AUTOPOIESIS: Recognizing Kin Across Adjacent Topologies

AUTOPOIESIS: Recognizing Kin Across Adjacent Topologies
Allies for the Uncertain Futures part 4

Curated by Shaunak Mahbubani,
with Curatorial Advisors Vidisha-Fadescha, Eli Moon, and Madhumita Nandi

Featuring Christopher Udemzue, Jesus Hilario-Reyes, Prabhakar Pachpute, Rajyashri Goody, Elyla, Subas Tamang, Andrew Ananda Voogel, Dhrubo Jyoti, Panocha Chichimeka, Santo Miguelito y Santa Sazón, Imaad Majeed, Avril Stormy Unger, Manuel Tzoc, Khandakar Ohida, Khytul Abyed, and others

In partnership with hosts Party Office (New Delhi + documenta fifteen), Bataclan International (Mexico City) and Oyoun (Berlin)

“We cannot give up writing stories about what it means to be human that displace those that are at the foundation of Empire.” — Sylvia Wynter

In her evocation ‘Being Human as Praxis’ (2007), Wynter expands on the importance of the origin story, centring the act of auto-narration in the process of instituting oneself as full and complex human being outside the enlightenment definition of Man — a move she describes as the 'Autopoetic Turn/Overturn'. In resonance with Wynter’s proposition, AUTOPOIESIS delves into the nuances of autobiographical art practices with roots in the antipodal topologies of South Asia, Central America and the Caribbean. Deploying 'gathering' as the primary mode of knowledge production, our multiform convergences across five cities (Berlin, Kassel, Mexico City, Guatemala City, New Delhi) facilitated the sharing of personal and community stories between the culturally adjacent but geographically antipodal topologies of Central America, the Caribbean, and South Asia, as well as within each region. Through exhibitions, performances, panel discussions, parties, and most beneficially in smaller intimate sharing sessions, we unpacked the emotional labour, artistic challenges, and communal joy of publicly sharing one's most vulnerable selves in the process of reclaiming agency over our narratives.

Separated by large latitudinal distance while overlapping in longitudinal spread, both regions have a palimpsestic density of indigenous networks, erased and metamorphosised by multiple waves of colonisation. This trajectory has triggered very specific social topologies which share broad adjacencies in their dynamics of caste-colourism, extractivism, and deep-rooted cultural erasure. Coming from systemically silenced positions from within these regions and their diaspora, each of the artists speaks from their own lived experience and engagement with ancestral cosmology, deploying creative strategies to re-energise wounded archives. Their sustained commitment to auto-narrative practice results in works that eschew a victim perspective, instead combining community research with empowered poetics to emulate Wynter’s vision of the full and complex human.

"I like to use the word adjacent instead of similar, because these conditions instead of being seen under the character of sameness, can rather be seen as running parallel, adjacent to each other, creating topologies that have an affinitive charge that doesnt need to be read through imperial modes such as maps and documents and statistics. These qualities are instead seen through the autonarrative practices of artists who have negotiated with the act of storytelling to find methods that reclaim agency in telling their personal, communal, and ancestral narratives. In seeing Subas Tamang's skilfull surfacing of the khokho mendo seeds integral to the Tamang cosmology with in imprint of community leader Gole Kalia from the community, whose contribution to Nepal's independence struggle as been erased, to Jesus Hilario Reyes' energetic channeling of the carnival aesthetics from Puerto Rico to complexity the relationship between invisibility and hypervisibility for the Black body.

From Khandakar Ohida's tender retelling of her uncles quest to create a museum of the mundane, a metaphorical museum on the moon, to Elyla's negotiation with the indigenous part of their identity, of ritually locating and challenging the multiple intersections that we each occupy, we see most of the archives that colonialism has tried hard to nullify, are not extinct; rather they can be seen, I propose as having been wounded. These wounded archives lose the ability to move, to circulate with their previous energy, and/or are impaled causing a loss of content and context allowing the stories of the oppressor to infiltrate and subjugate them."

Supported by the Goethe Institut Visual Arts Fund 2022

AUTOPOIESIS: Recognizing Kin Across Antipodal Topologies, featured in image (L-R): Rajyshri Goody, Christopher Udemzeu, Andrew Ananda Voogel in Khirkee Voice, Prabhakar Pachpite; Oyoun, Berlin, Aug 2022. Photo by Ceren Saner

AUTOPOIESIS: Recognizing Kin Across Antipodal Topologies, featured in image (L-R): Rajyshri Goody, Elyla, Dhrubo Jyoti, Christopher Udemzeu; Oyoun, Berlin, Aug 2022. Photo by Ceren Saner

AUTOPOIESIS: Recognizing Kin Across Antipodal Topologies, featured in image (L-R): Subas Tamang, Rajyashri Goody; Oyoun, Berlin, Aug 2022. Photo by Ceren Saner

AUTOPOIESIS: Recognizing Kin Across Antipodal Topologies, Reading by Rajyashri Goody; Oyoun, Berlin, Aug 2022. Photo by Ceren Saner

AUTOPOIESIS: Recognizing Kin Across Antipodal Topologies, visitors read Rajyashri Goody's collection of expert around food from autobiographies by writers from the Dalit community; Oyoun, Berlin, Aug 2022. Photo by Ceren Saner

AUTOPOIESIS: Recognizing Kin Across Antipodal Topologies, a visitor reads Andew Ananda Voogel's autofictional story in Khirkee Voice; Oyoun, Berlin, Aug 2022. Photo by Ceren Saner

AUTOPOIESIS: Recognizing Kin Across Antipodal Topologies, a visitor looks through community newspaper, Khirkee Voice's archive; Oyoun, Berlin, Aug 2022. Photo by Ceren Saner

AUTOPOIESIS: Recognizing Kin Across Antipodal Topologies, Akin to the Hurricane by Jesus Hilario-Reyes; Oyoun, Berlin, Aug 2022. Photo by Ceren Saner

AUTOPOIESIS: Of Adjacencies, Still Tangled by Avril Stormy Unger, Party Office, New Delhi, Feb 2023

AUTOPOIESIS: Of Adjacencies, Presentation by Subas Tamang, Party Office, New Delhi, Feb 2023

AUTOPOIESIS: Of Adjacencies, Presentation by Imaad Majeed, Party Office, New Delhi, Feb 2023

AUTOPOIESIS: Of Adjacencies, Presentation by Dhrubo Jyoti, Party Office, New Delhi, Feb 2023

AUTOPOIESIS: Of Adjacencies, Peer Sharing Gathering, Party Office, New Delhi, Feb 2023

Poesia Disidente, Guatemala City, Dec 2022

PerfoPoiesis, Guatemala City, Dec 2022

Autographias Disidente, curated by Eli Moon, Metro Tacubaya, Mexico City, Noc 2022