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Tecnologías Deculoniales:
In search of an estética multi-étnica y multicultural

by

Marton Robinson

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

August 2018

Copyright 2018 Marton Robinson

2
Table of Contents
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... 3
Tecnologías Deculoniales: in search of an estética multi-étnica y multicultural............................ 4
Chapter 1: MEMORY as DATA as ARCHIVE ........................................................................... 22
Chapter 2: Studio as installation space ......................................................................................... 33
Chapter 3: Performative actions.................................................................................................... 41
Chapter 4: A Non-Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 47
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 49

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Abstract

Tecnologías Deculoniales
1
is an ongoing investigation that aims to broaden the analysis
of the institutional policies and systemic practices of representation, technological globalization,
and verbal/non-verbal systems of communication. This essay will explore means of producing
art and sharing knowledge with fellow artistic practices, with a critical eye on Eurocentric and
institutionalized notions of aesthetics, place, and race.
Working within Tecnologías Deculoniales provides a platform for me to both create and
reflect upon an art practice that investigates the strategic interception of the speculative narrative,
social engagement, and the sustainable institutional practices in art history art studies that
concern multi-ethnic and multicultural art aesthetics.

1
For reference, my 3 projects mentioned in this essay are:
• Tecnologías Deculoniales: my thesis, an essay exploring a multi-ethnic and multicultural aesthetic.
• Studio Hub Residency: the name of my proposed studio project, comprised of my personal practice and the
establishment of a residency within my MFA program.
• Archiving the Familiar: my own evolving archive, comprised of images, photographs, texts, and objects, all
situated in my working studio.

4
Tecnologías Deculoniales: in search of an estética multi-étnica y multicultural

My initial education in health and human movement evolved into an interest of creating
health and recreational programs for communities at social risk. Working with the hearing-
impaired community, I was interested in an integral intervention that focused on the inclusion
and promotion of physical activity (specifically, mini-basketball), quality of life provided by
access to recreational activities that improve self-confidence, and visual communication utilizing
pictograms. My intention was to create a health and human movement program that would
facilitate learning that would improve of the quality of life of this population.
The before mentioned program was implemented at the Escuela de Educación Especial
Fernando Centeno Güell (San José, Costa Rica). It provided a pedagogical tool that taught the
fundamentals of mini-basketball to hearing-impaired students using pictograms to facilitate the
inclusion and adherence of children with hearing disabilities to this sport.
It is evident to me that systems play a significant role in my art practice—from my
interests in physical education, recreation and sports to the visual arts—in the sense that through
an understanding of the system, you can design strategies to defeat your designated “adversary”,
that is, to overcome the gaming structure of the system. Which means that I participate in the
system (art institutions) recognize the deficiencies in the system and operate within those gaps to
challenge the game, using the idea of the "game" to create a parallel to the art world. My
experience with the hearing-impaired community and the resulting visual design strategy to teach
basketball enhanced my engagement in the teaching of sports through alternative approaches of
arts and language. My research into the modes of communication for this community allowed me
to understand the interactions, adaptability, and possibilities of language. After teaching the
basketball class for two years, I was able to establish proof of the effectiveness of this teaching
5
method for the fundamentals of basketball. But the most significant outcome of this practice was
to allow these kids play a sport outside the deaf community as it allowed them to participate in
mainstream basketball leagues. The engagement with this new, non-special-needs-only
community forced upon both groups a new mode of communication, where the very verbal
language of mainstream basketball adapted into a non-verbal sign language both groups could
understand or interpret. The fundamental shift in the interaction between these two communities,
which I had no direct involvement in, helped me recognize that there are options for change or at
least for an improved understanding of community interaction through systematic strategies. A
new form of engagement proved itself possible between the hearing-impaired children and the
normal-hearing children.
And what started off as a new form of mutually-beneficial and effective communication
within a small group of basketball-playing students also caused an improvement in the way
students interacted with each other across the campus. The strong relationship among the deaf
community and their intense engagement with one another, certainly necessary for their
development of language and socialization, is unfortunately essentially exclusionary to others. In
this case, the others were the hearing community that consisted of the rest of the university’s
student body. With the implementation of the integrated basketball leagues comprised of
students of both communities, I observed that the boundaries of language and the segregation
between them were reduced, even when they started interacting beyond the basketball court.
My interest in the formal and informal modes of language, as well as the physical
performance of the body came from this intersection of communication, physical play, and social
transformation. The hearing-impaired community utilizes a concept of implementing
augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), defined as any technology, instrument, or
6
strategy that shortens or gives better access to communication. For me, Tecnologías
Deculoniales has significant parallels to the AAC technology used for hearing-impaired kids as I
am attempting to create strategies, or a mode of community engagement (that is the community
formed by entering my studio) for a visual language that can best communicate multi-ethnic and
multicultural art aesthetics—encompassing both the formal and the informal, the verbal and the
non-verbal.
In the last year I have developed a deeper understanding of my practice within a global
context, where the production of my work is influenced by where my artistic opportunities are
located. After nearly two years spent in to Los Angeles, pursuing my MFA at the USC Roski
School of Art and Design, I find myself conflicted by a national identity and, in turn, conflicted
by my own personal identity. The experience of hearing myself desperately search for a
statement that best articulates my belonging, such as "I am not American”, "I am not African-
American", or "I am not Latino", has forced upon a consideration of the diasporic mechanisms of
representation in the construction of my own ever-evolving hybrid identity. I perceive myself as
produced within those two contexts: a Costa Rican native and citizen but also American resident
and [non]citizen, and find it challenging and sometimes just taxing to perfectly adhere to the
specific terms or concepts used in one or the other, or, more often, both of these two nations.
I find it useful to frame my work within the conceptual and visual theory I call
Tecnologías Deculoniales because I feel it is necessary to understand the intersection of aesthetic
and knowledge, that is, art history/art formation, as a social phenomenon that coexists in constant
state oppression within art structures of colonialism that can be claimed to exist in the American
art. Which implies that the context and the production of artistic practices in most Latin
American countries are negotiated by the social, economic and political problems in the region.
7
The absence or limited patronage of the state and private institutions, force an art production that
is mediated by the limitations in access to high-quality materials, lack of space and the
inexistence of an "art market" in the region. For this reason, artists are forced to self-finance their
projects and exhibitions with the income from day jobs and without any intention of recovering
the investment. Compared with the American art system based on the sponsorship of private
collectors, access to advanced technology and materials, and an art market that proves to be
proliferative. It is a strategy that engages in the appropriation of content and medium that allows
for an exploration of the fundamentals of colonialism and post-colonialism; a strategy that
straddles a cultural mediation between Latin America and the United States.
This concept opened my eyes to how similar forces globalization and the economy of
knowledge are at play within the international art community, but in adversary roles. I have
experienced multiple national art communities, but I base my discussion here primarily on the
international art community I have experienced in Los Angeles.
I observe that societies tend to see a child with a hearing disability as someone lacking or
having a deficiency that must be fixed, rather than to see the child’s disability as a deficit of a
society that would refuse to adapt to that child. Afro-Latinos (simply “black bodies” to some)
and the prejudices against them are similarly related: the prejudices and misconceptions of the
Afro-Latino experience formed under the colonialism system of control and representation,
where ideas of class played a major role in the configuration of hierarchy are today a “foreign”
concept that much of American society seems to have no interest in breaking, perhaps out of a
fear of destroying the very colonialism-based systematic patterns under which we continue to co-
exist. You are the problem—you need to be fixed, not me.
8
In a globalized context, every continent and nearly every nation on earth has some
concept of humans of African origin that is even today still clouded by a constructed diasporic
imaginary and cultural heritage that has existed under a historical systematic colonialism and a
related primitivism. Therefore, it seems reasonable to first demand the recovery and recognition
of a historically accurate and fair position, and then to implement strategies for a balanced and
just negotiation of global culture.
A contemporary interest of cultural researchers is a critical investigation of the
intercultural consciousness built around (or built without regard to) new technologies, as what
the social critic Anita Say Chan, Assistant Research Professor of Communications in the
Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,
explores in her project “Hacking Digital Universalism: Inter-tecnologidad in the Andes”. Say
Chan identifies and gives consideration to the existence of an inter-technological consciousness,
one that can be an intentional component of a given technology. She aims to create new
pedagogical tools and “inclusive programming” methodologies to be used in technology design
that can better identify, consider, and then align with ethical-political ideals. Say Chan proposes
that inter-technological development around digitalism, typically something that makes use of
massive amounts of trans-local and global linking, is not inherently doomed to become a
component of world domination, and must, in fact, consciously avoid the global tendency of
cultural domination
2
.

2
Anita, Say Chan. “Hacking Digital Universalism: Inter-tecnologidad in the Andes” In Memorias, saberes y redes de
las culturas populares en América Latina, edited by Graciela Maglia and Leonor Hernández Fox, 89-101. Bogotá:
Universidad Externado de Colombia; Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Facultad de Ciencias Sociale; Lima: Instituto
Fránces de Estudios Andinos (IFEA), 2016.

9
The core focus of my own art practice after arriving to the U.S. required a certain
adjustment, something I did not necessarily want but felt was necessary if I was to maintain and
continue a loyalty to my primary interest: the exploration of decolonization and post-colonialism.
In my new surroundings of artists, both academic colleagues and even those of the Latino-strong
Los Angeles commercial art world, the dialogue around diasporic communities and its modern-
day effects on a people was different. The meaning—not simply the translation—of the term
“colonialism” was different here, which is to say, largely non-existent and/or, largely
uninteresting, to many. Although my academic community offers much in the way of intellectual
and artistic stimulation, I found this community vastly different from the one I had been
immersed in as an artist in Costa Rica: a diasporic community that even today lives in a world
that reeks of the effects of colonial rule that its forbearers never wanted, were forced against their
will (literally enslaved) to live and labor under. Heavy stuff, yet I find stimulating dialogue on
this subject a rare occurrence now. The effect of my new appreciation of the interest and
understanding, or of attempts to understand by others, was a first lesson in the language of
universality and how that functions. It was not a matter of a poor [Costa Rican] Spanish-to-
English translation. It was a matter of the difficulties and limitations of a given context not being
captured by a—or by any—universal language.
Although in multiple cultures and countries I have also experienced limits to constructive
dialogue about decolonization practices, at USC I sense a particular difficulty with an
institutional discourse on a subject that has such a strong (and complex) footing in the capital
fundamentals so basic to this country as well as to the university itself.
I find that interpretations of my work by others in the USC community have so far been
largely based strictly on the aesthetics and the formal aspects of the work, but with what I feel is
10
a summary dismissal of the content, or the intention of the content. I attribute this dismissal to a
lack of interest in the subject of my presentations, or perhaps a lack in consciousness or the
knowledge needed to participate in a discussion that is too contrary for its setting, or one with
meaning widely outside the school’s expected mainstream boundaries.
The limited evaluation of my work by colleagues caused me to question the rationale
underscoring my artistic pursuit, and a reconsideration of how I allotted resources (primarily,
time) to the work. I found solace, and eventually, solution, in my studio. Instead of presenting
individual work in a critique situation, where there seemed a lack of reference or preparation for
critique, I explored the use of my studio as a place for presentation and interaction with the
public: a setting/situation that allows me to envision my work more as an installation rather than
as individual works. My studio became a place where the production of the works was not by
just one, but rather the works were the product of the interactions and perceptions of those
visiting the studio. This was the beginning of my community-engaged practice. I altered my
studio space to house a collective platform that encouraged exploration of a non-traditional
perception of the artist's studio: in this place of individual creation and knowledge, I could
question the very need for an artist to claim a home and, indeed, create a community. In this way,
an examination of the need for, and how to make best use of, the space between these walls has
become an inquiry that is fundamental to my practice.
Art production in my practice will be made up by community of engaged and active
participants, utilizing a method I call "a micro-economy of knowledge production." I adapted my
studio space in a way that might foster creative engagement, by inviting and collaborating with
other artists and with professionals from multiple fields and backgrounds, specifically and
intentionally with those who in some way share an interest in an exploration of a multi-ethnic
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and multicultural art. It is my hope that this setting inspires and allows development for members
of the fine arts and visual arts communities to engage and allow an intersection of ideas in a
practice of sharing resources and knowledge.
By sharing space and resources in this manner, and by creating the Studio Hub Residency
within my MFA program, I am exploring forces at play that result in widely varying levels of
disability and freedom as they apply to the so-called periphery art practice and empowerment,
considered first locally and then nationally/regionally, and finally at the level of our planet. As
an example of national-level exploration, I am enthused by—maybe obsessed with—a better
understanding of the impact of globalization upon the production of Latino-American art in my
native Costa Rica.
The global art world lives within a larger global market that is ruled by economic forces,
and this world has changed how we relate to each other and how we perceive our identities and
has fundamentally transformed the production of images and ideologies, and even our concepts
and the meaning of what constitutes the creation of knowledge. An examination into the
shortcomings and lack of reflection on visual literacy, perhaps best demonstrated by today’s
standard and acceptance of the very bland "multi-ethnic and multicultural aesthetics", where
cultural spaces are re-read to identify (or invent) their “globalized” context, is the principle
interest of my Tecnologías Deculoniales project. The project considers works that elicit
perceptual and phenomenological engagement with the viewer while examining their decolonial,
deconstructivist impulses of diasporic imaginary, blackness, nationality, and anti-imperialist
epistemes.
If I can call myself an international artist, from a so-called underdeveloped nation, it is
with reluctance that I find myself partaking in a global art exchange that prioritizes a
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homogenization and trans-nationalization of the practices of art that has so effectively identified
ailments in sociocultural, political and artistic representation that exist in today’s Afro-Latino
culture. In my art practice I find myself ever-more challenged to produce work that stays true to
my personal historical and cultural realities.
There is a very common but very unfortunate assumption of a universal, “shared” Afro-
diasporic experience, an exceptionalism that is an overly-simplistic—and, frankly, lazy—
perception that any Afro-American experience is applicable to, and valid for, every black person.
By comparison, many people from Latin American countries were likely raised under at least
some remnants of a historically colonial system, in a place where class played a bigger role than
race—and this is often etched into their psyche. Thus, the Latin-American-born person may be
less likely to show ignorance of other races. It is not that he is not necessarily racist; it is just that
race is not central to his experience.
In contrast, the social construct of the American—that is, the way he thinks, the way his
national identity was formed—demonstrates that lack of history, and misconceptions may be the
result of an upbringing in a place where perceptions of race came first, class second. As a white
person in a white country, he does not have the strong aspiration to ascend in class because he
already considers himself at the top by virtue of just being white. This may explain why race
becomes his major preoccupation. The American take on the systems and methods of
representation and oppression thus may stand in sharp contrast to, or departure from, that which
exists outside the United States. Thus we see that for an American viewing art created by a
Latino-American, and using the only system of representation he knows—his own—may be
problematic. Whether by intention or simply ignorance, to deny the context in which the work
was produced, such as how an American regards images of blackness, which, from a Latino
13
perspective, is much more than just blackness: it engenders aspects of class and ideas of
genealogy; it is to remain ignorant of the art. An accurate reading of my own Latin-American-
based work needs both views, both perspectives from an indigenous perspective and colonial.
In an effort to stay true to my art, that is, MY art: Marton Robinson from San Jose, CR’s
art, I believe it necessary to find ways be better involve my practice within a robust
transcontinental network of discourse that establishes, maintains, promotes, and demands
adequate consideration and appreciation of the complexities and consequences of the inevitable
hybridization of the multiple cultures existing in Latin America today. Colombian literary theory
professor, Graciela Maglia
3
, in her introduction to the colloquium El Coloquio
Interdisciplinario: Memorias, saberes y redes de las culturas populares en América Latina, en
tiempos del capitalismo global, In Memoriam Carlos Monsiváis (Bogotá, Colombia, May, 2013),
proposed that multiculturalism focus be a thoughtful consideration of the sociocultural, political,
and artistic practices of the varied individual cultures within Latin America, rather than the
perhaps-anticipated attempt at globalizing homogenization, massification, and
transnationalization of its varied cultures, one that would align well with the technocracy of
global capitalism. Her proposal was accommodated, such that a robust central topic of the
colloquium became a consideration of the critical effects of globalization on cultural heritage
crisis, and a resulting effort to prevent further vanishing of the memories that were captured in
the early oralities in Latin America countries, now disappearing as a result of the changing
discursive standards of mass (that is, global) media communications. In addition, the colloquium

3
Graciela Maglia and Leonor Hernández Fox, Coloquio Interdisciplinario: Memorias, saberes y redes de las
culturas populares en América Latina, en tiempos del capitalismo global, Bogotá: Universidad Externado de
Colombia; Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Facultad de Ciencias Sociale; Lima: Instituto Fránces de Estudios
Andinos (IFEA), 2016.

14
allowed participants to re-examine and reconsider what Latin America is based on multiple art
and cultural disciplines, one that reached far beyond what would come from an overly-simplistic
comparison of high culture versus popular culture. As Maglia stated, the colloquium established
a first step in the de-exoticization of Latin America, effectively destabilizing the existing
rationalist conception of knowledge and the complicated notion of identity. Finally, it facilitated
a re-integration of Afro and indigenous participation into the discourse.
4

It is impossible to detach ourselves from the reality that we live within a global culture
that has brought about a technological revolution of knowledge, a thing we call “globalization”.
As stated by the Costa Rican writer Quince Duncan, in his lecture “En busca de una estética
multi-étcnica y multi-cultural en el contexto de la globalización” presented at El Coloquio
Interdisciplinario (Bogotá, Colombia, May, 2013) , the lexicon used around the concept of
globalization is mostly defined by a global economic operation, one which undermines and
causes a unavoidable transformation in how we relate to each other, to our identities, to the
production of images, and to knowledge. This process of “global integration,” as Duncan termed
it, causes an unequal and unfair disparity to many communities and nations. The process
adversely affects the content of cultural knowledge and unique characteristics of the verbal
orality of communities, occurring as a result of the implementation of “digital cultures”.
5

Neoliberal ideologies, defined as those that prioritize national/global capitalism and are
systematic, hegemonic forms of government, contribute to a manipulation of the way knowledge
is produced, and force identities—multiple, complex, rich, diverse identities—to align in one

4
Ibid.
5
Quince, Duncan. “En busca de una estética multi-étnica y multi-cultural en el contexto de la globalización.” In
Memorias, saberes y redes de las culturas populares en América Latina, edited by Graciela Maglia and Leonor
Hernández Fox, 343-56. Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia; Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Facultad de
Ciencias Sociale; Lima: Instituto Fránces de Estudios Andinos (IFEA), 2016.
15
direction. Duncan suggests that globalization is not just a system that defines economical
functions on a global scale, as many understand it, but also a process that encounters, integrates,
and then de-encounters individual cultures to feed into a harmonious single global realm. This he
again attributes to the mass media proffered by electronic communication. The effect, Duncan
says, is what now constitutes a person’s, a group’s, or other entity’s location, which was once
itself a factual and unique identifier; the effect is now subject to significant interpretation and
influence. This new phenomenon allows for massive exploitation of human labor and natural
resources, control of information, and control and potential exploitation of what constitutes
“knowledge”.
Anthropologist and professor Fabian Sanabria viewed cyberspace as a new topology that
redefines the social relationship that characterizes individual identity. He proposed a relational
anthropology that considers epistemologically against different philosophies from contemporary
societies. Sanabria suggests a virtual connection that creates a "heterotopia", one reconstructed
through crisis, a divergence of spaces (non-defined places), appropriation of sites, the
juxtaposition of spaces, and the illusion of compensations. On this basis, Sanabria argued that the
ephemeral power and the “useless” pleasure that new digital technologies provide called for an
“anthropology of the virtual” that recognizes the tradition and the contemporariness of others.
6

It is under exactly such a globalization of technology that Duncan says that we are now
standing: at the origin of a civilization that will be characterized by the production and sale of
specialized knowledge, cutting-edge technology, genetic engineering, and financial services.
7
The

6
Fabián, Sanabria. “La escritura de lo virtual hoy.” In Memorias, saberes y redes de las culturas populares en
América Latina, edited by Graciela Maglia and Leonor Hernández Fox, 45-62. Bogotá: Universidad Externado de
Colombia; Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Facultad de Ciencias Sociale; Lima: Instituto Fránces de Estudios
Andinos (IFEA), 2016.
7
Ibid.,7
16
new civilization Duncan envisions has its strength in a transformation of the means of knowledge
generation while in the process of producing material and spiritual goods; a revolution
distinguished by new and complex forms of socializing and information. Knowledge is renewed
and recreated at such a speed that it is impossible for a human being to stay entirely up-to-date in
any field; an entire range of innovative science and other disciplines will determine our lives at
the dawn of this new millennium
8
.
Duncan proposes that the identity of every town has been built through historical
processes. Within that process, sometimes that identity is imposed from imperial concepts and
assumed by the colony and, therefore, expressly not self-generated. Here is where ideas of the
construction of one’s own language and the resulting representation meets black empowerment
movements such as Marcus Garvey’s conceptions of black imaginary:
If the white man has the idea of a white God, let him worship his God as he desires. If the
yellow mans God is of his race let him worship his God as he sees fit. We, as Negroes,
have found a new ideal. Whilst our God has no color, yet it is human to see everything
through one's own spectacles, and since the white people have seen their God through
white spectacles, we have only now started out (late though it be) to see our God through
our own spectacles. The God of Isaac and the God of Jacob let Him exist for the race that
believes in the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. We Negroes believe in the God of
Ethiopia, the everlasting God—God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost,
the One God of all ages. That is the God in whom we believe, but we shall worship Him
through the spectacles of Ethiopia."
9

Building on the ideas of Garvey, Duncan notices the necessity to crack down on the
utopian projection common among white nations, which adopted European racist doctrines.
Duncan pursues this further, affirming that, in pursuit of a higher social status, the Creoles
dismissed their indigenous heritage— abandoned their local deities, and their ancestral cultures,

8
Ibid.
9
Garvey, A. J. The Philosophy & Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Dover, Massachusetts: The Majority Press, 1958.
17
and declared diversity to be dangerous for national unity. And then the Creoles pronounced
themselves to be a white nation, making their majority invisible or whitewashed by decree:
persons who, because of their phenotypic traits, could not pass for white.
10

The canon of Latin American aesthetics is built, as Duncan suggested, as a copy that is
often deficient in its accurate images of Europe. He says this occurs because of our europhilia,
which he explains as the alienation for the European; our ethno-phobia, a rejection of our own
diversity; and from our endo-phobia, the underestimation and denial of our own inheritance and
our real identities. Moreover, we challenge the process of globalization: the dichotomous
struggle of our people to participate as builders of the new civilization without being victims of a
new imperial vision that effectively imposes, once again, a biased global culture.
11

The world we inhabit has been grouped into large regional blocks. According to
Duncan’s thinking, it is from there that an opportunity for multiculturalism and pluralism arises.
Indeed, the identities of our towns have developed through their own unique, historic-based
processes. They are individual and demonstrate that most of us do not share the “equal
existence” that a global identity would suggest or dictate. The new towns that believe we all
share a global identity are simply confused: these towns do, or eventually will, when they start,
have a history. In this context, we claim the possibility for an aesthetic of diversity based on new
paradigms arising from concepts of globalization, with an understanding of aesthetics as a way to
manifest the world but based on the particular spirituality of just one. Spirituality, as Duncan
describes, is as an intangible dimension related to creativity, play, and art, one allows us to see
the world in its diversity and to renounce the imposition of Eurocentric vision, originating as it

10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
18
does from the powers that conquered us, but instead recover and integrate our ancestral aesthetic
into our own place and time.

Unfortunately, the aesthetic that is emerging from the phenomenon that is globalization is
an aesthetic of only relative diversity. The applicability of the term “codes” has double-meaning
here, one deliberate and one consequential. Much of globalization is literally based upon
technological (computer) coding, and it is this coding that forces change to the fundamental
codes of cultures: to their histories, to their arts. Thus we realize that modern-day technology has
the ability to transform meaning. Like it or not, we are facing the creation of a new universe—a
virtual universe. And in this universe, aesthetics cease to be the product of a profoundly
archetypal history (an element which, of course, I am not sorry to see go away) but to express the
ephemeral, the immediate. This ephemeral could be defined as the ‘cyberface-interface’, an
analogy of the coexistence between two spaces.
It is within this universe of the immediate (cyberspace) that I find an opportunity for the
construction of identity. The cyberspace is more accessible than textbooks, and it offers the
notion of sharing and construction of knowledge, yet it also offers the possibility for the
manipulation of the information. Also, there is an obligation to take part in the creation of this
new universe of the immediate. It features an innovative vision of the new, regarding as
respectable many ethnic and regional manifestations that once were considered exotic, primitive,
or otherwise of little aesthetic value.
Duncan concludes that, while conscious of the opportunities aesthetics offer as an
instrument to conserve cultures in a museum, it also permits change by the hands of those who
19
want it changed.
12
Yet he questions whether this process will result in a tangible aesthetic—a
plural, multicultural, diverse, aesthetic. How does one best contribute to historical and cultural
mediation between Latin America and the United States as it transcends notions of syncretism
and the boundaries of nepantle, vortex, or the in-between?
To effectively engage in a discussion of the multicultural aesthetic of Afro-Latino
cultures, it is necessary to understand Latin America as a conglomerate of cultural nations that
are in the process of forming a hybrid of multilingual political and socio-racial nations. Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., in his book Black in Latin America, attempts to explore the complexity of
blackness in Latin America countries. His reflections on race and class are crucial to greatly
inform an understanding of the structure and history of its hierarchy, and the contrasts between
societies of the United States, and among those of Latin American. Gates suggests that the
centrality of class in North American society tends to make it blind to race, whereas Latin
Americans are oblivious to the realities of race yet vigilant observant of class divisions.
13

I envision my artistic proposal as consisting of two parts, the first related to further
evolving my practice within the Afro-Latino experience and a continued critical discourse on
works in the contemporary African Diaspora. The second is a desire to understand the
intersection of my art practice and the microeconomic environment in which it exists—an
investigation of how my artistic pursuits could survive outside the established framework and
institutionalized systems of contemporary art. The extreme cost difference among various global
markets for the commodification of knowledge is a major consideration in my current practice. I
am concerned about the ultimate effect on art production and art’s social role—how such varying
educational costs (part of the “knowledge economy”, discussed above) might affect the artist’s

12
Ibid.
13
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Black in Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 3.
20
critical theory and perspective on both his or her own art and on transdisciplinary thinking. This
is especially problematic when knowledge is valued as an elitist product, in stark contrast to that
knowledge acquired outside institutionalized art training: the art and perceptions of everyday
experience.
For Tecnologías Deculoniales I employed mask and language (literal, genealogical, and
conceptual), as an interchangeable platform for addressing these issues. I investigate
performative strategies and systems where the relationship between the institutional and societal
might be manipulated to create an apparatus of insurrection. Here, the (in)material application of
language and masks and/or masking (in performance) of the body recalls historical problematics
including, but not limited to, social rituals of public shaming, ethnological practices, and
assimilation. Functioning as the cultural equivalent of the colonialism that formulated its
construction, language and masks here represent a by-product of both power and cultural
domination. Studio Hub Residency seeks to provide a performative socio-economic platform for
Costa Rican artists doing a residency in Los Angeles, as part of the Roski School of Art and
Design MFA program.

21
The proposed platform Tecnologías Deculoniales seeks to provide a counter-historical
narrative exploring the subjective experience of colonialism and domination concerning
language and global technologies between foreign territories. Featured works will likewise
function more broadly as interstitial allegories of positionality, geopolitics, displacement, and the
expulsion of alterity.
First, I will adapt practice ideas from methods used in Monica Mayer and Aby Warburg's
archives, by justifying the source and concept surrounding the use of archival material in the
analysis and procedures. I will explore the narrative as a strategy of repetition, and essential in
the diasporic experience, contrasting its origins between history and myth. Second, I will present
the outgoing research on installation projects, as "Untitled #1” and “Untitled #2". Both
installations will explore the employment and the interpretation of archival material, illustrating
the usefulness of archival material that has been re-interpreted with a non-linear and non-
Eurocentric notion of history, challenging the perception that data is memory. Finally, in
"performative actions" I will approach the potential for interactive performance that is a
construct of community and identity through the use of behaviors, gestures, and speech.

22
Chapter 1: MEMORY as DATA as ARCHIVE

The analogy of archive as narrative and data as memory is of particular interest in my
research. With the use of memory via archival material that I have collected of text and image, I
seek to break the prevailing notion that “the other” is a strange entity/identity. Duncan has
expressed interest in participating in the study of the construction of culture and identity in our
communities. I believe that good archiving offers an opportunity to create community identity
and then accurately preserve it. By engaging in the process of archiving our history and stories,
we understand and confront the neoliberal views, among others, that guided the configuration of
its multi-ethnic and multicultural aesthetics. However, we must acknowledge that it is through
both individual and collective historical processes that cultural identity can be established from
outside of our communities: through imperialist visions, through cultural values that are assumed
to be social facts. Duncan proposes that accurate cultural identity can be established with
multiple, diverse approaches.
First, the inescapable is established from the External source (from the outside, local and
global systems) – the inescapable. Examples of these are the neoliberalist doctrines, a global
economy that forced an uneven cultural relationship focus on the appropriation of knowledge,
and the devaluation of the cultural values, practices, and technologies of Afro-Latinos.
Additionally, international policies and the regulation of black communities within specific
boundaries were fundamental to the establishment of personal and national identity. Duncan is
aware of both the risks, and opportunities when formation of cultural identity occurs through
individual and collective historical processes. Again he warns that cultural identity can be
established from the outside of our communities, e.g., through imperialist visions, when cultural
values are assumed to be a social fact. The exposure I gained by travelling to different cultures
23
provided me evidence and an awareness of how global context causes that interception of race
and location of country to be different for the black populations in each country. The investment
in the archiving process I carry out is an opportunity to inform the discourse on the global
occurrence of the hybridization of our identities, to identify it, and thus potentially allow us to
form—or at least imagine forming—an identity that reveals our own, private spirituality.
Archiving the Familiar is my own evolving archive, comprised of images, photographs,
texts, and objects, all situated in my working studio. The archive articulates the aesthetics of my
own studio and changes as my interests related to the subject of my investigations evolve. This
allows my studio to function as an experimental source of content for my visual art practice. The
aim of Archiving the Familiar is to attain new meaning from the interpretation (and re-
interpretation) of primary and secondary sources, in an attempt to decolonize the classical and
traditional discourse, interpretation, and analysis of information that occurs in the construction of
a national and cultural identity. However, the archiving process presents a challenge: how can
one appropriately re/create a historical narrative from images and objects that accurately—
genuinely, even spiritually—illustrates the history and experience of others of a national identity
which is not their own? This project explores this question by analyzing the methods and
strategies of the Mexican artist and archivist Monica Mayer and art historian and cultural theorist
Aby Warburg. My intention is to use insight from my study to guide adaptations to the
framework of my own Archiving the Familiar.
To archive is to select what objects will or will not be preserved, and so the person or
institutions making the selection can strongly influence the later interpretation of that period’s
history—including the art history—represented by that archive. Because of this, when a person
accesses, explores, and interprets a historical archive in the present time, his/her interpretation of
24
that archive must include consideration of the historical archiving process—what that original
archivist chose to include, and what he/she chose not to include. Following such a critical
examination, sometimes it become obvious that the archive is deserving of a “re-interpretation”,
in an effort to more accurately reflect the context of the period of the archive, often providing it
new meaning.
Ulrich Baer, in his essay Deep in Archive, considered the archive a source of cultural
memory and history. Baer suggested that archives should include objects whose value and
meaning may not entirely be known, or appreciated at the time of their archiving
14
. In his essay
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, the philosopher Jacques Derrida analyzed the concept of
the archive/archiving on the basis of semiotics and deconstruction
15
.
The nature and the role an archive played during late nineteenth century is critical to an
understanding of the history of art and the accurate representation of cultures. Derrida saw the
linear interpretation of an archive as a form of nostalgia. The trouble with such a linear reading,
Derrida proposed, is that the archive is forced to forever after repeat that nostalgia. As an
alternative, Derrida proposed the use of semiotics in the interpretation of archives, allowing a
non-traditional perspective of other cultures, and a stepping away from the preconceived ideas of
the subject matter.
Aby Warburg’s The Atlas Mnemosyne proposes a revisionist method of art study based
on analysis that goes beyond an understanding that is limited to language. The Atlas is based on a
collection of 79 black portable panels with collected images from a range of such cultural

14
Ulrich Baer. “Deep in the Archive,” Aperture, 193 (Winter 2008): 54-59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24473508
(accessed Julio 10, 2017).
15
Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2
(Summer, 1995): 9-63. http://www.jstor.org/stable/465144 (accessed Julio 10, 2017).

25
subjects as politics, popular culture, and others with which Warburg created a multi-dimensional
image anthology. His purpose was to create an art history book that could be read or interpreted
without the use of text.
Relatedly, Sara Angel, in her essay The Mnemosyne Atlas and The Meaning of Panel 79
in Aby Warburg’s Oeuvre as a Distributed Object, argues that the interest in art history and
iconology in Warburg’s work was based on an emphasis of a reading art and art history that
encourages a comparison of visual forms of the period, and some context of other observable
cultural features. Angel suggests that the method employed by Warburg is ideal as a creative
methodology for interaction and interpretation with multiple, overlapping archives, potentially
yielding multi-dimensional results
16
.
Monica Mayer, a Mexican artist and archivist, presented her lecture Art, Archives and
Artist’s Archives at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, introducing the
audience to her conceptual archive project Pinto Mi Raya, an archive she started in 1991 with the
purpose of sharing information on the visual arts, assembling preserved news items and written
critiques of the visual arts. She was inspired to create the project when she first noticed a severe
lack of research and critical analysis on such topics as female artists, performance art, and
installations in her own country (Mexico). Mayer referred to them as “the invisible”. She argued
that this invisibility has resulted in a misleading representation of contemporary Mexican art in
major global art institutions, including many in Europe and the United States—a misleading
representation that reinforces colonial models and ideals of Latin American arts
17
.

16
Sara Angel. "The Mnemosyne Atlas and the Meaning of Panel 79 in Aby Warburg's Oeuvre as a Distributed
Object." Leonardo 44, no. 3 (2011): 266-267. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed July 10, 2017).
17
Monica Mayer, “Art, Archives and Artist’s Archives” (presentation, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at
the USC Libraries, Los Angeles, CA, Wednesday, September 28, 2016).
26
Image 1 shows several panels from Warburg’s The Mnemosyne Atlas, including panels
79, 45, and 46. Panel 46 (on the far right) consists of photographic images related to the
mythological nymph; in this black panel Warburg focused on the concept of a young woman,
arranging documents and paintings of the same period containing the image of the nymph,
featured in a domestic situation, biblical or mythological image, or a scene that would be typical
of an everyday situation. Panel 45 (middle panel) depicts images of nymphs as well, but in this
series Warburg has featured illustrations in which the young woman is accompanied by angels
and mixed images of youth along with figures of destruction and protection. Panel 79 (far left)
differs from the first two in that it contains the same themes, but the content comes from mostly
contemporary events: sports, newspapers, Japanese cultural images of a Eucharistic ceremony,
and some classical subjects.
Image 2 is a photograph of my current art studio. My studio contains my own work,
primarily of drawings on black walls, making reference to varied cultures and subjects. Contents
from my own Archiving of the Familiar can also be seen. The image provides an idea of how this
collection works visually, with black walls with drawings and collected objects from a diverse
range of sources, such as the religious, African, Greek, and Mesopotamian cultures, sports,
caricatures, and phrenology, all arranged in what I intend to be a sort of museographic space.
Note the similarities between the two images, such as the use of a black background on
which the objects are placed. Also, my studio space and Warburg’s panel 79 share the idea of
placing mixed images and objects from different contexts and periods.
In image 3 we have an example of the subject of Warburg’s concern, in the form of Costa
Rican public transportation, circa early nineteen century, where, the only textual information
provided is the title “From San José to Limón”. The image, a black and white engraving, is the
27
view of the first route built from the capital of Costa Rica, San José, located in the central valley
of the country, to Port Limón, which is located on the Caribbean coast. At the time, the only
access to the coast was via horses or mules. But due the introduction of Costa Rican coffee into
the international market, Costa Rica required the establishment of an improved trail, passing
through the mountains and the country’s volcanic system. The demand for Costa Rican coffee
kept increasing and it soon became clear that mule transportation could not keep up with the
market’s needs. This time the needed transportation improvement came in the form of a train.
We can learn from a closer study of this image information on, for example, the migrations
of Afro descendants from the Antilles Islands, such as Jamaica. The same image can be read to
identify the forced movements of peoples, such as those that ultimately resulted in the rise of
Pan-Africanism, Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League,
Black Star Line, ideas Africa diaspora, Civil Rights, Black is Beautiful, Black Panther, and
recently, Black Lives Matter.
In the case of Costa Rica, the migration of Afro descendents happened all on account of the
efforts of Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican citizen who had migrated to Costa Rica in hopes of a better
future. It was in Costa Rica that he started his fight for equality and for better conditions for
railroad workers. These workers were never paid what they had been promised, and they suffered
under the harsh conditions and care of the railroad company. The company controlled access to
supplies critical for survival. After the completion of the railroad, the workers had little choice
but to accept work in coastal banana plantations, under similar harsh conditions and control.
“If you believe the Negro has a soul…”
—Marcus Garvey

The African Champion series is an exploration of the geopolitical displacement of human
28
bodies—both contemporary and historical—where the newcomer is confronted with an
ideological normalization by his new host that regards “the other” as alien/stranger. I am drawn
by the constructed perceptions of a new “home”. The displaced person forms a sense of
belonging and identity, and yet the potential for manipulation occurs: first, by considering how
the body can be a speculative artifact, how speculative artifacts can become an element of
memory, and finally the use/misuse of memory as a unifying (often sociopolitical) tool. Using
both modern and historical popular culture images and objects, my work explores the critical role
that cultural signifiers can play in forming a national identity, specifically, the self-identity of
historically displaced Afro-Latinos.
The video “African Champion” alludes to ideas of empowerment, with physical ability
(one type of object functionality) as a determinant of pride but also acute awareness of its
relative fragility and lifespan, a syncretism of the perceptions of black empowerment and sports
empowerment. Although it is argued that modern-day notions of black emancipation are aligned
with the archetype of the “African Champion” (aka the American Dream), it could also be seen
as a transition from African kings to the New Black to Black Power and then to African
Champion. This audio contains speeches given by Marcus Garvey in the early 1920s to followers
in New York, where he lists the objectives of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA). The UNIA was funded by Garvey in 1914 with the objective to build a structure of self-
political and economic liberation for Black Americans; his organization’s motto was “Back to
Africa”. Flags represent nationalism and pride in the imaginative and ideological configuration
of a national identity, making it crucial and mandatory to scrutinize these symbols, particularly
the creation/unveiling of a new flag and the assumed (and the unanticipated) effects it may have
on relationships between people. Unraveling suggests the replacement and annulling of an
29
identity, not only for citizens of the United States but also for its alien citizens, at a time when
there are concerted efforts by opposing parties to re-construct—or resist any changes to the
construction—of the nation. The disassembly and deconstruction of the flag suggests a failed
transnational currency forced upon a people by the reigning political culture, and the attempt to
fabricate a national identity, informed here by a principle of black liberation theology to
challenge, and often amend or replace, dominant imaginary and discourse.
Warburg's Atlas offers an exciting opportunity for decolonizing the ideas of archiving and
image interpretation by making a comparison of visual forms, done in an attempt to challenge the
commonly used and overly simplistic discourse of "center/periphery, periphery/center". I agree
with artist Arthur Jafa who feels--as Warburg--at war with linear thinking in reading archives
material, and ideas of absolute are problematical. Jafa was concerned that we tend to narrow
relationship between things. He continuously expressed that it is a profound conundrum for
human beings, that associative thinking causes the basis of many of our problems, and the
importance for us as individuals and as an aggregate of individuals to not resist associative
thinking, but to resist the conclusions drawn
18
.
I am interested in an archival reading that focuses on the facets of the “in-between”
boundaries. My work to date has been fixed under a strategy of syncretism, which I consider a
mediation of cultural values and ideologies. But the term offers a limited codification to the
information upon which I base my work, resulting in an adherence—an assimilation—to colonial
process and its strategies of religion, culture, language, and mestizaje, to none of which I
willingly consent. Thus, I am intrigued by the possibilities offered by the “in-between space”. I

18
Kate Brown, “‘Black People Figured Out How to Make Culture in Freefall’: Arthur Jafa on the Creative Power of
Melancholy.” People, Artnet news, February 27, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/arthur-jafa-julia-stoschek-
collection-1227422.
30
would like to re-examine concepts of terms like “the sunken place", a term with multiple
interpretations: as a black person I understand it to be a place of constant systematic oppression,
a place of horror and frustration. UCLA Professor of African American Studies Tananarive Due
explains that the United States as a nation seems unable to deal with race issues in a healthy way,
or even anything close. A consideration of trauma as a black horror aesthetic would allow an
examination of the American psyche on race and system inequality if Americans would only first
admit its existence, and then be willing to confront its realities
19
. Notions of pain and
unconsciousness align with the shamanic practice and the engagement of altered states of
consciousness, states in which the shaman encounters trance, hypnosis, hallucination, and
meditation to gain knowledge and understanding of their words. Thus, pain offers the
opportunity to solve problems.
More recently I have been exploring the concepts of Nepantla and the Borderlands
(“borderlands” used here distinctly from the literal U.S.-Mexico border) created by the Chicana
cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, which is a concept defined within the U.S.-Mexican
borderland and the interception of language barrier and cultural struggle. Anzaldúa’s ideas on
identity are based on an awareness of its limits to our reality, in the sense that what we believe of
the truth of ourselves and our culture depends on a perspective that is determined by our “core
beliefs and prevailing social assumptions”.
20
She defines her theoretical framework of
Nepantlera as a pedagogical strategy for Chicanos and Latinos in borderland schooling—schools

19
Zahara Hill, “UCLA Professor To School On The Sunken Place In ‘Get Out’ Inspired Course.” Ebony. Seltember
8, 2017, http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/tv_film/ucla-professor-will-school-students-on-the-sunken-
place-in-get-out-inspired-course.
20
Gloria, Anzaldúa. “Now let us shift the path of conocimiento inner work, public acts.” In This bridge we call
home: Radical visions for transformation, edited by G. Anzaldúa & A.Keating (pp. 540–578). New York, NY:
Routledge, 2002.
31
for the children of immigrants--who typically speak Spanish but are taught in English, defining a
place in the in-between, with the possibility for a transformation of our identities. She conceives
of Neplantle as a place between two worlds located in the self, with association of a place of a
painful experience. I observe that, just as with “the sunken place” and shamanic altered state of
consciousness, Anzaldúa recognizes that pain and frustration exist in Nepantla, but that it also
permits dealing with uneasiness while offering a safe space to consider of how reality is
constructed, how knowledge gets produced, and how identities are created
21
.
I established my own Archiving the Familiar before I knew of Warburg’s panel 79, and of
the suggestions it offers on the process of archiving, such as narrating history without text and
non-linear reading, using forms and also semiotics in the reading of images and objects. These
are the objectives of Archiving the Familiar. Warburg’s investigation and approach to archives is
significant in my research because it opens the way we read archives and gives us the possibility
to use archives to benefit the communities and groups that are seeking recognition and visibility
from their society, in a way that includes other non-traditional narratives; narratives that are not
centered in political and social structures of power. As Mayer encouraged, we must often fight
against the accepted oral narrative and history by using the power of our own archiving, making
it accessible and, somehow, engaged with activism, using it to tell our own history the way we
want it to be told, and avoiding the otherwise inevitable “invisible”, that leading factor of
misleading information. Mayer’s concepts on “creating archives” provide inspiration for possible
approaches to my own struggle to express ideas of representation and identity.
In the series Money Talk series, 2012 – 2017 Frottage and digital print I respond to the
invisibility of black bodies within the history of nation formation in the Americas. Inscribing,

21
Bid.
32
“Who is John Hanson?” on US currency, I draw attention to the legend that the first American
president under the Articles of Confederation was African descent, and concurrently alludes to
the institution of slavery as intertwined with the story of the Founding Fathers.
The Costa Rican five colones bill is based on a painting at the country’s National Theatre
that depicts white, European peasants laboring at the coast, rather than the historically accurate
account of black labor. By superimposing the image of black figurines onto the currency, I
reinsert black identity into the national narrative and reclaim the historical truth of the
exploitation of African-descent peoples in the establishment of economies in the Americas.

33
Chapter 2: Studio as installation space

Tecnologías Deculoniales is a revision of my studio as a multi-functional hybrid place for
interacting and exploring ideas for the presentation of my work, as well as a place for community
engagement, through the invitation of artists, curators and the general public to interact and
collaborate, and in doing so, expanding the narrative of the components presented in that studio
space. I am interested in challenging the notion of the artist as a unique producer of knowledge; I
explored the relationship of the environments of engagement between the proposal and the
spectator, which allowed me to broaden the understanding of the narrative and intentions of my
work. The engagement of visitors enables a study of the perceptions of the public towards the
work.
The use of black walls and floors, instead of the fixed white typical of gallery spaces is an
articulation of the color black as an abstraction of institutionalized space and the implications of
spaces painted white as a norm for sanitization. The black cube versus the white cube, using
black color on the walls and floor, offers a reflection of the installation outside the institutional
white cube system such as galleries and museums, and the option to control the narrative and
discourse of the exhibition space by a distancing of traditional codes of exhibiting art. Another
analogy of the black walls is related to aviation technology: the black box, the piece of
equipment that records the flight procedures during flight. In that sense, my studio becomes a
place packed with data (memory, meaning), and its product ripe for decoding (interpretation).
In the two years of my MFA program, the arrangement of my studio space constantly
shifted according the investigation I was carrying out. I first considered what it meant to own a
studio space in a city such as Los Angeles, a city with an endemic housing shortage and a
gentrification problem, both difficult to ignore. For myself, I could observe what was required
34
for a sustainable practice as an international artist living overseas. I concluded that I do not need
a place with equipment and materials in order to produce art. I could appreciate the luxury of
having a studio space, and the obligation I feel to use the space wisely, and to share it.
The studio evolved through multiple arrangements. The first configuration was an empty
studio space with walls and floor painted all-black with only a computer and the HD TV I had
used for the projection of previous works and the showing of my portfolio. This space was the
preliminary consideration for the space that would become the Tecnologías Deculoniales
Installation Series.
Provided here are examples of the studio space, installations titled Untitled#2 and
Untitled#3, both based on considerations of historical colonial ancestry and language. These
pieces regard the reading of archival material from the concept of present time versus speculative
narrative, and language versus translation. These pieces, though momentarily static, change to
become something else. The concepts of phenomenology and cyberspace/interface are central to
these pieces.
The installation Untitled#2 began in my studio space and was then repositioned at the
Gayle and Ed Roski Master of Fine Arts Gallery. It is comprised of five photographs (40” x 40”)
of objects that emulate mechanisms of the museographic processes of selection and reading, and
a video projection (camera obscura) of the outside of the gallery. The gallery is established by
two walls (23’ in length, 7’ tall, and 1.5’ thick and facing each other). The floor and walls were
covered with black membrane roofing with the intention of emulating, in an inexpensive way,
the black walls and flooring of my studio. The space was dimly lit, forcing the spectator to first
adjust their view in order to see the photographs on the walls. As the spectators entered the
gallery you first faced two photographs, then, passing by a wall they entered the second space, in
35
which they encounter a black wall that faces another wall with three photographs. In one corner
of the gallery there was a video projection (camera obscura). The image captured was projected
the outside of the gallery.
The phenomenology that the viewer should have experienced played a major role in the
decoding of the information presented: the time required for the viewer to first adjust his or her
vision—a mechanical/systematic adjustment to the contraction of the muscles of the pupil of the
eye—forced him or her not only to engage longer, but also offered a clue on reading/decoding
the piece, related to the video projection (camera obscura) as a classic, basic form of
representation, and the camera obscura—including the necessary mechanical/systematic
adjustments necessary—as an analogy of the functioning of the eye. What I was trying to suggest
was that in reading these type of images, there exists the necessity of, and the potential offered
by, confronting them, and not to underestimate what they may present to the viewer. Moreover,
the installation experience offered a new method to decode archival materials by going from the
unknown to what the spectators know (from the abstract to the representative).
For my proposal I am interested in the investigation of concepts such as the idea of the
mask as a means of mockery in the form of shaming, connected to postcolonial aspects of race
and nationality, where the dynamics of discipline and punishment come into play. Discipline and
punishment is translated into control and inclusion within a context of global art characterized by
the categorization and exclusion of others.
The production process of the work began with field work and research in Mexico City,
where I had traced racial stereotypes that are even today still reproduced in North and South
America. The images used in the installation are presented as multiples layers—offering multiple
perspectives—of social configurations; I find it important not to limit their reading to the context
36
of American social-political history. The masks are allegories of the comic book Memín Pinguin,
created by Mexican writer Yolanda Vargas Dulché and the cartoonist Sixto Valencia, published
in Mexico since 1947 and distributed across Latin American countries. The book’s characters are
replicas of the African-American archetypes Black Sambo and the Mammy. The articulation of
these images is put in play with a bust of Jesus, a replica of one taken from the Cathedral of
Mexico City. The internalization of national sentiment (internalization of the self in various
geographical spaces) assumes an identity of values as representative of the nation, but at the
same time denying any trace our value from native cultures.
Mexico omitted from their history and national identity the idea of blackness. By not
allowing citizens to identify themselves as an “African descendent”--a fact only corrected in the
last several years-- the historical and/or current national and global imaginary of Mexico has
excluded any element of afro heritage.
Mexico instead assimilated European culture to be their national culture, allowing
establishment of systematic methods of oppression based on ideas of race and hierarchy, and as
basis for an imaginary where the tone of skin plays a major role in shaping social positions.
Many people (here, specifically Mexicans) refer to a black person as “Moreno” (brown-skinned),
an idealization of their own racial hierarchy and class, done to position themselves higher than
the black person, i.e., though we are both persons of color, I call you, a person whose skin is
darker than my (but not graphically the color black) “black” skin, and it doing so making my
color—which makes me--lighter, or whiter. This suggests they (Mexicans with darker
complexion) believe that their own cultural identity (Eurocentric vision) should be assumed as
the norm, a process of cultural assimilation that disregarded any cultural management of national
values.
37
Following the examination of race and class, the second layer addresses the interaction of
images related to Marcus Garvey’s ideology on constructing black imagery and viewing God
“through our own spectacles”. Along these lines, a consideration of the poem “Píntame
Angelitos Negros¨ (“Paint Me Black Little Angels”), written in the 1940’s by Venezuelan writer
Andrés Eloy Blanco, is appropriate. The poem condemns the lack of black representation in
heaven, and functions as an analogy for the full participation of black bodies in the nation, as
Professor Theresa Delgadillo of the Latino/a Studies Department at the University of Ohio states
in her essay, Singing “Angelitos Negros”: African Diaspora Meets Mestizaje in the Americas.
22

The poem was made popular by Pedro Infante in 1948, when he performed it as a song in the
Mexican film Angelitos Negros.
The exclusion of the black body of the song in religious imaginary, which could also
suggest the exclusion of black people from heaven, and from nations, idea reinforced the
prevalence of European aesthetics and neocolonial hierarchies of race.
23
The song was also
recorded by American singers such as Eartha Kitt in 1953 and Roberta Flack in 1969. It is
interesting to note how the text of the poem has spread across borders, crossing borders of
meaning and mediums, from a Venezuelan poem about discrimination to a Mexican song and
film addressing mestizaje (related to the caste painting system and the resulting configurations of
race and class), and then metamorphosing into an African ballad of black power, by using music
as a tool.
24
Music is a diasporic element that shifts in meaning and function according to the
context and location.
By appropriating the poem and turning it into a gospel anthem of empowerment, a

22
Theresa Delgadillo, “Singing “Angelitos Negros”: African Diaspora Meets Mestizaje in the Americas,” American
Quaterly 58, no. 2 (2006): 407, accessed December 4, 2017, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068369.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
38
diasporic black aesthetic was created. Professor Delgadillo suggests, the transnational cultural
relation in the Americas, the significance of African diaspora throughout the hemisphere, and the
conceptualization of race within and between nations, they manage to relate the song to their
own experiences, their interception of race, location (geographical and translation), and gender.
In doing so, they also call out the lack of female imaginary.
Language and translation are good places of exploration for the purposes of art production
and community engagement. Los Angeles is a landscape of a said-to-be diverse culture. Its
billboards, in multiple languages, offer an interesting place to contrast the overlapping borders of
Spanish and English language in the city. Moving around the LA, one begins to notice that many
of the English-to-Spanish translations were both poorly translated and in a way that is outside the
context of the original English. The Spanish translations often took on a darker meaning, one not
called for in the original English. A street sign that read in English, “No loitering” is translated to
Spanish as, “No se permite vagabundos, los violadores seran procesados” (No vagrants allowed,
rapists will be prosecuted). A simple, two word command in English became a two sentences in
Spanish with an unrepresentative aggressive, violent tone; I find this problematic.
Even just the first sentence of the literal translation seems to come from a strictly rules-
based, strict algorithm software program that did not involve (or perhaps even excluded) a
Spanish-speaking human. It made me curious about available commercially language translation
software. A study of the English-to-Spanish translations offered by “Google Translate” software
also revealed poor-quality, missed-their-mark translations. Interestingly though, I found here an
opportunity in the light such mistranslation might shine on my study of the “in-between space.”
The poor translations allowed me to appropriate that software as a tool of speculative narrative
that co-exists in the in-between of the original text and its meaning. In a way, this expresses a
39
virtual translation of a reality that’s interchangeable and ephemeral, because it exists in
cyberspace.
My observations of the Google Translate application is captured, as an example of the
appropriation of decoding, in my installation Untitled#3, established around an exploration of
language, translation, and formal/informal modes of communication. Untitled#3 is situated in my
studio space (a “black box”) occupied by posters (size 40x40 inches), and tote bags with white
lettering on black background. The phrases on the posters and tote bags are from archival
material, book references, and/or expressions translated with the application Google Translate.
The text on the posters and bags, because of the ineffectiveness of the software application
(system) is sometimes incomprehensible, misleading, or both. At times they dictate a new form
of language that then needs to be codified itself—outside normal codes of reading and
interpretation. The visual aesthetics of the installation frames the text-as-form instead of form-as-
text (the text function as pictograms) in the configuration of meaning. The work simultaneously
turns into an interactive ephemeral space of multiple interpretations. This space could be defined
as the interface, or the cyberspace, and/or the “in-between” of that application, and helps me
understand how the application works, and reveals the limitations to language that exists in the
programming or coding (a coding that omits humans), of cyberspace.
It turns out that the Google translation application does not actually read the typography of
the original (here, the individual letters of the English words), but instead reads the images (or
shapes) that look like or mimic the alphabet (language) it is trying to translate, so everything that
resembles a letter will be “translated”. Something approximating the shape of the letter “A” is
assigned a value by the software, and whatever comes close to that value, in terms of the shape,
will be read by Google Translate as an “A”. We see then that Google Translate regards the
40
shapes of letters as having more value than the language it was itself programmed in, such that
the value assigned to that English letter “A”, is or is not the value assigned to a Spanish letter
“A”; clearly these should be coded differently. I understand now that the software is not able to
recognize a text as a verbal language but as a semiotic language. This makes the consideration of
the effect of translating a language without regards for its cultural heritage relevant.
So, how is this related to my own investigation of the in-between and in the production of
art from this space? What started as a street action of loud, public, invasive intervention and an
exploring of the presence of black bodies in public spaces transformed into an interactive space
with multiple layers to represent the involvement of different technological systems, street
intervention (in the form of posters and tote bags), and decoding language.

41
Chapter 3: Performative actions

The term “performative” is widely used in different fields of art studies, including the
visual arts. Its common—perhaps overly common—use requires that it be carefully applied when
describing or analyzing conceptual art. An objective approach to the reading of performative art
is necessary to adequately assess the art form. “Performative” can be defined as an ability to
communicate constructs of identity. These identities are sourced by what we describe as
performative actions, in which the actions are supplied by the artist and identity is a source of
actions. Actions as a systematic strategy provide the potential to read performative actions as a
construct of an identity through the use of behaviors, gestures, and language.
Studies in fields such as linguistics and the philosophy of language build theories around
performative discourse in relation to observable facts that regulate and control performative
actions. According to Paul Schimmel, former chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles, there are no boundaries between action, performance, and a work of art, making
them indistinguishable and irrelevant. In that sense, and from both a theoretical and
iconographical point of view, it is possible to understand the factors that determine the meaning
of a performative action and its relation to the viewer
25
.
Furthermore, Aline Hernández, in her essay Pola Weiss: Matters of a Teleaste, discusses
how Weiss, the Mexican video artist, examined the difference between video and television
production. Weiss identified both the private/personal aspects of video and the mass
media/public nature of television; she used broadcast television as a conceptual model that
proposed a new public role of the artistic practice of video. She integrated the formal structure of

25
Paul Schimmel, and Kristine Stiles. Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979, The
Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Thames and Hudson (Los Angeles, 1998).
42
video with the rhetorical conceptual process of television, exploring the possibilities presented
by the combination, and restaging the use of both mediums
26
.
I am interested in the selection of objects that represent identity, in interaction with the
rhetoric of semiotics and philosophy of language, in the comprehension of performative actions,
and their relation to the human body. Using the work of Weiss as a starting place, I have
explored the formal structure of performative actions and the abstract aspects of the human body
and other objects. I had explored the phenomena of intersubjective interaction and the
understanding of the object as it relates to the spectator in real time and space, one which lacks
the proximity often experienced with performative art.
The Performative Actions series Tecnologías Deculoniales (Tic Tac Nod and Slot
Machine) is based on the generation of an interactive installation that utilizes language to engage
in community building by dismissing white subjects in public spaces (the exhibition space). This
is achieved with the use of technology - specifically programming software – in order to create
systems that disregard or include the spectator in the functioning and interaction of the
installation.
I am also interested in the separation of my actual physical body from the performance,
substituting instead some other object to serve as the performative agent (the body as an
artefact). The artistic expression behind a performative action is to create a conceptual object that
refers to identity within the performative (the body as an artefact), in an attempt to separate my
physical body from the object I have created. In this form, my body now functions as an artefact
that interacts with the participants in an engagement of body (public) and artefact (system), in the

26
Aline Hernández, and Benjamin Murphy, “Pola Weiss: Matters of a Teleaste,” in Pola Weiss: TV Sees You, ed.
Edna Torres (Mexico: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, 2014)

43
act of acknowledging each other through the spectator gaze. By shifting the traditional discourse
of the gaze in cultural spaces of spectatorship and turning the spectator into a spectacle, the
interactive works Tic Tac Nod and Slot Machine, both works in progress turns the spectator into
the spectacle. I am manipulating technologies of surveillance and public control to challenge the
way systems function in society. Queer politics and social theorist Michael Warner notes that an
essential characteristic of “the contemporary public sphere is this double movement of identify
and alienation: on one hand, the prophylaxis of general publicity; on the other hand, the always
inadequate particularity of individual bodies, experienced both as an invisible desire within a
visible body and, in consequence, as a kind of closeted vulnerability.”
27
The fundamental
objective is individual agency and the inclusion of those who are otherwise marginalized within
the political system.
My collection of performative actions is comprised of previous works, works in progress,
and undeveloped ideas. What qualifies these objects as “performative actions” is their rhetoric
and iconographic charge, art history, and the concepts presented in each project. Some of the
works refer to conceptual movement or kinetic nature, while for other pieces the performative
feature is one of decay or growth, expressed in terms of space and time. The performative action
is presented as a deconstruction to the viewer, with the object serving as the performative
phenomena.
I offer two examples here. The interactive works titled Tic Tac Nod and Slot Machine, both
based on a history of systematic colonial ancestry. Both pieces deals with the performative, from
the concepts of informal and formal modes of communication, presence versus absence, and
inclusion versus functionality. These actions or gestures, which momentarily appear static,

27
Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992): 397.
44
change with time to become something else.

Tic Tac Nod (cat): Acknowledgment and privilege, geography of race, and community
It is an interactive installation that uses facial recognition technology to first activate the
operation of the video and then expresses the relation of the facial features of the spectator with
the system. When the spectator faces the camera, the video records the image of the spectator.
The image is then evaluated by a face recognition software to determine if the facial features are
those of a person of African origin or not. A positive result signifies the accurate projection of
the spectator, whereas, the lack of an African-origin recognition will result in the projection of a
pre-selected stereotype image.
This piece seeks to recognize people of African descent in predominantly white spaces, the
exhibition space in this case, according to a computer-based analysis assessment of the
participants’ facial features. An algorithm programmed into a computer will select images that
will appear on the monitor. If the participant is of African descent, the system will select images
that do not include a pre-selected stereotype; otherwise, the images on the monitor will be those
of the stereotype. The piece is inspired by the ¨Nod¨, a diasporic gesture made between people of
African descent when one recognizes the other in public places (spaces). The system works both
as a platform for archiving the nodding (gesture) of people of African descent and as an
electronic tic tac toe game; in this form, the piece and the archive are presented as a single piece.
Another idea related to caste painting, which refers to a system of centralized command in
control of procreation and biological paternity in Latin American colonies, created for the
representation of the Americas; in the colonial context it also referred to the offspring of the
child of a mix of between Spaniards, Indians, and blacks in the New Spain. The colonial
45
classification system was initiated in the mid-seventeenth century under the premise "that the
bloodline of a person who could be identified and their identity would classified." Also, from the
institution of the system of caste painting came an effect of hybridizing and a mutating of
individual identities in the New World. The grid is essential in this work because it relates to
functions as a support/constructive system for the piece, and from a perspective of location I
view it as a colonial strategy that built new civilizations from the remains of others (syncretism).
I see a link in place, art, and race = technology, art, and race. It's here where system and
programming become vital to the Tecnologías Deculoniales project in the development of a new
truth.
Slot Machine; profiling, mask, shaming
An interactive installation that uses skin tone recognition technology to activate the
operation of a video. Like Tic Tac Nod, this piece seeks to recognize the exclusion of people of
African descent in public spaces. The system is activated based on recognition of the skin tone of
the participant/viewer, and includes deliberate “rejection” of participant/viewers who do not
match the symmetry specifics pre-programmed into the software of the computer’s recognition
system. The concept relates to the focus on technologies used for identification and surveillance
by police organizations (racial profiling, policing of black bodies) and ideas related to the
performative aspect of black bodies (the performative of blackbodies).
“The art of photography is its tendency to fetishize what is seen as foreign, exotic, alien,
or the other. Photography voyeurism becomes exacerbated in the face of racial, cultural
or sexual differences. Prejudice and desire, fear and pleasure are frequently projected
onto “subjects of difference”, turning them into alien and anomalous objects whose
identities, nonetheless provide perverse excitations”
—Taryn Simon
28

28
Simon, Taryn, and Geoffrey Batchen. "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapter I-XVIII." Australian and
New Zealand Journal of Art 12.1 (2012): 162-76.
46
The pose of the portrait used in Slot Machine references 1860’s daguerreotypes from J.T.
Zealy, a daguerreotypist who portrayed slaves as “evidence—specifically as scientific evidence
for polygenesis, the idea that human races had separate origins and were thus inescapably and
irrevocably different, and worked to strip their subjects of social identity and turn them into
scientific specimens. Colonial and postcolonial ideologies and since-disproven scientific theories
were embraced (and abused) during this period, using art history and “science” to establish white
people’s perception of black identity and ethnicity.
Slot Machine is a mockery of the concept “Limpieza de la sangre” (cleansing of the blood),
the systematic process of graphically bleaching the African body in the visual representation of
New Spain, a concept based on hierarchy and social practice. The so-called "purity of blood" that
is represented in caste painting are based on the principle that “native blood may be redeemed by
the mixture of Spanish blood, but the black blood is a corrupting force on pure lineages and the
whole social body, and the blood is apparently a vehicle for transmitting physical, psychological
and moral traits of generation” (Komarnisky, 2010). In other words, the concept dictated that the
right mix of patterns can lead to a higher status (Spanish and white), while mixing with black
categorically lowers status.

47
Chapter 4: A Non-Conclusion

The aim of this report is not to redirect a visual practice that satisfies a global market or artistic
circuit. Tecnologías Deculoniales marked a significant shift in reflecting an artistic practice
within an estética multi-étnica y multicultural, acknowledging that globalization (colonialization)
coexisted within us. These systems rule private and public institutions and everyday lives.

The Guatemalan writer Emma Chirix, in the Video-Foro with the collective Divergencia
Colectiva, provided a valuable starting and outgoing point for Tecnologías Deculoniales. Her
central arguments emphasize theoretical and political limitations encountered on prevailing ideas
of colonial and decolonial art practices. Chirix acknowledges that civilizational process and
colonialism should not be understood as a past historical time, but rather as a policy that
continues as principles and ideologies immersed in the policies and attitudes of educational
institutions. The educational system has perpetuated a policy and ideology towards the
"indigenous body and bodies of color." Here, the body is disciplined within these institutions
through civilizing norms, giving birth to a new civilized body, a validated body with a diploma,
not a folkloric representation of a Latino artist.

It is here where the "new civilized being" (Latino artist with an MFA degree) comes into conflict
with its already established ethics and customs. The institutional ethics of the academic have
driven me to fight for the principles and values of indigenous cultures and practices. It seems that
the worth or validation of Latin-American culture, knowledge and artistic expressions is only
possible via the Eurocentric criteria when it serves the needs and benefits of capitalist interest.
The civilizing norms that are still present in the books and the vocabulary that are used in the
48
classroom can be understood as a civilizing strategy against my culture, my way of thinking and
my worldview. It is essential to assume that the educational system coexists under the same
policies of the Nation regarding the domination of thought and the domination of the body
(economy of knowledge).

What educational institutions do is kill the indigenous within us. The civilized thought and the
ideology of whiteness are inserted in the social structure. As part of that structure it spreads into
the hegemonic structures. It is through this process of teaching-learning that it is internalized.
Instead of feeling pride for what you are or represent, you have to forget what you learned.
Killing the Indigenous is to normalize and take as official institutionalized educational
knowledge as the only value and knowledge, and annulate the previous knowledge.

The formulation of the terms Tecnologías Deculoniales has nothing to do with a reformulation of
theoretical construct of the word or expression or movement, but rather a position
(personal/ethical) that was instrumentalized as conceptual frame to explore ideas of colonial,
post-colonial and decolonization in a global context.

49
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Tecnologías Deculoniales is an ongoing investigation that aims to broaden the analysis of the institutional policies and systemic practices of representation, technological globalization, and verbal/non-verbal systems of communication. This essay will explore means of producing art and sharing knowledge with fellow artistic practices, with a critical eye on Eurocentric and institutionalized notions of aesthetics, place, and race. ❧ Working within Tecnologías Deculoniales provides a platform for me to both create and reflect upon an art practice that investigates the strategic interception of the speculative narrative, social engagement, and the sustainable institutional practices in art history art studies that concern multi-ethnic and multicultural art aesthetics.

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Creator Robinson, Marton (author)

Core Title Tecnologías deculoniales: in search of an estética multi-étnica y multicultural; Tecnologias deculoniales: in search of an estética multi-etnica y multicultural

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 08/03/2020

Defense Date 08/03/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

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Advisor Arcenaeaux, Edgar (committee chair), Annette, Kim (committee member), Suzanne, Lacy (committee member)

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