Passion in a field of echoes

An introductory note around A Toda Raja

Luis Guerra Miranda

“Poetry is a deeply political act.”

Cecilia Vicuña in conversation with Camila Marambio.

“Ce que peut essentiellement un émancipé, c’est être émancipateur: donner non pas la clef du savoir mais
la conscience de ce que peut une intelligence quand elle se considère comme égale à toute autre et
considère toute autre comme égale à la sienne.”
Jacques Rancière1

To read is a bodily experience. An experience that a body enacts. There is no such thing
as reading without a body. When we are reading we are experiencing, perceiving, that
which happens to exist just in front of us, generally between our hands, before our eyes.
I’m saying: when we are reading, because you are never alone when reading. In fact,
thousands are there reading at the same time, there, throughout your locality, you are a
point through which a multiplicity happens without anxiety. Therefore, it is a body, a
particular one, through which a manifold reality becomes possible. When reading the
words of other/s, as when you are reading our own words, we are immediately exposed
towards the words of someone else, doubling us; or like when you are reading the
fragmentary traces of a body that has already disappeared from a landscape you are
inhabiting, you are there with that other not there anymore; or even when you are
reading a subtle gesture of a hand touching us, or when a ghostly presence of a pale
light slightly presses your eyelids on a winter morning; or also when you are reading
something you can’t understand, what we are experiencing is a loss of that self we are
forced to be. You are losing your Self and subtracting your-self from the continuity of
an existent structure. When reading, passionately, the thinnest existence of a possible
assurance of an “I”, gets lost. At that precise instant as such the act of reading
emancipates what we are materially, losing the given certainty of any order. We are
falling into an abysmal infinity that vibrates, ex-posing us to other frequencies of sense.

Certainly, I am here supposing the existence of a passionate reading. What is this word
doing here: passionate? Why am I selecting this overcharged old-timer notion? Well, I

1
Jacques Rancière, Le Maître Ignorant, Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard,
1987), p. 68.
guess it is because it is an outlawed word nowadays. To be passionate, to feel passion of
and for something seems to be at odds, or out-of-frame, in the suspicious times where
we in-exist. Passion is an emotion, a barely controllable emotion. An extreme example
of this passion is when someone is reading poetry. Yes, another outlawed word today:
poetry. A poetry like that of María Salgado2 or Martín Espada3, of María Zambrano or
Sunni Patterson4. Poetry as the poetry this conversation convokes between the bodies of
Cecilia and Camila. Because, I must say, this conversation is a poem. That is its nature.
It's a conversation of two bodies building a tissue poem. A membrane. And what you
will read, and therefore experience, is a resonance of that happened conversation, a
song, an enchantment that will pull you in that net, forcing you to be a space for that
resonance to endure.5
This is not a passion produced only by the clouds of meanings being transferred like
ghosts by the words, but a passion imprinted in the materiality of the words themselves,
their forms, their sounds, the encoded resonances coming through them.

It was this flux of reverberance running through my body, as inexistance6, that I

experienced as passion. A passion born in a field of echoes. The reading of this
conversation is an oscillatory movement where a field emerges morphogenetically, an
echo upraises itself through a labyrinthic spiderweb of bodies throughout time, or
through what happens to be called history. I call this sudden inexistent phenomenon,
rising like an invisible chain of mountains, an echoicity, a frictional map produced by

2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAYXM_xbWLE
3
http://www.martinespada.net/uploads/6/9/9/8/69989673/vivas_to_those_who_have_failed_cycle.pdf
4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwtDfKpqxeo
5
There is this precious moment when Cecilia and Camila are talking about what wasn’t destroyed in
Chile. They are talking and then Cecilia asks: “Why Brandon is connected with Chile? Why Brandon is
connected to sound? I would like to start with this. I told you that in the mornings Jim talks and I take
notes. And the notes I take are his words a little bit disrupted by me, and with my commentaries. So, I
thought that as a structure for our conversation, we can insert little pieces or poems or cites from other
people, and also, when necessary, the voice of Jim, who participates in our dialogue.” From there, they
go to what Jim has said about their conversation about mushrooms. That reference makes Cecilia to say
about language: “I understand language to be that interconnectivity, but not language as just words, but
all forms of language. The language that bacteria speak to each other, the language that subatomic
particles speak to one another, the language of smells (…) In language, metaphors are the mushrooms.”
Each element of the conversation works as a threshold, taking us towards a series of pathways that
already are fully inhabited by multiple resonances.
6
This notion of inexistence comes from French philosopher Alain Badiou. In his philosophy we can find,
as the American philosopher Bruno Bosteels has also pointed out, two notions of the inexistent. One that
refers to the laws of appearing, and that of a real change in the worlds. The inexistent is that existence
with a minimum intensity within the given ordered world. An event can sublate, to lift up, to a maximum
degree of existence, those who stay in an inexistent condition. An event doesn’t need to be “sublime”, on
the contrary, it rests in a series of weak gestures, “les moindres gestes”, like the tone and words used in
this conversation.
the forces of diverse echoic reverberating bodies colliding. It is impossible to
preconceive its event. The bodies are touched by a litany of echoic remembrances that
re-membrane a new appearing. Another multiple body of bodies is therefore in motion.
A relational perceptive performativity is taking place, waging, wandering.7

The echo is the deferred return of a sound. Detached from any specific object, apart
from any phenomenon or manifestation, the echo itself is pure evocation. Unlike a
shadow, which produces an effect of proximity, an echo introduces a distance, a defect
of path and delay. In this deferring the echo is a fragmentation, a multiplication and
disturbance of an original sound. This defect characterizes the echo due to its
dependency on surfaces. There isn’t an echo without obstacles or impediments through
its trajectory, without bodies enduring its ex-sistance. The echo doesn’t return but
through mediations and impediments that extend it. Scattered upon the surfaces, on the
curvatures, the echo is what remains, what subsists, resounding. Echo is a leftover of a
disappeared entity, a failed trace.

“and that is what we are here for, to live for that possibility. To be the living memory.”
Cecilia Vicuña in conversation with Camila Marambio.

I can remember a song: Victor Jara’s “Luchín”8: “Frágil como un volantín, en los techos
de Barrancas, jugaba el niño Luchín, con sus manitos moradas”. That song was sung to
me by my aunt María many nights when I was a child. That song was written by Victor
Jara, teacher, theater director, poet, singer-songwriter and political activist, who was
murdered by the Dictatorship in Chile days after the Coup. That tiny act of resistance
was knitting a spiderweb, singing that song during the darkest night of Chile. That act
7
In another point of the conversation, Cecilia returns to a sudden encounter produced after she performed
in Argentina. It is here that she meets Argentinian singer, poet, folklorist, Leda Valladares, who is well
known for her recollective work of the “bagualas”, an anonym musical genre originally from Northwest
Argentina. Cecilia explains: “At the end of my performance Leda (who was in the public) stands up and
says: "I want to greet Cecilia Vicuña because she is singing the most archaic song of America, the song
that is conserved in one place in America, which is the high plateau of northwestern Argentina, and this
song has been lost for hundreds of years, and has been reborn with Cecilia. And she says that, so that
everyone will hear it. And I'm amazed, because I had no idea it was like that. And she comes up to me at
the end, grabs me by the arm, and violently rebukes me like that, and says to me, "And where did you
learn to sing like that? (...) And I say, "I didn't learn this anywhere! It comes out, it comes out, I don't
know what it is, it comes out on its own." "Oh," he says, "I'll tell you. I'm going to take you to my house."
And he grabs me by the wing, and he took me to his house, and he made me hear, and then with that I had
an impressive revelation of where this thing I do came from, and I understood the vocal lineage. That
comes, of course, from Africa, through Tibet, Mongolia, goes down to America by land on one side, and
on the other side goes down by sea by canoe.”
8
Victor Jara, La Población, 1972. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZPxPs1vX0w
was raising an echoic field. Today I sing that song to my son. That song is not only
charged by the accumulative experience of my body. It has been charged through an
entire memory field of bodies, forcing geographies, nationalities, periods or systems of
our shared present. The body of that song, its sound, words, endures anarchistorically
inscribing what occurs with us, between us, beyond ourselves. In this sense, a little act
like this one is like what the Quipus were unfolding, as Cecilia explains in the
conversation:
“The quipu is 5,000 years old, which makes it probably even older than writing in the Middle East. So, it
has been used as a record-keeping system. (…) They have hundreds and hundreds of permutations that
allow, just by the twisting, coloring, and positioning of the knot, and the number of twists that it has—the
encoding of information in the quipu is just as large as it is in the alphabet. And so, the kinds of
information encoded in the quipu are of every order: Historical, mythical, poetical, musical, and the one
that the Europeans understood were the statistical ones refering to the taxes. So, if you look for the quipu
online, they say that it is a mnemonic device, for keeping statistics, which is 1 per cent of the truth. And
there are two quipu, in addition to the tactile quipu. There is the virtual quipu meaning that it exists only
in the minds of people. And that is the one that interests me the most. It’s called ceque, and I have done
many works for that ceque. And it is the idea that Cuzco is the center of the quipu, and there are forty-one
lines that connect Cuzco to the sources of water in the universe, in all directions. So there are virtual,
mental lines, that are sight-lines between Cuzco and each one of those sites at the top of mountains. And
throughout, there are temples. But temples can be nothing! They can be a hole in the ground. A temple
can be just a spring that happens to cross. It can be a stone. You know, this to me is the most beautiful
thing: How these temples, huacas they are called in Quechua, these sacred sites, are places for gathering
the awareness of the people, of the responsibility to care for water and for distribution of water as well.
(…) So for 100 years, people kept doing quipus. And the Spaniards were very happy, because they
thought this was nothing, until the Spaniards started to take over the land of the people. And the people
saw that the Spaniards had these tribunals, and these laws written on paper, so they came to the tribunals
with their quipus, saying, “Here is the testimony of my ownership, or the ownership of this community of
this land.” That’s when the quipus were forbidden and burned. And everybody who was a wise person of
the quipu, which in all the books it says “men” or “quipucamayoc,” meaning the keeper of the quipus,
was killed. It seems that women were also quipucamayoc.”

I have read Cecilia-Camila’s book as if I was reading a quipu, a manifold conversation,

through which, by reading them, I was really hearing them. A dialog inhabited by
millenary wisdoms, inner present constellations, Andean philosophies.
I felt sometimes I was there, being with them, without interrupting them, without being
noticed. Listening these whispers, these two songs. Talking or writing, can’t be sure
here about the difference. Talking through our present, polluted by interrupting
machineries, and even through these machineries, these two absolute voices were
knitting a dialogue unsure of its “proper” outcome. Why I felt that way? I guess that is
the capacity of language, to bring something unknown from liminal experiences. This
text has emerged from a conversation in English and also produced from the interior of
a Spanish accent, an accent from my country, if you want, a Chilean language, which is
already exposed in the title of the book, A Toda Raja. Some of these words are heavily
charged with a familiarity from where I can’t escape. Someone could possible think
here in the Proustian experience of remembering through descriptions, or the Freudian
uncanniness. It is not that kind of familiarity. It is a familiarity without any nostalgia for
the past, nor a disturbance of the present. It is rather, here in all its mighty power, an
antipoetic familiarity of recognizing the brutality of the language from there. A brutality
so raw sometimes, so oceanic, so shaky. I can’t translate you that brutality. But you can
feel it by becoming a space to its echoicity.9

I know Cecilia and Camila’s works. I am writing this introduction thanks to the
encounter of so many planets. And I had the opportunity of reading the book before its
publication. When reading the book, I immediately felt the kind of familiarity that the
blinking of an eye produces, as it was so many times suggested by Peter Berger. I felt
participant. I felt part of a community without the necessity of its entity. A communal
experience that happens through the reading itself my body was producing. I felt,
without regret, the spider threads being worked around me.

9
If there is something that has really throw me into the reading of this conversation I must confess the
sorrow and sadness it provoked me the narrative of Cecilia’s oblivion during so many years in Chile. As
part of an entire generation who has made home outside of Chile, I felt very personal her description of
the authoritarian forms so imbedded yet in our culture. That brutality, as Cecilia and Camila expose, it has
its inner origins in the colonizing minds, the words of the master, and the brutal exclusion of any other
considered foreign to the “civilizational machinery”. Cecilia argues: “The effect of this exclusionary
attitude in Chile has been that if you only value knowledge from above and not the one that comes from
the bottom up, meaning the wisdom of the social struggles of the peoples, especially the native people,
los pueblos originarios, it is far easier to disregard them completely. This is how the effect of the
dictatorship, the ostra con limón, is perpetuated. Today when the Mapuche people and all indigenous
peoples are accused of terrorism and are terrorised and tortured by the state, there is complete indifference
in Chile and it doesn’t even make it to the news. Before the military coup, artists and intellectuals in Chile
participated fully in these struggles, but after the Avanzada effect over Chilean culture and the new
orientation of the art world in the Northern hemispheres from the ’80s on (the Reagan–Thatcher effect,
which unleashed the cult of greed), artists and intellectuals live in a separate world, in an academic bubble
only concerned with their careers.” Camila is right at citing Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui when she says:
“what enters into coalition is not social classes but historic horizons, in other words it is as if the past and
the present are in constant struggle with each other, and the past does not become subsumed and
exceeded, rather it remains alive and for this very reason, it presents tremendous complexity.” She goes
on to talk about “internal colonialism” and sees this as a system of domination. She says, “Coloniality is a
state, it is an abstract entity. Colonialism is active, it is embedded in subjectivity. Internal colonialism is
internalized in each subjectivity.”
The present book invites you to that experience, in fact, you have to leave your Self to
be driven by these two voices, by the geographies they are forming.

Arachnid affects and final ideas

“Como dije el otro día en la reunión en Pioneer Works, toda mi vida ha consistido en hacer actos que
son un fracaso, continuamente rechazados, no vistos, continuamente invisibles. Entonces yo podría
pensar así. Pero también puedo pensar al revés,” November 12, 2017, Cecilia Vicuña’s house on Beach
Street, New York City.

“My whole life has consisted of doing acts that are a failure, continually rejected,
unseen, continually invisible” Cecilia says. This conversation has been taking place for
years between Camila and Cecilia. This book is but a snippet of an infinite number of
hours of a sisterly talk, where both have shared not only memories and ideas but
emotions. In that sense, we can think of this book as another failure, a thin slice of an
intense dispossessed body interrupting our situation, as an event.
I must say that their conversation reminded me of Fernand Deligny’s words about the
spiders:

“Feeling somewhat Arachnean myself, I mean no insult to spiders or to humans, and just as a spider does
not need to have tasted some prey in order to begin weaving its web, while the first network of my own
devising was being woven, I was radically unaware of the reason behind this making, though it required
some determination on my part.”10

What I felt during my reading, and in fact, through the conversation, was an arachnid
companionship, a lost form of solidarity resting just in forms-forces like this book as a
material entity. To be radically unaware of the reasons is still today a radical position.
There is a radical unawareness in this conversation that resists today’s obsessive full-
consciousness, like a weapon of the weak, like Violeta Parra’s “musguito”, in the open
air. This conversation is an organic machinery knitting a territory upon the given
territory, like the map in Borges’ tale On Exactitude of Science: “a Map of the Empire
whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”
We can find an unfinished map without borders in the words and voices you will hear in
this body. Like Deligny, I think Cecilia and Camila are building a raft too, made of
10
Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean and other texts, trans. Drew S. Buck (Minneapolis: Univocal
Publishing), p. 35.
arachnid affects, formed in fragile conditions throughout different times and places,
surfaces and cavities, bodies and languages, memories and forgetfulness, mountains and
earthquakes, to which we are collectively invited.11

I will end this introduction describing my conditions of weaving: with my 10 months

old boy on my legs, writing with a blue pen on my craft A5 notebook, meanwhile my
partner plays with León building a “terrier”, both disguised with scarfs as tails because,
of course, we are wolves, again. I am remembering now the chaosmotic thoughts of a
former Argentinean guerrillero, telling me that there aren’t politics to discuss, only
political choices and acts to decide. That is the political act. There is nothing utopian in
the daily praxis of a dialogue that Cecilia and Camilia embraced, on the contrary, it was
a decisive act that hasn’t ended. Here we are invited to dance with them, to be part of a
spiderweb, a tejerla con ellas.

Luis Guerra Miranda

Barcelona, 2019

11
Fernand Deligny (1913-1996) is known because of his work particularly with children with deep
autism. All his activities were named by him as “attempts”. The last one, which endured from 1967 to
1996, known as The Cevennes’ Attempt, was a continuous territory formed by bodies in companionship.
He liked to name it as “the raft” (le radeau). When reading this introduction Camila call my attention to
the fact that Cecilia has created "rafts" in New York streets and the Hudson River in the 80's and most
recently, in the Mississippi, where she assembled her "Snake Raft to Escape the Flood" (About to
Happen, Center for Contemporary Arts, New Orleans, 2017.)