Spelling desire
A proposal by Jonas Van and Chienne de Garde, with visual interventions by Juno B.
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2020
2 channels video, stereo, 12'
What would happen if the desire operated only in the unpredictable? Or if we understood the
inherent mutability of nature as its non negotiable limit? Or if we were imbued to believe in
spells as a practice of resumption and restitution?
The speculative field that involves us in these questions leads us to the imaginative exercise
of the real crosses of worlds that we aim to access, those who can only be experienced
when we perceive and assimilate the circularity of time. Despite a whole history of looting
and violation materialized in history, it was from elaborations of ancestral pacts and future
fabulations that we arrived here.
Starting from the ideas that the desire is not neutral and that every gesture carries a spell,
we conjure the possibility of encounters as paths to a perceptual transition, witch help us to
reallocate untranslatable senses. The act of imaginate vocabularies is a radical exercise of
desire. To refute the imagetic genesis of our retinas changes time in its structure that, in
your bases, annihilate possibilities of plural readings of the world.
Understanding that imagination becomes possible from a critical and collective sense, we
propose to act in the elaboration of circumstances of complicity, where overlapping subjectivities,
forcibly subordinated and deprived by global necropolitics of precariousness,
racism and abjection, can effectuate (individually and collective) decolonial practices of
transformation.
Believing in intuition or in spells it's to believe in your own body.
images start in the minute 01 and 13 seconds
Based on the thought of Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, in her book Visualizing the body, where the author analyzes Western cognitive understanding and points out that it is essentially constructed by the sense of sight and by mental exercise, since it is inherited from the Cartesian tradition where the body and the spirit are separated, Jonas Van and Chienne de Garde propose Kebranto, an audiovisual piece materialized through the gestures of two bodies that create a narration of radical fantasies, questioning the neutrality of desires and their political origins. Kebranto, in Brazilian Portuguese, is a spiritual spell that is done from the gaze, which breaks the spirit into pieces and prevents its movement.
Cisgenerity being a tool of Western hegemony, it is crystallized in Switzerland in a violent way, as well as the desires which result from it. This crystallization makes possible the updating of Swiss coloniality and neutrality, which are inscribed in history and in the normative bodies, which structure the past and the present as a repetition of gestures and traditions.
With Kebranto, the artists repeat other pacts and alliances opening portals to cause a decrystallization. Ancient alpine mountains that sprout small precious stones between their fissures, avalanches that reveal erotic prisms and flood the kitsch binary, voices that orchestrate telepathy and self-combustion, rusty carmine color in terrestrial and lunar craters that dream of an extra collision sensory, infinite open eyes that tear faith in white cis men to pieces and smear their colonial languages.
Kebranto is a gesture. Every gesture is charged with magical power. Western thought learns to forget intuition and spells. Kebranto recalls that our own bodies are powerful, as well as the energy that lives there, it is a gesture of recovery of this power to destructure the colonial operation.
Curated by Valentina D’Avenia and Céline Burnand
live@ Espace Eeeeh! a Nyon, et Chienne de Guarde
Swiss neutral
Du 2 au 11 octobre 2020
