Nomadic Art: the world’s true identity

In Latin American geography and culture, each and every human being is at once a unit and a multiplicity – identical to him/herself while constantly changing. That is how we validate the existential game of cohabitation, how we celebrate presence of a human course originated in wanderings and shipwrecks that occurred all over the world and transplanted their actors’ lives among us. This principle may be interpreted as a way to comprehend identity, along with a sense of the universal that peers from every countenance and every gesture of that which, day by day, we end up being. In Latin America, we have so far gone through over five-hundred years of mixtures and rites composing the most surprising alliances. And this multicultural cohabitation – as an unrepeatable creative act, stocked with the glorifications and nostalgias of all the human

presences that shape us – keeps its distance from the generally accepted perspectives on relations between two or more cultural systems.

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In Latin American geography and culture, each and every human being is at once a unit and a multiplicity – identical to him/herself while constantly changing. That is how we validate the existential game of cohabitation, how we celebrate the presence of a human course originating in wanderings and ship wrecks that occur all over the world and transplanted their actors’ lives among us. This principle may be interpreted as a way to comprehend identity, along with a sense of the universal that peers from every countenance and every gesture of that which, day by day, we end up being. In Latin America, we have so far gone through over five-hundred years of mixtures and rites composing the most surprising alliances. And this multicultural cohabitation – as an unrepeatable creative act, stocked with the glorifications and nostalgia of all human presences that shape us – keeps its distance from the generally accepted perspectives on relations between two or more cultural systems.

Prior to the Spanish Conquista of what is today’s Latin American territory, the “Great Masters of Dawn” – who created humans out of corn – organized life in culturally heterogeneous societies with a yearning for eternity that spread throughout great regional expanses. Along the course of their history and in variable time frames, these societies shared the dreams and influences of diverse civilizing ranges, and left a testimony of early steps taken when the winds blew in a different direction. In fact, Latin America has been from the beginning an athanor furnace where the most diverse cultural and human compounds are fermented and cooked. Without exception, all of those have left their imprint –from the historically determined Asian ancestry of our indigenous population to the great pre-Columbian cultures that flourished in these lands, then the African and Iberian cultures, and on to the mid-nineteenth century Arabic and Hebraic migrations. So then, of which identity is it that we must speak? How can we placate the besieging challenges of such ontological anxiety?

Searching for my roots

As for me personally, through my veins flow blood from distant and mysterious African and Hindu lineages. And although my father, diluted in the pith of a sorrowful history, anticipated that its primeval sources would be cast into oblivion, the mystery remains, summoning my visions to restore its memory. My mother’s father, in turn, was a Hindu immigrant in Trinidad, when his motherland was still a British colony. Chasing after petroleum dreams like so many others, he arrived in Puerto la Cruz, going across the State of Sucre from Guiria. The “coolies,” as they were called in the zone, left in their wake throughout the country’s western lands a glorious culinary culture of exotic colors, flavors and aromas – as if to challenge eternity. I never got to know him, but I am told that his name was Irshad, that he had a tiger’s eyes and hair like the night. He was one of my grandmother’s early husbands, in the family’s primal days when, overtaken by all of love’s miracles, she allowed her heart to be consumed by the desires of that far-ranging wanderer.

One feels bound to give shape to that nostalgia, to question time so as to soothe the ravages of wakefulness. How to retrieve the gods of my ancestors? Something of the Buddha must have lodged in their dramas. Perchance Shiva or Vishnu appeased their yearning for Heaven. Were my African ancestors Muslims perhaps? The certainty that something has been hopelessly lost is painful. However, those interrogations return us to the beginning, where passion helps maintain myths alive, so that the imagination may offer its homage.

Our history provides certain distinctive venues that propose ways to understand our identity – its crossbreeding, hybridizations, cultural and racial blends – based on an acknowledgement of diversity. I have endeavored to assume that legacy in the context of today’s globalized world. I do this not to claim a self-contained identity, but rather to realize a spiritual cartography that, as shown by our historical genesis, suggests apertures. That is, doubtlessly, a conceivable set of tow ropes for this drifting journey, not simply to recover a diverse culture and identity, but to salvage a vital platform from which to bring forth a better insertion into global citizenship. Because being human implies being multicultural, as was so magnificently put by Hanif Kureishi, the British writer of Pakistani descent. Indeed, to speak of multicultural means accepting that we are shaped by different streams of history – which is a blessing in itself. There is no longer anything in the world that may be wasted because it is a fragment. “They” are “we,” and the beauty of the opposites imposes the probability of inventing a dream of inclusion, amplitude and tolerance.

The adventure of self-conquest

I had invented that dream intuitively already. At the age of fifteen, I celebrated the initiation rituals that my siblings had practiced religiously: to renounce familial protection in favor of embarking on the adventure of self-conquest. I would later learn, with Lao Tse, that the longest journey begins with one single step; and I had already taken that step. I was searching for glimpses of an ancient mystery, which would lead me to engage with a different kind of rigor in the soul’s journey on earth: a way of inquiring that should answer to the mute cry of the heart, a wish for the mysterious – in short, always a risky spiritual exercise in renovation that, as a powerful metaphor, forced me to stand face to face with the idea of God.

This was the only way to search for answers to the most profound questions. I attempted an incantation, an entreaty pointing to the most symbolically distant places: my own Mecca, my Jerusalem, my Sacred Valley of Giza. … I needed, as the Sufis say, to see with the eyes of the heart. I was thus avoiding the prison of those capricious rules that, every so often, are established arbitrarily in the arts to impose whatever tendencies. My immediate horizon was located, willfully, on the margins of local artistic and cultural fashions. That is the reason why my activity has evolved fundamentally outside our borders. Being receptive to the interweaving of local and global signifiers, I have so far shifted back and forth along the world in a succession of movements that have taken me in recurring occasions from Venezuela to Europe, Asia, Africa, and back to the Americas, as though repeating in actuality the symbolism of the inner journey’s circularity.

ESPRIT ET M_MOIRE

These remotions have stood for me as trailblazing ways toward heterogeneity and cultural juxtapositions. I went in search of the place where the history of civilization began. I was awed by the immensity of ancient culture. I allowed myself to be immersed in the aesthetic pleasures granted by innumerable ruins; I visited sanctuaries in many bends of the path: Chartres, Notre Dame, Stonehenge’s megalithic stones, and the Great Pyramid. I sailed the waters of the Nile; I wandered through desert sands, at every step coming upon ruins of nameless temples. On clear nights, the stars often reminded me of the eternal and of so many of the world’s sublime mysteries. And that nomadic life, which turned my experience of the journey into a strategy for artistic inquiry, started to take on decisive connotations in my investigative programme, moreover generating an increasingly complex gamut of personal experiences and practices in the field of trans-cultural interceptions.

Distant cultures interweaved

The final result of those relocations, which at other levels guard the sacred meaning of the pilgrimage, ended up becoming the grammar of my language. In doing so, it reasserted many of the artistic and conceptual premises that I had been working with. That interchange of cultural visions allowed me to reinterpret the profound meaning preserved by certain religious practices and traditions with which humankind has expressed its spiritual motivations.

This experience makes up the testimonial of a wandering transformed into an aesthetic gesture, of a constant pilgrimage that unfolds and makes manifest the traces of a rather “nomadic” art, in which the dazzling radiance of spiritual contents from very distant cultures is interweaved and juxtaposed. Thus conceived, art is open to a cosmological genesis as the true conceivability of identity, where cultural borders are abolished and every culture is its own legacy, as it is the product of a worldview that is open to the totality that we all belong to. From that perspective, the aesthetic dimension reverts again to that which links humankind to its most intimate experience. And this, as Krishnamurti foresaw it, stands as a reminder that beauty is a profound modality of knowledge, a direct intellection of the unfurling of the Divine’s depth. “Nomadic art” brings us closer to intimacy with the truth of those depths; it insinuates to us the various ways in which spirituality takes shape in cultures, to establish venues for communion with totality.

As I searched for that dimension of beauty, my faith has been reaffirmed. I have lived the artistic experience not as a profession or a trade; it has been rather the fundamental conformation of a destiny. The flame of mystery burns brighter every day in the evolution of that destiny, and it unveils – from an aesthetic unconsciousness – the spiritual vestiges of remote cultures. Crossbreeding, which is the world’s true identity, will in this way continue recomposing itself, free and without borders. And it will in painting as well.