issue 22
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