Allotropes en dislocation

Why do people see what they see? There must be conventions. There must be expectations. We see nothing otherwise; all would be chaos. Types, codes, categories, concepts.

Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World, p. 58.

According to Hito Steyerl, the new normal is not seeing anything intelligible. This is because information passes through as a set of signals (electric charges, radio waves, light pulses) that cannot be perceived by human senses. Since contemporary perception is largely machinic, human vision can only cover a tiny part of it. As a consequence, vision has lost relevance and is now replaced by machinic filtering, decrypting and pattern recognition. This means that unless signals are processed and transformed, humans are unable to see them, because images look different to machines than to humans¹Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (London and New York: Verso, 2017), pp. 47-49.. In other words, an unintelligible reality is being created by images imperceptible to humans and thus reality itself, has become, to a certain degree, unintelligible to human consciousness.

Miguel Ventura, untitled collage, 2019. Courtesy of the artist

Miguel Ventura’s (b. 1954, San Antonio Texas, U.S., based in Mexico City) collages juxtapose an array of apparently disparate elements: Classic Modern architecture and contemporary iconic Starchitecture, modern and contemporary art, images of celebrities, contemporary artists, politicians, dead bodies, a swastika every now and then, all arranged beautifully in intricate patterns. Similar juxtapositions appeared in a gigantic collage as part of Ventura’s 2008 installation Cantos cívicos at MUAC (University Contemporary Arts Museum, Mexico City), which gained the artist censorship, a civil lawsuit and accusations of making a “carnival of symbols” in which he effectively juxtaposed (not amalgamated as many claimed) Nazism and neoliberalism.

Mescaline, a film by Clarisse Hahn, France, 2017, Fiction, 45’04, Production Les films du Bélier

Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor.
Ciguri is the very mystery of all poetry.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux

Clarisse Hahn’s (b. and b. Paris, 1973) Mescaline (2017), is a narrative about the consequences of the mutually ignored crossing of the margins of an encounter. The events unfold in a small town in the Wirikuta desert in the northern center Mexican State of San Luis Potosí. It features a young European couple on a “Mystical Tourism” trip in search for the magic cactus, the peyote, in desert. They are cultured and curious and have traveled to Mexico following the steps of Antonin Artaud and Henri Michaux, looking for the secrets of the earth that can be revealed in the experience offered by peyote intake. For over 5000 years, peyote has been considered by Huichol and other indigenous peoples as a sacred food. Its consumption produces hallucinations during religious ceremonies, which they believe helps them develop healing capacities and communication with their gods. For them, all living beings have a soul and thus the peyote plant possesses a spirit and wisdom to share. For decades, travelers after Artaud – but also Carlos Castañeda, the American anthropologist who wrote extensively about his experiences with peyote – have traveled to Catorce to embark on a spiritual journey in the desert.