Night Journey. De dood en het hiernamaals van gebergten in internationale waardeketens

Luis Ortiz, Gabriel Rossell Santillán

The dead live, which is another fundamental element of the indigenous episteme. The dead live. They return from their world to ours. They protect us or marry us; they are not inert and forgettable beings.
— Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui¹

Associating research: an introduction

The artistic research presented in this paper refers to the methodology, production, and narration of the artistic research, woven as a physical tapestry, Night Journey. This tapestry represents the complexities of global capitalist chains of production and the broad existential and spiritual consequences they carry. We, the paper’s authors, analyse these complexities from our position as immigrants from the Global South with an artistic education in Germany.² We also share experiences from working with both Indigenous communities and Indigenous epistemologies in Abya Yala, the Indigenous name for the American continent used in decolonial contexts instead of the colonial connoted name America.³ This paper uses multiple theoretical sources, from critical writings on capitalism and decolonial theory to Indigenous and relational ontologies and epistemologies. These theories are used for the conceptual and methodological frames of our research.

The artistic research tapestry Night Journey is part of two more extensive projects from each of us, the authors of this paper. In this way, Night Journey is a collaboration at the site where two broader investigations meet and interact. The first artistic investigation is called The Mountains Travel, a PhD-in-Practice project by Luis Ortiz at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.⁴ Based on the transformation of mountains over space and time, The Mountains Travel articulates an immigrant perspective of territory. For a myriad of peoples in Abya Yala, mountains are essential beings.⁵ This understanding follows Indigenous relational ontologies that see territory as ontologically related to its human and nonhuman, living and nonliving inhabitants.⁶ This relational understanding of the mountains and their related peoples is represented in Night Journey. Migrant flows of people, often from the Global South to the Global North, follow the same routes as global value chains. These are the capitalist forms of extraction and global capital production responsible for an excessive exploitation of nature, as we explain further in the next section.⁷ In that sense, human immigrants like ourselves are also part of a singular, joint displacement of mountain-beings.

Second, Night Journey is also part of the tapestry series Flowers Beneath Our Feet, created by Gabriel Rossell Santillán in collaboration with artists from different countries in the Pacific Ocean.⁸ Flowers Beneath Our Feet was commissioned for the fifteenth Triennial of Small Sculpture in Fellbach, Germany, in 2022. Rossell Santillán exposes these collaborations as a way to recreate ancient cultural and natural connections between Asia, Oceania, and Abya Yala. The inspiration for the series comes from an unnamed Indian Mughal tapestry from the sixteenth century. The large tapestry was cut into fifteen pieces in Frankfurt, Germany, and sold to undisclosed museums.⁹

The original Mughal tapestry embodies an ecumenical approach to spirituality by showcasing a diverse range of elements. The tapestries that comprise Flowers Beneath Our Feet conceive the missing parts of the Mughal tapestry, and, in so doing speculate on a missing connection across the Pacific Ocean, form India to Abya Yala. Consequently, the tapestry series aims to recognize and recreate the relations of spiritual beings across the Pacific Ocean. These references recreate an ontological, deep time relationality that is spiritual-territorial and exists through the geologic Ring of Fire that extends across the Pacific Ocean in a spiral. This connection was also established through the human migrations from Asia and Oceania to Abya Yala.¹⁰ The relationships established by the participant artist of the series also create a contemporary connection between mainly Global South countries with a colonial past. In this way, a discussion about nearly forgotten and fractured artistic pieces, like the unnamed Mughal tapestry, is stimulated. Therefore, Flowers Beneath Our Feet is an artistic contribution to questions of reparation and addressing the consequences of globalized colonial violence.

Extractivist necropolitics and Night Journey

We will discuss some theoretical elements of the artistic research Night Journey, as well as present how they are represented in the tapestry. The mountains and their beings are dying due to capitalist exploitation. Extractivism is a form of exploitation of nature that looks for so-called resources in global territories to fulfil the demand of capitalist global value chains.¹¹ These resources are often extracted from soil and underground territories, including mountains, and are transported around the globe to manufacture commodities. One example is the use of gold and so-called rare-earth metals to produce chips for electronic devices. The capital created through these dynamics is often subject to speculation, and seldom returns to the places where nature is exploited. This capital usually remains either where the big mining corporations and their shareholders hold legal representation, or in the metropolises of the Global South. Either way, the wealth produced through resource exploitation for the production of commodities is often concentrated in a tiny class of people.¹² At the same time, exploration of nature is what political scientists Ulrich Brandt and Markus Wissen call an “Imperial Mode of Living.” Material and economic goods make possible a comfortable but extremely nature-exploitative standard of living.¹³

When the so-called materialities of mountains travel, their spirits and related beings travel too.

Further, if we follow the Indigenous relational ontologies of Abya Yala as presented by authors like anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena, we understand territory and especially mountains as always being in an ontological relation with the human and nonhuman beings connected to them.¹⁴ Feminist decolonial and Indigenous discourse in Abya Yala has named this kind of connection “the body-territory”.¹⁵ For de la Cadena, in Indigenous epistemologies, the beings that live in relation to the territory are the territory.¹⁶ These beings are not only human but also nonhuman, like animals, plants, and spiritual elements, and even the nonliving, like the soil and rocks themselves. We consider that when the so-called materialities from mountains travel, their spirits and related beings travel too. In that sense, movement of fragmented mountains through extractivism has an existential-spiritual dimension that cannot be simply ignored, a dimension we wish to make central to our analysis. Our artistic research tapestry Night Journey grapples with these complexities and tries to find means of representing mountain travel through global value chains that reflect the ontological relationalities they embody.

Continuing with our analysis of these travels, we consider philosopher Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. Necropolitics is based on necropower, which is the power to decide who lives and dies; for Mbembe, this is the most important form of control in multiple contemporary societies.¹⁷ We consider processes of nature exploitation to be a use of necropower against mountains and their related beings. Mbembe also names the existential character of the subject under necropolitical regimes as “living-deads”. A significant part of the global population is no longer alive, yet not totally dead.¹⁸ Immigrants like ourselves are not spared this. When we travel, often within processes of coercive migration to other places, we die in some way because we lose an ontological relation to territory that is the basis of the aforementioned relational ontologies. By coercive migration, we mean migration as a means of escaping the violence that is a consequence of extractive necropolitics, as is our experience of migration, in part. Coercive migration also reacts to better economic perspectives in the metropolis of the Global South or countries of the Global North. But not only are migrants a form of the “living-dead,” but so too the mountains themselves, their soil, their spirits, and the other related beings that die through global travel.

We will first present the narrative of the left-hand section of Night Journey’s woven tapestry. The tapestry represents a story that proceeds in a left-to-right narrative order. The first section of the tapestry reflects precisely the aforementioned aspects of mountain travel.

Night Journey depicts the upper sky changing from a light hue on the left side to dark blue on the right, symbolizing day turning into night. The mountains also change; a daytime depiction representing El Picacho, the most significant mountain from Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico, where the tapestry was designed and woven, transitions to a mountain shrouded in darkness. The mountains’ travels through extractivism represent a recent and profound change to their lengthy history. Indigenous Añu philosopher José Á. Quintero Weir posits that by relating to territory, one relates to the “time of the world itself”.¹⁹ Relating to or affecting the mountains through capitalist extractivism as much as through aesthetic forms, like this tapestry, are ways of interacting with the memories of the deep times and their spiritual inhabitants. In that sense, it is night itself in Night Journey that represents the disruptive capitalist order of contemporary times.

In the tapestry, a mine is represented in red topographic lines, as well as an inverted backhoe on the lower left side, starting a chain of relations from left to right. As such, we can see how the mountains and their beings travel along global value chains and the material and spiritual transformations they undergo. Next to the mine, one can find drawings of animals copied from the original Mughal tapestry presented in the introduction. These animals represent the spirits of the mountain. They are related to one another through a connection, mainly through the mouth, a gesture that could be interpreted as their eating of or talking to the other.²⁰ The figure of a hare follows an unidentified white animal, then a blue turtle, and then six parrots. They are again connected with a fox and a multicoloured deer. This deer references the sacred deer of many Mesoamerican philosophies and does not appear in the original Mughal tapestry. Above these mountain spirits is a representation of a Marush branch, a plant used to extract a yellowish tincture and traditionally used for pigmentation in Mexico, including yellow colourings in tapestry.

The travel continues as the inner organs of the mountains and their beings travel into the night. The tapestry’s centre represents the liver, pancreas, and intestine, interwoven with golden strings. They come out of the deer, out of the mountains and their spirits, and travel into the night of the Global North. A satellite surveys the process, exercising technological control. This understanding of the inner earth as organs is a concept posited in the philosophy of the Wixárika, an Indigenous people with whom Rossell Santillán has been working for twenty years. The Wixárika live in northern Mexico in the Sierra Madre Mountain Range. They are widely known for their prolific and diverse artistic production. Nonetheless, the spiritual essence of the mountains and their beings persists in the distance, like the laughing head of the Quetzalcoatl, the feathered snake of the Mesoamerican pantheon. The Quetzalcoatl is represented here with a body made from the intestine of the deer. In the Mesoamerican tradition, this deity represents the cosmic cycles of time and vegetational renewal.

By representing the spatial-temporal travel of the mountains, we consider the complex and probably still not fully known consequences of an exploitative lifestyle that does not assess the significance of Indigenous relational ontologies.

The presence of the fragmented beings portrayed in the tapestry corresponds with Ortiz’s dialogues with José Luis Romero Chino, an Indigenous Nahua artist from the collective Tequiocalco from Tlaxcala, Mexico. For him, extractivism denies us even our death; the death with which we are confronted in Abya Yala is the death of others, of beings from the Global North.²¹ In that way, even the destruction of nature is unrelated to the beings bonded to the mountains, since it corresponds to a form of extraction fuelling an imperialistic way of life. Because of this, the traditional Indigenous relationship to death—a relationship that would consider the possibility of an afterlife and even rebirth in the cycle of life and death—seems impossible. This is a sign of the spiritual consequences of extractive necropolitics. For Aymara descendant and sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the dead are part of our reality, and we interact with them.²² The possibility of encountering death and having a relationship to it is one of the main elements of Indigenous epistemology. To forget the dead and to close that relationship is a loss of an essential aspect of existence.²³ As a result, ours is a methodology of seeking out encounters with death and the dead.

Decolonial relationality as methodology

Our methodology follows the concept of the totality of relationality, as presented by philosopher Édouard Glissant. For him, there is a total relation in all beings based on the differences inherent to every being in relation to another. From there, and from his complex and mixed Creole identity, he constructs a sophisticated idea of relationality that sees the potential of relationships built upon the encounters between different cultures and peoples via globalization.²⁴ Thus, he uses the concept of “world-totality” to refer to the contemporary globalized world where everything is in interaction and relationship. He also understands that the relational world is fundamentally chaotic, for all the complexity of relationality: “I call chaos-world the shock, the intertwining, the repulsions, attractions, complicities, oppositions, and conflicts between the cultures of peoples in the contemporary world-totality.”²⁵ This globalized world of complex relations is the one we are portraying in Night Journey. The relationalities that mountains create when they travel are complex and, in many ways, unpredictable. Considering this relational totality helps us understand that complexity and look for more ethical forms of relationship than those of the capitalistic global production chains.

The contemporary globalized world is not only chaotic, but its forms of capitalistic extraction also imply forms of cultural extraction. Of this, we are quite conscious and make no claim to the innocence of our work. Rivera Cusicanqui proposes the positionality of the ch’ixi as a form for the mestizx population of Abya Yala to relate to its Indigenous elements.²⁶ Ch’ixi is a word from the Aymara philosophy that represents something that is not clearly one thing or another but that is both and neither at the same time. It is described metaphorically as a grey fabric resulting from putting multiple colours together.²⁷ Rivera Cusicanqui sees mestizx subjects from Abya Yala as fragmented by colonialism and fundamentally ambiguous. She proposes that by striving for a relationship with the Indigenous cultural and ontological aspects within the Indigenous and mestizx populations, we can deal with them in non-extractive ways. It is a way of re-relating to our indigeneity, which is usually negated by colonialism. It is also a positionality, that is a specific form of thinking and doing, which corresponds with the Indigenous episteme.²⁸ Nonetheless, neither does she negate the fragmentation already caused by colonialism; on the contrary, she embraces that ambiguity.²⁹ That is, in a way, an essential aspect of the work we are realizing here with the tapestry. Our ch’ixi positionality is also doubly fragmented since it is not only a reflection of a colonial mestizx identity but, in our particular case, of our own migration and our ambiguous position of having lived nearly half of our lives in Europe. This means that in this artistic research we follow a relational methodology as immigrant, already dead beings. Our creation of Night Journey is an act against loss, fragmentation, and negation by re-relating with Indigenous epistemologies and communities.

Night Journey was made during a stay of a couple of weeks in the Bën Za community of Teotlitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico. The Bën Za people, also known as Zapotecas, are one of the most numerous Indigenous peoples from the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. They are well known for traditional handcrafting of highly sophisticated tapestries. What would become the tapestry was first painted with watercolour, vinyl, and ink. The artful hand-weaving of the tapestry was realized by Bën Za artists in the Cruz workshop in the same town, under the leadership of Luis David, Emiliano, and Lilia Cruz. To create the tapestry, the workshop used natural threads pigmented with organic tinctures through traditional methods. The original painting was destroyed in the process of weaving the tapestry.

The Bën Za community of Teotlitlán del Valle, like most Indigenous communities in Abya Yala, suffers from threats of territorial and cultural loss, making it a community in resistance. Our privileges as merely temporary visitors in that environment cannot be negated. Our commissioning of the Cruz workshop to weave the tapestry is a form of resource sharing with the Indigenous community. Especially Gabriel Rosell Santillán has further developed a partnership with this workshop, having collaborated on the production of other tapestries there. Together with the Cruz family, we visited the mountains of the community. We exchanged our visions of territoriality and the importance of the Picacho as a mountain guardian. These exchanges were essential for the process of painting and reflecting, as epitomized in the tapestry and this paper. Even from our differing realities, we share the same preoccupation with the loss of our territorial relations. Night Journey is a small example of an approach to decolonial relationalities through the ambivalent position of ch’ixi. It is not an answer to extractivism, whether ecological or cultural, but a quest in the midst of the chaos-world.

The journey’s momentary end

We will now continue with Night Journey’s narration to analyse some of the relationalities made possible by the culmination of the mountain’s travel. On the right-hand side of the tapestry, biotechnological tentacles emanate from the serpent’s crest, which is made of banknotes, connecting it to an electronic chip. This transformation of the mountains from animals, plants, and spiritual beings into commodities and the technology used in contemporary everyday life is completed. At night, the mountain’s inner organs also become capital; the banknotes represent the economic interests and capitalist speculation made with the so-called resources and their final products. At the same time, the biotechnological tentacles in connection to the electronic chip represent the ambivalence of those transformation processes. These technologies exist between life and death, just like the living-dead beings within necropolitics. These technologies are based on the exploitation of the living and dead beings of the mountains. Still, they seem to give a kind of life to electronic devices. In them, can we glimpse an afterlife and the promise of the agency of the dead as presented in Indigenous epistemologies? Gold, also exploited from the entrails of mountains, is found in electronic chips, which are, at the same time, one of the components in satellites that act as a surveillance agent over the process. Of course, these electronic devices do not function alone but are also manufactured, commercialized, and managed by powers following a profit logic and, often enough, specific geopolitical interests. The complex relationalities in the afterlife of the mountains are difficult to grasp.

The electronic chip is finally touched by a dark subject, ending the relational chain. It is the shadow of us, the subjects of the night, of contemporary disruptive times. But are we understanding the processes undergone by the so-called materialities that make our everyday technology? Do these materialistic and spiritual relationalities not affect us and our imperialist lifestyle? Additionally, this shadow subject has an aura; it becomes spiritual through the material connection with the travelling spirits, but the spirituality it develops is strange and dark. Maybe some of the spiritual and natural energy of the mountains and their beings remains in those technological artefacts. But then, they have also changed and become peculiar, even if they are still related to the mountains. Quetzalcoatl laughs again.

In the lower right of the tapestry, a conjoined figure displays a mountain landscape at its core. The conjoined figure represents immigrants still inhabited by the mountains despite their distance from them; the shared nostalgia dwells in their insides. The figure is inspired by a similar figure from El Señor del Secreto (“The Secret's Lord”), a collagraphy by artist Belkis Ayón.³⁰ As expressed in the introduction, the mountains travel with the migrants and the migrants with the mountains. Like the ch’ixi that recognizes the fragments of what we once were, the relational ontology with the mountains never fully disappears.

By representing the spatial-temporal travel of the mountains, we consider the complex and probably still not fully known consequences of an exploitative lifestyle that does not assess the significance of Indigenous relational ontologies. From the knowledge of already being living-dead, fragmented beings that become ever more fragmented through migration, we try to observe glimpses of the afterlife of the mountains and their related beings. Some seem strange and less than obvious, such as the mountain-beings’ relationship to capital and technology. Other forms of the continuous presence of the mountains give us strength, like an immigrant’s relationship to our lost territory, nostalgic as it may be. The very production and journey of the Night Journey tapestry itself, first from Oaxaca with German funding, to its display in Germany, is a reference to the chains of capital production; an ambiguous reference, since we were able to bring resources to the Bën Za community, yet at the same time their beautiful product again journeyed to the Global North. The search for connection with a forgotten Mughal tapestry gives us glimpses of very old relationalities around the Pacific Ocean, and the opportunity of providing an afterlife to that colonially damaged tapestry. All of these are examples of how Night Journey became a vehicle for relating in unusual ways.

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Luis Ortiz

is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher who has experienced multiple migrations from the peripheries of the Colombian state to its capital and later to Germany. He studied art at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He is currently a candidate for a PhD-in-Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, with a project titled The Mountains Travel. Stations of Migrant Territorialities.

luiso5484@gmail.com

Gabriel Rossell Santillán

studied art at the National University of Mexico and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Throughout twenty years of residencies and collaborations with the Wixárika Indigenous people in Mexico, his practice has been dedicated to an understanding of Indigenous critical thinking.

grossells@yahoo.com

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