Reded Scapes & On Spellbounds

Reded scapes

^{Bylma excavation photo slides, by Rijksdienst voor Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek, 1957(1)}

Tell me about yourself, how are you? I'd like to see you.
I saw you in a picture and I felt like eating you.
I know that like me, in love you haven't been lucky
But the desire to see you kills me

“The Curiosity” - Jay Wheeler, DJ Nelson, Myke Towers

• Dig, dig, dig, buddy.

• I'm on it. – I answered.

• It won't be long now.

My nails, my pores and my mind seem to want to dissolve the boundaries between my body and the ground. I've been in this job for more than a month now, and even in my dreams I yearn to find that which they are looking for so much and which I cannot distinguish. It is as if I were on the high seas, where the sea overcomes the land and where the horizon is always distant and blurred.

• Come on!
  Wield that shovel well!
  The sooner we finish, the sooner we'll all leave.

I am the youngest brother of seven sisters, the most beautiful and desired of all Groningen. When the war started, they saw my skin so pale that they refused to draft me because they thought I would die soon. Since then, I have worked in temporary jobs wherever they would pay me enough to save the necessary amount for soon to go where love is not foreign to me.

• Don't get distracted! – I heard in the distance.

My life today depends on how much power I can wield to move and transfer as many small portions of land from one place to another. Today I fantasize about my love affair with this earth, with the matter that you and I walk on to move, that our race has dreamed for centuries of being able to dominate and pass through its cavities.

I wonder if the archaeologists are waiting for us to discover a horrifying vestige, or perhaps a charming residue. Sometimes it seems to me that they don't know what they are looking for, and I too get confused trying to decipher what I am supposed to be doing. They say that a powerful and ruthless being lived here. That those like me, who enjoy going to church to grope each other and play with each other's fluids in the gloom, were murdered. Could it be that under the next mound of earth I raise, I’ll find my face in pieces? Perhaps my ashes from the past are already under my fingernails, in my lungs and in my hair. The archaeologist says that it is not about going to the bottom, but about discovering the bounds of what once could have been something or someone.

Since a few days ago, it has been confirmed that the earth here is redder. Maybe because of the spilled blood, I think. So, imagining myself on this earth keeps me awake, even though I sometimes find my limbs moving on their own and my mind furiously eating the edges of some possible structure. Yesterday I ate the cock of a sailor who is about to marry a German widow. It was nighttime, I went out to smoke a cigarette and as I lit a fire, I saw his silhouette approaching from across the street. His cock was big, and I couldn't help but remember the huge rock we finally managed to unearth last week. When he ejaculated, I remembered the exact moment when we all pushed the big rock at the same time. The satisfaction we felt didn’t last long, after a while we were sent to continue wielding the shovel and pickaxe in another area. Every time I pass by the subway passage discovered with the exit of the huge stone, I can't take my eyes off the reddish bricks of those stairs, which I imagine once led to a deeper place. I have dreamed of remembering to have descended there to the point that today its depth is familiar to me.

I remember the immeasurable thirst that forced me to walk in that direction to also discover the redness of my veins and my blood, the scarlet passion flowing from my wounded hands. I have walked under the same skin that today covers the muscles with which I dig and wield these weapons of wood and metal. Yesterday, the horny sailor seemed to faint when I finished tasting him.

• What's the matter with you?
  You already look like a specter from standing there minutes ago and without moving the mound that carries your shovel.
  Let's get to work! – they shouted at me.

• I'm sorry, I thought I found something...
  It's nothing. – I replied.

I'll come back at night. When there's no one around. With no light and no man's tools, I'll go down those stairs. I will feel myself everywhere and I will arrive at the other end, where everything is redder, and where only I’ll enjoy my escape to the past, going through the vestiges of that other world of mine without haste and without orders. As if I were riding a horse that knows how to slip quickly in the dark, I’ll wander among my new discoveries, lying to myself, I will look at them as if I did not know what I was looking for from them and I’ll recognize that there are some that I forgot to look at again. Since it’s night, I won't need to dig. Little by little, I will be able to filter through the cracks following the water channels.

Finally, I will be able to extract the earth as I please. Where it provokes me, I will rediscover anew the somber red of what would probably be a new earth. What if I get lost? What if I discover a deep river or another underwater canal that shatters with my arrival? What if I drown? What if I take a wrong turn and end up in the midst of a nuclear radiation?

• What is this? – I whispered to myself.

Some kind of long object has cut into my left thigh and is stuck in my foot. It is dry and fibrous, surely a tree root or a piece of some ancient instrument. It looks like a bone. How did I not manage to dodge it? In the end, it is a bone. Could it be from a man or an animal? From the sharp point, could it have been an ancient instrument of war? Could this be evidence or a clue to some occurrence of the past? I can't go back now, when the archaeologist discovers it they will find my dried blood on it and they will want to know how I was able to desecrate this land without moving it.

I must hurry, the night is not everlasting and by tomorrow I must reach the other place. Their view of justice has always been skewed, I have just given up my life in their world and now I no longer need the courage of a piece of paper or some few coins to escape. Perhaps I will find another home. Now I no longer have to hide my thirst. What would my home be like, would I need a living room, a dining room, a basement? Where would I keep my discoveries, my trophies? Who would I be there?

I keep moving forward and the earth seems to be getting warmer and the humidity is turning the dry sediment into mud. I feel like when my anus was filled with cum for the first time, an inexplicable wetness oozing out of me from the inside out. That time, I rode and rode picking up the pleasure data from the boy's facial expressions. I remember that I ejaculated first, but not exactly when he did. I think I felt it just as these green waters are carrying me now, unaware of when it started, just being carried along by the current and the consciousness of my reflection fading with the movement. It is as if I cannot bear the power of the liquid, as if the limits of my body have melted with the fluids. It seems that I have finally ceased to be the double of a man, cause I no longer have a reflection.

If a crystal freezes and cuts movement, now I am its complete reversion. A reverse that does not cut in its solidity, but leaks in its flow of almost solid appearance.

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On Spellbounds

A gaze into an other otherness. How can we look into the particularities of an aestheticized living archief without avoiding our own ways of seeing an expected otherness? For me, approaching to MONSTER ARCHIEF project (MA) has supposed, at first, a work of looking into the literally wormholes that crave into the modernist structure narratives that had socially legitimized and conditioned the Sodomy murderers during De Mepsche’s times.

Where is the monster?, is perhaps the everlasting question that continues to accompany my immersion process within the MA since my first contact with it. Initially, for me, the authoritarian figure of De Mepsche appeared as the incarnation of the Monster himself due to the despicable persecution of the crimes of sodomy he prosecuted. But this narrative was also an inverse “initial” reading, subsequent to the founding of the horror, that was based on how a “sodomite” was (mis)understood from the conservative, normative and ecclesiastical point of view of the time. Later on, I was uncovering another meaning for the monstrous, one which inevitably justified that the environmental catastrophes of the century were the outcome of a divine punishment that disguised the truth about the failure of the marine occupation project from the Dutch crown. Thus, the colonial authorities of that time argued their "justice" pursue on the gaze of what the undesirable meant back then, that is to say on the non-heterosexual corporealities to the point of finding in their non-normative and liberal sexual practices the reason to understand and translate the wrath of God that they tried to extinguish. In my brief research on the historical context of Bylma, I discovered that in reality it was nothing more than the human inability to control a plague of “Teredo navalis” (a species of worm-like mollusks and common of fresh waters) that prayed the wooden structures designed to support the dyke systems of the city. In this sense, these worm-like mollusks were the ones who caused several of the “divine” catastrophes of the time, under which the sodomite persecution in different territories of the Dutch colonies were argued and justified.

I believe that it is precisely in this inconsistency of the monstrous body, multiple and unlimited in its place of strangeness that its own limits relentlessly blur its own form. This phenomena is where it lies, or from where we can weave, a sense to understand the horror and the pain of a social trauma characteristic of colonial traditions and contexts. Where the quest to dominate, catalog, classify and harshly rationalize reality leads to a split off understanding of all vital experience.

The constructive process of this phenomenon is structured from the act of observation of the one who looks at another, in order to delimit the dimensions of an inside and an outside.

Writing from Lima-Peru, where I was born and raised, I recognize that this particular phenomenon of the gaze has manifested itself through diverse cultural expressions that have been able to translate -and inevitably fantasize- the violence of the Spanish colonial occupation process. Paraphrasing historian Carlos Guillermo Paramo's research on "Wakas y temblores: Terror indígena en la Gran Revuelta andina"⁽²⁾, the magic of this type of gaze has been the object of recurrent studies in ethnology and folklore through the well-known "mal de ojo" (bad eye). Where the act, voluntary or involuntary, of evil looking transmits envy; producing fascination, an enchantment or a spell. According to Páramo, these characteristics are attributes related to the aesthetic experience of the sublime and its reverse, the terror experience; both of which are characteristic of a Wak'a. The Wak'a or Huaca is a Quechua and Aymara word frequently used to name powerful entities that were part of a sacred or divine being such as the Andean hills or Pachamama(mother earth), which is why on our daily basis speech the pre-hispanic archaeological enclosures are often called Wakas.

In this photograph⁽³⁾ we see the monumentality and the vestiges of the sacred sanctuary of the Huaca Pucllana, located in the middle of the district of Miraflores in the city of Lima. The photograph was taken by my great friend Edita, who is a witch tarot reader, a translator, a researcher and a passionate fan of her neighbor the Huaca Pucllana. Every time we meet to have a coffee or eat something, I learn a lot about Pucllana because she always tells me some of her childhood stories or she shares with me some of her recent research related to her Huaca. With her, I have slowly learned to distance myself from the way in which Inca and pre-Inca cultures are usually idealized; because in her Huaca, as in many others, remains of human sacrifices have been discovered that were part of pre-hispanic ritual practices. There are also many studies and evidences that recognize the Inca culture as the most bloodthirsty to inhabit this territory. In order to build the Inca Empire of Tahuantinsuyo, the Incas had to conquer the pre-existing cultures through armed wars. However, despite the substance of these data, i belief its not viable to consider these evidences as valid arguments to naturalize the genocide perpetrated by the colonial occupation of the Spain crown.⁽⁴⁾ For me, now is not the time to set a judgment, mainly because we will see with the eyes of the West and with our rational understanding of "violence" a culture in which the extirpation of idolatries was practiced, evangelized, enslaved and plundered for centuries.

⁽⁵⁾

Even though in Peru, we continue to experience colonial racism in a very intense way on a daily basis, there are still narrative strategies that allow us to resist and preserve historically undesirable memories. For example, the Pishtaco, Nakaj or Carasiri, is an Andean version of the western vampire. This being is usually represented as a white-skinned man in a position of power, who goes out into the countryside at night to hunt indigenous and mestizos. Once he captures a victim, he slits their throats and extracts the fat from their bodies, which he then sells in the city. According to researcher Takahiro Kato, the Pishtaco narrative serves to protect peasant ways of life from the extractive logics inherited from the colonial occupation. The consumers of the fat, who finance the terror instilled by the Pishtaco, use the sebum for the production of both medical drugs and for oiling industrial machines, as well as for the maintenance of church bells and religious idols.

From the present, some of us may not be able to achieve patriarchal justice, but we can still dispute the way in which today’s truth is setting our unconscious boundaries.