For the 8th edition of post(s), we are accepting academic essays that examine problematics proposed by our new guest editor, Adriana Salazar (Universidad Autónoma de México). post(s) publishes academic research papers, and also experimental and performative forms of writing and knowledge production.The Call for Papers is open until April 15, 2022. The proposals should be submitted through the OJS platform. For more details on the publication process, please visit Information.

The next issue of post(s) invites us to destabilize the ontological division between the living and the inert. This division understands the living as that which autonomously thrives and reproduces, while defining the inert as that which is sterile, without agency, a wasteland and therefore disposed to the will of the living for expansion. Thanks to this separation, hegemonic ways of knowing, occupying and extracting this planet we inhabit are sustained, and therefore thinking about and dismantling it is a matter of urgency. For this, we want to start from the articulation between knowledge that converges in the vortex of artistic practices and concerns that have been emerging from naturocultural thought (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017,141), which originates in a crossing of knowledge from various fields of the humanities, social sciences and life practices: the affirmation of diverse worlds that produce from themselves multiple orders, multiple natures and multiple epistemologies. Within this field, diverse theoretical tools have been produced that have helped to reveal how this and other divisions fracture worlds in concrete ways. The word geontopower (Povinelli, 2016), for example, is particularly useful to us: according to this concept, things named as "living" become entrenched in an economic regime of reproduction that enables them to fracture the inert. Rocks (geos), and with these a wide spectrum of things trapped on the inert side of the divide, consequently become a resource or available matter, and thus a multitude of sentient and speaking entities is systematically perceived as mute.

Following this logic, we wish to inquire into this silence, observing how geontopower generates silences of various kinds. For example, it silences the voice of native peoples in occupied territories, considering the absence of humanity in their bodies. It silences rivers in order to take control of their courses. It silences the voice of minerals in order to extract them from the bowels of the earth. It silences the voice of the trees to see in them timber materials and silences everything that does not correspond to the narrow definitions of "life" that serve the production of capital. Even in metropolitan contexts in which the regime of the livin "”understood as reproduction"”rules seemingly unanimously over the inert, there are voices silenced by these kinds of divisive words: colonies, plots, chinampas and other inter-species community networks in which a certain kind of vitality endures.

In accordance with the above, we ask ourselves: How can we listen again to the silenced voices of the inert? What voices currently occupy our listening? Upon their arrival, the First Nations of today"™s North American territories raised the question of the ontological status of the new occupants, upon hearing the strange metallic sounds emitted by their phonatory devices: "Are these newcomers (Europeans) people?" (Morrison 2013, 38). By turning this question onto those of us who usually utter it"”are we really people, for example, who have inherited colonial epistemic traditions?"”this summoning may acquire new resonances and possible spaces of openness. Together with the peoples mentioned above, we would like to delve into the problematic folds of "human" voices: "personhood," for example, could here be rethought of as a situated definition that is founded on relations of conversation and reciprocal actions between entities, worlds, and natures, and not on conceptual divisions and their consequent violences (Krenak 2020, Kopenawa 2018, Rivera Cusicanqui 2016). Accordingly, the rocks (geos) could be murmuring something that needs to be heard.

In line with these and other provocations not yet glimpsed in this call, for this issue of post(s) we call upon those to whom the"inert things"speak. We wish to receive contributions from those who, from their own life or research practices, are explicitly interpellated by what María Puig de la Bellacasa calls the more-than-human worlds (2017, 13): those worlds decentered from the capitalocentric regime that establishes and insists on the divisions between nature and culture, between humanity and non- humanity, between life and non-life. We would like to open space to those who, through diverse forms of political imagination, envision other worlds in which it is possible to give voice to that which is believed to be inert and without agency. We also contemplate other experimental and unusual ways of approaching this field of problems from the poetic potencies of text, sound, image and their different intersections. We seek approaches that come from different territorialized spaces whose materiality whispers, sings or shouts in a particular way. We invoke the voices of jungles, plains, forests, deserts, hills, rivers, lakes, springs, minerals, plants, animals, cities, artifacts and everything that from its own features, tensions or forces proposes alternatives to the hegemonic human voices.

We call for feeling and thinking about these and related issues: deep listening experiences, speculative fabulations, object biographies, relations between ontologies and ways of knowing, linguistic diversities, naturocultural thinking, political ontology, political ecology, agroecology and other outbursts of life in territories fractured by some form of geontopower.

With this, we open the journal as a space to challenge the divisions that have been established to name, know, govern, extract, capitalize, dispossess and annihilate "inanimate" things in their apparent absence of voice. Likewise, we propose a dialogue between epistemologies, ontologies and contexts for which the call of certain living entities, insistently silenced, is understood as a matter of both local and planetary survival.

 

Kopenawa Yanomami, Davi. 2019. "Piedras eléctricas", en B. Santos, Curación como tecnología, Bogotá: Instituto Distrital de las Artes Idartes, pp. 44-52.

Krenak, Ailton. 2020. O amanhã não está à venda, São Paulo: Companhia das letras.

Morrison, Kenneth. 2013. "Animism and a proposal for a post-Cartesian anthropology", en The Handbook of Contemporary Animism Routledge, editado por Graham Harvey, octubre 31, pp. 38-52, en https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315728964.ch3. Consultado el 4 de abril de 2021.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. "The Three Figures of Geontology", en Geontologies: a Requiem to Late Liberalism, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 2-29.

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2015. Matters of Care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2018. Un mundo ch'ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis. Buenos Aires, Tinta Limón.

 

Adriana Salazar is a Colombian artist, researcher and educator currently based in Mexico City. Her projects are situated in territories where the living and the inanimate are redefined, approaching them from the articulation between diverse knowledge and practices. Conceived as open and long-term research, they start from the appropriation of certain epistemic traditions, to turn them around and open a place for collaborative processes, museological experiments, experimental writings, discussion forums, pedagogical spaces, and other processes of construction of other types of knowledge. Since 2015, her research processes have focused on the transformations and resistance movements (both human and non-human) specific to the Lake Texcoco region, as well as the water crises in the metropolitan area of Mexico City. Adriana has a degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá, a Master in Philosophy from the Universidad Javeriana in the same city and a PhD in Art and Design from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She teaches in the Visual Arts program at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and is a workshop leader and an advisor for cultural projects. She also writes texts, books and articles for artistic, academic and informative publications.