Anarchy or Barbarity: Lonely spirals of somatic performativity
On the incomplete task of rooting my practice of my biography
Aramo Olaya 2023
How did all of this start?
The energy that moves whatever I’m dragging along is being with me since I was a baby. I could say that this journal starts the day I was looking at one of my own colors and forms drawings on the wall of my room in 1983? I must have been two or three years old, maybe I am exaggerating. I was looking at the drawing and I started seeing the forms and the colors on the drawing moving around the sheet of paper. My vision was not the analytic stable camera for perception that I have experienced most of the time in adulthood, even in mature childhood. Back then, before that change, eyes were entities that moved things around. Things were not stable or still. I see a reminiscence of that in the obsession adults show for giving children a world of fantasy. There might be a longing for a lost phenomenological memory lying there. I think there is a tendency to think that we are manipulating children to believe in this fantastic world for the sake of creativity. Rather, I think we do it because we remember that we had a perceptual system that allowed us to see beyond adults’ understanding of things. Thingness in adulthood is a kind of stillness, a newtonian stability.
However, we intellectual adults are the first ones who like to dispute that state of affairs. Maybe intellectual thinking is also a kind of reminiscence of those lost knowledgeable abilities.
My second important event for the journal is that of my sexual relationship with my same age neighbor Miguel Soto. He lived in the apartment in front of mine, in an eight floors, two apartments per floor building in Oviedo, Asturies, Spain. We developed quite an erotic relationship from when we were two to when we were six. This relationship changed as we changed and started to perceive things in a more thingy way. I remember that he became interested in construction blocks, parking lots, small manly dolls. Then I just stopped visiting. That was not interesting for me. We had this game in which we would crawl and rub against each other on his living room’s wooden floor. His mother would make dinner for us and we would turn off the lights, use a flashlight and play this dance game. I don’t know how often this would happen. Maybe it was only a couple of times. Maybe I have completely made it up (I hope not). Maybe it was a pretty common practice. No doubt I only remember my relationship with him because of this.
At the same time I was seduced-abused by an older boy at school. He would cooperate with a friend who would cover for him in the school bus. He would touch between my legs. I do remember having a troubled relationship with him. His name was Julian. I was four years old when it started and it lasted until I was eight. It was kind of a semipublic thing that happened with the tacit consent of everybody else, I guess. Apart from that, I was a very bullied kid at school.
My mother found out. I don’t remember how, but in some way she started asking me questions until she discovered what was happening. She called the school. They interrogated me. The school kicked him out. Their classmates continued to insult me in public calling me whore until they graduated when they were eighteen years old. I’m still quite proud of my mother for being sensitive to this. I have never been able to find out anything about this person. He must be fifty now.
I’ve been trapped in an obsession of repetition of both experiences. This repetition has taken many forms, both in the history of my own sexuality and in that of my quest of looking for somatic communication through movement and touch. Both of these repetitions have overlapped.
I feel very vulnerable about telling these stories, which are way too intimate to be shared in this medium, but I think it is necessary. It makes sense in the most literal meaning of the expression. These experiences have been lenses or fabrics, or smells, or flavours, or echoes through which I have been making sense for a long time.
When I was seventeen years old I wrote a short haiku:
Bring me those hands,
And I’ll lead you.
I lead you
(Dame esas manos,
que yo te llevo.
Que te llevo)
This simple desire has been in the center of my movement and somatic search. It expresses the desire to switch the roles that had been assigned culturally, and maybe biologically, in the sphere of intimacy. I can say I have always felt haunted by intimacy and intimate encounters. I believe (even if not with the same intensity I used to) that they are the most political kind of events. I have thought of political intervention as something to be done at an intimate level. I felt very connected with queer theory because I thought it opened up the possibility of articulating this as discourse and community. That has happened partially.
I was always looking for improvisation, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. When I was in college, an Italian friend, Gabriele Blundo (now a professor of philosophy in Messina, Sicilia), started a theatre course at our dorm, the Col.legi Major Rector Peset (Our dorm apart from a dorm was a university institution with a vibrant cultural life). This course was based on somatics an improvisation. This was the first time I had the opportunity of engaging in improvisation, and it totally captivated me. I liked theatre, but most of everything I liked the physical sensation of becoming in the improvisation. I liked the sensation of creating situation and text out from nowhere, but what I liked the most was the sensation of stepping into the unknown through my body. In my highly intellectual household, I had been trained in concepts and words, but never in the materiality of my body. Gabriele and the rest of friends I made there created a fountain of freedom and creativity that fulfilled me. Later on, I went to theatre school at OFF Teatro y Cine in Valencia. But my theatre school had a very traditional, text-based Shakespeare oriented take on theatre. They made great work, I was not a bad actor, but I never felt part of it. I thought that theatre was not what I was looking for. Same happened with dance. I tried a myriad of contemporary dance classes. I could not do more than a couple of months. I kept waiting for teachers to offer us space for improvisation, but they never did. I did not understand how that could be called ‘contemporary’. For me it was clear that contemporary should have meant looking for movement in the fountain of your own creativity, but it did not. It was about imitating the teacher’s movements the most accurately. I could not understand it. I turned to politics, and I was an anarchist activist during my twenties, applying my quite intellectual mind to questions of community building, and decision making at squatted social centers and houses. I was twenty seven when I finally came across improvisation again, through tango. This happened during my PhD. I was granted a very good scholarship to go to the Southern Corn and do some research about abortion policies in southern Latin America.
In my first tango class, Pancho, my first tango teacher ever, said: ‘To tango is to walk. It is about finding out the way you walk’. I perfectly remember the sensation of softness on the ground, similar to those false steps that make you fall in dreams, as if the ground was fluffy. I had bought some very bad quality high heels, thinking that I was going there to do research on gender embodiment. But then Pancho said we should pay attention to our center. I immediately understood that I was not just there to develop a queer practice, but that there was a whole new world waiting for me.
At the very exact time I met Cristobal B. Corvalán, a Chilean contemporary and postmodern dancer who became my friend and told me about contact improvisation. Cristóbal’s somatic sensibility was out-worldly, and he taught me many things about bodies, breathing, and the metaphysical importance of movement. It was through him that I started to comprehend the phenomenological and energetic dimensions of movement and touch. He always said that he wanted to create spaces for intimacy in his classes. He is to this day one of the movers I admire the most.
Back in Spain I started CI classes with Diana Bonilla and Cristiane Boullosa and intensive training in tango with any local and international teachers visiting Madrid. During the next ten years, I finished my Sociology of Gender PhD, but was never really caught by sociology, and I worked with tango, queer tango and contact improvisation in Madrid and Valencia.
Another person who was very important during this time was Yui Gómez Ábalos. Yui is a translator, an artist, and a trans activist part of my group of friends in Valencia. We were in an intimate relationship intermittently during these ten years. Yui and I created an artistic collective, Cuerpo Ficción. Cuerpo Ficción was a space for us to communicate beyond the limits of the ordinary uses of language. We were both very troubled by each other. The somatic and the queer practices I had been developing for a long time found a common ground and were projected into discourse through my relationship with Yui. A profusion of many ideas and a lot of text and images was an outcome of our clash, but in the end everything between us ended up unfinished.
It was in this stage of the second half of my thirties that I started working with group performance. I started creating workshops that constituted collective happenings of somatic embodiment through words, somatic practices, the use of the gaze and the sense of sight, improvised movement under the form of tango or contact improvisation, and the ideas of des-identification, ungendering, somatic performativity, corpo-reality, monsterification, alien-becoming, and so on. I started traveling a lot, specially in Spain but also in Germany, France, and England, to teach workshops in different kinds of events: queer dance events in tango or contact improvisation, contact-tango, and also more institutional settings like gender theory university courses, Masters Degrees, and PhDs, teacher’s trainings in education and social work, artistic institutions, apart from my regular classes at private dance schools. What I have tried to recreate under all of these formats has always been that ability to see beyond the Newtonian pristine world of hard-shaped and sharpened bodies. A world that becomes invisible when we train capitalistic heteronormativity and authoritarian ways of dealing with bodies to interact in an adult world. Improvisation as a physical sensation (on whichever medium it is performed) allows to feel that tickling that comes with the emergence of the unknown. I have tried to recreate spaces for this emergence that go in the direction of my own political interests, like the undoing of gender or the spreading of intimacy as a medium for communication. It doesn’t always work, and there are infinite other ways to do it. However, during that period, I did feel I was getting somewhere.
Then Covid came. All my work was based on touch. My job just disappeared over a weekend. Spain had a strict lockdown. We were confined at home for almost three months and there was curfew for a year and a half. I was used to touch people literally everyday. It was a radical situation of touch deprivation. But I was very privileged. I could spend the lockdown by myself in a beautiful apartment with a terrace. There were no cars. Birds chirped. The sky was clear and its colors changed. A lot of people wanted to connect. I had the chance to talk with many friends I had lost contact with. We had time. My mother told me why wouldn’t I take the opportunity to write some story. I was very surprised that she thought I could do that. I had an idea for a science-fiction short story that had been solidifying in my mind for three years. I envisioned a rural de-growing society in which there was no family anymore and kids were taken care of inquisitively. I had many friends that had tried or achieved moving to the countryside to live in community. It had been the lost dream me and some of my friends couldn’t achieve because we felt too dependent from the city to get touch, dance, money, relationships. A semi-lost dream, I still longed for that kind of life (I still do). Because I hadn’t found the chosen queer family, the perfect anarchist community, I decided to realize it in fiction, at a world-wide level. What started as a short story became a 200 pages book in a few weeks. This was the period when I started to apply to performance studies programs in the US more seriously.
When the lockdown finished I moved back to Madrid and I started working as a high-school teacher in a public high school. We still had hard masking and social distancing policies and the government had made an effort to create smaller students’ groups in educational facilities, so the teaching that year in particular was kind of Utopian. That was also the reason I was hired, they needed way more people to teach. In Madrid some CI and tango events happened under the blanket. My CI school was functioning normally and discreetly. I started writing my second novel, this one just emerged super fast. In the first book, another imaginary book was mentioned, a book that narrated the revolution that had initiated the world unfold in the first book. I was thinking of how could I make CI appear in this revolutionary world as a practice that had become generalized as an alternative form of lingua franca. I wanted to write a highly pornographic queer and sapphic novel. I also wanted to imagine a post-nuclear world with a generations-long lockdown. During the pandemic, I had a lot of thoughts about the interconnections between political and religious discourses and their views on revolution, revolt, and armed struggle, ritual, and culture. I decided I could create a community of women who were at the same time the founders of a new religion, terrorists, and somatic practitioners. I looked for suitable monasteries in Spain that could work as a setting for the second part of the novel. I visited El Monasterio de los Monjes Identes at La Sierra de la Cabrera in Madrid. I wrote the novel in three months. Immediately after I was admitted in our program.
The Great Transition was also mentioned in the first novel as a period that had existed between Alondra’s revolution and the beginning of long-term cooperation between humans and machines, and the worldwide decision of degrowing in the use of resources, people, and organizational complexity. I started thinking in the third novel as soon as I finished the second one. I had an image of a group of wild cows killing a group of humans who were in a mission to find other humans groups. I also had the image of a queer character who was heretic to the idente traditions, that had lost their political meaning after the revolution. I’m still revolving around this character, their motives, their identity, and their personality. My friend Chomoi gave me the idea of finishing The Great Transition with a very detailed account of the first Planet Assembly’s minutes. The main idea is that whatever amount of power Tajo could get to hold during their reign in their attempt to revitalize a capitalistic hierarchical society would be dissolved at the end of the novel. The character would dissolve in the plot as well. It would cease to be important when the plot moves on to discussing the first Planet Assembly.
While I was starting to write La Gran Transicion, all of a sudden, and without really believing it very much, I was transplanted into California. Not to mention other adaptation aspects, and US’s academic environment, CI’s culture in the Bay and Davis turned out to be quite different than what I was used to in Spain. The similarities are definitely bigger than the differences, but the differences were magnified by my body being transplanted into a new soil. I’m still in a period of adaptation. I would not know how to describe these differences, but overall I think they made it difficult for me to feel part of the community, if such thing exists. Though it is also true that I’m generally critical of the idea of a CI community, also in Spain. Due to this transplant and a number of unforeseen circumstances, during these first two years I could not create a consistent environment in which to deepen in the most intriguing aspects of energetic practice I brought with me from EspacioFCI. I would have wanted my portfolio to be about touch, to be based on a shared touch practice, but it was not possible. I don’t know if I could have done it in Madrid. Maybe. I did find a close collaborator after I finished my second novel. With Ilda Freire I developed some of the touch language in the interstices of CI and queer sexuality I had been looking for since my queer anarchist activism years. It also didn’t last very long, though. The thing with touch is that finding collaborators and conserving them is very difficult. We are dealing with very sensitive material, some kind of special connection that cannot be planned needs to emerge. Questions of familiarity, structural power, understanding of the practice and of intimacy, and all kinds of difficult commitments and desires keep arising.
This is why I decided to turn back to the novel for the portfolio. The novels are the place in which I can realize the imagined Utopian world and its constrains in total freedom from actual embodied restrictions, and without the limitations of time and space imposed by shared space-time. Besides that, part of Tajo’s character development implicated a solo dancing practice that I had beed sharing both in CI classes and at DRAMA 10. I started to work in the portfolio’s performance practice in Winter, when metallic qualities of energy sharing are practiced in my CI training.
The seven or eight movements come from a practice that I have learnt at EspacioFCI from Cristiane and Diana. They don’t call them like that at all. We practice them as part of warming up, among many other versions of limbs-center connection. During a period of years Cristiane was a little bit more specific about them, correlating each of them to different meridians. Probably not done exactly in the same way I’m doing them right now. They have also told me that these movements come from their practice of sinergetics. Not only Cristiane is a shiatsu practitioner apart from a dancer (other CI teachers have followed this path, too, like for example Ray Chung), also Diana’s mother is a natural therapist and she has shared a lot of spaces with Cristiane. Diana is a doctor by degree apart from a dancer. There is a strong connection between EspacioFCI’s understanding of CI as a dance technique and other energetic practices are brought to our practice without capturing it. There is a climate of a zen philosophy, South-American shamanism (Cristiane is Brazilian), and Chinese medicine fluttering around and in our CI practice. These influences occur in a de-contextualized environment, though. Questions of cultural appropriation and impossibility of translation arise. Cristiane and Diana have always been very careful in not trying to claim belonging or understanding of any tradition in particular. They apply some energetic qualities found in other spaces to CI practice. They understand CI as a dance form and technique. There is not a doctrinal aspect to our practice. But there are definitely some philosophical and ethical practices that are conveyed in their CI practice.
Tajo’s seven or eight movements are related to all of this. They are related to my own interpretation of EspacioFCI’s methodology for the practice of CI. I’m specially interested in the proximal energies that emerge from bodies, what is now called the biofield. I have to say here that I’m not a mystic person at all. I have never been open to think in subtle or transcendental forms of energy or entities. All the opposite. Nevertheless, my dance practice has always been related to the emergence of out-worldly sensations of embodied connection, porosity, somatic communication, deep breathing, ecstatic experience, or material intra-action that I believe cannot be sufficiently accounted for through a phenomenological paradigm. They do happen beyond perception. I believe they express the existence of material energy in an objective yet difficult to study way. That’s why I bet for the concept of biofield as well as for that of electricity being a constitutional process of matter, including our own, and of awareness as a constitutional quality of matter, including everything that has been described as inert.
In the yearly cycle of energetic practice that I learnt at EspacioFCI there’s a period that is dedicated to metal energy. It coincides with the first part of winter and it is related to breathing and the skin, among other characteristics. Cristiane often talks about the space in between bodies as a space that needs training. I have discovered that for her that space is already a space of contact, but I have found myself more interested in that space as where there is still no direct skin to skin contact, the space of biofields. I find that that space it is greatly aroused by the practice of the meridian-related movements. The meridian related movements were also an important part of my practice in the Cuerpo Ficcion performance collective that I formed with Yui Gómez Ábalos prior to the pandemic. We would talk about the traces on the body as wounds capable of being filled up with gold, like in kintsugi. These traces carried a lot of meanings, from identity to health markers, from energetic channels to the unknown to places to unfold movement, touch, and a poetics of the body. There were also the traces of the re-stitching of the body of the monster, the scars of imaginary or actual recompositions of the non-cis body. Although this research process was interrupted and unfinished, it remained with me to this day. This traces were also those I saw for the first time through breathing practice with Cristobal B. Corvalan, colored subtle matter spirals existing in the air around two bodies practicing breathing together. Those traces made me realize that the improvisation I was looking for was to be found in shared movement practice.
I’m very ambitious about CI. Although I have been educated in understanding it as a dance form and technique, and I respect and see the power of understanding it this way, in order to be able to develop all the set of skills that it is capable of, I also understand CI beyond dance, as a form of language. I have experienced a strong feeling of communication with other bodies (people included) through the training of touch and movement sensibility an energetic approach to CI brings about. Communication is not yet language. However, I’m ambitious enough to try to understand CI as a language besides a means for communication. I want to try out how far can we go in articulating CI communication as a form of language. Somatic communication exists. If it is articulable, then in can be understood as a language.
The seven or eight movements work as that language’s basic vocabulary of sorts. Yet they are not yet the subject of a possible dissertation. They exist in the imaginary space of science-fiction, or in this case, somatic fiction. They prepare the soil for future endeavors in the shared space-time. They exist as if the language of flesh existed in the transition to a future imaginary primitivist yet to come anarchist queer Utopia. They serve to pose the reflection that is in the background of imagining CI as a language of flesh: the desire for an improved version of the world, a desire to unfold the Spinozian potentialities of bodies: ‘We yet don’t know what a body can do’. Tajo’s movements imagine a life in which these possibilities are toted on a specific body, the body of Tajo’s character in The Great Transition, a novel which writing was interrupted by me being here.
In the loneliness of not having a clear long-term collaborator, I have partially embodied Tajo’s experience through a series of videos and practices that I carried out throughout the 22-23 academic year. Nonetheless, I had occasional collaborators, like Molly Nyeland, Joe Dumit, the people from the Davis CI club and Berkeley’s jam, but this has been overall a solo project. In Tajo, I found the possibility of carrying out this portfolio project on my own, and it has also served very well the goal of keeping the writing on, gripping my imagination attached to Tojé’s reign, developing Aythor’s character, and imagining how different materials, like iron, water, plants, and experiences, like the one in the cave and in the white cell, could have affected Tajo to become more and more obsessed with the seven movements, to the point of turning into Tajo’s main source of meaning.
During the first months of my portfolio practice, I concentrated in repeating and repeating the movements and I created a sequence of them. In the beginning, there was only one movement, that of the spiraling hands around the hips that creates the shape and energetic force of a torus. Then I started stretching the torus shape into the space in front of my body, creating an ellipse. From there I would elevate my hands over my head, creating a linear channel between soil and sky. Then from there I would bring my hands to the sides grabbing the proximal energies of other bodies in our milieu. And finally I would bring my hands against my torso, giving back all of these qualities of energy to my heart and solar plexus. There’s a lot to be said and described about these movements. I have attempted to do so in the ‘Documentation’. This process took several months. Then, I brought these to my CI classes at the UC Davis CI club. This is not the first time I do this, these movements are part of my regular CI teaching practice. I do them in the Winter when we practice metallic qualities of energy. I understand metal as a conductor of electric impulses. These movements help enhancing the electric and magnetic qualities of human matter. Repeating these movements on your own body and with other bodies creates a frizzling sensation in the whole body tissues. I have confirmed that I’m not the only one that feels this. People in class has repeatedly told me that they feel unbound and sparkled, that the space between bodies feels weightless and silky, bright, easy to transit. Touch connections happen without the need of direct contact. These and other descriptions match my own and that of my classmates’s ones at EspacioFCI.
I have also shared these practices consistently with my Drama 10 students. Energetic practices with them have been directed towards group cohesion and facilitation of body alignment, spherical attention, and mutual support. One practice in particular is worth mentioning, not only because it met the expectations the students could figure out about the practice, but also the symbolic environment of my novels narrative. In Anarquia o Barbarie there is a moment when Erendi tells Xurde: ‘Hands are like bowls. They can contain soup or poison, but they are still bowls’. Doing energetic somatic practice with Drama 10 students is challenging because they are not expecting it. They are young people who might easily feel that kind of practice is far from what they expect from a theatre class, even if it is about improvisation. That day, I told the students this sentence, and I invited them to make the form of a bowl with their hands. We started to feel the energy in the bowl and to concentrate it. Then we started to open it bit by bit, spreading it in the space in front of bodies, and in controlled spiraling forms in the space, and we finally concentrated all the group’s energies in the center of Della. All the students were amazed. They reported that they have felt real energy present in the space that was not present there before class. Some of them were really mesmerized, some others were more playful, but everybody took it seriously. It was a very successful energetic practice.
I kept practicing the eight movements on my own until the end of Spring quarter, while I planned a series of videos to be shoot in Spain during the Summer.
An Asturian quest for Utopia
‘Natural Paradise’ is the official institutional motto for Asturies, my homeland in Spain. In the last months of execution of my portfolio project, I have roamed Asturies with my friends and family repeating the movements and embodying Tajo’s character. The longing for home is present not only in the novel but also in my own experience as a (very privileged) immigrant in the USA. My novels contain a strong feeling of Asturian culture and landscape, specially Anarquía o Barbarie. It was only by being in another country that I realized to which level my Utopia contains a longing for a lost Asturies, one that is disappearing under post-capitalist exploitation, climate change, and the loss and revival of celtic traditions in my land. We Europeans don’t have the same feeling of land I perceive here in the US, as many of us are born and grow in the same land our ancestors did. Me, in particular, I’m an Asturian for as many generations as my family can remember, from both parts. Asturies is a small, beautiful piece of land that has remained quite isolated for as long as history can remember, between intricate mountains and the sea (it’s like a tiny Chile). Although Christianity entered Asturies during the Roman Empire, celtic traditions have always co-existed with it, and they may have always been more important than Christian practices, also mixed with Roman polytheistic beliefs. It is still partially an enchanted land with a strong memory of zero waste practices and circular matrilineal economy. Those are strongly engrained in our ethical values. Now there is a rebirth of these practices thanks to the neo-rural movement happening all over Spain (and I guess all over the world under different forms).
As well as Tajo becomes connected to the seven or eight movements, I become connected to Asturies through the practice of the movements in Asturian landscapes. I have wandered Asturies with friends this summer in search for beautiful images of a Utopian land that is the one that appears in Anarquia o Barbarie. Tajo is related to one of the characters in Anarquia o Barbarie, Xurde, who has an Asturian name and embodies somatic knowledge and somatic trouble. The videos represent Tajo repeating this basic somatic vocabulary as a ritual or tribute to their homeland, that is also Xurde’s homeland, and also mine. Tajo is reminiscing images of their childhood, but also images of Xurde’s childhood. Actually Tajo’s land in my imagination is not Asturies, although partially it is. This is the magic of speculative fiction. It allows you to be in several places at the same time, in several times at the same time, it allows you to be embodied without being trapped in shared space-time. Fictional writing does share a lot of characteristics with somatic practice.
I made six trips with my friends and family between the end of July and mid September. I visited Las Cascadas de Oneta, the beaches at Llanes region, the Texeo copper and cobalt neolithic mines, the Cueva del Caldueñín, the Picos de Europa, and the forests and rivers of L.larón, at the Natural Reserve of Muniellos. I chose these places for their personal significance and their adjustment to the novels aesthetics. Some of them I had never been before. These trips took us to different facts of the history, culture, and mythology of Asturies, revealing how some world-wide processes manifest locally, and bringing us closer and further away from Utopia. Now I will narrate some conversations me and my friends had during these trips and their significance to think about Utopia, Dystopia, and the present world through our wanderings. Practicing the seven movements as Tajo in these settings and around these stories was a way to connect and also take a distance from these places and my personal connection with all of them.
Las Cascadas de Oneta is a dream paradisiac place in Western Asturies. Very easy to access, they are a group of cascades at the Oneta river. In Asturian mythology, there is a character, the Xana, a river nymph who would seduce young men and make them disappear who lives in clear flowing water and cascades. One version of the Xana relates her to the Roman goddess Diana. Another makes them female bodied versions of the snake, asking young mozos to liberate them from the river’s enchantment. The challenge is to dare to be totally constrained by their snake body and kiss them in their snake mouth three times. In current Asturian mythology, however, xanas have a very positive connotation as feminine beings that populate rivers and cascades with whom visitors can eventually interact in different forms. Me and my friend Umbe Aranguren, a tango dancer who runs a dance school in Gijón, spent a day in Oneta and had a lot of conversations about dance, life, and being in nature in Asturies. We recalled how many things have changed a lot in Asturias in the span of our lifetime. She’s becoming more and more involved with the neo-rural movement now. She explained to me her plans to move to a small village in the mountains, where there’s a growing community of people who have moved there from Asturian cities, and also from other parts of Spain. The region where she’s moving to, Infiesto, is now being populated by queer activists interested in recovering old music and dances, reviving young life in the region. There are some rural cultural and political institutions that are being rehabilitated by this group, like ‘La Benéfica’, a warehouse built in 1926 that was the headquarters of the Mutual Aid Society whose objective was to help members meet needs that the State did not cover, like health, education, and leisure. The society became so successful that they built a rectangular warehouse of about 400 square meters that functioned as a theater, dance hall, social meeting place and cinema. This project is specially curated by musician Rodrigo Cuevas, a very famous queer artist and activist in Spain.
The beaches of Llanes region are the places were I spent my childhood. Asturias has more than 300 beaches and it’s famous all over Spain for having a cooler weather than the rest of Spain. We visited a good number of beaches, La Playa de Cuevas, La Playa de San Antonio de Mar, La Playa de Toró, La Playa de Puertu Chicu, and other beaches in Western and Central Asturies like La Playa de Frejulfe, La Playa de Barayo, La Playa de Bayas, and others. Most of these beaches are increasingly being exploited for tourism in the last decades, to the point that now they resemble the kind of touristic exploitation that has been pervasive in Mediterranean Spain since the 60’, when English and German working class workers started to buy a lot of property there.
Asturies used to be a miner region in the late XIXth and early XXth Centuries, as it was also during the Roman Empire. Mining was controlled by English companies at first. It stopped being profitable when neo-liberalist policies moved mining exploitations to Southern countries. Tourism has replaced mining as the main source of wealth in Asturies since then. Asturies as a region keeps loosing population until the present day. In the beaches, we noticed two very alarming situations. One, some of the beaches were dirty. There was some kind of leaked brown substance in the water at La Playa de Bayas, no public measures taken about it whatsoever. There are still some metallurgic industries in the area. Some friends told me that they had seen this substance at other beaches in the last years. I looked for any warnings about this on the government’s websites with no result. Another circumstance, even more worrying, was the water’s temperature. Asturias beaches have always had temperatures between 16-19 celsius. In the last years the temperature of the water has been increasing. This year it was never under 22. People commented on how nice the temperature of the water was. We were very horrified and worried about the lack of any public commentary about this. This is for sure due to global warming. In the last years, we have witnessed how algae enter the beaches way earlier than they have always used to during the Summer. Traditional big tides of San Agustín no longer happen at the end of August. The average Summer temperature in Asturias has raised from 20 to 30 celsius in ten years. Visiting the beaches left us very scared.
The next trip was with my friend Xiu Cueva and their partner Alexis Puente Montiel. We visited Las Minas de Texeu in the back of the Aramo mountain range. These mines are located on the southeastern slope of the Sierra del Aramo. The Aramo is a big mountain range very close to Asturies capital, Oviedo, where I come from. It is also the name I have chosen for my non-binary self. It is not a name in Spanish or Asturian, and the origin of the name of the mountain is unknown. It was very important for me to go to the Aramo, because even when it is so close to my home (it can be seen from Oviedo) people rarely visits it. Las Minas de Texeu is an interesting place because it shows several layers of mining history in Asturies. As I explained before, in the XIXth Century English mining companies owned mining lands and exploitation in Asturies. In the beginning, they would exploit cobalt and copper here to produce luxury items in England like the finest pottery decorations. Back then Asturies was a very poor region. Alphabetization was extremely low. Most people had never left Asturies, until at the end of the XIXth Century a phenomenon of migration started to happen in Asturies. A lot of people would travel to América, specifically to then richer and more promising countries like México, Argentina, or Cuba. This created a phenomenon that still has an impact in Asturias landscape, architecture and culture, Los Indianos. Los Indianos were American (when we say American in Asturias we mean from South American countries) descendants of Asturian migrants who got rich in América and came back. They built small palaces, schools, different kinds of institutions. Some of them were an incipient progressive bourgeoisie that helped in the process of alphabetization and became progressive politicians in the Republican governments. Others (or the same ones) became property and mines owners when the English started to exploit mining in England and in the Common Wealth colonies. Some of them even have a very dark history of human trafficking for slavery, like Antonio López, Marchis of Comillas in Cantabria.
Las Minas de Texeo were owned by Asturians after being owned by the English, but they decayed pretty soon. In the end of the 19th century, Texéu experienced great splendor. The Aramo Cooper Mines Ltd., with English capital, was the first company to work in the mines, from 1897 until the end of the First World War. Then, the Asturian Mining Metallurgical Society took over between 1947 and 1960, when it was closed due to the extraction of mineral being cheaper in American countries. But Las Minas de Texeu have been exploited since prehistoric times, as attested by the findings of human remains and utensils made there, after being ‘discovered’ in 1888 by the Belgian engineer Alejandro Van Straalen y Urlinos (1835-1920). A ‘discovery’ that was probably known by locals since the Neolithic. But, back then, Spain was also considered as discoverable place by Northern Europeans. The mining settlement is very small and interesting, and it has been rehabilitated recently. The Neolithic mines are up the mountain, and they form an impressive group of massive concavities. It’s not a well-known hike. We didn’t meet anyone in all the way up and down. Just a few horses and the distant bells of some cows. And a smelly horse head and a friendly dog who came with us from the town at the bottom of the mountain. In the cold old mines, the red of copper flooded us with the overwhelming sensation of a place that seems natural but it’s not. As if humans were imitating nature. A kind of landscape that it’s also possible to visit at the Roman gold mines of Las Médulas, in el Bierzo, very close to Asturias. Las Medulas gold mines might have been one of the biggest gold exploitations of Roman antiquity. Romans enslaved the local populations to work in the mines, though there are academics debates around the labor conditions and the relationship between the legions and the celtic local populations. Thousands of years of layers of imperialistic exploitation can be touched at Texeu or Las Medulas impressive carved artificial caves. Time makes them look more and more natural.
Again with Umbe, our next trip took us to La Cueva del Caldueñín, a place that is specially important in the novel because it is the place where the character suffers a brutal episode of rape that determines the rest of their life. I did not know the cave before. I was impressed by how much the cave resembled my own imagination. It even had a river inside just like in the novel. I found it on Instagram as a nice hike you can do with small kids, because it is very close to the village. El Caldueñín is a tiny village in the south front of El Cuera Mountain range, in orient Asturias, very close to Los Picos de Europa and Llanes’s beaches. They say that during the Civil War (1936-1939), one of the most momentous battles in Asturias took place in the Cuera Valley, and in some accounts of the description of the battle it is told how locals used this cave to survive to the bombings. People and also their animals were sheltered for weeks (if the animals were killed in war, this would be a death sentence for the villagers due to the famine).
In the videos series, the memory of the cave comes to Tajo when they are the shining queen of Tojé, who rules by displaying an impressive performative display. Part of the imaginary of the Queen is based on Spanish Virgins like La Virgen de la Guía de Llanes. Catholic Marian cults are also a manifestation of layers of religious traditions in the area. This is part of the reasons why the Reform in Northern Europe banned Marian cults. Although that memory is being lost for centuries, we know that they are syncretic in essence. The Marian cults hide or fusion cults of former Roman and Celtic goddesses, as well as popular myths and local feminine divinities. We were traveling around oriental Asturies in the second half of August, which is the period in which many towns in Spain and in Asturies celebrate the most important Marian rituals of the year. August Marian cults are related to the end of harvest, the beginning of the Fall, and the cycle of death. You don’t need to be a practicing believer to actively participate in these festivities in Spain. In fact, most of the organizers of these festivities are perfectly agnostic. Although under catholic institutions, Marian traditions are not about Christian belief. They are about communal ritual, society reproduction, and the protection of local traditions. They are, at the same time, made up and contemporary. Most Marian cults come from the late Middle Ages, but the forms of the rituals as we know them today are under constant renovation. Most dances that are danced as if they were lost in the night of time actually come from the XIX Century, and the form the rituals have today is no older than a hundred years. This idea of the reinvention of tradition is central to my own narratives in science fiction, as Tajo’s character invents themselves as a traditional never existing figure, taking power from their own performative display. The choreography, in the part of the story the scene of the cave makes reference to, is a way to create a bond and a separation with the people of Tojé. Tajo is a living María, a dancing folk deity, and a ruler, all together.
The scene at Los Picos de Europa represents another moment in Tajo’s life, Aythor’s death. Actually, in other videos, I also felt these feeling of mourning. Tajo mourns both officially as the ruler and privately as a widow. If the public display of the mourning is an excuse to invest Tajo with the king’s power, the private cult to the murdered husband is a moment of intimacy with loss. Tajo remembers the mountains of Setúbal and the miserable childhood in Duga. I went on this trip with my parents Amelia Valcárcel and Lluis Álvarez and a taxi driver, Jesús de la Fuente, who was my assistant director. We went to two well known sight-seeing spots in the Cabrales region. The second of them was almost near the beginning of the hiking and climbers routs at Picos de Europa (Europe’s peaks). My parents had never seen the Picu Urriellu so close, they told me. My father and my mother are both Asturian. They come from very two close valleys in central Asturies, the Sama and the Moreda valley. My father’s father was a gynecologist, and his father was a coal mine owner in Sama de Langreo. My mother’s mother migrated to Madrid in the fifties, after de war, and was a servant in some middle class family. Her mother had survived doing trade in the black market after being abandoned with eleven children by her husband during the war. Both of them were born and grew up in a theocratic Spain, quite resembling of today’s Iran in some important aspects. For example, education was totally in the hands of clergy. My father was almost ordained as a Dominican. My mother was a fervent catholic girl before becoming a feminist communist in the seventies. Both of them had their roots in rural Asturies, but their parents had already moved out from the valleys when they were born. Both of them moved to Oviedo, Asturies capital, to study philosophy at university. Oviedo’s university is one of the oldest in the country, it was stablished in the XVI Century. There they became Asturianist communist activists, they got married, and they worked together for decades.
During our trip to Picos, my parents, Jesús, and I, talked about the relativity of place and distance and how much these concepts have changed in our lifetime. Although it was just a three hours drive in the mountains, for my parents it was a big adventure. With Jesús, we were talking about how the roads had improved in the last thirty years, and how the people in the region have become less and less isolated. Jesús reminisced the times of his grandfather when going from Llanes to Cabrales was almost impossible, because it could only be done by donkey. People in Cabrales would never or very rarely see the sea, which is literally two kilometres away from El Cuera mountain rage, the first row of Los Picos de Europa. All the works in the field and with the cattle were done by hand, and most of the economy was strictly local. There are no Indianos mansions in Cabrales, and until today there are no high-school facilites. However, it is currently a very rich region. Tourism has invaded the mountains, and local blue cheese is very well known and highly consumed in Spain. Less than a Century ago, the distance between Oviedo and Cabrales, or Cabrales and Llanes, might have been as big as that between Oviedo and California, at least in terms of time and resources spent in the trip.
The last trip was to la Reserva de Muniellos, specifically to the village of L.larón, where my friend Xiu comes from. This is a two hours and a half drive from Oviedo through intricate curvy roads. The Muniellos reserve is an impressive mountain forest, but for the locals the forests represent change and the loss of their way of life. In the fifties and sixties the mountains were still covered by cattle fields. Xiu’s mother, grandmother, and previous generations were all born in L.larón. But Xiu’s mother went to Oviedo to study at university, like my parents did. In the seventies, at the end of Franquismo, Spain had what is called the “baby-boom”, a peak in the natality rate that has decreased ever since. This generation, the generation of our parents, lived a way of life in some cases completely different than their parents. They left their villages, they received formal education, and they had an access to technology and urban knowledge that was unseen in rural areas like Muniellos. Xiu’s grandfather looked after the cattle and saw the sea for the first time when he was 80 years old (it is a three hours drive from L.laron). Xiu is a professional pianist and studied at Urbana Champaigne in Illinois. Both their parents studied computer science in Oviedo. In L.laron, we visited the river, the forest and their grandmother’s garden. Xiu told me about their uncle who robbed most of the properties in the village from his sisters and brothers, by creating property deeds with a notary. Just thirty years ago, nobody would hold property deeds for the houses and the lands, that were considered communal property. In the same fashion, it’s known that clan’s properties before the XX Century in Asturias and other parts of Spain used to be matrilineal, and that’s the original reason why Spanish people still use both of their parents’ last names. Matrilineal and patriarchal practices of kinship had been coexisting and maybe at some point in the past they fought. It is almost impossible to know, because the peoples that populated Asturies, apart from the Romans, never had writing systems. Our trip to L.laron was also an occasion for Xiu and I to remember some chapters of our friendship, that started at school when we were seven years old. And also to keep refreshing some plans we have to buy some property in Asturies and die there together with some other friends.
Maybe the land of Utopia resembles everyone’s land. I’m convinced that’s the case for me, because everybody agrees that Asturies is stunningly beautiful. It feels like its beauty is both a fantasy and a make-up, but also a memory from a lost past, and maybe the possibility of another future. Asturies as a land and Asturian culture as a struggle between rural and imperial economies and political systems are a constant reminder that urbanization comes with resistance. For example, 1934’s communist miners Revolution against the raising of fascism in Madrid. Asturies even declared a socialist republic for a few days before the revolution was put to an end by the Spanish army. When the socialist government in Madrid was at threat of being overthrown by the conservatives, the powerful coal miners had weapons and dynamite and were very well organized. The Asturian Socialist Republic was proclaimed in Gijón and Civil Guard posts, churches, or town halls were attacked. Within three days almost all of Asturies was in the hands of the miners, including the arms factories of Trubia and La Vega. After ten days, some 30,000 workers formed the Asturian Red Army. But the repression was very harsh. The government considered that the revolt was a full-fledged civil war. Until now the Revolución del 34 is considered the chapter previous to the Civil War in 1936.
But Asturies is also the contested origin of Spain as a country, with the myth of the Batalla de Covadonga. In this myth, La Virgen de Covadonga, the most famous of the cave virgins in Asturies (and probably another Xana or local divinity of Cangues de Onís) allegedly helped king Pelayo (from Pelagus, that is, the Mediterranean sea) to fight the moros (the muslims, who never really stablished in Northern Spain). There are no details about this supernatural help, but the nationalist myth depicts Pelayo as the Christian white savior king that expelled the moros and started the project of the Reconquista, the historical name of the process of re-christianization of the Peninsula between 722 and 1492. This myth makes of Asturias the cradle of the Spanish Empire that invaded América, massacred the native americans, expelled the muslims, expelled the jews, expelled the moriscs (the descendants of the muslims), and imposed Christianity as the one and only legal religion in the Spanish empire. Quite a somber origin myth, indeed.
Both visions of Asturies, the indiana and the paisana, the popular and the hispanist, the Roman and the Celtic, the urban and the aldeana have been coexisting in tension in Asturies since at least the decay of the Roman Empire. Utopia falls to the side of the paisanas, the xanas and the trasgos, the celtic bagpipes, the villages in the mountains. This self-romanticization is strongly present in current Asturies culture. I’m part of this romanticization via my parents, who were fervent supporters of regional nationalism in the seventies. Although regional nationalism in Asturies was not as successful as it was the Catalonian or the Basque ones, because they had way more resources and Spain as a country depended on their industries to a great extent. However, Asturies retained the enchantment elements of the syncretic myths, and the sensation that a non-christian, non-capitalistic, and in some versions even a non-patriarchal society have been going on forever, with and despite the imperial cultures that have also shaped our costumes, traditions, and mindset. This long stroll in my homeland while I was embodying the character of my novel, which happens in a primitivist Asturies 500 years in the future, created a distance and a tension that allowed me to see Asturies from the distance, and at the same time to be in it as it was not Asturies. The freedom of speculative fiction is that of detaching place of its cultural markers, by substituting or multiplying them, or by messing them up to create new versions of the future. I learnt that my futures are impregnated by my past. That my imagination is filled with layers of lost memory, that my memory is composed by forgotten empty pieces. It is in this empty space of forgetfulness where the new emerges, partly unaware and partly innocent, half recomposed and restitched, a quarter peccant and crafty, and maybe another quarter pristine and original.
Creating the website
I had the idea of organizing the videos in a website to display the portfolio’s documents, but what started as a specific project for the videos ended being a place in which to reinstantiate the novels as fragments of text, sound, and images. I wanted to include the drawings I made for Anarquía o Barbarie. I made these drawings right after finishing writing the novel only because I wanted to linger in the novel’s world. Actually they took me more time than the novel itself. I hadn’t drawn anything since I was a child. Then, for Tras la Espera, I wanted to include some drawings made by AI, because in this novel there is a very important character who is an AI obsessed with various forms of art. I also wanted to include some of the places that are real in the novel, like for example the monastery of Las Identes del Pico de la Miel at La Sierra de la Cabrera in Madrid, or the animals and elements of nature that populate the narrative, like the blackbirds and the larks, the seagulls, the mountains, the sea. It ended up being a tedious long process that it is still partially incomplete, but I’m happy that I went through it, because in this place I could linger again in the space-time of the novels. It is for me a refuge. A space in which I can be all of the characters and situations, even when they are already living in the past of the writing. I hope that the website can serve to somehow advertise the novels at some point. It is also an attempt to communicate a specific theme in the novels, the ocurrence of somatic communication and violence, concentrating the energy that the novels carry for me towards a specific research goal. Let the website speak by itself about the novels and my writing, and the occurrence of somatic communication and violence between the characters, and the solutions they found for these messy encounters.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the novels and my practice keep asking about the question of whether or not is it possible to envision a worldwide language. Not so much a universal language, emptied of misunderstanding, but a worldwide language capable of communicating very basic aspects of intimacy and friendship. I came across the language of flesh, the language of touch as the result of a personal quest which origin is unknown and opaque to myself. It is entirely driven by desire. I have been very addicted to touch throughout these last fifteen years. I have felt partially deprived from touch since the pandemic, but I have also realized that the language of touch in CI here is not exactly the same than the one I was raised in. I realized that it was not just touch, but the fact of sharing the same understanding of CI language with my classmates at EspacioFCI. I keep missing the possibility of being guided there by Diana and Cristiane into very specific qualities of touch I may or may not have found in California, even when I’m sharing touch and space with people who are very sensitive and well trained in CI and in somatics. Even the language of flesh has its idioms and does not blank the longing for home. It does not sort out the longing for belonging. Exactly the same that happens when I try to communicate in English, I need to adapt what I’m saying to the vocabulary I have, and I’m not in control of the different connotations or the different meanings that my deformed use of Spanish grammar into the English language and my limited training in English vocabulary can cause in communication. Therefore, the language of flesh is not exempt from misunderstandings. This sensation of loss is deeply related to the longing of the immigrant, and with the hesitation and desire for translation that is at the base of imagining a language of flesh. So, no, the language of flesh is not exactly the same as the universal language. Like a lingua franca, it is a rough version of language, often a very unsatisfying one, but at the same time a great opportunity for finding shared grammar and vocabulary, shared sensations of communication, shared general frameworks of meaning. The language of flesh can be a worldwide means for communication, but it is still a language of pleasure and violence, like any other one.