Invoking Art: Spirit-Seeds

Or How to Make Artistic Activity a Practice of Care^[i]

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What they didn’t do to bury me,

but forgot that I was a seed ^[ii]

—Dinos Christianopoulos

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 [I] considered [my] own empty hands. [I]

had to rely on the world to take care of [me].^[iii] 

—Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Today is Wednesday, October 9, 2024, and it’s 2:42 p.m. I’m wearing a blue shirt with small white dots. It’s about seven years old—and it shows. It fits snugly, forcing me to suck in my stomach and lift my chest almost to the height of my chin, correcting the poor posture of my back and neck. It used to belong to my younger brother, and I know it didn’t flatter him or me. It’s part of my at-home clothing, and I wear it when I want to sit down and write. Every time I go to the bathroom and look in the mirror, I tell myself: I really look like an office person! I confirm that a shirt like this is precisely the vocational prosthesis I need to type in Word and engage in mental hygiene, interpreting feelings and thoughts into words, or as an exercise in emotional organization and management, cheaper than any millennial holistic therapy. For sure.

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After writing the previous paragraph, I took a recreational break. And yes, I know, it’s quite early to have written so little, but I can't seem to concentrate. I opened YouTube and dedicated some time to karaoke: La Isla Bonita by Madonna, Eternal Flame by The Bangles, Mi Fiesta by Bandalos Chinos, and Trigal by Sandro. My intestines relax, gifting me a generous dose of serotonin. The muscle tension in my hips and lower back decreases after a healthy shot of endorphins. And cortisol levels drop enough to return my focus to this: the text. Really, you should try it. Do it when stress, overwhelm, or anxiety are taking control of your bodies as “empowered entrepreneurs.” Why don’t they teach us these things as kids? If our school classes (chemistry, music, physical education, ethics) did some cruising between classrooms, they surely would have gifted us karaoke as a powerful psycho-affective practice to heal our psyche and regulate the crazy alchemy of our neoliberal-trained body-mind-spirits.

Today, the emotion that sat me down to write is sadness. After having named it as anger, frustration, disappointment, discomfort, dissatisfaction, repulsion, boredom, and irritation, I understood that what I was actually feeling— with splinters of all the above— was sadness. This sadness has been brewing between the mistreatment and precariousness involved in making a life in the current ecosystem of contemporary art, solidifying between the anger and discomfort that grow among artists year after year due to the infamous treatment we receive from the vast majority of galleries, the unbearably classist and elitist nature of major socialization and commercialization events for artworks—primarily fairs— and the disdain shown by institutions that violate contracts and agreements, allocate public budgets arbitrarily or impose thematic agendas based on gender, ethnicity, class, citizenship, etc. As long as artists remain obedient, learn to be silent, and maintain a submissive and complacent profile with what the system demands of us, we might earn some of its favors, at least for a while. But if we raise our voices, demand, or protest against any form of mistreatment, we will be reminded of how disposable we are to this system: easily replaceable, cancelable, and forgettable. Here, care—like in so many other dimensions of life—has completely disappeared from the relational code of our artistic ecosystem, and it is the main reason for my sadness.

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Despite all this, I need to understand sadness as a mobilizing emotion. With some emotional intelligence, it allows one to slow down space-time perception and operate at different rhythms—free from the fumes of hysteria—and to enter a 'reflective mode' to find unexpected solutions to problems that seem unsolvable, something that our smartphones or smart electronic devices still do not incorporate. I came to understand this not through the didactic Pixar Animation Studios film Inside Out, but by conversing with my friend, Estonian artist Dénes Farkas, with whom I shared a time of introspection, creation, and celebration in the URRA Tigre residency program in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2017. When I met Dénes, one of the first things that caught my attention was his calm way of speaking, the serenity and meditation present in each of his movements, and how his brow and gaze added an aura of tranquility and restraint to his words. Spending time with Dénes was like inhabiting an 'other dimension' where each spoken word expanded so much that one could see within it, like fibers that, when stretched, reveal hidden messages. His healthy relationship with sadness—which he understood as a prudent and necessary deceleration of mental and emotional processes—helped him navigate challenging situations serenely and reflectively, without falling into despair or depression (Thank you for this, Dénes).

Embracing this emotion—one that has often made my body ache and my skin boil—as a 'possibility' rather than a blockage stems from my stubborn belief that there are other ways to create a life in (and with) art. Forms that do not need to conform to the avatar of the neoliberal artist, which today shapes the identity profile of every human artist to enter the game, but instead, are based on an ecology of care that fosters more supportive, cooperative, and friendly relationships.

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The current system of energy exchange—neoliberal capitalism—that dominates the collective imagination of "Westernized" societies and defines how human life is produced and reproduced, as well as how we think, feel, and exist in the world, has managed, despite all efforts of resistance, to install the libidinous avatar of the neoliberal artist into the human closet of performable identity fictions. This avatar defines what an 'artist' is and must be today to exist within the current global art ecosystem, to participate, interact, and fight for a place within its structures. Configured under the logic of competition, accumulation, and success, the neoliberal artist projects as a kind of an individualistic narcissist who rivals their peers, undertakes projects by accumulating lines of achievements in a CV, and applies for mobility or creation grants while producing works of art as sensitive luxury objects. Some of these artworks, once materialized and conceived as consumer goods, end up, if lucky, in the storage of a museum, in the showroom of a gallery, in a private collection, or, in most cases, on an Instagram profile, an online art sales platform, or furnishing the artist's home.

The ethos of the neoliberal artist has been carefully shaped by the cultural, economic, and educational institutions and apparatuses—both public and private—of the neoliberal state, to which the design of the forms, agents, and dynamics of the global contemporary art ecosystem has been inadvertently entrusted. This has limited the spectrum of subjective elaboration and the agency of the 'artist subject' to that of a 'producer' within a creative and entertainment industry, distancing it from what could be an ecology of energy exchange based on care. While this does not constitute a corollary or absolute truth about the sensitive practice and the type of relationship that every being, self-perceived as an artist, assumes and reproduces in the art milieu today, we cannot deny how heavy and difficult it is to evade it while trying to make art a sensitive activity that allows for imagining and embodying less alienating worlds based on care practices, policies of interdependence, and solidarity. With this, I do not seek to romanticize artist fiction that has previously been personified in one geography or another. Nor do I intend to formulate a new idealized paradigm of the artist's subject. What I propose is to try to open possible lines of flight towards an 'other' space of existence that allows us to experiment with less harmful ways of making a life in art.

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To begin with, we could say that one of the greatest challenges we face in opening new paths for the emancipation of art from its neoliberal function is, more than semiotic or political, of an ontological nature. Neoliberal capitalism, with all its spikes (heteropatriarchal, racial, colonial, extractivist, etc.), has colonized, among so many other spheres, the imagination of art. The essence of what art is or can be today as a human activity has been codified into the logic of hyperproduction, progress, and competition. Thus, from artists as contestants, our existence became spectacle; from artists as entrepreneurs, our existence turned into branding; from artists as denouncers, our existence became testimony. What can we do then? If we respond with real commitment to the calls from some of the most cited authors in the global art field—in curatorial texts, open call submissions, lectures, or Instagram stories—Donna Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Claire Bishop, Fred Moten, Boris Groys, or Nicholas Bourriaud—we need, above all, to tell ourselves other stories. Better stories! Stories that allow us to recover some fantasy, affection, and magic—however corny it may seem— about what the artist and artwork could be on a hyperconnected and diverse planet, where multiple onto-epistemic maps begin to splash and intertwine, bringing forth posthuman, de-anthropocentralized, and ch’ixi natures (veined, streaked, and recognized in their differences and contradictions)^[iv], as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui proposes in her writings, talks, and conferences. In this context, a figure like the artist can be powerfully nourished through these processes, germinating as a new ‘poetic symbiont’ capable of generating other possible worlds to inhabit in the future and embody them in a present in crisis.

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Our escape is possible if we attempt to view artistic activity not so much as a job or trade—terms that today seem to respond more to vocational roles and market standards than to a sensitive practice—but as a ‘mental-spiritual state’ from which we are, feel, and produce ourselves in (and with) the world in unexpected and surprising ways. In other words, we should try to conceive our poetic symbiont—political and desirous—, which we call our ‘artist self,’ not just as a producer of things, nor its materialized creations as products, but as a psychosomatic disposition capable of accessing the unexplored memories of our unconscious to transplant, from that strange space-time, spirit-seeds that, when embodied in this variegated reality, are what we call ‘artworks.’

The spectral condition of artworks—whether it be a clay and saliva sculpture, a crypto poem, an oral narration, a protest music cassette, or a watercolor on paper—could resonate, to some extent, with what Derrida formulated as hauntology^[v] in the 90s, proposing that multiple onto-epistemic structures of the world persist as ghosts or specters in various aspects of culture and society. These specters configure a non-linear and juxtaposed time, an intertwining of space-time dimensions that affect each other, destabilizing and releasing unrealized possibilities or causes from past times towards potential futures. This process is what an exciting film, image, book, or story achieves, as they are experienced, digested, and regurgitated, time and again, by different people through various material bodies. It is inhabiting what Mark Fisher—may his soul find peace—described as “the space between Being and Nothingness”^[vi] when reading The Specters of Marx, with the 'oneiric dance' of Burial’s self-titled album and Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom by The Caretaker as mnemonic-emotional prostheses. Or like the ecstatic experience of dancing at a party with a perfectly mixed selection of songs under the effects of MDMA. This urge to modify the physical, mental, and spiritual state with which we experience life arises as a rebellious response to a neo-liberalized world that feels unbearable to us.

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Art as a ‘rebellious mental-spiritual state’ of invocation.

What would it mean to conceive of art as a rebellious state of the body-mind-spirit and, in action, as an invocation that treats our works not as inert things but as spirit-seeds? Based on this ontological-epistemological delirium, I propose that works of art, understood as spirit-seeds, are living affective entities that embody ideas, concepts, stories, myths, and theories from various time-spaces, thus becoming beings rather than objects. They are alive! Just as Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa felt and thought when invoking Borderlands/La Frontera, her most sprouted and flourishing spirit-seed in contemporary decolonial thought: “[…] the work has an identity: it is a ‘who’ or a ‘what,’ and contains the presences of persons, that is, the incarnations of gods or ancestors or natural and cosmic powers. The work manifests the same needs as a person: it needs to be ‘fed,’ la tengo que bañar y vestir [I must bathe and dress it].”^[vii]

By recognizing our 'works of art' as spirit-seeds rather than mere dead objects or products, we introduce a different ontological approach that allows for a dimension of care in artistic activity; they are bodies and they are alive, embodying affections and thoughts, and, as such, they vibrate, splash, and contaminate others. This idea emerged during a conversation with Cuna anthropologist Edgar Ramírez Villalaz. Edgar shared that by considering our creations—whether an essay, a theory, a mathematical formula, or even a poem—as seeds, we are recognizing in their rhythms and existential skills that exceed us, that go beyond ourselves and our lifespan. Once conceived, our works become an organic part of the world; as artists, we operate as channels or instruments for these spirit-seeds to materialize in this reality. Every time they are seen, read, discussed, or written about, our seeds take root in our collective imagination, and every time we speak and think with them, we are watering, feeding, bathing, and dressing them so they can sprout branches and bloom into new concepts, stories, or new reference universes. We learn from their power and understand their hidden messages by being their gardener-caretakers.

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Artists as gardener-caretakers

It is also relevant to integrate the Aymara-Quechua concept of mutual nurturing of the arts (yanak uywaña)^[viii], woven by the feeling-thinking hands of the Bolivian artist and weaver Elvira Espejo Ayca (thanks to my friend-colleague Ana Milena Gómez for the reference). Creating implies a communion and reciprocal relationship between the creator of the work and the raw material that will give body to the spirit-seed. It is not simply about mastering a technique or material; it is about establishing a mutually nurturing relationship with the matter and its energy. This intimate relationship manifests in every action during the creative process. By recognizing that everything is alive—the clay, the paper, the sheep’s wool, the glass, the pigment, the hard drive, or the software we use to edit video clips—our body-mind-spirit understands that what emerges from there is a kinesthetic exchange with the matter; a process of care and mutual nurturing. In Elvira's words: “When you think that the earth nurtures you, that the water nurtures you, that the wind nurtures you, that the fire nurtures you, you must have a lot of affection and care to integrate them in the best way because we need each other. It is a balance that comes from understanding the universe.”

This does not imply that our spirit-seeds cannot circulate within a market ecosystem. Every sale of a work is an energetic exchange, even a necessary one. The problem is not whether to sell or not sell the works of art, but rather the mistreatment that occurs in this economic, intellectual, and energetic transaction. The issue is that hundreds of artists dedicate their time, thought, and creativity to creating works with specific themes for competitions—say, for a soap brand—attracted by the promise of cash prizes and exposure, only to find that everything dissolves into smoke and bubbles (of champagne).

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Or to invest lifetime structuring projects for pseudo-awards that disguise a beneficial and opportunistic acquisition as support and encouragement for a career. The problem is receiving a creation grant without fees or being paid for work in extended installments over twenty-four months. Understanding our works as spirit-seeds will not fix a system that is rotten from within, nor is it our responsibility to do so. Considering them in this way is a poetic and rebellious exercise against a system that has destroyed our relationship with art and what we do in its name. Being an artist today more than ever is a commitment to imagine, invoke, and embody other ways of existing in this world, based on policies of interdependence, reciprocity, and commonality. A tremendously difficult decision that involves emotional and psychological resistance, surviving by doing a myriad of jobs that we sometimes enjoy and sometimes do not, so we can continue to invoke stories, images, and material bodies—spirit-seeds—that help us invent other ways of living a life.

“Language is the invention of ways of life, and ways of life the invention of language,”^[ix] wrote the Argentine political scientist Diego Sztulwark, while reading Baruch Spinoza through Henri Meschonnic. An almost paranormal act of whispers, as if Meschonnic had breathed Spinoza’s thought into Sztulwark’s ears, weaving bridges of air between authors from different times and spaces.

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My witch godmothers —I say this with love and respect— Gloria Anzaldúa, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Paul Preciado, José Esteban Muñoz, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Gloria Naranjo and María Helena González (my grandmothers), have whispered in books, conferences, poems, weavings, dolls, and refrigerator magnets the spirit-seeds that led me to write my creed and invocation as a subversive practice of psychosomatic reconfiguration, which has accompanied my mornings for over a year now:

“I know Earth is a coiled serpent.

I know time is a giant snail of aragonite, calcite, and mother-of-pearl.

I know that everything is alive: air, stones, bread, smartphones, images of animals in dreams… our skin, and all the skins we put on ourselves. And I also know that everything is dead at the same time.

Our bodies are reptilian scales. They are bowls of iridescent keratin. Mirrors. Crystals that are both water and light, soil and darkness. And that is what we are: mutants. We belong to a single celestial organ with a dragontine appearance. Like our fingernails, we are ecosystems that simultaneously comprise other ecosystems, equally large but seemingly smaller than the others: racks of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. Of fear. Of beautiful and incomprehensible questions. And eternal feedback loops are produced as technological recombination of absorption, digestion, reproduction, and signification of the world. Intelligence. Resiliencies. Before being human bodies, some of us were vapors. Others were grass, and some were electromagnetic cryptograms. Or we fantastically existed as entities floating in little boats on the slime of a gastropod mollusk. And the fact is that we are dancing in squeaking spirals. We descend into the underworld. We are seeking to reach the center and explode: Boom!!!! Chaos.”^[x]

Andres Matias Pinilla, Bogotá, 2024

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^[i] Over a period of eight months, I was invited as a fellow by the WHW Akademija in Zagreb (Croatia), along with eleven artists from diverse nationalities and sociocultural backgrounds, to collectively reflect on ‘care’ as both a concept and a practice, within and beyond the artistic realm. This process led us to explore fundamental questions about care, imagining it as a possible posthuman planetary ecology grounded in interdependence, mutuality, solidarity, and reciprocity.

^[ii] Interpretation in Spanish of the poem: Τι δεν έκαναν για να με θάψουν / αλλά ξέχασαν ότι ήμουν σπόρος, 1978, by Dinos Christianopoulos.

^[iii] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013, Pg. 211. / I made a modification to the original version, changing the wording from the third person to the first person. In the original text, it is said, referring to Nanabozho (a mythological character in the culture of Indigenous peoples of North America, especially among the Anishinaabe peoples, including the Ojibwe and the Potawatomi): “He considered his own empty hands. He had to rely on the world to take care of him.”

^[iv] Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. Un mundo ch’ixi es posible: Ensayos desde un presente en crisis. Ed. Tinta Limón. 2020.

^[v] Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international (M. O. McKeon, Ed.). Routledge, 2006.

^[vi] Fisher, Mark. Ghosts Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. Zero Books, 2014, Pg. 112.

^[vii] Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987, Pg. 67.

^[viii] Espejo Ayca, Elvira. YANAK UYWAÑA. La crianza mutua de las artes. PCP Programa Cultural Política, 2022.

^[ix] Sztulwark, D. (n.d.). Antídoto Spinoza: La crítica como invención de modo de vida: https://lobosuelto.com/antidoto-spinoza-la-critica-como-invencion-de-modo-de-vida-diego-sztulwark/

^[x] Pinilla, Andrés Matías. I Know Earth, I Know Time, I Know Everything and Nothing (invocation), 2023

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