This piece appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
Read this article in Spanish / Lea este artículo en español.
On December 14, 2024, the artist Pelé Sánchez Tormes transformed their now-abandoned family home in Ponce, Puerto Rico, into a stage. In the performance Iracunda, the artist engages in a series of intimate choreographies with the body of the house: climbing through its windows, crowning themself with loose blocks, raking the overgrowth with fury, methodically breaking tiles, scraping the skin of the walls with a clawed glove.
The site-specific performance of Iracunda orients this issue, attuned to what artistic practices activate or dismantle in a conjuncture besieged by the disabling temporality of catastrophe and the ongoing continuity of colonial violence. In a present marked by the accumulation of manufactured crises—the unevenly distributed effects of racial capitalism and what legal scholar Francesca Albanese has called “the economy of genocide”—the horizon seems to close in on us. In response, Iracunda presents territory as a central temporal problem: a space of memory, of present-making, and a site from which to rehearse the desiring temporalities of “what could have been,” as thinkers such as Ariella Azoulay and María del Rosario Acosta López propose. The house in which Iracunda unfolds is marked by a colonial history of debt and dispossession. Yet the performance suspends the spatiotemporal structures that compel us to understand territory as either ruin or private property. Despite the apparent abandonment of the space—one the artist cannot claim as “their own” in terms of legal title, but can in terms of belonging—the choreography brings to the fore an inexpropriable excess, an abundance of images immune to the dispossession that, paradoxically, has already taken place.
Iracunda presents territory as a central temporal problem: a space of memory, of present-making, and a site from which to rehearse the desiring temporalities of “what could have been.”
This issue of the NACLA Report explores practices of creation and research that, like Iracunda, experiment with ways of inhabiting, (re)writing history, activating memory, engaging the archive, and stirring the senses in and from conditions of present dispossession. To think through this vital milieu, we turn to the practices of living and creating that critical theorist Neferti Tadiar calls remaindered life: “The remaindered life is composed of the leftover practices and forms of living—the ‘open socialities of survival’—that remain superfluous to the production of valued, and even of disposable, life.” In naming these practices as “desiring temporalities” and “playful aesthetics,” we also echo Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, who call for the development of research and creative methodologies oriented by desire—understood not as “the antonym but rather the antidote for damage-focused narratives.” In Iracunda, this desire challenges us directly: what does it mean to desire both home and movement? What does a rooted mobility enable?
If, as Jacques Derrida suggests, the origin of every archive lies in its domiciliation, then the house in Iracunda is a living archive that holds family history, periods of abundance and scarcity, and forms of rural architecture. The performance manifests this relationship between body, house, memory, and archive through a dialectical choreography that at once inhabits, archives, and unarchives tiles, blocks, and other elements of the house. Iracunda’s movements—at times agile and dynamic, at others soft and sensual—undo preconceived notions of innocence while also attending to the non-living (that which haunts) and to forgetting. The complicit eye of photographer Andrés Octavo documents their performance, generating another archive through which the scene’s movements continue to be reactivated and reverberate.
On Living Archives and Desiring Temporalities
The call around desiring temporalities necessarily raised questions about how memory is made in the present, and about collaborative methodologies of (un)archiving. In that vein, María del Rosario Acosta López analyzes Eblin Grueso’s performance Viaje en el tiempo through three critical movements rooted in the histories of Colombia’s Pacific region: return, fantasear, and breach. Grueso’s journey inside a sarcophagus—from Santa María de Timbiquí to Cali—gives form to “the lived experience of traveling through time.” In dialogue with Black critical thought, Acosta López distinguishes this mode of indexing “the living memory of slavery” from the grammars of “afterlife” and “the wake,” in order to propose Grueso’s notion of breach—a “todavía” (still) that does not fully align with the popularized notion of “fugitivity” that permeates thinking on artistic practices of the Black Atlantic.
The issue continues to deepen the question of living archives, forms of mourning, and memory as collective, ongoing labor through an interview by Ángeles Donoso Macaya with photographer Zahara Gómez Lucini and journalist and curator Romina Resuche. In the conversation, Zahara and Romina reflect on their experiences as facilitators of, respectively, Recetario para la memoria and Archivos y Activaciones, projects characterized by a continuing effort to collectivize the archive, memory, and forgetting, as well as by the question of why and for whom, as both practice and desiring temporality. Collective activation emerges as an open-ended process, always conjugated in the present and, for that very reason, one that strays from pre-established aesthetic formats.
Extending these hemispheric practices of archival collectivization, Nilo Couret offers a reading of Crazy Ass Latin America, an X account dedicated to collecting “receipts” of the region’s far right through humor and parody. @AssLatAm confronts the proliferation of disinformation and viral currents designed to disorient and overwhelm, repurposing the same algorithmic tools to record and preserve what might otherwise be dismissed or forgotten. In Couret’s reading, @AssLatAm emerges as an alternative archon—“of the people,” so to speak—shaped to the scale of a collective memory that can emerge in the age of Web 2.0.
Relational Poetics: From Listening to Touch, from Touch to Play
The Report continues with essays that explore different pedagogies of the senses—practices centered on touch and the textile, on listening and music—and consider the efficacy of these aesthetic forms in generating collectives around “what we have not yet been able to name,” as Giulianna Zambrano Murillo proposes in her reflection on Crónicas al borde, a collaborative podcast that she founded and directs.
Drawing on the experience of tuning into the open and public dialogue that emerged during Ecuador’s 2019 national strike, Zambrano Murillo addresses the need for practices of “wild listening” that reorient our sense of the commons in times of conflict. In the face of the algorithmic, segmented soundscapes of rising authoritarianism, Crónicas al borde invites us to listen otherwise: to perceive how a cruise ship becomes an invasion when heard from beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, or how the Machángara River resonates as it flows through Quito, in defiance of those who declare it a dead ecosystem.
From listening we move to touch and to “minimal” forms of relation that emerge in contexts of restricted and surveilled (im)mobility. Alina Peña Iguarán reflects on Proyecto Amuleto, framed within what she calls “the textile turn”: a collaborative, itinerant, and situated initiative centered on the practice of making and giving amulets along the migratory corridor that crosses Central America and Mexico. Advocating for the activating power of the minimal gesture, the amulet made of scraps emerges as an offering that does not seek to represent care or guarantee total protection against vulnerability, but rather to bring together—within an equally minimal relational choreography—bodies, materials, and words.
Another way of approaching the experience of transit appears in Marcelo Carosi’s reading of Migranta, a performance created by a travesti collective composed of Brazilian and Afro-descendant performers who move between São Paulo and Barcelona. Here we hear an echo of the desire for a mobility that remains rooted that marks Iracunda: a collective choreography that repeats gestures without predetermined direction, expressing a shared desire to inhabit, to stay, to live—not to continue in transit. Migranta brings to the stage the experience of migration “less as forward motion than as the tension migrants feel between moving and being made to stay.”
This dialectic between pause and movement also emerges in“Poema dispuesto,” the poetic conversation that the collective Contaminación Cruzada (Carolina Dávila, Jennifer Vega, and Juan Afanador) sustains with different urban spaces in Bogotá and New York City. The question is not so much how to inhabit the city poetically, but how places—parks, clinics, walls—respond, or do not (because they do not always do so), to the invitation to arrange poetry in public space. Contaminación Cruzada thus unsettles individual authorship: in the cross-contamination between word, place, elements, and organic matter, poetry opens onto other forms of relation, expanding its field of action and incorporating new writing strategies and creative tools.
Poetic imagination also emerges beyond the page in Rojo Robles’s reading of the practice of Jazzoetry by Afro–Puerto Rican poet Louis Reyes Rivera, approached as both a Black diasporic archive and a communal space. Robles suggests that, at the intersection of musical essay and the poetics of conversation—embodied in jazz’s call and response—another temporality is rehearsed: a liberated or desiring time that confronts colonial time. In light of the poem “for tom and judy,” Robles further reflects on how Reyes Rivera conceived his work as educator, archivist, and organizer as that of a” janitor of history,” in continuity with the often-invisibilized labor of maintenance performed by tom and judy.
Rubén Darío Martínez Ramírez approaches diasporic experience and other forms of transit through the music of Venezuelan artist Arca. In Martínez Ramírez’s reading, the disorienting and intoxicating effect of listening to—and watching—Arca expands sensory and aesthetic experience into a speculative, even utopian space in which the human body can transform, couple with, or merge into other forms and organisms.
Play, Gender Performance, and Poetic Experience in Militarized Territories
As we were preparing this issue, the recently renamed U.S. Department of War, under the command of TV-personality-turned–Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, bombarded Venezuela, Iran, and dozens of vessels in the Caribbean Sea, justifying these actions as national defense against “terrorism” and “drug trafficking.” The United States has also continued to provide weapons, funding, and intelligence to Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government has extended the genocidal policies of Gaza into Lebanon. The essays by Gabrielle Tillenburg and Judith Sierra Rivera engage this present moment, situating us within the longue durée of U.S. imperialism and colonialism in the Puerto Rican archipelago.
In this context, Tillenburg focuses on the experience of Vieques and on the antimilitarist work of Puerto Rican visual artists such as John Dominic Colón, Eric Rivera Barbeito, and Jonathan Pérez, who manipulate militarized toys and the notion of the theater of war to show that “militarism continues to plague Puerto Rico not because it has been rendered invisible, but because it has been so thoroughly staged, rehearsed, and replayed that it becomes background.” The essay concludes by recognizing women’s collectives and artists who have challenged both the hypermasculine logics and the “juvenile bravado” of militarization, as well as the media’s emphasis on male protagonism in struggles against the U.S. Navy.
Confronted with a permanent state of war that stretches from the Caribbean to the Red Sea, the essays gathered here report from and on territories where collective projects emerge that refuse ongoing genocidal complicity.
Sierra Rivera offers an intimate reading of a series by Puerto Rican photographer Carla Cavina, interpreting it in dialogue with Antonio S. Pedreira’s Insularismo and its tension between confinement and drifting. Through the play of pose, scenography, and minimal movements that reveal “an (im)possible synthesis of opposites,” Cavina’s snapshots and self-portraits dismantle, like Iracunda, the militarized binary between masculine and feminine. By embodying the nave al garete (ship adrift) so denounced by Pedreira in the 1930s, Cavina’s posing opens desiring paths that evade the insular enclosure of the militarized archipelago.
The issue concludes with an interview by mónica teresa ortiz with Palestinian American poet Summer Farah. In connection with her new collection The Hungering Years, Farah and ortiz reflect on the relationship between Latin America and Gaza, the role of play in poetic creation, refusal as both politics and poetics, and poetry as an expression of solidarity in the face of the destructive logics of empire.
Confronted with a permanent state of war that stretches from the Caribbean to the Red Sea, the essays gathered here report from and on territories—Santa María de Timbiquí, Isla del Tigre, Medellín, Bogotá, Sinaloa, Vieques, Cali, Quito, Toluca, Central America, New York City, Palestine, Lebanon, and beyond—where collective projects emerge that refuse ongoing genocidal complicity. These practices and projects make visible the political dimension of anticapitalist, collaborative, and relational artistic expressions, expanding aesthetic experience and appealing to—and inciting—all our senses.
Translated from Spanish by NACLA.
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Ángeles Donoso Macaya is an immigrant feminist scholar and writer from Santiago, Chile, based in New York. She is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures at BMCC and affiliated faculty in the PhD Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures and in the Advanced Certificate in Public Scholarship at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile’s Dictatorship (2020), Lanallwe (2023) and archivo imperfecto/imperfect archive (2023).
Laura Juliana Torres Rodríguez, originally from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, is a writer and scholar currently based in Atlanta. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University. Her research and writing focus on Mexican literature, Asian-Latin American studies, Puerto Rican literature, art, and thought, and critical disability studies. She is the author of Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia (2019).