Desiring Temporalities + Playful Aesthetics Web Collection

Through essays, interviews, experimental poetry, photography, music, and performance, contributors examine how memory is made in the present and how artistic and collective practices can forge spaces of resistance and worldmaking.

NACLA

August 19, 2026

The Summer 2026 issue of the NACLA Report explores artistic and research practices that activate memory, engage the archive, and expand the possibilities of collective life amid ongoing forms of dispossession, militarization, and war. From Puerto Rico and Palestine to Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and the diaspora, contributors examine how artists, writers, performers, and organizers are creating new ways of inhabiting history, preserving memory, and imagining futures that exceed the limits imposed by colonialism, racial capitalism, and state violence.

Guest edited by Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Laura Juliana Torres Rodríguez, the issue turns to what the editors call “desiring temporalities”: creative methodologies oriented by desire that refuse to be defined solely by catastrophe or loss. Through essays, interviews, experimental poetry, photography, music, and performance, contributors examine how memory is made in the present and how artistic and collective practices can forge spaces of resistance and worldmaking. Taken together, these contributions illuminate how play, desire, and collective creation can sustain projects of care, dignity, and liberation in a time of permanent war.

Here you will find a number of pieces from the issue in translation, in addition to a curated selection of articles available open access for a limited time. Read the full editor’s introduction and explore more from the issue. And while supplies last, order an individual copy of this issue for $18. SOLD OUT

Open Access

A Thread in the Thicket

Giulianna Zambrano Murillo

What forms of listening make the commons possible in contexts of conflict? An approach to “wild listening” as a micropolitical practice in the face of contemporary violence.

Arca: Mutation and Materiality

Rubén Darío Martínez Ramírez

Through sound, language, and trans embodiment, Arca reshapes experimental electronic music into a transnational Latin American practice of transformation and worldmaking.

Listening Under the Shadow

Bret Gustafson

A conversation with Michael Fox on building an immersive podcast about U.S. intervention in Latin America and audio storytelling as a form of time travel.

Amulets in Transit: Gifts of Care in Times of Violence

Alina Peña Iguarán

Through the making and exchange of textile pouches, minimal gifts become relational practices that sustain presence where violence seeks erasure.

“A Body That Does Not Die in the Act of Being Erased”

María del Rosario Acosta López

Tracing a journey from the gold mines of Timbiquí to the Pacific and on to Cali, Eblin Grueso’s Viaje en el Tiempo activates memory as a detonating force that affirms Black life.

Crazy Ass Moments: A Catalog of Appropriation and Playful Protest

Nilo Couret

The X account @AssLatAm turns viral political absurdities into a counter-archive of regional populism, challenging the engineered amnesia of the digital timeline.