Translated by Cayley Taylor
Experiments with time and darkness inform the early investigations of the Filósofas of Bling, the group that became known through pamphlets such as Adorno in Los Angeles.
What act of creation could have spawned those faces?
In one, a gland secretes a gelatinous mass which invades the organism and makes it translucent. In the other, deities from the first phase of Neanderthal colonization of the earth link their lineage to the diamond and the rock. How would the species look if our Pliocenian ancestors had mated in furious, juicy hordes with other species is the question that organizes their early explorations.
How would the species look, stripped from the human project.
More and more, we’ve renounced the idea of man as separate from his means and ends, they explain, citing Roger Caillois’ treatise on stones. (As they assert in Adorno in Los Angeles, “mere hot-blooded humanity” is of little interest to them.)
What matters to them is the species traveling back in time in a ball of fire, returning to its own black hole.
It is in this regard that their obsessions with immobility should be understood. The project encompasses the writing of a zoological art history, the fantasy of unforeseen unions between natural kingdoms. The species is left in parenthesis, immobilized like a butterfly.
They are adamant in their assertion that minerals are alive because we see their speech acts through the rocks covering men. The plan is to let them grow, gain ground on the matter, to later retreat slightly, to behold their magic and horror. In their excursions into the forbidden laboratories of the natural world, the Filósofas of Bling apply themselves to the study of diagonals that unite the species acting as a matrix of forms; in other documents, they speak of “workshops of Being where humans become part of the solar machinery bound to the motionless engine of flowers in their sexual encounters with insects and whose purpose oils the infallible logic of the earth.”
They imagine a theoretical afterlife for Adorno in L.A., the megalopolis on the Pacific where Theodor the philosopher from Frankfurt would ready his assault on global mass culture. «Adorno absorbed in hate» and «Adorno cannot get his kuchen» give way to Adorno in L.A.
To revel in darkness, and in the wandering chaos of the species, becomes their fate: in this vein they approach the Quechua cosmology recorded by the Jesuits. Hyperborean travelers had noted that, in the Southern Hemisphere, they could not recognize their skies from the old world. Because in this part of the world there is more darkness than stars:
I do not speak only of the lucid, resplendent areas… I refer to the dark and black areas that are in the sky. Because we see very notable dark patches of which I have never seen in Europe and that in this hemisphere are, truly, very manifest. These patches of color and shape are like darkness and shade, attached to the same stars (…) José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias.
With these night maps, the speakers of Runa Simi constructed a sky defined by dark cloud constellations. A treatise on the stars based on darkness, Incan cosmology works via negationis. In the dark clouds of the Milky Way they identified diverse animals whose journey through the dark fields encodes the history of the earth. The codex of their tribe, written in the skies.
When the black goats came walking through the sky, waters covered the earth; when the sky formed the llama with the lamb, half of our people disappeared from the face of the earth.
The great Jesuit astronomer, Christopher Clavius, made an early reference to the dark cloud constellations in the 1596 edition of his Commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco, which was later incorporated into his Opera Mathematica (1612). Clavius reports that dark areas appear close to the pole in the night sky, as if the skies had been perforated.
Stars that cannot come to terms with darkness fade from the map.
These sky maps are just one chapter from a study of nature that proceeds through readings of patterns. This shaky, in-motion story of physis discards the glorified convention of a science where experiments are carried out in environments repeatable in aeternum in the vacuum. The reading of the dark skies was to be paired with observations such as where the falcons nest, how long it takes for the k’antú rose to bloom and what transmits the softness to its petals, among myriads of other apparently random observations. The articulation of these readings determined the projection of the future. It is an epistemology that moves forward in chaos, discarding vintage science, because it reigns in contingency. This kind of investigation through emerging patterns, which takes instability as the primordial base, was considered non-scientific during millennia; now it is a surging paradigm, coinciding with the loss of Europe’s vital energy. Science ceases to be a polished spectacle for the explorer-spectator with a trembling magnifying glass in hand; possibly, because it secretly believes that the universe is much more complex and marvelous. The night map posits chaos; it is an invitation to find the creatures lurking in the dark.
Amid the chaos, to appear and to dazzle is everything.
The Filósofas of Bling are categorical in regard to their range of application. Their latest communications state: We believe that the purpose of the theory of the Other was to train us to withstand the next humiliation that awaits the human project: when we become the radical other, when artificial intelligence takes over the earth.
Blessed be the grace that flaunts its atrocious presence.
Arta Magazine, Buenos Aires, May, 2014