Liliana Conlisk Gallegos

As an Optimus Prime Trauma Transformer con lengua de machete, Liliana Conlisk Gallegos cannot help but experiment with EVERYTHING including art, technology, and all forms of media. With the goal of advancing the certain decolonial turn, her live, interactive media art production and rasquache performances generate culturally specific, collective, technocultural creative spaces of production that reconnect Chicana/o/x Indigenous mestiza wisdom and conocimiento to their ongoing technological and scientific contributions, still currently "overlooked" through the logic of the decaying Eurocentric project of Modernity. As a transfronteriza (perpetual border crosser), the current limited perceptions of what research, media, and technology can be and do are like a yonke (junkyard), from which pieces are upcycled and repurposed to amplify individual and collective expression, community healing, and social justice.

This submission is composed of a single sheet containing a painting in 2D which visually guides the viewer from the mouth of a Brown woman shouting out in protest against the deaths of Indigenous women due to violence and rape in an agave blood and water bordered path that leads to representations of Las Muertas de Juarez, Malintzin (Maternal loss), known as La Malinche, La Llorona, maquiladoras, sex workers (Economic Loss), amongst other issues. The Brown woman represents Tlazolteotl, the anthropomorphic representation of purification, life making, and renewal through the process of eating “shit”, or in the case of Brown and Black women, experiencing some of the worst versions of colonial violence. The path finally leads into a chalchihuitl stone (jade) placed over an ornamental setting usually found in Aztec codices to demarcate representations of precious things. In the jade stone there is a QR code that will take the viewer to a Virtual Reality spoken word experience titled, The Coyolxauhqui Imperative 2020.

The COVID pandemic brought with it a discourse that has treated the concept of a global pandemic as an oddity, a rupture in the normalcy of an otherwise healthy reality. To me and to many other feminists like me who have become conscious of the forces of coloniality, the concept of a global pandemic eating away at human life is not a new thing. This has been clear to me throughout my life many times being forced to “eat shit” as a transfronteriza Indigenous mestiza from the Tijuana-San Ysidro border and now as a Woman of Color academic navigating and literally fighting within predominantly white, Eurocentric, and alarmingly violent, hierarchical and binary formats of institutionalized racism and sexism. For others for which this may not be so clear, bridges are necessary to get them to cross into this other consciousness. This bridge leads to an example of Xicana transfronteriza Indigenous mestiza feminist sensibility and shows patterns that link Women of Color experiences with coloniality. This multimedia audio-visual painted, cross-stitched, coffee tainted, crocheted poetic and immersive virtual reality textile bridge introduces into the multidimensional yet deeply correlated experiences of Women with colonial violence across five centuries. The title, “Ni una mas: para todas todo, nada para nosotras” is inspired by the motto, “Para todos todo, para nosotros nada” found through Zapatista communities. Zapatismo is the “intuition rooted in dignity that is felt in the chest and compels one to say ‘Enough’ in the face of injustice and suffering of others.” (globalsocialtheory.org) By changing the words into their feminine form, they acquire a different meaning, one of reclamo/demand. The invisibility of the pandemic killing Indigenous, Brown and Black women is much in tune with the invisibility of the women who lead the Zapatista Movement through the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee but which mass media has mostly attributed to men and their spokesperson Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano formerly known as Marcos, and this same invisibility is in tune with the shared sensibilities and history of Women of Color and the feminine experience within global coloniality and the myth of modernity.