The Atlantic Hypothesis

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

“The Sea Is History”, Selected Poems, Derek Walcott, 2007

As a result of the attention devoted to the concept of tricontinentality in the Canary Islands during the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the international debate on postcolonialism already underway at that time, the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, with the essential critical support of this very journal, has focused from its beginnings on exploring the possibilities of an oceanic narrative1Martín Chirino López, “El CAAM, utopía tricontinental” [extract from a lecture], in Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno – CAAM: Elogio del museo y post-museo: 20 años de práctica intercultural (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: CAAM, 2010), p. 43.. It is no coincidence that the Atlantic Ocean as a historical entity also pervades the academic journal Anuarios de Estudios Atlánticos, a project initiated in 1955 by the historian Antonio Rumeu de Armas and published since then by Casa Colón in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. As is well known, the Atlantic imagination was manifested particularly in the modernist utopia of the poet Tomás Morales and its influence on Agustín Espinosa, writers who embodied the dream of a cosmopolitan Canarian mythology with very obvious appropriations from classical culture2Tomás Morales, Oda al Atlántico (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, 1971), and Agustín Espinosa, “Primer manifiesto de La Rosa de los Vientos”, La Prensa, 1 February 1928. See also Agustín Espinosa, Lancelot, 28º-7º (guía integral de una isla atlántica), ed. Nilo Palenzuela (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Interinsular Canaria, 1988).. The interpretation of the Atlantic as the expression of a complex cultural hybridization was also present in the work of the mixed-race poet Bartolomé Cairasco de Figueroa, son of a European father and an indigenous Canarian mother, who founded the Atlantic Museum in the garden of his own house in 15803Andrés Sánchez Robayna, Museo Atlántico: Antología de la poesía canaria (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Interinsular Canaria, 1983). See also María Dolores Barrena Delgado, D. (2020) “Monte público, indígenas, turismo y museos en la época del DiY”, REGAC, 7, no. 1 (2020): 111–22 (pp. 113–14).. But in addition, from other shores and at the height of postmodernism, Paul Gilroy’s audacious proposal in his well-known book The Black Atlantic (1993) was precisely to call into question the essentialisms of ethnicity and identity, mapping miscegenated cultures, intercultural memories and the reverse image of modernity, which, like Derek Walcott’s work, the Atlantic contains4Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).. On the occasion of this new phase of the journal which we are inaugurating with this issue, and in response to the question about the indigenous status of the Canary Islands — whether it is imagined as aboriginal, Guanche or Amazigh — perhaps we could allow ourselves to assert, once again, the potential of that Atlantic hypothesis.

Given the particular spectral status of the indigenous element in the Canary Islands, this question has been primarily aimed at speculating on its origin and continued existence, giving impetus to historical research, wide-ranging debates and artistic works that have sometimes come to have a great impact beyond the islands, such as Óscar Domínguez’s Cueva de los guanches [Guanche Cave] (1935) or Manolo Millares’s burlap works5Since it is impossible, in these few pages, to sum up the issues arising from the many research studies and debates conducted to date, I refer readers to the anthology of texts by Fernando Estévez, Canarios en la jaula identitaria, edited in 2019 by Mayte Henríquez and Mariano de Santa Ana, and particularly — considering the contradictions between its first and last texts — the article “Guanches, magos, turistas e inmigrantes: Canarios en la jaula identitaria”, published in 2011 in this very journal, Atlántica, which I shall quote several times in the course of this text. . The Canarian avant garde based around the Luján Pérez School, influenced both by the primitivism of the European avant garde and by Latin-American indigenism, had previously ventured to explore the premises of modernity in relation to the possibility of a Canarian identity6On indigenism, see Nilo Palenzuela, “Avatares de la crítica: E. Pestana, J. M. Trujillo, E. Westerdahl y D. Pérez Minik”, in Canarias: las vanguardias históricas, ed. Andrés Sánchez Robayna (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: CAAM, 1992), pp. 243–64.. Although attempts have been made in recent years to update these contributions from a postmodern perspective, in the international critical sphere the term indigenism — whether in the sense of a series of paternalistic public policies applied from the 1940s in Latin America or an avant-garde style with a tendency towards exoticism — has been displaced by the concept of indigeneity as a countermodel to colonialism7Nasheli Jiménez del Val and Anna Maria Guasch, “Indigenism(s)/Indigeneity: Towards a Visual Sovereignty”, REGAC, 7, no. 1 (2020): 1–12..

This critical sphere, led by the English-speaking academic field of Cultural Studies, has also discredited the notion of ideology, which has been supplanted by that of representation, as well as the concept of false consciousness, superseded by that of epistemic colonialism, prioritizing cultural criticism when addressing the mechanisms of exploitation and domination. It is this paradigm shift that pervades the concerns of the postcolonial theorists Edward Said and Homi Bhabha regarding cultural imbalances, the commitment to a deconstruction of the wisdom of modernity from the decolonial perspective of Walter Mignolo or Aníbal Quijano, the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s claims of an epistemology of the south, and the art theorist Joaquín Barriendos’s analyses of the “coloniality of seeing”, among many others8To make the text less cumbersome for the reader I have taken the liberty of not referencing these well-known publications.. But it is above all theorists like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Bruno Latour who have recently been engaged in taking the politics of representation — or identity politics — towards the notion of an “indigenous knowledge system”, akin to a post-anthropocentric transhumanism.

Despite the demands from academic and cultural spheres for greater implementation of all these ideas, it cannot be said that such approaches do not already carry some weight in the Canary Islands. During the 1970s, the MPAIAC — Movement for the Self-Determination and Independence of the Canarian Archipelago — began to pursue an Africanist line with decolonial tendencies from the identity and political point of view, especially following the decolonization of the Sahara and the establishment of the Canary Islands as a political border in Europe9On this issue, see Domingo Garí, “África en el imaginario del nacionalismo canario”, Historia Actual Online, 48, no. 1 (2019): 23–33.. This, combined with the death of General Franco, mobilized intellectual and artistic circles with actions such as the Manifiesto del Hierro [El Hierro Manifesto] (1976), which claimed the need to reaffirm Canarian culture and its identifying features. Since then — without going into how all this may be interpreted at a popular level on the basis of an inclination towards certain political parties — a decolonial perspective and policies of representation have been encouraged by universities and various cultural centres in the Canary Islands, most notably at the University of La Laguna, which for several years has had the Grupo de Investigación de Estudios Decoloniales y Pensamiento Crítico [Decolonial Studies and Critical Thought Research Group], drawing together fields of study such as Sociology, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Language and Literature, Philosophy, History and Art, as well as through various doctoral theses that have been produced recently10 Without entering into an assessment of the content of these theses, and being fully conscious of the variety of subject-matter, fields of study and approaches, some of those I am referring to, in order of completion, are Roberto Gil Hernández, Los guanches: conquista y anticonquista del archipiélago canario (2015), Pablo Estévez Hernández, El cuerpo de la nación: diferencia colonial y ausencia étnica en el censo español (2016), Larisa Pérez Flórez, Islas, cuerpos y desplazamientos: Las Antillas, Canarias y la descolonización del conocimiento (2017) and José Antonio Otero Cabrera, ¿Canarias es África? Análisis y prospectiva cultural de una cuestión abierta (2019).

However, when it comes to steering a course through the above-mentioned Atlantic hypothesis, accommodating the franchises of Cultural Studies, with the intention of avoiding the temptation to concoct a consensus — which normalizes discourses and makes it impossible to question them — it would be wise to approach the matter, if not with suspicion, at least with a certain critical caution towards certain assumptions that are deployed nowadays as a new hegemonic narrative or dominant culture. The anthropologist Fernando Estévez warned us that “limiting oneself to a critique of old forms and politics of identity merely helps to pave the way for new forms of domination”11Fernando Estévez González, “Guanches, magos, turistas e inmigrantes: Canarios en la jaula identitaria”, in Canarios en la jaula identitaria, ed. by Mayte Henríquez and Mariano de Santa Ana (Madrid: Mercurio, 2019), p. 259. . It is more necessary than ever to exercise this prudent, critical approach through the work of artists: current artists working today in the Canary Islands, in a range of perspectives and formats, on the question of the continuing presence of the indigenous, commercialization of nostalgia and speculation on origin. Far from revealing a truth to us, the value of their contribution lies in allowing us to discredit certain certainties, breaking with the logic of consensus and stimulating us to problematize received ideas.

Madre, Teresa Correa, 2003, cortesía de la artista.
Madre, Teresa Correa, 2003, courtesy of the artist.

Madre [Mother] (2003) is one of the paradigmatic works of Teresa Correa (born 1961). Correa is undoubtedly one of the artists who have been most determined not only to establish a dialogue between photography, the archive, archaeology and anthropology in the Canary Islands, but also to demonstrate the sometimes diffuse transition between modernity and postmodernity, as well as showing how much of that modernity endures in our imaginary. Working for more than two decades in the Museo Canario in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, founded in 1879, heir to the racial taxonomy of that time, she found an aboriginal woman’s skull in Sala Verneau, identified by archive no. 138312Teresa Correa: Hablando de pájaros y flores, exhibition catalogue (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: CAAM, 2017. . This encounter with alterity — and, in turn, recognition in it — was to engender a whole series of artistic images and experiences close to ritual practice. In her photography, despite a conscious rhetoric — use of black and white, treatment of light, scientific rigour — evoking the archival impulse and nineteenth-century physical anthropology, her framings and conceptual metaphors reveal a contemporary gaze uneasily taking a peek at that legacy.

In contrast to the terminal narratives about the disappearance of a proto-Canarian ethnicity, and contrary to the racialization processes still maintained today in other colonized territories, the survival of the pre-conquest Canarian population through miscegenation is now a proven fact. It is also true, however, that this same population should be considered to have originated from a heterogeneous set of North African ethnic groups with different acculturation processes who settled in the islands in various waves over a period of several centuries, so the existence of an essential indigenous ethnicity cannot be sustained13A. José Farrujia de la Rosa, “Una arqueología política sobre las políticas del pasado y el primigenio poblamiento de Canarias”, Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos, 66, no. 2 (2020): 1–19 (p. 9).. This provides us with an excuse to avoid the always dangerous drift into essentialisms of identity that justify both colonial racialization and the biological leanings of fascism or the new nationalisms. As is noted in the very recent volume of essays Perverse Decolonization? (2021),edited by Ekaterina Degot, David Riff and Jan Sowa, even the discourse of “decoloniality” is now espoused by reactionary regimes and cultural practices that favour the adoption of these revitalized nationalisms14Perverse Decolonization?, ed. by Ekaterina Degot, David Riff and Jan Sowa (Berlin: Archive Books, 2021)..

A social rather than a physical anthropology is therefore the interpretative tool we would be well advised to call upon when approaching projects like Nos-otros [We-others] (2011–in process) by the artist Alexis W (b. 1972), which he develops as an ethnographic mapping of the complex memory of the island of El Hierro in the twenty-first century. The work is composed of almost 1000 portraits of people native to the island, along with Venezuelan immigrants and tourists. This project, which is the basis of various actions in collaboration with the participants themselves, as well as interventions in the public space, exhibitions and a publication, also includes the idea of the ancestral survival of the island’s first settlers — concentrated especially, according to the artist’s hypothesis, in the municipality of El Pinar — through an interpretation of the customs and practices of grazing, resulting from the class division and appropriation of natural resources by the colonizers after the conquest.

It is true that the art theorist Hal Foster, in his well-known essay “The Artist as Ethnographer?” (1995), sensed the risk that certain cultural practices, even while appealing for a transformation of the hegemonic narrative, will end up adopting a dominant position relative to certain subaltern groups which are considered “other”, reproducing certain paternalistic ways of looking at these same groups15Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?”, in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 302–09.. Something of this underlies the idealizing tendency to identify indigenous people with the idea of authenticity or the noble savage. The feminist political scientist Breny Mendoza has also pointed out that the identification of indigenous people as “others”, based on the idea of ethnic purity or authenticity, is really a practice representative of colonialism16Breny Mendoza, “Can the Subaltern Save Us?”, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 1, no. 1 (2018): 109–22.. This colonialism can be seen as being manifested today through a new kind of extractivism that looks to indigeneity for reserves of otherness and exoticism, or even through the expression of a guilty conscience in the dominant class when it comes to demanding that those “others” provide us with an alternative to capitalism that will save us from environmental disasters, if not from patriarchy.

Given the impossibility of identifying a genuinely indigenous group in the Canary Islands, yearnings for authenticity have historically been directed towards the shepherd or peasant — the maúro or mago — as Fernando Estévez observed. This was the conviction of the archaeologist Luis Diego Cuscoy, who sought, in his research on the island of Tenerife during the Francoist period, to identify the island’s shepherds as direct descendants of the Guanches and custodians of their culture, reactivating a theory that other researchers, such as the naturalist and ethnologist Sabin Berthelot, had already maintained in the nineteenth century. The copious sound recordings that Diego Cuscoy compiled through interviews with shepherds as an oral memory archive, together with fictional and non-fictional images from more than thirty collections, all dating from between 1920 and 1970, are the basis of the documentary film essay De los nombres de las cabras [On the Names of the Goats] (2019), directed by Silvia Navarro Martín (b. 1986) and Miguel G. Morales (b. 1978), which clearly shows how the construction of a truth is simply the result of a process of naturalization of certain narratives.

To a certain extent, this naturalization could be explained by Fernando Estévez’s idea of “the marketing of nostalgia”; that is, the need of certain elites to provide a narrative about premodern ancestors that would serve not only to establish a Canarian nationalism, but also — and above all — to feed the postmodern tourist industry, so eager for ultralocal legends and mythologies17Estévez González, “Guanches, magos, turistas e inmigrantes”, pp. 253–54.. It is therefore not that heritage management is being swayed by tourism — as it is sometimes accused of being — but rather that tourism nowadays defines what we understand as heritage. All this has to do with the fact that the neoliberal globalization process itself needs to offset the homogeneity of its economic policies with cultural heterogeneity: so-called multiculturalism, which celebrates differences while ensuring larger market shares18Indeed, Karl Marx had already described the need to decentralize centrality to avoid the ruin of capitalism, a mechanism that the geographer David Harvey has explained on the basis of the idea of monopoly rent, that is, the ability to present goods as something unique. See David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012).. So a neoliberal strategy has ended up in a close relationship to projects that are prima facie opposed to it, such as those of nationalism, and has led thinkers like Achille Mbembe to state that “non-racialism is the antithesis of the rule of the market”19Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).. Not to mention the fact that identity politics, as the feminist political scientist Nancy Fraser has shown, has ultimately functioned as a smokescreen to avoid the crucial debate on class inequality, involving, of course, the insecure employment conditions of workers in the tourism industry, which occupies such a dominant position in the Canary Islands.20Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age”, in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 11–40..

The process of marketing nostalgia and designing ultralocal mythologies reaches its zenith in the souvenir object with which the artist Nicolás Laiz Placeres (b. 1975) has experimented in numerous ways, always with an ironic distance that prompts the local to speak of the global. His “ultrasouvenirs” invoke the iconography of ancestral island myths, idols and rituals such as the Idol of Tara, the Bride and Groom of El Mojón and Zonzamas, using industrial materials such as expanded polystyrene or resin, as well as the plastic or piche (tar) that he collects from the beaches of Lanzarote21Ultrasuvenir, exhibition catalogue (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Sala de Arte Contemporáneo, 2017).. Maybe some of his sculptures even emerge mysteriously from dramatized archaeological excavations, as recounted in his artist’s book Elementos identitarios [Elements of Identity] (2018)22Published on the occasion of his exhibition Ultrasuvenir .. In the Ambrosio Betancor Perdomo project (2018), this exercise in fakery involved assembling a cabinet of curiosities composed of more than 500 remains of a supposed vanished people23La colección del doctor Ambrosio Betancor Perdomo, exhibition catalogue (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, 2018).. However, as in every contemporary art project, it is ultimately talking about none other than ourselves, a consumer society at the height of what the artist calls the Tourismocene era. It is an audacious mockery of tourist mythologies which perhaps allows us to recover an apt definition of kitsch: an object that in claiming to imitate the real ends up becoming ridiculous.

Ambrosio Betancor Perdomo, Nicolás Laiz Placeres, 2018, courtesy of the artist.

An indictment of the claims to truth and moral superiority paraded by certain theorists of the decolonial sphere such as Walter Mignolo is provided by the sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, who also suggests that such thinkers, in their monolithic confrontation with modernity, not only deny the participation of indigenous people in that modernity, perpetuating the stereotype of the noble savage, but also make it impossible to review modernity itself by identifying a kind of counter-hegemonic set of attitudes — a reverse image of history — within a project swathed in contradictions.24Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2010).. Similarly, lamentations over the ideological bias attributed to approaches to indigeneity in the Canary Islands — whether by public policies, the media, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, linguistic and literary studies or cultural practices — do not take account of the fact that according to the much-propounded theories of post-structuralism, nothing exists outside the episteme; in other words, nowhere is there a truth that has not been culturally constructed. For this reason, artistic and speculative exercises, liberated from such claims, often have more to tell us about our origin than scientific practice itself.

Ambrosio Betancor Perdomo, Nicolás Laiz Placeres, 2018, cortesía del artista.
Ambrosio Betancor Perdomo, Nicolás Laiz Placeres, 2018, courtesy of the artist.

In an attempt to cultivate a futurity capable of reactivating the ancestral world linked to the Tindaya mountain on the island of Fuerteventura, the visual anthropologist Isaac Marrero Guillamón conducted an “ethno-speculative” experiment through an extensive research project, including the production of the film Tindaya Variations (2018), in which he addressed the multiple controversy surrounding the mountain as a catalogued indigenous archaeological site, a protected natural environment, a mining resource, and, in turn, the designated location for the monumental work by the sculptor Eduardo Chillida, currently in abeyance25Currently, both the Island Council of Fuerteventura and the Regional Government of the Canary Islands have, in principle, ruled out the project. See “Fuerteventura da carpetazo a la idea de Chillida y decide proteger Tindaya”, El País, 06/09/2019.. This state of suspension, in its very inability to identify a recognizable future, nevertheless conferred the potential to project all possible imaginations. So beyond a state of uncertainty, Tindaya Variations delineates a performative space of possibility, a dispute over the future of the mountain between the tension of progress and indigenous heritage as a temporal-speculative tool to liberate our political imagination26A sample of texts by the author himself, both popular and academic, along with other material can be consulted on the project website: <tindayavariations.net>.

Tindaya Variations, Isaac Marrero Guillamón, 2018, cortesía del artista.
Tindaya Variations, Isaac Marrero Guillamón, 2018, courtesy of the artist.

In 2003, in his “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism”, the cyberculture critic Kodwo Eshun, influenced by the hypothesis raised by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, put forward a theory on the possibility of an archaeology of the future that would be capable of recognizing the role of the Afrodiasporic subject in modernity and postmodernity27 Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism”, The New Centennial Review, 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 287–302. . Inspired by this Afrofuturism, the cultural critic Grace L. Dillon has proposed an indigenous futurism with which to refute the theories that consign indigenous subjects to prehistory, by playing with the intersecting boundaries between science, technology and futurity28 Dillon, G-L. (2012) Walking The Clouds: An Anthology Of Indigenous Science Fiction. University of Arizona Press. . Indeed, Fernando Estévez acknowledged that “[…] the Guanche has never been a matter of the past, but rather a problem of the present and future”29Estévez González, “Guanches, magos, turistas e inmigrantes”, p. 244.. From a futurist perspective, the question about a Canarian indigeneity would therefore lie not in “discovering the truth”, or even fostering an ethnicist perspective, but rather in addressing the complexity of current mythologies, urgently pursuing all possible speculations.

From this speculative viewpoint, the project Hipótesis [Hypothesis] (2015–2021) by Rafael Arocha (b. 1978) shows the confrontation of two mythologies that are in principle remote from each other, and certainly fragmented, evoking the partiality of beliefs and the currency of myths through a subtle irony which connects the question about aboriginal survival with the widespread culture of shopping centres. He does this using two series of photographs that engage in a dialogue through geometric, even abstract, elements and volumes drawn both from the urban landscape and from caves in the archaeological park on the island of Gran Canaria. However, nothing presented in these photographs seems to suggest the desire to authenticate a past that will inevitably be the product of particular interpretations; on the contrary, they seem to underline its artificiality through a speculative exercise and an aesthetic close to science fiction. As with any hypothesis, the impossibility of validating the origin through our own experience means that doubt becomes the only certainty.

But in addition, the fact is that when speculating on the origin, the metaphor of the cave inevitably directs our attention to female genital topography. As the historian Karl Schlögel precisely observed, the fact that the labyrinthine topography of Eros with all its locations has come to be the most highly developed branch of mental topographies must have something to do with the matter, with eros, pleasure and desire30Karl Schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics, trans. by Gerrit Jackson (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2016).. . In terms of anthropogenesis in a psychoanalytical vein, one might wonder whether imagining the aboriginal, Guanche or Amazigh origin of the world in the Canary Islands, like so many other mythologies about the loss of a primordial paradise, is also the way in which we embody the loss of the original space of human coexistence31 On this interpretation, see Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres, I: Microspherology, trans. by Wieland Hoban (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011).. It is there that postmodern hauntology acquires its full meaning: represented in loss as a support for desire32I am obviously referring to Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), and to Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power”, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 226–80.. Only through the potential of that loss, finally emancipated from all ontological temptation with regard to identity (colonial, fascist or neoliberal), through the politics of absence or what Frantz Fanon called “non-being”, will it be possible to recognize the absent otherness that also inhabits us, reviving, once again, Arthur Rimbaud’s watchword I is another33One might add that the category of “non-being” is described by Fanon as the most adversely affected in the modern-colonial relationship, as long as it is the reading of an inescapable dualism; see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986).. This potential is also that of a territory enveloped by the waves of Atlantic history, in whose negative dimension otherness, negotiations, exchanges and cultural miscegenations also sail: the Atlantic as an epistemic space through which to escape from the affirmation of being, because the place where nothing is is also the place where everything can come to be.

Diana Padrón – Biography

Diana Padrón is an assistant professor, researcher, critic, and an independent curator. B.A. in Art History at University of La Laguna, M.A. in Advanced Studies of Art History at University of Barcelona and Ph.D. in Society and Culture: History, Anthropology, Arts, Heritage and Cultural Management at the same university.

She is a member of academic staff of M.A. Contemporary Art: Context, Mediation and Management at Il3 Institute of University of Barcelona. Since 2012, she has been collaborating with Art Globalization Interculturality R&D research group. She has been coordinator of On Mediation. Platform on Research and Curatorship and co-editor of REG|AC journal (Journal of Global Studies and Contemporary Art) at University of Barcelona.

As an independent curator, she has curated exhibitions for centers such as San Martín Centro de Cultura Contemporánea, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Museu Picasso of Barcelona, Loop Barcelona Festival, 13th Havana Biennial, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporànea.

www.dianapadronalonso.com

  • 1
    Martín Chirino López, “El CAAM, utopía tricontinental” [extract from a lecture], in Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno – CAAM: Elogio del museo y post-museo: 20 años de práctica intercultural (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: CAAM, 2010), p. 43.
  • 2
    Tomás Morales, Oda al Atlántico (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, 1971), and Agustín Espinosa, “Primer manifiesto de La Rosa de los Vientos”, La Prensa, 1 February 1928. See also Agustín Espinosa, Lancelot, 28º-7º (guía integral de una isla atlántica), ed. Nilo Palenzuela (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Interinsular Canaria, 1988).
  • 3
    Andrés Sánchez Robayna, Museo Atlántico: Antología de la poesía canaria (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Interinsular Canaria, 1983). See also María Dolores Barrena Delgado, D. (2020) “Monte público, indígenas, turismo y museos en la época del DiY”, REGAC, 7, no. 1 (2020): 111–22 (pp. 113–14).
  • 4
    Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).
  • 5
    Since it is impossible, in these few pages, to sum up the issues arising from the many research studies and debates conducted to date, I refer readers to the anthology of texts by Fernando Estévez, Canarios en la jaula identitaria, edited in 2019 by Mayte Henríquez and Mariano de Santa Ana, and particularly — considering the contradictions between its first and last texts — the article “Guanches, magos, turistas e inmigrantes: Canarios en la jaula identitaria”, published in 2011 in this very journal, Atlántica, which I shall quote several times in the course of this text.
  • 6
    On indigenism, see Nilo Palenzuela, “Avatares de la crítica: E. Pestana, J. M. Trujillo, E. Westerdahl y D. Pérez Minik”, in Canarias: las vanguardias históricas, ed. Andrés Sánchez Robayna (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: CAAM, 1992), pp. 243–64.
  • 7
    Nasheli Jiménez del Val and Anna Maria Guasch, “Indigenism(s)/Indigeneity: Towards a Visual Sovereignty”, REGAC, 7, no. 1 (2020): 1–12.
  • 8
    To make the text less cumbersome for the reader I have taken the liberty of not referencing these well-known publications.
  • 9
    On this issue, see Domingo Garí, “África en el imaginario del nacionalismo canario”, Historia Actual Online, 48, no. 1 (2019): 23–33.
  • 10
    Without entering into an assessment of the content of these theses, and being fully conscious of the variety of subject-matter, fields of study and approaches, some of those I am referring to, in order of completion, are Roberto Gil Hernández, Los guanches: conquista y anticonquista del archipiélago canario (2015), Pablo Estévez Hernández, El cuerpo de la nación: diferencia colonial y ausencia étnica en el censo español (2016), Larisa Pérez Flórez, Islas, cuerpos y desplazamientos: Las Antillas, Canarias y la descolonización del conocimiento (2017) and José Antonio Otero Cabrera, ¿Canarias es África? Análisis y prospectiva cultural de una cuestión abierta (2019).
  • 11
    Fernando Estévez González, “Guanches, magos, turistas e inmigrantes: Canarios en la jaula identitaria”, in Canarios en la jaula identitaria, ed. by Mayte Henríquez and Mariano de Santa Ana (Madrid: Mercurio, 2019), p. 259.
  • 12
    Teresa Correa: Hablando de pájaros y flores, exhibition catalogue (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: CAAM, 2017.
  • 13
    A. José Farrujia de la Rosa, “Una arqueología política sobre las políticas del pasado y el primigenio poblamiento de Canarias”, Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos, 66, no. 2 (2020): 1–19 (p. 9).
  • 14
    Perverse Decolonization?, ed. by Ekaterina Degot, David Riff and Jan Sowa (Berlin: Archive Books, 2021).
  • 15
    Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?”, in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 302–09.
  • 16
    Breny Mendoza, “Can the Subaltern Save Us?”, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 1, no. 1 (2018): 109–22.
  • 17
    Estévez González, “Guanches, magos, turistas e inmigrantes”, pp. 253–54.
  • 18
    Indeed, Karl Marx had already described the need to decentralize centrality to avoid the ruin of capitalism, a mechanism that the geographer David Harvey has explained on the basis of the idea of monopoly rent, that is, the ability to present goods as something unique. See David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012).
  • 19
    Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
  • 20
    Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age”, in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 11–40.
  • 21
    Ultrasuvenir, exhibition catalogue (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Sala de Arte Contemporáneo, 2017).
  • 22
    Published on the occasion of his exhibition Ultrasuvenir .
  • 23
    La colección del doctor Ambrosio Betancor Perdomo, exhibition catalogue (Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, 2018).
  • 24
    Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2010).
  • 25
    Currently, both the Island Council of Fuerteventura and the Regional Government of the Canary Islands have, in principle, ruled out the project. See “Fuerteventura da carpetazo a la idea de Chillida y decide proteger Tindaya”, El País, 06/09/2019.
  • 26
    A sample of texts by the author himself, both popular and academic, along with other material can be consulted on the project website: <tindayavariations.net>
  • 27
    Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism”, The New Centennial Review, 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 287–302.
  • 28
    Dillon, G-L. (2012) Walking The Clouds: An Anthology Of Indigenous Science Fiction. University of Arizona Press.
  • 29
    Estévez González, “Guanches, magos, turistas e inmigrantes”, p. 244.
  • 30
    Karl Schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics, trans. by Gerrit Jackson (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2016)..
  • 31
    On this interpretation, see Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres, I: Microspherology, trans. by Wieland Hoban (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011).
  • 32
    I am obviously referring to Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), and to Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power”, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 226–80.
  • 33
    One might add that the category of “non-being” is described by Fanon as the most adversely affected in the modern-colonial relationship, as long as it is the reading of an inescapable dualism; see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986).
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