post(s) is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ. The journal engages with contemporary debates in cultural studies and artistic practices, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to the study and production of visual culture and contemporary thought, as well as to critical inquiry and theoretical reflection. The thematic focus of each issue is developed collaboratively by the journal’s editorial directors and invited guest editors. post(s) foregrounds professional, artistic, and academic praxis, positioning creative practice as a central axis of the publication. In addition to publishing scholarly research articles, the journal also provides a platform for experimental and performative forms of writing and knowledge production that expand conventional formats of academic inquiry.
USFQ Press, Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ
post (s) is a publication of the College of Communication and Contemporary Arts of Universidad San Francisco de Quito and USFQ Press. Authorship rights are the property of the authors of each article. All the content of the publication, except when otherwise indicated, is published under the the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Commercial use of the publication or its possible derivative works is not allowed. All articles should be cited using the citation letterhead recommendations. This is a summary and not a substitute for the license. To read the full details of the terms and conditions of the current license, visit this link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en
This issue of post(s) is an invitation to approach the intersection of art, research, and environment as a powerful way of living and communicating through a passion for knowledge, through the untamed nature of the artistic field, and through environmental attentiveness. How can we learn to listen to the land, to engage in reciprocal dialogue with it, sustained by humility? A radical ecology, marked by a revealing intimacy.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ilana Boltvinik https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Shapes of Grief. Witnessing the unbearable
The essay «The Shapes of Grief. Witnessing the Unbearable» was originally published in volume 112, No. 3 of The Yale Review, September 9, 2024. We are deeply grateful to the author for allowing us to make this translation and to the artist Joumana Medlej for sharing her work with us.
Copyright (c) 2025 Christina Sharpe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
This article addresses the creative and investigative process of the Archivo de Voces Espectrales, (AVEs), which consists of a collection of sound recordings that explore the “spectra of the voice.” By describing the ethical, aesthetic, and methodological aspects of this project, the notion of “epistemologies of the flock” is proposed, offering an alternative perspective to both research and artistic production within artistic and academic spheres.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jorge David García https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Nature through Acceleration. Regimes of Visuality in the Guano Ecosystem Between the 19th and 20th Centuries
This essay examines the transformation of visuality regimes associated with guano extraction at the Chincha Islands in Peru from the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. These transformations are framed as part of a broader shift in the relationship between the consolidation of capitalism in the Peruvian context and its increasingly technocratic approach to nature. The research traces a transformation in the extractive imagination of guano through nonfiction writing and the analysis of visual archives that circulated during that period.
Copyright (c) 2026 Raúl Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This academic analysis explores the role of the performativity of the vice presidency in Ecuador, examining it from a historical context to its public perception. The performative nature of political power is reflected in the repetition of political scripts and actions that defined the behavior of 16 vice presidents between 1979 and 2019 in Ecuador's republican history. The document brings these actions into memory, employing performance as a methodology to understand political power and the contestation of representation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gabriela Rosero Delgado, Juan Arellano Jara, Jorge Carrillo Grandes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
This essay reflects on contemporary phenomena occurring in cemeteries that are associated with information and communication technologies (ICT), such as the implementation of QR codes on tombstones and the #GraveTok trend popularized on the social media platform TikTok. In a context where death—like other dimensions of everyday life—is subject to the laws of capital, and based on the hypothesis that the networked space is a stage that, though virtual, is no less real, the essay seeks to examine an era of virtual dead and online altars.
Copyright (c) 2025 cora levin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Este artículo explora el proceso de constitución mediante la escritura colaborativa, integrando marcos psicoanalíticos, filosóficos y estéticos. Examinamos la interacción de elementos que conforman formaciones relacionales y proponemos un modelo de constitución como un proceso tenso y a la vez coherente. El texto encarna una negociación continua de significado, agencia y afecto, sirviendo como producto y testimonio del acto de constitución.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lucas Andino, Olivia Joret https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
A Story Within a Story, Within a Story, Within a Story...
The original version of this essay, "A Story Within a Story, Within a Story, Within a Story...", was published in 2015 By Art & Theory Publishing, in the catalogue of the eighth edition of the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose. We are deeply grateful to the author and to the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, which commissioned the essay, for allowing us to translate this work.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elvira Dyangani; Bernarda Troccoli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Corporeal Division of the World, or Aesthetic Ruination
“The Corporeal Division of the World, or the Aesthetic Ruination” is the second chapter of the book Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, published by Stanford University Press in 2023. We are infinitely grateful to Rizvana Bradley and the publisher for allowing us to translate and share this work in Spanish.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rizvana Bradley, Anamaría Garzón Mantilla https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Autoritarismo, censura y lo cuir en el Chile (pos)golpe
Este ensayo analiza la censura en el arte chileno contemporáneo como un espacio de disputa sobre soberanía, libertad de expresión y disidencia queer. A través de cuatro casos—Complejo Conejo y la represión estatal, Bando 19 y la censura en la era Jarpa, la prohibición de Casa Particular y la polémica en torno a Ideología de Felipe Rivas—explora cómo las estéticas subversivas desafían narrativas hegemónicas y el control estatal, revelando los límites de la libertad artística.
Copyright (c) 2025 aliwen munoz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
More than fifteen years have passed since the inclusion of the Rights of Nature in the Latin American constitutional frameworks of Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2010). Since then, the rights of more-than-human beings have become consolidated as a legal-political tool within a growing universal jurisdiction of Mother Earth. However, these advances coexist with an intensification of climate crises and the aggressive expansion of extractive frontiers into Indigenous territories and fragile ecosystems. This text brings together fragments from the *Non-Human Rights* project, a series of conversations held in Ecuador in 2012 with key figures involved in the constitutionalization of the Rights of Nature. These dialogues reflect on the political, cosmological, and legal foundations of the movement, and bear witness to a moment that may seem utopian today, but whose memory is crucial to preserve in order to continue imagining a more just and less violent future.
Copyright (c) 2025 Paulo Tavares https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Community shelters have emerged as key spaces for care and resilience for children after natural disasters, as evidenced by the 2016 earthquake in Bahía de Caráquez, Ecuador. In these environments, children developed resilience and agency through mutual care, play, and community participation—actions that redefined public spaces in the absence of state support. Through participatory video, their perspectives and experiences were recorded, highlighting their active role in shaping new social dynamics. This analysis underscores the importance of recognizing community action and strengthening participatory public policies that foster collective resilience and address the needs of children in crisis contexts.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nicolás Schvarzberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Haibun of The Castle Lagoon. A Ruinous Convergence Between Natura & Polis
This work offers an aesthetic view about the surroundings of a lagoon located at El Castillo, an ejido bordering the city of Xalapa, where human and no-human interests converge, and some realities overlap expressed in the encounter between Natura & Polis. A series of Japanese inspired poems are interwoven with the appearance of ruined buildings along a road opened in 2015, and the controversies it has provoked.
Copyright (c) 2026 Alejandro Sánchez Vigil https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Can the most dystopian materials engendered by technology suggest a new way of embodying the world? Dolores plásticos is a video essay constructed from found footage, 3D scans, animations, and artificial intelligence that delves into accumulation, mutability, and excess as sensory experiences that pierce us in a turbulent present. The essay, written as a diary, narrates the artistic decisions that guided the video’s direction, and seeks to embody a form of thought born from excess and saturation.
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrea Guízar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This article presents two artistic works as part of a research project that combines ethnography and acoustic studies. Drawing on listening practices in Chimborazo, and through field recordings, sound walks, and visual translations of sound, the research approaches the high mountain as a landscape in transition. Rather than documenting loss, the text proposes listening as a situated practice for sustaining the relationship between humans and the more-than-human within a context of socio-ecological fragility.
Copyright (c) 2026 Estefanía Piñeiros https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Notes From the Unfolding of a Lithium Battery
This essay is based on the artistic research project (Li)temia, which examines lithium in its dual role as a psychotropic drug and an energy resource through a self-theoretical practice that intertwines material and symbolic agencies. Lithium emerges as an element that permeates bodies, technologies, and territories, revealing regimes of functionality, containment, and control. Through the doubling of the battery as a method, the text traces correspondences between human and non-human bodies and presents the research findings.
Copyright (c) 2026 Lucía Rodríguez Fernández https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This visual essay presents a series of paintings and short texts that reflect on water as a living entity, composed of a multiplicity of organisms in constant interaction. It explores the notion of the ecotone as a space where life is organized, transformed, and redefines its boundaries.
Copyright (c) 2026 María Campiglia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Topote de Acahual is an artistic community that has developed in the Tuxtlas jungle in Mexico. It is a hub of practices and conversations born in a nursery that, through its reverberations, has created a hybrid space between ecology and research, pedagogy, and artistic creation. The guide on this journey is the acahual: an ecotone or border territory that connects the jungle with the pasture, the village. To be like the acahual and activate its work, they have cultivated ten sprouts that are named as a manifesto.
Copyright (c) 2026 Mauricio Patrón Rivera, Emilia López, Ana Emilia Felker, Esteban Azuela https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Oratorio for a Constitution of the Earth
Oratorio para una Constitución de la Tierra premiered at the 16th Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador), curated by Ferran Barenblit and inaugurated in December 2023. It is a work of experimental legislative writing, conceived as a recompositional writing project built from citations of preexisting texts. The title can be read as a global constitutional charter that transcends the borders of nation-states, while also posing the challenge of how to conceptualize a new kind of non-androcentric rights—ones that encompass other nonhuman forms of life as well as those elements of our ecosystems that have traditionally been regarded as inanimate. The final form of this Constitution is that of an oratorio, meant to be performed live by four diverse female voices.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcelo Expósito https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Ñuka shuti man (My Name is) is a project that narrates the memories of the daughters of Carmelina Ushigua, a woman from the Sapara culture. She had to migrate from the jungle to the city of Puyo in Ecuador due to a forced marriage and in order to offer a better future for her children. After her displacement, she felt the need to rebuild a community similar to the one she had in the jungle, but this time on the outskirts of the city, recreating the space of her childhood.
Copyright (c) 2025 Colectivo Tawna , Sani Montahuano, Mukutsawa Montahuano, Boloh Miranda, Enoc Merino, Lucía Villaruel, Tatiana López https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Tactics of Transmisión is the first performative lecture publicly presented by the artists as part of the research they have been developing since 2022 on Puerto Rican collections at the Smithsonian Institution. This research examines the histories of accession of these collections, how they are housed in the institution’s storage facilities, and the possibilities of mediating their return to the people and places to which they belong. In this presentation, produced for the Vera List Center Conference in 2024, the artists share their experiences navigating the imperial archive as disobedient colonial subjects, as well as historical gossip, discoveries, and revelations that emerged throughout their research process.
Copyright (c) 2025 Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Sofía Gallisá Muriente https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The sculpture Mantys/Nepenthes refers to a carnivorous plant species that contains a liqueur distilled from eight plants, herbs, barks, and roots that grow in areas of the Ecuadorian Amazon affected by oil extraction. The mix represents the open wound in the local landscape. Drinking this digestive liqueur offers a bodily experience of its extractive reality and complex vitality. This visual essay traces the work’s origins and the gustatory and sensory experimentation that it offers.
Copyright (c) 2026 Martina Miño Pérez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Real and Authentic Story of a Wonderful Fruit Called Pineapple
A series of fictional letters tracing pineapple from European colonial imagination to its cultivation in England, intertwining history, archives, and fantasy. Through non- human voices and historical figures, the text exposes how extractive desire, the slave trade, and botanical science shape an imperial imaginary that persists today.
Copyright (c) 2026 Diana Barquero-Pérez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Based on artistic research around the Lithium Triangle, this text reflects on the relationships between mineral life, technology, and ecological thinking. It focuses on the processes of inquiry, experimentation, and decision-making that shaped the work, bringing together material practices, technological explorations, and critical speculation to consider how minerals can activate alternative ways of reading contemporary technologies and their modes of production.
Copyright (c) 2026 Angel Salazar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Filmar la espesura de los ecotonos del cuidado
Esta investigación propone el cine como herramienta exploratoria para captar la espesura de los momentos relacionales que configuran el sistema híbrido de gestión de residuos en la Zona Metropolitana de la Ciudad de México. En este ecosistema de límites porosos, la continuidad depende de interacciones, ajustes y prácticas de cuidado. El cine se convierte en un medio adaptado para revelar estos ecotonos y la fragilidad del sistema.
Copyright (c) 2026 Géraldine de Neuville https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This essay invites the reader to take a non-linear journey through time, moving between ideas, memories, and personal creative processes. In this text, words shift acrossa spectrum—between fragments, frequencies, interferences, and resonances—much like tuning a radio. An intimate and political reflection on motherhood, distance, extractivism, communication, and telepathy unfolds, culminating in the creation of ONDA, a 16 mm film that traces the invisible path of an HF radio signal through the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest.
Copyright (c) 2026 Sofía Acosta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
<span style="caret-color: #000000; color: #000000; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none; display: inline !important; float: none;">This volume explores the idea of constitution through the intersection of their various opposites, the micro and macro dimensions of their processes, the dissonances or harmonies of their voices, and their dependence on specific times and spaces: history, territories, and social and political processes. The intersection of these opposites—the network they weave—is the texture of what is called into being.
Copyright (c) 2025 Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This paper presents methodologies and results of a research-creation process that complexifies food as a cultural, biological, and political concept. Developed by the Lab a-PTSE research group at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, it articulates cartographies, gatherings, collective creation and speculative writing, informed by the concepts of multispecies (Haraway) and cosmopolitics (Stengers), opening multiple readings and approaches to the act of eating.
Copyright (c) 2026 Valentina Tobón , Luz Álvarez Garzón, Juan Esteban Garay https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
From the Socialist-inspired Multinational State to the Indigenous Reinvention of Plurinationality in Bolivia
This article examines the evolution of the concept of multi-plurinationality in Bolivia, from its Marxist origins and its encounter with Katarist Indianism to its inclusion in the 2009 Constitution. It analyzes the proposals for a Multinational State by Jorge Alejandro Ovando Sanz (1962), inspired by the Soviet model; Guillermo Lora (1988), from a Trotskyist perspective; and Álvaro García Linera (2003), initially based on the encounter between Indianism and Marxism, and later proposing the Latin American Plurinational State as a project for regional economic integration. The concept was adopted by peasant and indigenous organizations, leading to a constitutionalization disconnected from its core meaning, associated with self-determined ethnic territory.
Copyright (c) 2025 Salvador Schavelzon https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Recently, reparations have gained visibility as a theoretical, ethical, and methodological framework in various academic and political discussions. To such an extent that gradually, «reparations studies» are emerging as a new transdisciplinary research approach. Through the lens of reparations, academics from diverse backgrounds are mapping out a broad range of activities, skills, and subjectivities. This article examines the main theoretical reflections on the topic and some methodological steps to carry out a transmedia project on repair culture, in which a documentary, a doctoral thesis, and a docuweb engage in dialogue.
Copyright (c) 2024 Hugo Chávez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/