From attention, not from understanding
 ^15.10.24

Reading(with) Jesús Sosa Lozada

My practice is centered on the union of two worlds: my ancestral spiritual practices and my artistic practice, specifically everything related to accompaniment through ritual embroidery. When working with racialized people, Afro-descendants, and dissidents, I recognise a fundamental imbalance—our bodies in this society are always bodies that provide, work, and give, but are rarely receivers.

Accompaniment for me is about offering an experience that is uncommon in people's individual and collective memories of the people and communities with whom I work. I'm interested in what can emerge creatively, emotionally, sensorially, and spiritually when we step out of our usual roles and allow ourselves to be held and embraced in our contradictions, doubts, uncertainties, and pain.

These spaces of chaos, confusion, and contradiction (everyday spaces for identities historically traversed by oppression) are spaces that in our bodies are often reduced to solitude, isolation, and individuality. I also recognize that due to structural contexts, most of our communities don't have access to therapy or containment spaces. So while I'm not a psychologist, my practice brings together elements I've previously worked on with myself and that's what I call artistic-spiritual pedagogies.

These pedagogies were born from a process of more than two years when I decided to isolate myself in the Sacred Valley of the Incas (Cusco) to begin connecting with new forms of learning that are disruptive to colonial paradigms. It's not like I read something, accumulate the information, process it and that's it, but rather it's about how through rituality, through experience, through those other codes that transcend colonial logic, learning can be developed.

I feel that when accompanying artistic and spiritual processes that are also closely linked to our political work and our own internal processes, the approach is often centered on the theoretical. We've become expert at naming oppression, identifying it, recognising it, but the process doesn't end with identification. What happens with that emotional saturation – those emotions that don't need logical explanation or discourse for us to recognise their existence within us? What other forms of liberation are possible?

One of the themes I like to address is how colonial violence and racial trauma generate multiple impacts inside us that perpetuate numbness, hardening, and disconnection from certain parts of ourselves that connect us with the vital pulse to live. Our bodies are accustomed to hardness and complex processes, and therefore, the energy of subtlety and softness are experiences that our nervous systems rarely recognize.

This is reflected in aspects as everyday as how many times we're working and need to use the bathroom, but we don't go until our bodies are about to collapse. Bodies affected by trauma tend toward containment and repression, and this affects how we relate to ourselves and our communities. Conflict and discomfort are often only perceived when they reach a breaking point, weakening our connection with ourselves and our collectives, making us navigate conflicts from very punitive places.

This is why I work a lot with what I call sensory justice or internal justice. How disconnected are we from ourselves? To what extent do we create the forms of justice that we pursue and build collectively through practices that are unjust to ourselves? (Recognizing that the ways in which justice is obtained in this world are forms that are violent to our bodies and seek reparation through punishment.)

I often work with embroidery as a possibility to build gradually through stitches – bit by bit through a mechanical action. Mechanical activities carry strong traumatic memory for us because of coloniality, but embroidery offers us a different kind of mechanical practice – one that doesn't generate trauma, but instead helps us understand that even the tiniest stitch constitutes a form.

I'm interested in what's both on the front of the embroidery hoop and behind it – the back of the hoop is a sensory radiograph of how we embroider. What's behind each embroidered stitch? How often do we build wonderful things at the cost of internal knots because we can't process them?

I teach embroidery techniques but promote the possibility of abstract embroidery. How can we express ourselves beyond concepts? How can this be an act of resistance? I can express myself from places where I don't have to justify who I am, from places other than the conceptual, opening paths to the abstract as an act of justice for bodies that learned to become experts at theorising our experiences of oppression as a survival mechanism.

When I facilitate these spaces, one invitation is to inhabit our sensations – to allow ourselves to sit with the necessary discomfort that we often try to escape by theorising about what's happening to us. We lack collective tools for expressing ourselves beyond conceptual frameworks.

I'm not looking for everyone to give me a paper on their identity, because those conditioning patterns of associating our identity with something theoretical are also a reflection of the impact of racial trauma that constantly leads us to reaffirm ourselves in the world from certain places. How valuable can it be for our nervous systems to be in a space where we don't have to justify our existence? Where we don't feel the obligation to theorise or find out why certain things associated with racial trauma happened, but instead to be able to feel them and be able to experience a memory in which we can navigate these confusing, painful emotions while being supported?

The first workshop I conducted at sala de lectura was a space for healing and disidentification from racial trauma. This space wasn't about continuing to dig into theorizing about structures and the impacts of the colonial capitalist system, but rather about how this translates into sensations and how that distorts our self-perception, making us live disconnected and/or from hyperproductivity.

We invited participants to a practice of embroidery over two sessions. We started with a ritual process of breath work and somatic exercises, to open a connection to ancestral ritual from an African and Black matrix. From that sensory work, there was a process of reading and feeling-thinking collectively with Victoria Santa Cruz's book "Rhythm of the Eternal Organizer" and reflected on it. The process alternated between reading, expressing, and embroidering simultaneously.

Participants embroidered on childhood photographs, working with childhood pain that was the product of racial trauma but couldn't be theorized at that time. Now we have tools to identify and theorize about it, but would that theorization have helped our inner children? We need to find other ways to repair and heal the effects of racial trauma in our lives beyond developing theory.

I'm very convinced that an act of responsibility is opening a space that can be closed. I think sometimes there's a prevalence of opening processes without closing them. I've been talking about this a lot these past weeks because I've been in different spaces that have invited dissidents to ritualise and work, and it was clear to me – I know it's a very delicate subject, but knowing about these processes doesn't necessarily give you the tools for everything that holding a collective space implies.

It's like creating a space for things to open up, but if I don't have containers for any crisis process, recognizing that our bodies can overflow with minimal openings... How can we build responsible spaces? If I'm going to open certain topics, I need to be able to sustain the accumulated silence that, when released, is released not only through words but also through the nervous system, the sensory field – recognising the strong possibility of overwhelming reactions in those experiencing these liberation processes.

A better process is not necessarily one that opens more things, because I also feel that's a clear reflection of colonialism in us – extracting our pains as if they were a gold mine and seeking grand realizations when what our sensory fields need, the justice they need, doesn't come from understanding but from attention and care.

Often when one works with spaces and institutions, the question arises: "How do I camouflage what I do within the interests that these spaces propose?", which is a very draining exercise. But with sala de lectura, I feel the freedom to propose things, especially in my own very specific personal way, like incorporating ritual and spiritual practice within these processes of exploration and artistic creation to strengthen our collective fabric.

The spaces I've developed at sala de lectura have been with six or seven people maximum, which allowed each participant to feel they were in a collective process while also receiving individual accompaniment. Finding that balance is very complex and requires specific conditions of time and number of people – such basic elements that allow a person to feel that delicate balance between individual and collective needs.

I'm developing a program of ritual embroidery sessions which I'm calling "Emotional Braiding Circle and Ritual Embroidery among Black People for the Regeneration of the Bond with our Blackness." This space proposes a collective exploration other places of approaching our blackness through more sensory approaches, with a focus on sensory justice.

Within my study, I address three phases: reforestation (what symbols planted by coloniality prevent us from inhabiting our blackness from other places other than oppression and how can we uninstall them?), composting (what unprocessed emotions resulting from colonial trauma need transformation within us?), and fertilization (sensory explorations and the study of the subtlety of the senses).

I want to work with Afrodescendant people from Abya Yala and the African Diaspora, recognising the urgency of spaces for accompaniment that are not coming from psychology but from a ritual, spiritual, ancestral and artistic place.