Bestiarum
Janitzio or The Heavy Resilience and the Politics of Resistance
(AR with 3D object target)
Territories transform in time and space; as dynamic systems they establish the relations between the organic and inorganic agents that coexist in them. By shaping new types of territories, new power relations arise, as well as new forms of cohabitation in space and time. The Anthropocene is reshaping the ecology of the planet, destroying places and times of refuge for people and other critters. (Donna Haraway) There are many people who are trying to save the territories from the predation of unscrupulous policies The Heavy Resilience and the Politics of Resistance tells one of those stories.
A story of the Purepecha people goes as follows. When we die our souls fly like monarch butterflies over an enchanted lake to a magical island called Janitzio the maize blossom.
The illegal logging of the forests where monarch butterflies live in Mexico to grow avocados is putting the future of this species at risk. Due to the great economic benefit of this fruit, the defenders of these territories suffer constant threats.
The Sweet Whisper of the Symbolic Power
(Web-AR)
The sweet whisper of the symbolic power is an AR to Web and one-channel sound installation based on the voice of a quetzal bird, as a part of Gerardo Nolasco’s Bestiarum Vocarium. The installation is based on the concept of the symbolic power of Pierre Bourdieu, understood as an invisible power; the practice of this power becomes unconscious and comes into play in symbolic systems that transform the human interaction into a spiral of domination and being dominated, though it can only be done with the complicity of those who make use of it and those who suffer it.
Quetzalcoatl is a central figure of Mesoamerican mythology, depicted as a feathered serpent, symbolizing fertility and internal political structures. Later, in the Aztec’s despotic state, sacrifices in the name of Huitzilopochtli lost their religious background and became spectacles, displays of the power of the state: the sacred became an instrument of repression.
This chapter of Mesoamerican history is a good example of the use of symbolic power. Here the singing of the quetzal sounds as a sweet hidden whisper, seemingly natural, but actually as artificial as the abuse of the vast majority of the society by a privileged minority.
The Sweet Illusion of the Economy of Power
(Web-AR)
The Sweet Illusion of the Economy of Power is an AR to Web and one-channel sound installation using the voice of the crocodile. This piece is a part of Gerardo Nolasco’s Bestiarum Vocarium. The installation is based on the concept of the economy of power, by Michel Foucault. In Foucalt´s Discipline and Punish and The Will to know he analyses technologies that enable and boost the economy of power. When the power starts to be dislocated, dispersed and hidden, when it becomes more diffuse and less spectacular, increasingly economized with technologies that allow it to penetrate subjects, the resistance lose the ability to converge and to confront power. This power moves from the fits of brutality to euphemisms through subtle technologies, where power is never in operation, but leaves its effects. So the institutionalization of power is an economization of governance, devices that use microphysics of power to penetrate subjects.
The Leviathan (in hebrew Taninim, is a sea monster, crocodile or large snake) is the title of the book by Thomas Hobbes, where the social contract creates the modern state, it serves to legitimize the state as a voluntary agreement.
For Hobbes all men are equal by nature, but the main problem among men is competition. The land assets are limited and we desire the property of the others, therefore competition will generate discord and war of all against all. Although the fear of death and the desire to live comfortably is also a constant; the survival instinct leads us to form a pact among us, a pact on which the state is based. Hobbes names this state Leviathan.
The state is empowered to use physical violence against individuals who break that covenant, the state is supposed to ensure the safety of men, thus creates a disciplinary society to dominate men. What happens, when the state is perverted? When the power becomes reason, which sees, controls and dominates? This reason uses men but also develops humanistic social science due to Foucault. The aim of these sciences is not to know humans better but master and rule humans better. Power has the power to impose the truth; in other words the state determines our subjectivity, and imposes its truth upon and restrains us.
The state manipulates us to generate reptiles of the mind, as William Blake wrote in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 'The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.'
Adding up all the references the voice of the crocodiles stand for the state, the water of the fountain for the mind, “infected” by reptiles, Besides the fountain itself is a representative manifestation for the state (using soft power).
