NAOMI RINCÓN GALLARDO 

Decolonial Queer (Under)Worldmaking In Contexts Of Dispossession: A Trilogy of Caves.

The queer/decolonial (under)worldmaking projects that compound the trilogy, namely The Formaldehyde Trip, Heavy Blood and Opossum Resilience, address racialized women*’s stories of resistance against the dispossession of their lands, cultures and bodies in Mexican Territory. The term (under)worldmaking is proposed in order to acknowledge the intimacy with death as a constitutive condition for life among landscapes of dispossession. Drawing on epistemological crossings between women of color feminisms, decolonial feminisms, and queer of color critique, the dissertation describes and reflects on the methods, theory and processes deployed in the making of the trilogy. The artistic research is contextualized in specific places in Mexico that are affected by processes of unleashed dispossession, state violence and transnational extractivism. The methodology articulates theoretical accounts with story-telling strategies and formal/material practices that include aspects of positionality and oppositionality, non-linear understandings of time, revision of pre-colonial Mesoamerican cosmologies and myths in the search of a queer decolonial aesthetics.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo (North Carolina, USA. 1979). Based in Mexico City, currently living in Vienna. Understanding research as an artful and transdisciplinary fabrication, her latest work adresses initiatives related to the creation of counter-worlds in the recent past in Mexico. She uses irony, masquerade lenses and queer methodologies to create a place between radical utopian experiences, fantasy and crises of beliefs. Rincón Gallardo integrates her interest in music, literature, theater games, feminisms and critical pedagogy into her work. Alongside her artistic work, she has been involved in institutional and non-institutional education settings and comunity projects, both teaching and coordinating.