My feet are firmly planted in Mexico City
My feet are firmly planted in Mexico City. This is not my home, but the number of mundane encounters and friends made make me feel different than the last time I was a tourist. I came here as part of Materia Abierta, a summer school on arts, rituals, theory.
We played instruments, touched, became uncomfortable, practiced translation, refused translation, sat with the mystery, ate great food, learned about spiders and being porous, and performed with the great Awilda Sterling-Duprey. The program is now over and after becoming fully undone there is now the opportunity to slowly shift form.
I learned more in one month than I have in the past two years and I am unsure of how to move forward with all the new information. It feels impossible to even attempt to give a summary here but what is the most apparent is all the learning and unlearning that is necessary to do around the educational training I have received in the US. Materia Abierta was a space that was nourishing, free of punishment, and not about adhering to a binary of “right” vs “wrong.” Our emotions were welcomed, as was our personal experience. Everyone was so invested in the program and each others’ work in such a beautiful way. Sometimes in New York it feels like people want to know what you do before they invest in the relationship but in this program we did not even talk about our own personal work until half way through.Instead of focusing on solitary creative work, we spent sometimes up to 10 hours a day together in discussions, ritual work, meals, and dancing. We really got to just receive
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But now, I am spending another month here decompressing and reorienting towards research interests and am writing more. The interesting thing about doing research on public sex here is that notions of what is public vs private and the agreements related to these spaces are not universal. Still untangling this.
On the train a young boy pulls his body closer to another boy and they kiss in a packed train. On my commutes, I pass by multiple couples kissing and cuddling in parks, by monuments, and on benches. Just for saying hello, I receive hugs and kisses from new friends.
The public bathroom by the metro costs about six pesos, you can only smoke weed in certain specified legal zones, there are barely any public trash cans, and there are public bath houses with private rooms you can rent.
No one can tell me where the glory holes are but the city is full of holes, fissures, cracks, and uneven sidewalks and somehow very clean, although you still sometimes smell shit. Shit finds its way
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And I have found my way to extend my time outside of NYC. In October, I’ll be moving to Spain for three months to take part in Praxis, an intensive study programme organized by fluent, an arts organization devoted to rehearsing radical imagination as a means to propitiate new ecologies of thought and action.
“Reacting to current conditions of great narrative anxiety where detachment and hyper–mediation have replaced the openness of the narrative; emotion and affectivity are at the forefront of this new phase of neoliberalism. Considering these challenges and the subsequent role of the arts and humanities, Praxis aims to develop socially transformative prospects that repair the social realm from reduced listening and re–articulate aesthetics, and making processes.“
If I am being completely honest, I cannot afford to be in New York right now. It is actually cheaper for me to leave and do this program. My GoFundMe is still open if you want to support me staying alive and learning. Everything that I am doing so far is also really helping me shape the class I will teach once I return to New York in January.
I am also still looking for remote work and am pretty open. I would especially love to work with organizations / people / projects concerned with eroticism, sex, sex work advocacy, herbalism, immigration, technology, etc. I am really interested in more writing opportunities, leading workshops (especially around queer ecology, queer geography, herbalism, sound art, erotic everything), and getting paid to do research.
besos