Caliban, berdache, eupupillan: Archives knots. Video-essays in the Catrileo+Carrión Community Video-ensayos en la Comunidad Catrileo+Carrión

Abstract

This article presents an aesthetic discussion between, first, the dramatic figure of Caliban that, in the Latin American postcolonial region, has been a source of symbolic, cultural and political controversies as a result of the master-slave language that underlies the legacy of Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611). And second, the conjectures that emerge from it through the work of the Catrileo+Carrión Community, groups of Mapuche artists and activists, who have developed documentary countervisual strategies to destabilize the archive of Calibanist writings, usually centered on the symbol of rebellious and unsubmissive masculinity. For this, the format of the video-essay that this artistic group has developed will be examined to think about conditions of gender and identity displaced from classificatory, binary and civilizational categories, and more open to contrasexual forms of inhabiting the transliterations of Mapuzungun; knots of language whose postcolonial discussion is proposed through being epupillan: multiple spirits.

Video-essays

visual art

aesthetics

postcoloniality

countervisuality