Leandro Martínez Depietri

While mainstream intellectuals discuss the dawning of a new post-pandemic world live on Zoom and newspapers, for many the sun has risen already and been up in the sky for quite a while. Speaking of a crisis - in singular - makes us forget what philosopher Gabriel Rockhill puts forward with much simplicity from a perspective of radical historicism: “we always start in the middle, so to speak, in a complex nexus of immanent, historically constituted notions and practices.” [1] Rather than reimagining our practices from a theoretical and unattainable scratch point, the pandemic brings us (yet again), the opportunity of turning to existing know-hows of collectively dealing with precarity.

After the strict stay-at-home order enforced by the Argentine government, an immediate rise on femicides followed: in approximately 40 days of seclusion, 36 femicides took place. [2] Women artists collective ​La Lola Mora, based in the northwest province of Tucumán, responded quickly with the campaign ​Face Mask, Not Muzzle. I​t consisted on the online publication on social media of selfies of ​Las​ ​Lolas​, wearing self-made face masks with defiant phrases embroidered, stamped, painted digitally, or by hand on them. The collective put up a website on which they socialized the pattern to sew face masks and incited others to produce their own “screaming models” - as ​La Lola​ Alejandra Mizrahi describes them.  [3] Soon, other femmes from all over the country submitted their own portrait, the images got reposted and, in a conservative and catholic province such as Tucumán, the main local newspaper​ La Gaceta​ published an article on the initiative.

While artists all around the globe started to intervene face masks during the pandemic, the singular force of ​La Lola’s​ action lies, first, on the repurposing of these protective tools as protest placards for a world of confinement and virtuality. Secondly, it lies on rapidly perceiving and questioning the aestheticization of the face mask-selfie and, therefore, of the verticality of State’s biopolitics and its monolithic understanding of care. Contrary to the reactionary movements that spread in neoliberal democracies demanding an end to stay-at-home orders and asking to sacrifice the lives of those made most vulnerable in the sake of the economy goddess, ​La Lola Mora​ embraces State’s protective measures while calling for an expanded, horizontal, and feminist understanding of care that takes into account the ongoing gender crisis.

Performative political intervention has a distinct genealogy in Argentine recent history. During the last military dictatorship (1976-83), ​Madres de Plaza de Mayo​ - the collective of mothers of those who were disappeared by the apparatus of State terrorism - strived for visibility through political performance. Their most emblematic action was to march in circles in Buenos Aires’ main square, around one of its monuments, carrying photographs of their missing daughters and sons. Many of these photographs were taken from national identity cards. Thus, while the military government denied knowledge of those who they have secretly abducted, their mothers - as Ana Longoni argues - weaponized the state tools for identification against the very government who had initially issued them. [4] After the dictatorship, they developed an array of visual techniques to involve society in their struggle for the prosecution and incarceration of the military. They organized the ​March of the White Masks​, in which thousands marched with identical white masks covering their faces. As Longoni points out: “This procedure made the demonstrators — each carrying a mask and thus becoming anonymous — once again stand in for the missing persons, each demonstrator lending his or her body and life to the disappeared.”[5] So powerful were the Madres​’s actions that renowned critic Diana Taylor almost built an entire theory on performance and politics after conducting research with them and with other associations of relatives. [6] So impactful were these performances that they stayed alive in the collective imaginary, forming a contestatory repertoire of protest actions and becoming what Taylor calls the ​DNA of performance​, which draws from “not only the biology and the performance, but the archive and repertoire. The linkage refutes colonial notions that the archival and biological is more lasting or accurate than embodied performance practice.” [7] Still today, Argentines collectively embody the memory of the disappeared, year after year, by marching on the anniversary of the military coup, carrying their portraits and shouting out their names. With time, these strategies started to be deployed in protests against women trafficking, femicides, and tranvesticides - cases that have come to known of as ​the disappeared under democracy​. 

It comes as no surprise then that ​Las Lolas​ - as​ a​ feminist action collective - were able to rapidly intervene in the social field during the pandemic through innovative visual politics.​ La Lola Mora​ is a collective of artists from all disciplines, born as the Tucumán chapter of the larger women artists’ collective​ Nosotras Proponemos.​ They soon felt that the former, a Buenos Aires centered group, did not address the scope and urgency of the issues that mobilized them. While ​Nosotras Proponemos i​s primarily focused on fighting for equal representation in the visual art world, these Tucumán artists felt more compelled to intervene in social issues such as the debate around the legalization of abortion that took place in Argentina in 2018. They founded ​La Lola Mora t​hen, named after the acclaimed modernist sculptor from Tucumán who defied male hegemony in the arts of late XIX century Argentina. They designed an apron with their logo - identifying themselves as art laborers and wearing it as a collective identifier - and went out together to march in pro-choice demonstrations, organized rallies, socialized the pattern for their apron as a way of calling others to join their causes, and did things like presenting a list of demands to the Ministry of Culture in Tucumán that expanded well beyond the problem of gender representation in culture. For example, they allied with weavers from indigenous communities in the province’s valleys and included the latter’s concerns in their demands, opposing the longstanding racist divide between fine arts and crafts still visible in cultural public policies. In consequence, they form a collective of artists mobilized not by the singular crisis of an ideal national identity - the way in which the pandemic is officially presented (We are all in this together!) -but by a built up state of precarity that results from the overlapping crises of neoliberal and patriarchal violence: gender and race inequality, femicides, the immense regional imbalance between the city of Buenos Aires and the 23 provinces of the Federal Republic, etc. 

When COVID-19 arrived, they had already established a collective know-how for creatively intervening in political struggles. Facing the imminent possibility of a health system collapse, their first action was to start producing face masks and other protective tools that were lacking to donate them to public hospitals. This group effort was not realized without internal controversy. Members of the group felt that it was unfair that - in a declared anti-choice province, filled with doctors who are conscientious objectors and who have even forced raped underage women to give birth - they went out to supply the needs of their ideological rivals. In spite of their internal debates, they moved forward and embraced the controversy through individual statements on social media in which they shared their conundrum. Furthermore, they socialized the pattern to sew face masks with whatever fabric people had in their homes and got criticized for promoting the use of non-specific fabrics. They understood that in the urgency of matters, knowing the deep precarity of many people in Tucumán, it was best if they had, at least, something to protect themselves. Interestingly, many ​Lolas​ work in governmental entities such as the National University of Tucumán and other public cultural entities. These were among the first to privately question their actions. However, after the impact of ​Face Mask, Not Muzzle​, they got invited by the School of the Arts of the National University of Tucumán to do a promotional video inviting the academic community and others to partake. This represents a particularly interesting feedback loop between a social movement and the government. It disrupts what philosopher Flavia Dezzutto identifies as a “precarious mediation” in progressive governments - such as the one currently in power in Argentina - which limits “the empowerment and capacity for autonomy” of social movements “inhibiting the dynamics of building people's power.” [8]

By turning the face mask-selfie into a contestary image for protest against the subsuming of the gender crisis under the health crisis,​ Las Lolas​ follow the traces of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo​ - activating ​the DNA of performance​ present in the particular chain of the Argentine feminist movement. In a similar fashion to how ​Madres​ weaponized the stated identity card against the military government, ​Las Lolas​ - while embracing the need for a stay-at-home order - deploy the face mask against the very government that enforces its use. With embroidered phrases such as ​¿Dónde está Daiana?​ [Where is Daiana?] that demand truth and justice for a recent victim of women trafficking, ​Las Lolas lend their bodies to the disappeared as it happened with the ​Madres’​ Mask March. Having their noses and mouths covered and refusing to include individual names on their online postings, they maintain a kind of collective anonymity that reinforces the notion that femicides and patriarchal violence are not a problem of some but that they should concern all citizens equally. ​Las Lolas​ wear their face masks as the Zapatistas wear their ski-masks: highlighting the resolution and ferociousness of the struggle in their eyes.

After the posting of the first selfies, the relatives of Daiana decided to join the campaign and posted their own face mask-selfies. With this action, ​La Lola​ inverted the trajectory of the Madres’ action - producing a kind of questioning that goes from the larger societal framework into the family sphere. This is particularly compelling in considering that Face Mask, not Muzzle​ was partly a reaction to government’s slogan ​#Tapatelaboca [#Coveryourmouth]. This necessary protective mandate resounds inevitably, in a heteropatriarchal society, with the implicit commandment to remain silent or avoid confrontation in the face of sexist violence. ​La Lola​ them strategically appropriates the government's slogan to denounce centuries of silencing and contest the heteronormative imaginary that surrounds the stay-at-home order and its rhetorics of valuing home and family. As seen, activating the DNA of performance means both repeating available gestures and strategies but also actualizing them in the face of our current situation of confinement and virtuality. As philosopher Diego Sztulwark suggests, “when a body discovers common purpose along with others, it engenders a knowledge that goes beyond itself” [9] establishing a “ practical knowledge of counter-power.” [10] ​La Lola,​ tuned in with the present and deeply affected by the ongoing crises of gendered, racialized, and provincialized bodies in Argentina, produce what we could call a thinking-in-motion, a thought on the march, that is the result of a militant trajectory inscribed in a particular historicity.

Acknowledging the strength of the theoretical proposal of an action collective must not imply an anti-intellectual statement. We might recuperate the words by philosopher León Rozitchner that Sztulwark often cites: “When the people do not fight, philosophy does not think.”[11] ​La Lola Mora​ reminds us that is not through abstract discussions on ideals for the future that we will come out of the pandemic transformed but through actively undoing today the hierarchies in our fields of aesthetic and political practices. Appropriating the judeo-christian saying that there is nothing new under the sun, we might understand that instead of discussing a new dawn, it is time to walk the walk under the burning sunbeam. 

Notes


1 Rockhill, Gabriel. ​Radical History & the Politics of Art​. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, p. 51.

2 See: https://www.filo.news/actualidad/36-femicidios-en-Argentina-desde-que-inicio-la-cuarentena-2020050 1-0033.html

3 Interview with the author, 2020. 

4 Longoni, Ana. 2010.​ Photographs and Silhouettes: Visual Politics in the Human Rights Movement of Argentina​. Vol. 25 University of Chicago Press.

5 Ibid, p. 14.

6 See Taylor, Diana. 2002.​ quot;You are here": The DNA of Performance​. Vol. 46 The MIT Press.
7 Ibid. 

8 Interview with Flavia Dezzutto, ​La Mar en Coche​, August 28, 2018, available on marencoche.wordpress.com. 

9 Sztulwark, Diego. La Ofensiva Sensible. Buenos Aires. Caja Negra, 2019. p.19 10 Ibid, p. 111.
11 Ibid, p. 19. 

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Even though Ascott understood electronic media as spiritual and material phenomena (2003b, p. 330), he focused primarily on the development of bio-electronic technologies without questioning the sources of the materials that create such technologies. Through a different approach, the knowers interviewed by Santos point towards the common spiritual and material origins of western and ancestral technologies without forgetting their fundamental differences. Davi Kopenawa, from the Yanomami ethnic group, says that minerals such as gold hold knowledge directly related to the spirit of the sun, which is tied to the source of life and the flow of energy through all that is living (Santos, p. 44). Material and spiritual are not separated categories in indigenous philosophy, as the spiritual characteristics of a given material are contained in its composition and relation to its environment. Technology, thus, emerges from and is contained by the will of spirits, which we could interpret to be, to some extent, the electronic make up of minerals themselves.

Even though there are points of connection between western and indigenous technologies, their differences are crucial. Kopenawa says that minerals must be kept under the soil because their extraction brings disease to the world (p. 45), a claim that stands in sharp contrast to the extractive practices at the core of modern technologies. As Libardo Bolívar Marín suggests, western technology misuses the spiritual force of technology in order to construct and destruct; indigenous knowers use it instead to heal and protect (p. 69). In the face of the ecological disaster caused by mining and the waste produced by capitalist technologies, and considering the arrival of a virus that has hijacked the survival of vulnerable communities around the world, it is vital to consider the material base of the technologies currently promoted as the socioeconomic cure to Covid-19. Santos’ long-term collaborative practice and deep engagement with Amazonian indigenous communities provides fresh alternatives to the study of the intersections between art, science, and technology, through carefully listening to amerindian ontologies that challenge the colonial anthropocentrism at the core of western technoscience[11].


Conclusion
Modern telematics has undoubtedly shifted the consciousness of those who are part of its global networks. However, as the internet increasingly becomes a consumer good capable of exploiting our most intimate desires and turn them into profit, it is paramount that we consider the origins of interconnected digital technologies and question the uses we give to them. Ascott’s dreams of a decentralized and loving telematic embrace were never fully realized, as digital telepathy became quickly subsumed by hypermodern capitalist modes of production and consumption. What he dreamed of in terms of education via teleconferencing as a way to expand global consciousness (2003a, p. 197), is now espoused by governments and tech-companies as the most profitable and easy solution to the Covid-19 pandemic. The "bird's eye-view, the all-over, all-embracing, holistic systems view of structures, relationships, and events" (2003c, p. 236) that telematic works aspired to in the 1990s, has engendered the surveillance apparatus that embraces the entire world, not with love, but with chains made of fiber optics and conflict minerals.

Ascott’s intuition about other forms of networked telepathy in Amazonian indigenous cultures, which he called Vegetal Reality, has complicated echoes nowadays. Through placing his attention on shamanism, Ascott questioned the dryness of digital computers and started to think about the possibilities of bio-technologies. However, his approach has been mainly echoed by bio-art experiments with manufactured lab-life in controlled environments, not by the entangled, complex, interdependent, and context-aware knowledge of ecological dynamics. The interconnections Ascott imagined, at their core, are different from the rhizomatic ecological connection of life and matter in the planet—which predates any human historical formation—, and with which indigenous knowledge interfaces with. Western technoscience is heavily founded on colonial practices, since there is always a central matrix that benefits from a set of peripheral nodes of material extraction. In conversation with Santos, Jesús León Muipu tells us that digital technology comes as a reconquest, a second conquista of Amazonian territories (p. 32). His appreciation holds true both in the material level, due to mining and deforestation, and in the spiritual level, as languages and local technologies are replaced by digital devices without open experimentation and dialogue.

Ascott was trying to humanize western technoscience through emphasizing its spiritual connotations. However, that is precisely the very pitfall of his approach: we do not need to come up with spiritual ways of relating to our technologies, but to place spirituality at the center of what we think of as technology. In other words, does it matter if we develop loving and spiritual relations to our computers if they are still fueled by an exctractivist industry based on labor exploitation, deforestation, mining, and producing millions of tons of e-waste per year? Santos research suggests that instead of falling into binary traps between techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, it is crucial to explore the ways in which the online culture we participate in can be altered and better informed by the ecological paradigms of ancestral technologies. What amerindian technologies show us is that in order to reevaluate and reappropriate the role of digital technologies in our lives, it is important that we reflect on the material dimension of our telepathic systems.
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Covid-19 is affecting the Amazon at a significantly higher rate than other regions in the world, killing several knowers along with their knowledge about how to relate to the network of ecological telepathy that sustains the balance of the forest. Under this scenario, it is vital that we situate ourselves within the extractive dynamics of digital technologies, and question the telepathic consequences that our actions have elsewhere. Nevertheless, my point is not to say that modern western life should be more like indigenous life, nor is it to promote cultural appropriations of amerindian knowledge into our ways of living. But it is crucial that we—the networked inhabitants of digitized urban life—listen carefully to other ways of relating to the Earth, and engage in respectful and horizontal dialogues with other forms of telepathic doing and thinking in order to construct new rituals of communion amongst ourselves, with other species, and with the material world around us. This might be the only way of altering the dangerous course that digital technologies have taken as apparatus for social control and unprecedented accumulation of resources. Considering the acute crisis that we face due to Covid-19, as well as the imminent socioecological catastrophe created by capitalist systems, it is vital that we reflect on more regenerative possibilities of doing, thinking, and sensing each other at a distance.
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Notes
1. Naomi Klein, Google CEO Eric Schmidt pushing for more telehealth, remote learning, broadband. Screen New Deal. https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/

2. In her most recent book “Surveillance Capitalism”, Shoshana Zuboff further discusses the overlap between digital technologies and capitalist markets, as private companies profit on our social and spatial relations connected to the internet.

3. Ayahuasca is a medicinal brew used by spiritual leaders and communities in several regions of the Amazon. Beyond its hallucinogenic properties, its relevance for amazonian communities lies in its function as a connector to multiple layers of life and reality.

4. In Spanish, it is common to refer to those who bear ancestral knowledge and wisdom as sabedores, which literally translates into “knowers”.

5. At Ars Electronica in 1982, Ascott used satellite technologies in order to perform a global simultaneous toss of the I Ching (Ascott 2003a), bringing multiple sites together through a techno-spiritual encounter. In 1989, also at Ars Electronica, Ascott presented “Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth” where participators from around the world used telematic networks in order to create and transform texts and images inspired in James Lovelock, a british chemist who referred to Gaia as the dynamic and interconnected flow of life energies that creates and sustains Planet Earth (Shanken 2003, p. 70).

6. Roy Ascott is referred to as a visionary in multiple texts compiled by Edward Shanken, a term that I find highly problematic due to its historical connotations related to religious messianism and progress.

7. In 2017, The Guardian reported on human rights abuses in mining practices in countries like Colombia, Myanmar, and Peru, are tied to the production of smartphones and TVs. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/apr/07/tech-companies-conflict-minerals-rights-abuses-verisk-maplecroft  

​8. In an article for The New York Times, Kara Swisher discusses the increasing consumption of hallucinogenics such as LSD or ayahuasca in Silicon Valley, as a source for inspiration in the start-up world. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/opinion/elon-musk-burning-man-drugs-lsd.html

9. To know more about El Cuenco de Cera, please visit their website https://quiasma.co/badi-kati-narise-tuayire

10. The book is currently not available in English, but a free PDF version in Spanish can be downloaded in the following link: https://idartesencasa.gov.co/arte-ciencia-y-tecnologia/libros/curacion-como-tecnologia-basado-en-entrevistas-sabedores-de-la

11. Santos’ approach resembles the recent ontological turn in Anthropology characterized by scholars such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo Kohn, and Philippe Descola, who perform a decolonial deep listening of Amazonian knowledge as profound philosophical traditions with their own theoretical propositions, not as pre modern sensibilities or as symbolic equivalents to western modern thought (Viveiros de Castro 2014, p.48).
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Bibliography
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Ascott, R. (2003a). Art and Telematics: Towards a Network Consciousness (1984). In E. A. Shanken (Ed.), Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (pp. 232–246). University of California Press.

Ascott, R. (2003b). Back to Nature II: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (1995). In E. A. Shanken (Ed.), Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (pp. 327–339). University of California Press.

Ascott, R. (2003c). Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace? (1990). In E. A. Shanken (Ed.), Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (pp. 232–246). University of California Press.

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