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3 - An Anthropophagic Ch’ixi Poetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2023

Jane Elizabeth Lavery
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
Sarah Bowskill
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
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Summary

My work is an open question concerning identity. What does it mean to be a woman, neither heterosexual nor homosexual, neither white nor indigenous, neither rich nor poor, with no children, a feminist, a writer, performance artist, ecologist, indigenist pro-indigenous and pro-developing world, living and working in Latin America. I’m interested in untangling the dark side of that history: my history as a daughter of the military coup in Chile, born in that fateful year of 1973, and the history of Chile as part of the history of violence of this century and of this world.

My work is a sort of travel blog log for a body – a territory colonized by ideologies, religions, failed and contradictory political practices, with an ancestral and rebellious memory which refuses to be blotted out. In this journey, it is art and the dialogue between disciplines that has been the best tool for disentangling, understanding, and decolonizing this body, like a minuscule work of personal archaeology.

At the formal level, my work is composed of layers and layers of knowledge and practices that at some moment have come to me, reached me, through channels that are as diverse as they are apocryphal. Like a hungry anthropophagic animal, in the style of Oswald de Andrade, everything nourishes me, everything is useful to me and can be turned into a work of art. The result has been the construction of a Ch’ixi or “sullied” mestizo identity, a compendium of impure attributes and hybrid techniques. Nevertheless, I recognize in poetry an impulse to put everything in order. Like an axis or a vertebral column, the desire for poiesis is the driving force for my work.

Outside the academic world and outside the market, as an artist I’ve had to find my own way without clear direction. This path has been intuitive, autonomous, and political. A productive state of being which has allowed me an inordinate freedom to transform the sense of lack into a creative resource.

I am interested in art as construction of a utopian imaginary. A social experiment that leads me to new ways of relating to the world. I am someone who believes that change has to be cultural or it will not be change at all, and I am also someone who believes that art is the last refuge of humanity in an increasingly dehumanized world.

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