The Adobe House

The Intersection

Despite their pleasing aesthetic, Guadalupe Miles’ photographs delve into the heart of serious issues that unsettle current critical thought. They cross a line that is disturbing for our culture, and this radical gesture dislodges her images from the position of hierarchy implicated in most documentary records. Strictly speaking, her images are not documentary, and even less so, ethnographic; the fact that Miles establishes the base of her enunciation in Wichí territory itself distorts the conventional concepts that frame representations of alterity.

Through long, continued stays in ethnic territories, Guadalupe has established strong ties with certain Wichí communities, enriched by indigenous Chorotes and Nivaclés settlements in their midst. A good expression of this relationship is the fact that the High Tiluk constructed a house with her, which would be the artist’s own. Tiluk was a powerful shaman and the prestigious leader of the Santa Victoria Este-2 community; their close relationship enabled Guadalupe to engage in a long process of learning and personal growth. The very title of this book, Hace 10.000 veces éramos familia (Since 10.000 Times Ago We Were Family), in Spanish with an altered grammar that grows in that difference, expresses her close connection with the shaman, given that this phrase comes from the oneiric realm. Tiluk shared with her some of the principles of shamanic wisdom related to how to see, perceive and feel the things and events of the world in a different manner. Everyone knows that art also looks to approach reality—in its different dimensions—moving past what shows most evidently. Not looking beneath appearances, but through them; following the trail of complex truths that do not compliantly respond to symbolic requirements. However, in order to perceive—albeit fleetingly—the intricate density of certain occurrences, and to permit being affected by them, creation needs not only beauty and talent as buttresses, but also an added plus of energy which comes from diverse, primarily unknown, sources. To look as the wise look—above and beyond knowledge, outside established categories—provides the means to glimpse brilliance, tremors, darknesses, subtleties and rumors that leave any intention of exoticism in disarray. And they disconcert all romantic-idealistic registers of otherness.

Guadalupe Miles looks at the Wichí world from the frontal and horizontal position that her inclusion in the community assigns to her. This posture allows her to very naturally name people, contexts and scenes, eluding the risks of an extractivist looting of images that are different; she evades the colonialism that reproduces power relationships between the person taking the photograph and the person whose photograph is taken. In this case, the community itself is involved in the making of these images, just as it is involved, spontaneously, in editing this book, approving—or not—of the title, the order of the photographs and the accuracy of the captions. This situation remits to two questions.

Representations

The first of these refers to the thorny issue of aesthetic and political representation of the indigenous; a matter that has become especially incendiary today, when different images are coveted by the larger art system, motivated in terms of the market (biennials, museums, art fairs and blockbuster exhibitions). It is quite evident that to a considerable degree, the presence of these images responds to mainstream practices of pillaging, indifferent to indigenous peoples’ contexts and interests; in other words, it responds to a regime that is only interested in profits and the prestige garnered by exhibiting radical otherness. In an attempt to elude colonialist traps and cancellation by critical sectors, many artists choose to avoid conflictive themes, looking the other way. However, this omission comes with an additional cost: it promotes excluding the indigenous from public spaces. According to Rancière, in the realm of images, a political moment is instituted with the appearance of invisibilized sectors in the establishment. Obviously, this presence must be driven or adopted by these sectors, but participation does not guarantee parity. In a space marked by asymmetries and structural inequalities, any intercultural exchange is dangerous. Nevertheless, commitment to the indigenous cause demands taking risks; it is worse to abstain, confining different subjects to the limbo of the ineffable. There is no way forward other than to fight for equitable participation on the part of the indigenous in matters involving them; this entails assuring that the struggle for meaning has its space, situated at the core of de-colonial debates. This litigation mobilizes political dimensions, specifically, micropolitics, in opposition to the attempt to shift the very power of creation in order to benefit the globalized capital regime.

With a solid base of self-management, motivated by resistant subjectivities and backed by public policies, it should be the indigenous peoples themselves who decide the extent of their presence in hegemonic art circles. And they will be the ones to consider the possibility of their forms being activated in foreign territories and what they can affect, or be affected by new conditions there.

The second question refers to Guadalupe Miles’ involvement in Wichí culture. This fact does not mean an identification with that culture; she does not purport to abandon her place to occupy that of the other, but rather to enrich her position by displacing it from any closed identity, where it intersects with the singularity of that culture, maintaining a third place—that of difference—open. A meeting of cultures supposes the affirmation of the singularity of each one, when placed in confrontation with that of the others. This is why Guadalupe can go in and out of her adobe house, of friendly territory, of Chaco’s dry climate. An attempt to represent cultural otherness from outside is questionable, but it is enriching to look, to perceive, to feel and to express that different space by moving about inside it, to prowl about its boundaries, from contiguous sites that allow gazes, however fleeting, to meet; gazes that renew the wonder incited by others without losing familiarity with them.

Tiluk’s Lesson

At least since Plato, Western culture has grown on a platform split between poles in binary opposition, like body and spirit, form and matter, the human condition and the natural world to which humanity pertains, among many other metaphysical disjunctions. Yet at the same time, at least since then, critical thinking has tried, without definitive results, to overcome the schisms that these dualisms produce on every level. As is the case for indigenous peoples in general, Wichí culture skirts these dichotomies; although it does maintain their singularities, it does not separate thought and sensitivity, art and life, nature and artifice. Different cultures articulate these moments in contingent configurations, conditioned by specific situations, intersected by paths driven by winds of subjectivity and the body and that convoke the whims of history. To look/to feel/to think of the world in this (these) way(s) encourages forms of contact with the environment, intelligible as well as sensitive, symbolic as well as imaginary. These vehicles affect sensations, perceptions and ideas, and they activate aesthetic and poetic forces. On the basis of these conditions, Guadalupe Miles can, without a great deal of rhetoric digression (aside from metaphor), represent bodies’ relationship with the river and mud, with the mountains and with water. With animals. With the light that burns and also illuminates the skin.

This is the teaching that Tiluk leaves: the need to search for a point of view that annuls the photograph’s pure exteriority, ignores established categories and adopts the agency of natural forces. The Wichí way of seeing—the indigenous gaze in general—runs skipping over dualist schisms, dodging hierarchies and disregarding time’s evolutionary flow. The intense images house memory as well as the potency of different futures: “they tremble with reflections of the future”, as figured by Benjamin. It is in this aperture toward the possible, as opposed to that which is instituted forever, that the political meaning of the work should be sought. In Guadalupe’s images, this meaning does not address representations of the emancipation desired; it is affirmed through fleeting announcements of alternative energies of creation and thought. In opposition to nature conceived as a reserve for anthropocentric extractivism, it places soft, barely detectable signals of different ways of managing the territory and inhabiting the world. These same ways are being pursued by policies of veritable extermination: their biocentric vocation threatens too many of global productivism’s interests. Therefore, every stitch of beauty can constitute a small act of resistance.