Liliana Conlisk Gallegos
Liliana Conlisk Gallegos “Mystic Machete” is a feminist, anti colonial performer of research, a translator, and an uncivil disruptor who doesn’t know her place. As an Optimus Prime Trauma Transformer con lengua de machete she exposes and confronts supremacist formats by experimenting “con lo que caiga”. Her live, interactive media art production and rasquache performances generate culturally specific, collective, technocultural creative spaces of production that reconnect Chicana/o/x Mestiza Indigenous wisdom and conocimiento to their ongoing technological and scientific contributions. 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.
Dr. Conlisk Gallegos’s first installment of her piece, Before the Sixth Sun: A codex for our children, showcases the forces of coloniality and its counter resistance through decolonial aestheSis. Inspired by what Walter Mignolo refers to as the processes of thinking and doing, of sensing and existing beyond the impositions and absurdity of coloniality, Before the Sixth Sun, a codex for our children began with the idea of writing a children's book which incorporated audio, tactile, olfactory, and AR components that would retell the story of coloniality, the system of ideas and ways of thinking that remains following the invasion, injustices, and issues of Indigenous lives and land stewardship through the allusion of the relationship between native medicinal herbs and imported settler flowers represented by roses. The rose, known as the national flower of England, originates from Central Asia, illustrating the hegemonic recapitulation of regional flora (and fauna) of colonial spaces. The textile book/codex is a work in progress produced over burlap and muslin fabric, with designs and backdrops in embroidery and crochet using cotton, wool, acrylic, and silk threads.
Before the Sixth Sun: A codex for our children is an homage to Indigenous codices which were painted colorful pictographic books which recorded precious knowledge that came to be forbidden during colonialism and beyond. Only about 23 codices survived. Some were burned inside the buildings that kept them, called amoxcalli. Others were burned in piles during “acts of faith'' because they had been “painted and created under demonic inspiration”.
As is with Indigenous textile tradition and transfronteriza knowledge production, Before the Sixth Sun creates an opportunity for a non-linear morphing genealogy of presentations of fragmentary versions of this piece. Due to the way the piece is exhibited, the form will continue to change as it is embroidered and being completed (always in a non-linear way). Initially, the piece functioned as a multisensory children's book as a way to tackle issues of accessibility. The completed textile codex will be composed of at least 35 pages of 18 inches wide and 14 in. high each. As Liliana continues to work, the pieces will not be attached to each other, so that they can be arranged and rearranged in different ways as long as the order is coherent and there is continuity expressed even through the space of the venue itself.
The burlap base represents the bounty of Indigenous and feminine and feminist forms of data storage and storytelling, alluding to the presence of “hidden” elements found in the augmented reality portion. Here, direct and unfiltered decolonial roots are not shared “underground” but through an invisible wireless technology around everyone. The digital element makes it possible to universalize the function of Chicano and Indigenous pedagogies of the home (Delgado Bernal 2001) as futuristic, “the communication, practices and learning that occur in the home and community…and serve as a cultural knowledge base that helps Chicanas… negotiate the daily experiences of sexist, racist, and classist microaggressions'' (p. 624) This represents the overlapping versions of history that she received while she was a child at home, recreating the dissonance she experienced as a Xicana transfronteriza and Kumeyaay descendant, while receiving the legitimized white-washed version of the coming of two cultures: the European and Indigenous.
With this codex, Liliana re-litigates the lesser known debts of coloniality. Specifically, note that the design at the bottom is the design found in the Codex Huexotzinco of 1531, a codex used in the court of law which included a detailed list of debts which led the Nahua people of Huexotzinco to win a legal case against representatives of the abusive Spanish colonial government in Mexico. For Liliana, working on this artisan multisensorial textile AR animation piece recreates the sensing of the embodied POC experience in receiving overlapping oral histories in constant movement and the dissonance from receiving a static legitimized version of history.
Finally, this piece of hyper design mixes folk artistry with technology exposing the artisan’s hand as a counter-story to mass production and capitalism in the uniqueness of presence, making the moment and the event more valuable than the object, and bringing materiality back to its connection to ritual and meaning.
This work in progress is scheduled to be part of the Mexicali Biennial exhibition, The Land of Milk and Honey with its first installment at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum slated to open in late February 25 - May 28, 2023.