Reweaving from the future: Patricia Domínguez and Victoria Vargas-Downing in conversation

Victoria Vargas-Downing and Patricia Domínguez critique, from different standpoints, the epistemic injustice of colonisation; colonialism’s insistence on containing and curtailing Indigenous and other non-linear temporalities; and the ongoing violence of extractive capitalism. Domínguez brings together experimental research on ethnobotany, healing practices, and extractivism, focusing on tracing digital and spiritual relationships between living species in an increasingly corporate cosmos. Her installations take the form of sculptures, videos and publications which are designed to exorcise the effects of late capitalism and ecological destruction in the physical and social body, while exploring the emancipatory potential of artistic imagination as a form of psychic emancipation and as a path of healing colonial trauma. Meanwhile, Vargas-Downing’s work challenges ontological assumptions about art and heritage in its interrogation of which histories heritage studies privileges and which histories are invisibilised. Vargas-Downing stages an inquiry into how art and heritage interact in a mutual constituency and reciprocal relationship. She challenges and presents alternatives to logics of accumulation, extraction, temporality and materiality to unveil other ways of relating and interacting with heritage, art and the world.

Both Domínguez and Vargas-Downing offer an understanding of history emerging from lived relations with the earth and environment. Dwelling in other intelligences and atemporal energies – plant worlds, non-human, and more-than-human – is a generative act. Their connection to the Atacama Desert – once Indigenous land that has been extracted by global mining corporations – is woven into their work in different ways and informs their decolonial practice. The imposition of colonial logic, Vargas-Downing argues, conditions us to ‘trust only what is measurable. […] Colonisation […] invisibilise[s] and displace[s] everything that is out of the aspirations of capitalism […] to impose one way of being and knowing’. As Domínguez puts it, ‘the desert creates an expansion of you as a human, it puts you in connection with so many other beings […] We learn to trust and honour this other intelligence’. Privileging non-verbal communication, affective encounters, touch, corporeal connection, thinking with other forms of being and knowing is, for both, a form of decolonial practice.

Patricia Domínguez is an artist, educator and earth defender based in Puchuncaví, Chile. She is currently director of the ethnobotanical platform Studio Vegetalista. Recent exhibitions include Screen Series, New Museum, New York (2022); Rooted Beings, Wellcome Collection, London (2022); Super Natural, Eden Project, UK (2022) and How to Tread Lightly, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Spain (2020-21). Domínguez presented a solo booth with Cecilia Brunson Projects at Frieze London in 2022, and exhibited at the 2022 Screen City Biennial, Berlin and the 2021 Gwangju Biennale. She was awarded the Simetría Residency Award by CERN in 2020 and Beca Botín in 2022.

Victoria Vargas-Downing is an early career researcher. She holds a BA in Fine Theory and History of Art from the University of Chile and an MA in Arts Management and Heritage Studies from the University of Leeds. She completed her doctoral thesis ‘Following threads touching knots, Decolonising Heritage through Contemporary Art’ in 2023. ‘Pulling threads: Decolonising Heritage through Contemporary Art’ will be published in Prácticas desobedientes/Working disobedience encounter, Gasworks London, Latin Elephant and Tate Exchange in 2024.

This article forms part of the special issue of parallax, ‘Reading Otherwise: Decolonial Feminisms’. The issue features conversations which took place 2021–23. Prompts relating to the speaker’s work and the key terms of the issue were circulated ahead of this conversation. We started the conversation by asking what had brought them to their work.

Victoria Vargas-Downing: My work is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Lugones, Aurora Levins Morales and the work of Cecilia Vicuña. But beyond those people, my work is mostly inspired by the Desert – the Atacama Desert – because I grew up there. It’s funny because when people go there for the first time, the first impression that they have is that they are on a different planet. I lived there until I was fifteen. And when I left the Desert to move to the capital (Santiago) everything was very different and later when I moved to the UK it was like, ‘wow! This is a new and different planet’. Imagine coming from a place where it rains once every two years, no trees and cloudless sky, to arrive at this green body of land where the clouds inhabit it almost every day and the rain is constant. I had to learn a new language. Growing up in the Desert helped me to think, and to read space in different ways. When you encounter the Desert, the first thing that you see is apparently nothing, but that ‘nothing’ is full of little things that you need to learn how to see… Little lizards, birds, dragonflies, the stars in the night… It’s just a matter of waiting and learning to read that space in a different way. How did you get to where you are now, Patricia?

Patricia Domínguez: It’s interesting that you’re talking about the Desert, because I grew up in Santiago, but I have been going to the Atacama Desert all my life because of my family; it is also a starting point for me. My grandfather has a small museum, which is a subjective museum where, through the objects of the earth, he has understood the history of that territory and also changed the history of that space. He has found industrial garbage, objects from colonisation, from traders, from mining, pre-Columbian artefacts. He also found a fossil of a whale that had been a unique species and he discovered the most southern colony of green turtles on the planet, which ended up being the key to defending the place from the biggest thermoelectric coal plant in South America. He also made jewellery with shells, musical instruments, decorations and he recreated the pirates that came to Chile. All that with garbage he found in the Desert. He made ovens with shells to prepare bread. In a tiny adobe room, he used discarded nets from the ocean as the cabinets to hold the collection. He has rechoreographed all the objects into his own cosmology.

So this experience of the Desert is very strong, at least in my work. That area used to be Indigenous lands. Now, it’s a totally extracted area, where all these multinational corporations come to extract and destroy the natural elements. They’re the ‘new gods’, the ones that move the mountains – this mountain disappears, and a new mountain arises made of leftovers by the mining industry.

I had a dream that made me understand the transformations that are happening there in a metaphorical way. In the dream, I saw the intricate patterns that decorate Diaguitas bases shapeshifting into the straight lines of the patterns of corporate shirts.¹ They were the same lines, arranged in a different way. Ordered by a different worldview. I think that dream came out of the experience of living in the Desert and getting to know it through experience. As Victoria was saying, you can see there’s ‘nothing’, but it’s full of life and information, so much information; you have access to the sky, which is very cosmological, because we have the clearest sky on the planet. The Desert creates an expansion of you as a human; it puts you in connection with so many other beings. That non-human connection is very strong. You can expand yourself as a cosmological sensor.

Victoria: Yes. The Desert is really important in my work too in different ways. Not only because it is a constant presence in my life – my family and friends are still living there – but also because it is a healing space. I was born with a bone condition that caused me a lot of pain when I was growing up, which made it difficult to walk. And because of that, my mom always took me to the termas – the spring water in the middle of the Desert that has healing properties. That was also a way of learning of the Desert; the termas are located in pueblitos in the middle of unexpected places, and to get to the termas you need to pass by different places where sometimes you saw geoglyphs, oases, and so on. After a few trips, I stopped having those bone pains, thanks to the Desert.

I started to understand the Desert in a different way. I remember it was quite normal to go to a restaurant, hotel, or a house, or tiny schools with small archaeological collections. You’d always find a cabinet with a pre-Columbian ceramic, or with textiles, or with different things that people found over the years, or things that were inherited – things that I later saw in museums, and in art galleries and in different spaces. So it’s quite interesting how the Desert can impregnate people, objects and different beings.

Patricia: And it’s also interesting how a physical condition or sickness can open you to other sensibilities. It’s these kinds of other perceptions, or trust in other living elements that can heal your body, your mind, your soul and then organise that so it materialises in physical healing. So I guess sometimes sickness or physical conditions open portals of understanding about which we’re not usually trained or taught to have. We learn to trust and honour this other intelligence.

Victoria: I totally agree. I think that particularly because of this bone condition, in my case, I’m always very aware of my body. If something is wrong with my body – whether it’s something that I’m seeing, or something that I’m feeling, anything that unsettles me – I immediately trust my body. And for the same reason, I’m also very sensitive to the environment; I feel more information than what I can give sense to sometimes, but I know that every time that I’m receiving this kind of information, I need to trust it, and then I can process it in better ways or understand it better. It can be information, for example, from plants, or from the Desert, from the ocean… The issue is that we are constantly in contact with so many sources of information that we do not recognise as such, because we have been conditioned to trust only what is measurable and avoid paying attention to the sources that are closest to us. I remember once I was trying to explain how I learned to swim in the ocean. It was very particular because I was explaining it to someone that had learned to swim in a pool. And I was explaining how, for me, swimming was always with the waves. Basically, someone throws you in and you go with a wave and then somehow, after a few tries, you end up swimming and not sinking. After a few tries, you not only learn how to swim, but it also teaches you to understand how the waves work, the currents, how the ocean has a pattern and how everything somehow has worked to let you swim.

I was also thinking of this idea that I just told you about – of other living beings that can heal your body – and I remember a lot of objects, ceramics, and a lot of elements during trips to the Desert that I later found in galleries. I remember one visit to La Galería Patricia Ready in Santiago, where I saw some of your ceramics. I think they were part of ‘The eyes will be the last to pixelate’ (2019). And then I saw your work (‘The Isle of Dogs; A Curse in Reverse’, 2017) in Gasworks, London. In that way I started to connect with your work and with the ways it expands healing and other ways of knowing and alternative forms of thinking.

Ruth Daly: It’s so interesting to hear you speak about your experience of learning to swim, Victoria. The sense-knowing and attunement – sound, touch, feeling, resonance, rhythm, flow – you describe here connects to our thinking with and about affect. I’m really interested to hear what you think about how this idea might extend beyond phallocentric, colonial, capitalist paradigms to imagine the capaciousness of otherwise(s). It seems very connected to how one attends to those invisible processes you’ve both gestured towards. Could you say a bit more about this in relation to what you describe as other ways of knowing?

Victoria: Sure. Because of my bone condition, since I was little I was told to not do many things, because of the risk of breaking a bone. So, I had to learn my limits, but you only know your limits by exploring them, understanding how much you can bear and learning to recognise patterns, weaknesses and strengths. And when you experience that, there are more things that appear in that way. I started to understand how the body communicates and expresses itself beyond words, and then, if the body can communicate without words, I thought about which other ‘beings’ can do the same. There are many other ways of communicating beyond words and visible forms and because of colonialism we are not trained to listen to them or notice them, because colonialism privileges mainly human forms of communication and mainly written sources. For example, a recent article discusses how plants ‘scream’ when in pain or cut or stressed.² But their screams are so high-pitched that we cannot hear them. However, sounds are frequencies: even when we cannot hear them, we receive that information in the body and it can affect us, our bodies can feel vibrations of sounds, even when we are not conscious of them. Then, reading these embodied vibrations moves away from the idea that knowledge comes from a disembodied and detached observer; it actually happens in the body, and this also implies the need to recognise other beings and life forms. That is part of decolonisation and how to unsettle imposed structures of knowledge.

Patricia: For me, personally, at this moment of my life, I think the decolonial is about more than being in opposition and fighting and losing energy. I’ve been trying to dwell in other intelligences – plant words, the intelligence of the Earth – these atemporal energies that we can dwell on… there’s so much to learn from that. The ceramics also come out of that search. My work is trying to go beyond these linear utilitarian languages that we use all the time and really emerge in a new non-linear mix of nonverbal languages. It’s like a dream where you can recombine everything into a new image, or at least propose a new re-coding of the elements of this brutal capitalist and neoliberal system.

For instance, the reversal of relationships I did in ‘Eres un Princeso’, which was research into the relationship between humans and horses in Colombia, in the second colonisation of the land. I played with changing the power structures. Instead of putting the owner over the horse, I put the caretaker over the horse, because he was the one that was in deep resonance with the horse, with his body. Having the boy – the caretaker – barefoot and in a dress over the white horse, transformed him into a mystical image, one that emerged from that complicated power situation, but that honoured his own intimate relationship with the horse. I was trying to transform that image into some kind of mythological figure that maybe can emerge, even only through imagination or a possibility, from this really brutal situation of colonial modes of functioning. So how can we elevate those relationships through imagination and try to create new interactions otherwise than the capitalist system? The role of imagination for me is huge in this decolonial conversation, even as a way of speculating, creating new possibilities for rearranging the elements and the mental particles of reality.

Figure 1 Patricia Domínguez, Eres un Princeso #1, 2013. Courtesy Patricia Domínguez. © Patricia Domínguez.

Victoria: I think that is one of the main ideas of decolonisation. Because what colonisation does is impose a way of thinking, a way of seeing, a narrative and linearity. And the work of decolonisation is somehow linked to reimagining, refiguring and unsettling those standards and those assumptions that somehow have taken us to where we are.

Patricia: Exactly. And if you think of the time of pre-colonisation, Indigenous peoples around the world were connected to the Earth energies – these kinds of living energies with their own parameters, almost like a cosmos, matter beyond human. It’s interesting to think about these forms of being/knowing also as decolonisation, in addition to fighting colonisation or capitalism or whatever, which is of course also important. I think it’s nice to just connect with this well of other languages with their own parameters and decide how you want to represent yourself or think about the world. There are so many possibilities which are totally cut off by the system. Intuition and all these other ways of knowing – not only Indigenous ways of knowing but also many others that are connected to non-linear thinking, spirituality, intuition, etc. – have historically been so invisibilised and the subject of prejudice, right?

Victoria: Yes, absolutely. That is what colonisation does, invisibilise and displace everything that is out of the aspirations of capitalism or that proposes alternatives, to then impose one way of being and knowing.

Patricia: I interviewed a Machi. You know, for you [Ruth and Maya], Machi are the highest spiritual figure of the Mapuche people here in Chile. And they are not only healers, but they’re also spiritual figures. Because of the system, the Machi was saying that she was regarded as crazy, and she felt she was crazy for so long. She even had doubts about speaking about how she sees, how she communicates and sings with the horses and the plants and the spirits she is in contact with. Even now, she was saying ‘I might sound crazy’. I was like, ‘please continue…’. The damage that colonialism has imposed on their ancestral ways of relating to the living has been profound and nefarious.

Ruth: Thank you. It’s interesting to see connections between what you’ve been discussing and what other contributors have shared. When naming this issue ‘reading otherwise’ one of the things we wanted to explore was a potential form of reading – and perhaps a temporality – which acknowledges the ongoing realities of modern violence, while not simply positioning itself as oppositional. So it’s very interesting to hear you speak about connection, relationality, intuition and the capacity of these ways of thinking to interrupt that linearity imposed by colonisation and colonial logic. You’ve both spoken about the centrality of care, and vulnerability to decolonial ways of thinking and being. Could you say a bit more about how this shows up in your work?

Victoria: It’s quite interesting to think about relationality, particularly when you think about pre-Columbian cultures, and other ways of thinking that are not from the West, or to think about the idea of the energy or agency of things. For instance, Gabriela Siracussano has this theory about the importance of colour in colonial paintings.³ She says that in colonial paintings, what mattered wasn’t the representation of God, the virgin, and the Holy Family. For the Indigenous people, their concern was not the ‘accuracy’ of the representation. What mattered was the pigment, the material composition of the earth that created the pigment, the mountain or mineral. For the Indigenous people during the colonial period, the notion of representing something out there was not relevant. Rather, the energy of the mountain, the stone, or the plant was being enacted and present in the paintings; they were looking at something in front of them and not an outside representation, compared to the West. And similarly the poetic language that you normally see and use in Latin America is more related to how to enact something, how to create something in reality, rather than representing something that is not there.

Patricia: Wow, that’s like another way of seeing – not even seeing but feeling – those presences in the pigments. I think, in the end, like any kind of vision it’s being open to this constitution of information that can be read, maybe not in a linear way, but through intuition, or, as you were saying Victoria, using your body to scan.

It makes you ask what should we read or why should we read? Because I read all the time, but there are so many things that can’t be read or written about. Like sex, or like connecting with plants; you have to experience them. And it’s so interesting to learn to read the imperceptible, the invisible – it’s another way of learning to read life, or – as you say – the pigments or the information that each object holds. It is another kind of reading which is so complex; it’s a multi-dimensional way of accessing and learning. Talking about the question of experience, sometimes if you read about something you get it through an intellectual, somehow superficial way but if you live it, you feel it, you’re affected in multiple ways. It’s so profound, because you are ‘reading’ your body, your waters, the cosmos.

Victoria: It’s linked again with the normative notion of reading as being at a distance from something. So, for example, and it’s very understandable, that the notion of being in touch with an object, can provoke fear. Because, as you say, when you’re in touch, you have to read in these other ways that are not just at a distance. You are exposed to your affects and to the affects of the other. You are exposed to your feelings; you’re exposed to your fears; you’re exposed to everything that can shake you up. And sometimes it implies being very vulnerable to all these sensations and being very aware of what is going on. For some people, detachment is okay. But for a lot of people, detachment is not the way that we learn; we learn with touching, with contacting, with conversation, with different forms of interaction, whether it’s with human, non-human or more than human. And I think that is also a really interesting process that has not been very explored, because it means being more vulnerable and exposing yourself in ways that we are not used to, in ways that, from a modern perspective, are too close, too personal too risky and not everyone is willing to be vulnerable in that way.

Patricia: Exactly, and we also have this kind of education that trains you to be productive and to work and hopefully not connect with your emotions so you can keep going like a stable machine. But I think part of being a woman is learning how to deal with emotions and to heal ourselves collectively, to try to understand what’s happening and go to the source of it, to unknot the personal and communal knots. It’s like a process of re-educating; it’s an ongoing process. And using your body as a sensor, as you were saying, sensing what is happening with other people, beyond our location. It means transcending this homogenisation state that you have to be in in order to work, to be productive, all of these things that cannot deal with vulnerability.

Victoria: Yes. I think that is the point I wanted to make. We are not allowed to be vulnerable in this society; we are formed to be independent. We have these commands: you need to be perfect; you need to produce; you need to be rational and almost without any emotion. From a feminist point of view, there’s the concept of precarity that reminds us of the interdependency that we have – as Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant have argued – and also how being in precarity is the only moment when we can be vulnerable, because we can rely on others to hold us in those moments, being vulnerable is what allows others to sustain us in moments of precarity.

I was thinking too of this idea about decolonisation as more than being in opposition, and what you said about feminism and the idea of disobedience. When we think about disobedience, the first image that we often have is this very patriarchal, radical idea of disobedience, almost childlike disobedience. But when we think about disobedience with a feminist decolonial approach, it is a different kind of disobedience. It’s the kind of disobedience you find when, for example, you are in your house with your parents as a kid, and your dad says, ‘No, you cannot do that,’ then your mum says, ‘you can do it, but don’t let him know’. It’s this kind of disobedience that is discreet, that you don’t realise is happening, but is taking place in little measures everywhere.

Patricia: It’s like you’re always under the male gaze, and you have to be perfect. The biggest disobedience for me at least is to expand and to allow all our possibilities. And also to get into a place which is really honouring our values as women.

There’s so many infinite little gestures and ways of getting rid of the male gaze over your body, over your works. I have been dealing with that all my life, like in Chile, which can be so misogynist. I was taught to be a good housewife and be a Sunday painter. And so, disobedience for me is being an artist, and trying to expand my knowledge and get rid of all these cultural expectations. I had the luxury of becoming an artist. So, it’s not that protest is not important. It is crucial and sometimes urgent. But I think there are also inner layers of disobedience. I was an activist for many years, and I guess I collapsed with the amount of violence that you have to deal with. Sometimes it’s important to go into the street when it’s urgent; I can do it and I will die for it if necessary, that’s okay. But I don’t think it is that productive in the end. I think it’s much more productive to go the other route, the propositive – a route that suggests and proposes new worlds, new options, new ways of entering in relation – having the kind of freedom that you were talking about…

Maya Caspari: I’m struck by how, for you, ‘decolonial practice’ isn’t simply oppositional, but is rather something that moves, something that is also imaginative and generative. I am fascinated by what you say about your own exposure to violence as an activist, Patricia, and the value of small gestures of disobedience. You’ve mentioned working in museums, galleries, and the academy, in or in-between varied national contexts. I am not suggesting that these spaces all function in the same way, or that your work is in opposition to them. But I am curious about how you situate yourself, and form your practice, in relation to the varied spaces – and places – in which you’ve worked, especially institutional spaces?

Victoria: I feel I am in an interesting position because it is in-between, at least in my academic work. But it is mainly because I am particularly alert with my background and influence on decolonial thought and also as Latina, studying in a University in Europe and researching decolonisation. It is a contradiction. Then, when I need to write about something, I normally have to set this floor of vulnerability, that is basically exposing myself with all my vulnerabilities, imperfections and the things that normally people do not want to show, including inequalities and sometimes violences. So then the other can say, okay, if you have exposed all this, then I can be a little bit more flexible. And, sometimes again, it’s trying to fight, but in a different way. It is not trying to impose a way of thinking, rather to show that there is another option that is equally valid. Sometimes it’s very well received. Because we need to acknowledge that there are different kinds of academics and different types of academic work. There are more rigid ways of working that are more concerned with the rules, for example, the rules of language, the rules of how you have to write academically. This is the neutral detached voice, or the impossibility of writing from an ‘I’ as it can be considered too ‘subjective’, although, neutrality conveys and hides many other interests, structures and power relationships. I’m not a huge fan of that type of work. Because I can see that it is more cryptic. Sometimes there is a lot of information that is not received because of this detached way of framing the world or because it is invalidated as it does not fit to that imposed form. I prefer working in a different way. And that is a way of trying to connect, a way that is more evocative, that is more poetic. And for some academics, it’s going to be great, and for others, it’s probably going to be too disruptive. But it’s part of the plurality. And I understand how some of these small ruptures may be threatening, particularly if forms are part of structures that replicate violence or if they are the result of the violence suffered. In any case I cannot change their ideas by imposing new ones.

I guess there are different ways of navigating that. There was a period where I had to explain everything, every dot, every comma, everything in the writing or in the way I was doing things, and that was very exhausting. I’m still doing that, but much, much less than before. And I’m trying just to say it is the way it is, and most of my mistakes are the result of colonial impositions. If I don’t manage a command with ‘native’ perfection, it is because I had to learn a different language, a different style of writing, a different culture… Sometimes writing is going to touch some fibres in some people and other fibres in others and in that process some people are going to get uncomfortable. It’s okay, because in the end, I’m doing my job if I’m making the people that have been comfortable for a long time uncomfortable, rather than if I kept things comfortable for them and uncomfortable for me, even though it’s never totally comfortable for me…

Patricia: I love that. I think it’s also about renegotiating in little steps. I have worked with a lot of institutions and museums and collections. On the one hand, I wonder if I should participate at all. But personally, I prefer to participate and as Donna Haraway puts it, stay with the trouble and move little things. For example, the Wellcome Collection invited me to revise their South American ethnobotanical collection, which had never been shown before.⁴ They gave me the freedom to choose and to propose a narrative. So, of course, it’s problematic to be showing these objects which are sacred. For me, these are plants of vision, sacred plants, not only scientific specimens. But it was all about negotiating the little permissions, in how to exhibit them. So they said, okay, the specimens have to be shown in archival conditions, but you can create everything that surrounds and holds the archival material. I wanted to challenge how these objects were shown: why do we need to keep the same kind of cabinets? So, we ended up making some cabinets that were also shrines and totems with shapes inspired in the same plant morphologies. We decided to expose the stories of colonial abuse behind the objects, at the same time of honouring them as sacred plants and remembering the people that suffered during their collection under colonial rule. And, in the end, I was very happy to participate. I doubted it before, but I don’t think a binary between institutions and decolonial practice is that generative. It depends so much on the team. I think it’s something you consider case by case: their openness, how much they have had to deconstruct their selves, their knowledge; the respect.

Victoria: I agree it is case by case. Because sometimes you need to know that you are going to be supported by people. Facing all these topics, whether it’s decolonisation, whether it’s how we treat and behave with plants, whether it’s academia… depends on being willing to do the work, especially in terms of decolonisation; it’s not an easy job, because if you decide to change you’re replacing your old ways of thinking, facing assumptions and sometimes recognising when you have reproduced systems of violence towards the other. We are still living in a colonised world, and therefore we are still colonised in more ways that we can realise. We breathe colonisation every time, everywhere with everything that we do. I mean, for instance, we are now communicating online through our computers, the battery of our computers needs lithium that is extracted from different parts leaving catastrophic environmental consequences in the places where the mineral is extracted, the politics of extraction of those minerals are structured by colonial legacies where some lives have more value than others, human over nature. This is not to say that we should throw away the advances of modernity, but maybe rethink how those politics affect other beings that inhabit the world with us.

It also means acknowledging which kinds of privilege we have. And where the spaces are where we can work with other people to acknowledge the privilege and say, okay, maybe I can give a little bit of my privilege. So others don’t need to struggle all the time.

Patricia: Listening to you talk made me think of all of these little gestures of reparation. For example, in the Wellcome Collection, we encountered a picture of a Machi, the healer I was telling you about, which I was so honoured to find and also very scared to exhibit it because it raised all these kinds of politics and questions about who has the right to talk or to show a Machi image. And it was really badly labelled – it said she was a kind of witch. And I said, ‘Wait, she’s not a witch; she is a Machi.’ So we actually changed the classification in the collection which I see as a little, little amendment to one point or one thread in the huge web of colonisation, where there’s so much waiting to be amended. It’s like a little ritual, a hacking of the power structures. The beautiful thing is that then we invited Machi Millaray Huichalaf to the public program, so she could talk about what it means to be a Machi today rather than having the voice of anthropologists speak for her as has always happened before.

And then we became friends and I am happy that I’m now helping her publish her first book of medicinal plants. So what’s beautiful is how one little point of contact, where these two voices or two worlds are able to be there, can move the colonial energies and enter into a beautiful friendship. These kinds of things happen when you are vulnerable enough to enter in conversation and decide to interact, to go beyond the fixed positions that we should occupy. We embody so many positions in our bodies – our position, the colour of our skin, our history, education – that I think it’s so important to move beyond them through friendship or through resonance, to really engage in a way of interacting between us beyond the positions that we should occupy under colonial power structures. To understand, as Machi have said, that we speak the same language, even if we are different.

Ruth: Your discussion of privilege and positionalities is especially interesting in the broader context of this issue’s concerns. I have been thinking about my own positionality and privilege, the privilege I hold as a white Irish woman and academic during the process of working on this special issue (and throughout my journey as a PhD student and now early career researcher). How does that privilege work? How do I attend to my research with reflexivity while working from within a colonial, neoliberal institution with all of this privilege? Who does the work? Who has more to give? It would be interesting to hear more about what privilege might mean in different contexts. For example, the position of being an academic based in the UK versus being in Chile. Patricia, to what extent can the positions you discuss be moved beyond?

Victoria: Yes definitely. I have to say, I am very privileged because I had access to good education, my parents had the means for helping me while studying, which in Chile is a huge privilege. And yet, I am not the most privileged of all, I learnt English just before coming to the UK, and once here you are an immigrant and you are alone, you are not with your family, have no connections, etc. So basically you don’t have all those privileges and yet you are privileged to be studying abroad. It is a contradiction, but then, because I have that huge privilege I can do something with it, whether that is working towards ways of decolonising colonial spaces such as the academy, or if I have the chance, bringing a Latin American or Indigenous artist to talk to the university or any other place. The thing is once you know where your privilege is, how are you going to use it?

I’m thinking about the fact that you [Patricia] found this picture of the Machi. I think it’s also being willing to hear and not just in the human way. There is an agency of materiality, the agency of the picture, the idea that somehow the picture can choose us to say, hey, hear, hear me. And you say, okay, something’s happening here, and I need to pay attention. And because you paid attention, then you read the label, and then said, hey, this is not a witch, this is a Machi. You started to make all those connections that were lost before because of this colonial logic of separation and analysis.

Patricia: That’s beautiful. It’s like going through the future to reweave the whole. Also, it’s nice that the Wellcome was open enough to invite other voices from other parts to go into that collection. That generated a lot of other things. It was a portal. It’s amazing to see how that old image in the collection ended up calling a Machi, a woman from the future, to intervene in that colonial collection. Another example of how objects and beings from the past show up in the present and help to stage interventions can be seen in the ways that Machi’s community is fighting against Statkraft, a Norwegian state company that is building a hydroelectric plant that risks destroying the river’s whole ecosystem. They found that the plant would be built over an old cemetery, maybe even older than Mapuche people. This cemetery might prevent the company from completing its construction. Again, the energy from the past, those objects and beings from the past, are helping to protect that land. Through the remains, their objects have a presence in our present and the future. The whole situation has created huge conflict. A Machi relative was shot while protesting against the hydroelectric plant two weeks ago. That’s colonisation again, in its new form of neoliberalism.

Maya: What you say is also interesting in terms of considering what a collection or a museum presentation can do in terms of temporality. In some conversations by others in this special issue, contributors have critiqued how objects, particularly from (post)colonial contexts, are sometimes presented in museums as though they are something from a past that’s shut off from the present moment. Lisa Lowe and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay for instance discussed the necessity of instead re-activating the potential of those objects and restoring them to a ‘community of relation’. It seems to imply taking them out of a linear timeframe and bringing them into relation with other present and potential future objects.

Victoria: Yes, for example, for Indigenous cultures, particularly in the Andes (Aymara and Quechua people), the past is not something that is behind, but in front of you. So it’s something that you’re seeing. While the future is a load on your back because you cannot see it, if you put it in front of you it does not allow you to walk. In contrast, in Western culture, there is the idea that the past is something that is behind, separated from the present and, please don’t touch it, please don’t interact with it, just pass it on to the future. But don’t touch it! Then it is more of an imposition than a value acquired by the interaction that we can have with that past. Instead, for Indigenous cultures, the past is here. I mean, the building, the ceramic, the board, the textile… they are here, they are not in another time, not locked in the past, not attempting to be a future, but here and now. We can see it and we can touch it; we can do something with it. When for example, there is a ‘discovery’ from the past, let’s say an Indigenous cemetery, the past appears at the right moment to say something, to re-make something that we have forgotten or need to remember at that moment, whether it’s stopping the exploitation of the area, whether it is stop the hydroelectric plant, stop this, move that, think about why that is reappearing, what we need to recall… There are different relationships that come back to be re-activated in that re-emergence of the past… that make that past alive in the present, maybe to repair or heal generational traumas.

Maya: It’s interesting to hear you talking about touch and its connection to potentiality and the speculative… this makes me think of stories of haunting that emerge across varied contexts, and how these relate to (or differ from) what you describe as ‘reactivation’ or reanimation, which sounds perhaps like a tactile encounter which both recalls and moves the past, evoking not only what was but what might be as well as what might have been?

Patricia: It’s beautiful, because we were talking the other week with a person who was saying that intacto in Spanish sounds like ‘intact’ in English, but in Spanish it means literally in relationship, in touch. It’s interesting to think about this in relation to the history of objects. Why are we so dedicated to holding everything at one point in time when it is impossible to keep it like that? And then if you apply that to, for example, Indigenous cultures, they’re always in motion. We need to defend the freedom to keep inventing, expanding and creating these energies but in new ways. If we want, of course. I am also very connected to the forms that I got to know and that I have to let go now. It’s a total ecological grief. We’re experiencing a huge drought here. The trees and animals are dying, we are seeing those life forms continuously die. My heart shrinks. But at the same time, I ask myself: how many times has this matter transformed? How many times does matter–living beings–keep finding other ways of appearing. It’s a very sad grief though.

Victoria: I think that part of that apprehension to keep things is again based in capitalist thinking, which tells us you need to accumulate knowledge; you need to accumulate stuff, accumulate capital. Because in accumulation there is stability, less uncertainty and less chaos, but without chaos there is no change, no transits, nor transformations. Other ways of thinking – going again, for example, to Indigenous ways of thinking, or the idea of the precarious – suggest that things don’t have to last forever; forms can be regenerated, can be transformed.

Patricia: Before we started, I was also trying to think about the word precariedad – precarity – to break down what it means.

Victoria: Precarity comes from the word precis in Latin – to pray, orar/oir, at least that is the meaning in Cecilia Vicuña’s works.⁵ So each ‘precarity’ is like a little prayer.

Patricia: Precarity can be a nice word, as it deconstructs what is ‘precious’ to us. In our societies, we are always looking for precious things and when something is precious, you take care of it, we try to keep it forever and ever. On the other hand, the precarious, this simple prayer, is something that is just for the moment; you can pray with anything, it is something that is there just to sustain you when you need it. And it’s about the demands of the moment, rather than thinking about this linear time and future.

Victoria: And that is the beauty of the precarious: it is whatever you have there in the moment, what can sustain you; to hold what you need to hold for the moment, and then it can be transformed into something new, or called something else. So it’s a different way of thinking, of interacting with things, interacting with people too. At the same time, sometimes you have people in your life that stay and other that people appear like a lifesaver at a particular time, to say what you need to hear, to exchange what you need to exchange, to nurture the parts that need to be nurtured and then you don’t see them anymore.

Patricia: That makes me think about one of my teachers Eulalia Valldosera saying that she used to do art with bread leftovers, because it wasn’t about the preciousness of the material, but all the energy that she was putting into it. She was transferring a spiritual prayer into very simple objects or carriers.

Maya: That’s so interesting and reminds me of how concepts like ‘vulnerability’ and ‘precarity’ resonate differently in different contexts… I wonder if you could talk about the relationship between specific, lived experiences of vulnerability, and feminist engagements with vulnerability as a basis for a relational mode of being? Perhaps the point is that the material and theoretical are necessarily interconnected… I am considering how negotiating this relationship both evokes, but also troubles, the possibility of speaking as an ‘us’ or ‘we’?

Victoria: I think that people and beings are vulnerable in different ways, but what precarity requires is a mutual exposure. Lauren Berlant talks about this in an interview: through mutual exposure of our vulnerabilities we can rely on others’ strengths to sustain us while we are in precarious moments.⁶ When we hear that prayer, it is possible to sustain the other in acts of care, but it needs to be a care that hears the needs of the moment, not one that is imposed; in those gestures of care we also are nurturing each other. In relation to the question of who the ‘we’ is, I think we are always moving and shifting positions, mentally and physically, so I think that ‘we’ depends on how much it resonates within your personal experience. For Lugones, ‘I’ is always multiple when inhabiting different worlds.⁷

Maya: How do you draw on this sense of movement, multiplicity and transformation in your own creative and curatorial practice?

Victoria: The things I do are very influenced by my own movement. There’s migration; it’s also that I love travelling; I love talking and all those kinds of interactions always bring movement. So, in my curatorial practice I also try to see how I can make those interactions happen, whether they are between artworks, between people, or something that is going on in my life. I guess it is thinking about where change can happen and that comes from those different movements and interactions, rather than being quiet. Because we are constantly moving, we are in constant movement between places, we are in constant interaction, again, with people with plants, with objects with animals. So it’s just trying to be aware of how those interactions move something in me and how to make those movements evident for more people. And if it moves something in me it’s very likely it’s going to move something in someone else, to shake up something that we didn’t know we could shake.

Patricia: I feel similar. Sometimes, I think about shapeshifting: how can I try to think of a piece or a project that is complex enough to hold a lot of information so that when you show it, it can talk to people and have a ‘free pass’ into their beings. So it’s more than feeling a gradual movement; it’s like events. Some complex events that we can do through a text or through a piece or a video, a conversation…some art pieces hold enough information in their complexity and energies they weave together to change the information around ourselves or the viewers and provoke an event, a movement. For me I think it is a matter of how to build, or to complete, those equations of complexity so they can make those movements. This process of activating possibilities is a new tool for me, and it’s totally not linear. I have also been learning a lot about other ways of knowing, like the Andean conception of time… My understanding of time is energetic more than movement as a gradual or linear motion. I see the process of proposing these events through going into some kind of invisible or visual realm and re-choreographing the energies, so that their new organisation can expand after and move the events that conform our notions of time. A virtuous jump in time, as a friend says.

Ruth: Thank you. It’s a privilege to have shared this conversation and I’m really struck by how generative your discussion has been. Thank you also for sharing how your personal histories have informed your decolonial practice. Before we end, I’m interested in returning to something you said earlier, Patricia about how the system cuts off the very possibilities of what it is that we want to think about. I’m reminded of a recent talk I attended in which the closing question asked us to think about the ethics of ‘harvesting’ Indigenous knowledge. This felt like an unsettling note to end on, in particular, the use of the word ‘harvesting’ which invokes ideas around colonialism – who is sowing? On whose land does the crop grow? Who gets to reap the spoils of the harvest? – and it brings me back to questions of relationality and connection. How do we focus on the possibility of these relational ways of being and doing while also attending to the potential unevenness of our relations?

Patricia: I have been thinking so much about that, because in the end, colonialism is violence, right? How can we live in other non-violent ways, or at least propose them?

That word ‘harvesting’ is a complicated word. I’m not Indigenous, so I’ve been dealing with this all my life: how to establish… for me, this is just a personal thing, but it’s about learning and establishing friendship, and then totally modifying my perception of the world, my hologram. And then, learning to be an artist, a human, with the modification that is coming from learning or from friendship.

Victoria: Yeah, I was thinking that harvesting is still exploitative language. The history in my family is quite complex and diverse. I know, for example, that we have Indigenous roots, but we don’t have any clue of how, when, whose, what the names are… all of that information has been erased because of the history of colonialism, because of its structure and even colonialism within my family. I think that the best way of describing the way that I work, at least with Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous ways of thinking, rather than harvesting, is honouring because somehow everything I’m trying to do, is trying to honour that history of my ancestors that was erased. Everything that I’m trying to say, trying to be, is to be a good ancestor and at the same time honouring those histories, those voices, not to bring back, but to at least say what they couldn’t say or what they couldn’t be, here at the moment. So more than harvesting, it is trying to honour them in the best way that is possible.

Patricia: I think the words honouring and learning are great because I see them as a route of contact with these Earth energies and it’s how you honour planetary memory.

Victoria: Honouring like that is respect, but it’s not a respect that is imposed. It’s not a military, violent respect.

Patricia: It’s a spiritual one.

The conversation took place in March 2023.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patricia Domínguez Claro

Patricia Domínguez Claro is an artist, educator and earth defender based in Puchuncaví, Chile. She is currently director of the ethnobotanical platform Studio Vegetalista. Email: [email protected]

Victoria Vargas-Downing

Victoria Vargas-Downing is a Chilean art historian and heritage researcher based in the UK. Email: [email protected]

Maya Caspari

Maya Caspari is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Email: [email protected]

Ruth Daly

Ruth Daly is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Global Creative Industries at the University of Leeds. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 The Diaguita are South American Indigenous people native to the Chilean Norte Chico and the Argentine Northwest. In 1997 the Chilean government claimed 40% of the Diaguitas’ land on which global corporations began constructing mines. Diaguita described the extraction of rare earth minerals and the destruction of the land as a new form of colonisation. See, for example, Yáñez and Rea, ‘The Valley of Gold’.

2 Khait and others, ‘Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative’.

3 See Siracussano, 2011.

4 ‘Matrix Vegetal’ was created by Patricia Domínguez for a Wellcome Collection commission, devised as part of the Rooted Beings exhibition (24 February – 29 August 2022). See: https://wellcomecollection.org/events/YhTyEhMAADOEddAT.

5 Vicuña, ‘Introduction’.

6 Puar, ‘Precarity Talk’.

7 Lugones, Pilgrimages = Peregrinajes.