This article appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
El blanco vive en su casa
de madera con balcón
el negro en rancho de paja
en un solo paredón.
Y aunque mi amo me mate
a la mina no voy
yo no quiero morirme
en un socavón.Don Pedro es tu amo
él te compró
se compran las cosas
a los hombres no.En la mina brilla el oro
al fondo del socavón
el blanco se lleva todo
y al negro deja el dolor.—“La Mina”
Lea este artículo en Español.
At the center of the gallery stands a desecrated sarcophagus. Behind it, three looping video projections unfold across the walls.
Together they trace what appears to be the coffin’s journey by land, river, and sea. The sarcophagus itself was constructed in the same way that tunnel shafts are carved in the gold mines of Santa María de Timbiquí, the artist’s hometown and the point from which the action documented in the installation begins.
In the first video, we see the artist’s father and grandfather, along with other members of the community, carving a piedra de peña or block of stone that gradually takes the shape of the sarcophagus now on display— empty—in the gallery. The second video shows 12 men carrying it on their shoulders: along slippery rainforest slopes, by boat down the Timbiquí River to the sea, by ship across the Pacific to the port of Buenaventura, and finally by truck to the city of Cali. In the last video, 12 men again take turns carrying it through the streets of the city, accompanied by the verses of “La Mina,” a song inherited from enslaved communities in Santa Bárbara de Iscuandé, on Colombia’s Pacific coast, sung in the style of alabaos or funerary chants (“I do not want to die in a mine shaft”). In the final scene of the sequence, we see the artist, Eblin Joban Grueso, emerge slowly from the sarcophagus after his brother chips away the stone that enclosed him. Only then do we realize that he has been there all along—held within the stone that preserved him in the earth’s depths, as if awaiting his disinternment. He stands, breathes, looks at the audience, and, in response to an invitation from his aunt, who receives him with solemn gratitude, speaks the following words:
… it is not a spirit; it is a living body that feels, that resists, that does not die in the act of being erased, that resonates, that camouflages itself and waits for a signal of light, that passes through the earth and the walls through which the voice enters in order to say: ‘we are still alive!’
The performance ends with the sound of marimbas from Timbiquí. Grueso smiles and dances with his aunt. The video fades to white, emulating perhaps the blinding light that confronts someone emerging from the mine/from the tomb—someone returning, time and again, from death.
As the surrounding iconography suggests, this is indeed a journey from death to life. Yet the installation by Grueso, an artist from Colombia’s Pacific region, is not about sacrifice or redemption. Rather, he describes it as “a performative action that travels through time, brushing the dust from history in order to speak about the past and present of Black bodies rendered invisible in Santa María de Timbiquí, Cauca.”
I encountered this work in July 2024 at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), as part of the exhibition Desafiar. Atravesar el sol desde un gran Pacífico (To Defy: To Cross the Sun from a Vast Pacific), curated by Yolanda Chois. Since then, I have continually searched for language that allows me to approach Grueso’s gesture. How are we to understand the singular wager of this work?
Grueso spent three days inside the sarcophagus— three days being transported. The work invites us to imagine collectively what only his body could know of that journey, yet what thousands of bodies carry with them at once, share, and index within a bodily memory that is—and remains—the living archive of enslavement. “To have been embarked is to have been moved by others, with others,” Grueso recalls, citing The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. Yet although this is one of the references the artist himself invokes, the work cannot, I believe, be read entirely through the notion of fugitivity so central to Moten’s thought. Nor are we operating solely within the grammar of survival or the “afterlife” that Saidiya Hartman has so incisively theorized to describe the persistence of slavery in the present. The piece also does not fully inhabit the “orthography of the wake” developed by Christina Sharpe, drawing on the multiple meanings of wake in English to describe the kind of temporality that anti-Blackness as climate inscribes in the present.
In contrast to this constellation of recent Black critical thought from the Global North, Grueso’s work seems to carry another temporality, one brought into the scene and remembered by the Black body in this installation. This is not simply an act of resurrection, despite the scenography that frames the piece and the art-historical language it evokes and resignifies. It is indeed a return to/from life—within the wake of death’s vigil—but above all, it emphasizes that which challenges death, which awaits its passing without being reduced to its trace. It is a kind of imagining otherwise, a fantasear Grueso insists, that seeks to break with the logic of sacrifice—and with it the logic of capital and enslavement—in order to open our listening toward the stories that the piedra de peña, the act of carving it, the mine shaft, and the marimbas still have to tell. This is a breach in time that opens onto a todavía (still) that the work both pronounces and indexes. It is distinct, at least in emphasis, from Hart- man’s insistence on the persistence of a past that has not yet passed, and from the enunciation of a “gram- mar of black feminist futurity” articulated by Tina Campt as the imperative of Black art in the present.
Return, fantasy, breach. I follow these words that Grueso offers us—along with the work itself—as keys for thinking through the grammar this installation both invokes and inaugurates: a mode of thought articulated in the Pacific rather than solely in the wake traced by the slave ship across the Atlantic; a rhythm marked by mining rather than plantation labor; a way of inhabiting the vivir sabroso of Afro-descendant communities in the Southern Hemisphere, of articulating their own forms of insurgency or waywardness, using Hartman’s term, and complicating what the performance does and asks us to hear.
These terms come from Grueso’s own text, written in 2024 as part of his undergraduate thesis in the Fine Arts program at the Faculty of Visual and Applied Arts in Cali, Colombia, which originally included the works that now compose the installation at MAMM. I read this document as a reflection on his artistic practice in the form of what might be called a critical poetics—one that cannot be separated from the historical and geographical context from which the work originates and which Grueso reconstructs in order to, quite literally, give it a place. Or as he himself puts it: to “give an image to what has no image.” This is what he calls fantasear.
[retorno]
“ … it is not a spirit; it is a living body that feels, that resists … ”
Return is the title of the performance documented in the triptych that accompanies and sets the rhythm of the installation. It is the rhythm of the stone cutters who appear in the first video “unearthing” the carved sarcophagus that greets us in the gallery, evoking at once the mine shafts built for the entrance—and far less often, the exit—of bodies in the gold mines established by a French company in Santa María de Timbiquí at the beginning of the 20th century. It is a rhythm that Grueso relates to the labors of everyday life that sustain and reproduce the inherited practices shaped by the region’s history of enslavement, even as they refuse to be reduced to it:
For a long time I have heard the sound of the pick striking, scraping, searching, wearing down, the sound of a body that resists, of labor abuse, of incessant cries of pain. Th ese sounds have formed an intimate continuum of stories that are difficult to tell, sad and painful memories of a lived time that cannot be silenced.
Through repetition, and through what Grueso calls “the vibration of materialities,” this rhythm also accompanies “the harmonic construction of the funerary and liberation songs of the traditional peoples of Colombia’s Pacific region.” It is the rhythm of the alabaos the artist recalls as he describes his journey inside the sarcophagus across the sea toward Buenaventura:
The rocking of the waves seemed like the lullabies of the alabaos sung for the dead … The blows of the waves against the metal sheets of the boat passed through the stone walls, producing in me a back-and- forth between present and past, in that play with death inside a sarcophagus.
It is also the rhythm that accompanies those who, in the third video, walk through the city carrying the sarcophagus on their shoulders, marked by the alabao verses they sing together as a reminder that they all share its weight. The procession comes to a halt upon reaching the Asociación Casa Cultural El Chontaduro, the journey’s final destination, located in the urban area that has received the steady mass migration from Timbiquí to the city of Cali.
The rhythm then shifts and transforms into the marimbas of the musical group Raíces de Timbiquí, performing the song “Pacífico,” by Herencia de Timbiquí (“How beautiful it is to be born in the Pacific, how beautiful it is to live in the Pacific!”), which begins to play as Grueso slowly emerges from the sarcophagus/mine shaft. He is received by all those present—many of whom accompanied him on the journey, or part of it—and, after exchanging a few words with his aunt, Elena Hinestroza Venté, a prominent Afro-Colombian community leader known in Cali for her political activism through music, the artist invites them to dance as the final image that closes the triptych and inaugurates the full experience of the installation in the gallery.
It is here, in this encounter between Grueso and his aunt, that the dialogue unfolds whose closing lines frame my reflection on the work. I reproduce it here in full, since it is only through their exchange that the installation fully comes into focus.
Grueso: I come from the ruins of memory, where the fossils of the sea lie covered in dust and the secrets that lead toward immortality are kept. In the light of darkness, where hope is worth more than time (and it is not true that time is worth gold), there I found my grandmother, who, with her resounding voice, awakened hummingbirds and bats upon the foundations of spirituality—she sang and sang and sang.
Aunt, do you remember the prayer your grandmother taught you for protection when you left the house?
Hinestroza: Yes, yes, nephew. I remember many stories my grandmother used to tell. In a corner of the room she would sit, lifting her skirts, crossing her long legs, lighting a large cigar, drawing its flame inward, and without taking it from her mouth she would tell us a thousand stories. One of them was about the mines, the tunnel shafts carved in stone where the bosses, the owners, were the French. The French company brought this mechanism here to work the mine. And my grandmother would say, ‘If those shafts could speak, what wouldn’t they tell us! How many deaths, how many abuses!’ Nephew, my grandmother used to say that many women came out of those shafts pregnant, abused— so many stories still to be told. And I’m glad that today you are unearthing all that pending memory. Thank you, nephew.
Grueso: On the ancestral plane, many lives have been sacrificed to protect the defenseless. It is not a spirit—it is a living body that feels, that resists, that does not die in the act of being erased … that resonates, that camouflages itself and waits for a signal of light, that passes through the cracks in the walls through which the voice enters in order to say: ‘we are still alive! We are still alive! We are still alive!’
I look once again at the empty sarcophagus, and ask myself what it is that “returns” in Grueso’s work. I think then of the recent gesture by the Afro-Colombian writer Adelaida Fernández Ochoa, born in Cali, who imagines return in Afuera crece un mundo as a journey back to the place of origin. Grueso’s return is not, however, a return to the origin as in so many narratives and imaginaries surrounding enslaved subjects. But neither is it, as I suggested earlier, simply a passage from death back to life. Rather, it appears as a return of life itself onto the scene—an act of refusing and defying death with the force of that todavía that Grueso proclaims, echoed in the repetition of the same gesture in the verses of the song that fills the gallery: “Life can still be lived (in the Pacific) / joy can still be felt (in the Pacific).” This is not only resistance; it is living. It is not survival; it is affirmation. It is life, and it is joy.
At the heart of the memory of that violence (“If those shafts could speak, what wouldn’t they tell us! How many deaths, how many abuses!”), in the repetition of the rhythm that recalls and inscribes it in the body, “the living body that feels” appears on the scene to challenge the slow, prolonged, and enduring death imposed by capital and its death-dealing logics. To give image to this, Grueso tells us—to evoke it, to create it—is to “phantasize.”
[fantasear]
“ … that does not die in the act of being erased … ”
This is why, perhaps, it is important for Grueso to distance his performance from readings that would interpret it as exposing the body to death. The image of Grueso emerging from the stone coffin recalls Cuban artist Carlos Martiel’s performance Recono- cimiento, carried out in the courtyard of the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City in 2019. In that action, we see Martiel emerge from a concrete coffin after it has been shattered with sledgehammer blows. “As Martiel takes the body to its limits,” Grueso writes in his text, “I ask myself about the value of life in each of my actions, despite the risks.” While Martiel’s work marks and denounces the violence of anti-Blackness by wounding the body and exposing it to sacrifice, Grueso instead insists on caring for the body in order to affirm, explore, and make visible what lives, beats, pulses, and dwells within it. And this care, the work suggests, is only possible because it takes place in community: unlike Martiel, Grueso is surrounded by those who carry him, accompany him with their songs, and celebrate life with him.
The body thus functions here as “support,” Grueso writes: one’s own body, the collective body, the coffin-body, the body as territory. Its care, latency, and persistence appear as moments of interruption within a logic of sacrifice that echoes—and is reproduced in parallel by—the logic of capital itself, which the work challenges through the immense labor involved in the very act of disinterment:
Moving the coffin from the depths of the earth to another place meant awakening many memories and objects. It meant moving an entire community. Many people mobilized in Santa María, Buenaventura, and Cali; there was extensive coordination in order to create an image, to evoke an image. In that sense, this action differs greatly from the labor of the slave and from capital. To make such an effort simply to achieve an image—that is fantasear.
I am reminded here of Walter Benjamin’s famous claim in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Before the aestheticization that saturates all modes of representation—and labor—in the age of capital, art (a certain kind of art, Benjamin insists, politicized art) can emerge as a sus- pension of the frameworks that ground and reproduce the sacrificial logics of capital and its fascist—today we might say necropolitical—operations. As Benja- min writes, the concepts introduced into the theory of art must be “completely useless for the purposes of Fascism,” displacing the instrumental logics that would otherwise subordinate art to the aims of capital. “It is not fiction,” the artist observes, “it is the lived experience of traveling through time.”
Here, fantasear becomes another way of naming remembrance—of making memory and bringing to memory stories that otherwise resist being fully told. Remembrance not as the recollection of a past experience waiting to be retrieved, but as a living experience carried in the body. The memory of the body—embedded in everyday tasks that are them- selves the result and ongoing reenactment of processes of enslavement—is also an archive of gestures that function, on the one hand, as “acts of everyday survival,” and on the other, as challenges to the meanings historically imposed upon them. The body thus appears here as a kind of vibrating archive: the rocking of the waves recalling funerary songs, the striking of stone carrying ancestral memory, the body that, after enclosure—after its “play with death,” which is also the daily labor of the mine—allows itself to be touched by drums and marimbas and begins to dance with them.
“These are forms of knowledge,” Grueso writes, “that give meaning to life”: carrying, carpentry, dancing, singing, tilling the soil by hand, paddling canoes—gestures transmitted from generation to generation. In his thesis, Grueso insists on this “poetics of everyday acts” as an artistic search for resignification: the body as support, the body as archive, the body as the place where history is borne and reworked. “It is important,” he writes, “to speak of those bodies that inherit trades and that detonate things.” The body is also piedra de peña, a material that accumulates layers of time: “To remove a stone coffin is like bringing up a body buried since time immemorial and carrying it on a journey into our present—to where we are today, the inhabitants of Santa María, now in Cali. The sarcophagus, the body, and the stone carry and are carried in their journey from the mines to the city, tracing the reverse path of those bodies who migrate toward the city only to return home to be mourned:
Our vivir sabroso remains only in the memory of what once was. They destroyed the land and, with it, the crops. Today hope lies in a gram of gold and in leaving everything behind in search of a better ‘life’ in the city—and then, after some time, returning to one’s land inside a wooden box.
The city of Cali is home, according to recent figures, to nearly 27 percent of Colombia’s Afro-descendant population, the majority of whom come from the Pacific region. High rates of poverty—42.7 percent of households cannot meet their minimum daily calorie requirements, according to recent estimates—and the search for better socioeconomic conditions, compounded in recent decades by forced displacement due to the presence of armed groups in the region, are among the principal reasons behind the massive migration from Timbiquí to the city. This is an important part of the background against which Grueso’s installation unfolds.
For this reason, Grueso insists that his disinterment is also detonation, deviation, a form of fantasizing and inhabiting history in order to index a present that not only resists but also challenges from within that todavía that opens a breach through which memory slips, camouflaged, into view.
[brecha]
“ … that resonates, that camouflages itself and waits for a signal of light, that passes through the earth and the walls through which the voice enters in order to say: we are still alive” …
Breach is precisely the word Grueso uses to describe the action in his performance:
The breach opened by performativity, by using and activating the works; by sharing that experience so that others may have another aesthetic experience in another place, another space. The discourse of object-primacy is dismantled, and that leap is made possible by documentation, by performance, by life itself.
What art activates—and what it dismantles in the process—is one of the questions that runs throughout Grueso’s work and reflections. The breach here is the possibility of the lived experience of return—the return, as I have suggested, as a gesture of defiance— and it is also the task of fantasizing in and from the present in order to deactivate what would otherwise reduce it to nothing more than the continuation of the violence it carries within.
In this sense, I find in the gesture proposed by Viaje en el tiempo an affinity with what the philosopher Rizvana Bradley describes in Ante-aesthetics: Black Aesthetics and the Critique of Form as a position marked by an “anteriority” that is not only spatial but epistemic, and that she names in her work as “vestibular.” A Bradley writes: “Black aisthesis is at once vestibular to the anti-black world … and always already subjected to the violence of that world, even if not reducible to or fully subsumed by it.” Grueso’s piece does not advocate—at least not exactly—an escape from the violence it denounces, nor does it seek to suspend or interrupt that violence through the emancipatory promise of the aesthetic. To fantasear, give image, open a breach in time in order to mark, despite everything, not only the continuity of death but also that of life, is not a romanticization of art’s emancipatory potential, nor can it be read as a disorganization of the epistemic and aesthetic grammars that structure the present.
Rather, the installation seems to insist on precisely that place Bradley refuses to describe as “habitable”: a space in which Black art never escapes the violence that makes it possible, but is nonetheless not entirely reducible to its effects. The work does not propose imagining other worlds from within the aesthetic; instead, it presents a way of denouncing, of refusing to be reduced to—while still unable to escape—the afterlife of slavery.
Here, the breach is at once spatial and temporal. It does not seek to recover a “before” violence, nor to emphasize its founding moment, but neither can it be read solely in terms of an “after” that survives in continuity with a violence that has not ceased. It is vestibular—like the mine shafts of Timbiquí—from which a life is articulated that is not a life elsewhere, but a life that persists and moves constantly along this path of departure and return.
The central gesture, as the title of Chois’ curatorial decision suggests, is therefore one of defiance rather than resistance: the affirmation of life, not its sacrifice. The defiance posed by a living body to structural racism’s death machine; the challenge posed by a living, vibrating archive to the forgetting and erasure produced by colonial operations and their still-active effects in Santa María de Timbiquí. To give image in this context is not only to “make visible what cannot be concealed,” as Colombia’s now Vice President Francia Márquez declared before the House of Representatives during the 2021 national strike in Colombia, when she publicly denounced the state’s complicity in the extermination of Black youth in the streets of Cali. It is also a mechanism for challenging the structural logics that make such violence possible. Fantasear, then, is not to remain haunted by the past. It is, Grueso insists, a lived experience. Not a ghost, not a spirit, but a “living body.” The indexing of these forms of knowledge that the work proposes is thus a wager on opening, in the present, a breach toward—and into—a past that indeed lives on, revives and survives, yet remains constantly at risk of disappearance. The central gesture of Grueso’s work, then, is not—though it does not cease to be so—a denunciation of a past that, in Hartman’s terms and within her formulation of the afterlife of slavery, continues to be reactivated in the present. Nor is it the prefiguration of a future “that has not yet happened but must,” to recall Campt’s words. Between that “not yet” invoked by both Campt and Hartman and Grueso’s todavía, there seems to be a difference worthy of attention.
Viaje en el tiempo articulates, stages, and presents—from the materiality of the stone that is scattered in the gallery to the performance narrated in loop by the triptych of videos that structure the spatial experience of the installation—the insistence of that todavía contained in everything this past carries with it: forms of rootedness, knowledge, understanding, of pleasure in practices inherited and resignified in and from the present. In this sense, the body appears, as Grueso insists, “in order to affirm life,” not merely to index the death to which it has always already been subjected. The return thus—the exhuming of the past in the present—becomes an invitation to fantasear from within the breach that the performance opens within the present.
Translated from Spanish by NACLA.
Author’s note: I am grateful to Eblin Grueso for his generosity in allowing me to engage closely with his work; to Alejandro Martín and Ana Ruiz-Valencia for conversations about the installation; to Farides Lugo Zuleta for helping me think beyond the powerful—but perhaps insufficient—framework of the after- life of slavery; and to those who attended my recent presentation at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico whose questions shaped this first, still tentative approach to Grueso’s work.
María del Rosario Acosta López is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and cooperating faculty in Philosophy and Comparative Literature. Her work spans aesthetics, political philosophy, and decolonial thought, with a focus on memory, trauma, and violence in Colombia. Her recent books include Gramáticas de la escucha: hacer audible lo inaudito (Herder, 2026) and “Haciendo memoria”: La memoria histórica en Colombia y sus legados (EAFIT & Siglo, 2026).
Eblin Joban Grueso Cuero (Santa María de Timbiquí, Cauca, 1994) is an Afro-Colombian artist, educator, and cultural organizer whose work explores the body as a territory of memory and resistance. He received the First National University Art Salon Prize in Bogotá and the Sara Modiano Prize (2024) and has exhibited nationally and internationally across museums, public spaces, and digital platforms.