امريكية
My blood runs in one direction; everything else is backward.
My blood runs in the forest in the suburbs on the farm. It ties me to truth stabs holes in my echo chamber but it's starting to fall in drops of metal.
The division between industrialized nations and agrarian societies is weighing increasingly heavily on today’s global society, and without doubt it is a product of colonization.
My blood is halfway to yellow and its markers are gilded. My blood glares at my friends brings judgement to their borrowed doorstep it pools outside their so-called havens and soaks their hands in the sins of their neighbors.
Postcolonialism can be understood as an emerging awareness of the consequences of centuries of colonization of the larger part of the world by the smaller part.
I wish the sun would open my veins. Flow from of me let me fill with sand, ocean, flavor with cardamom, thyme, anything to get the orange stain from my blushing cheeks. If I could chant foreign letters in determined protest if the ink would climb in script up my arms fill my arteries with poetry.
Exclusions for ethnic, religious ideological economic or political reasons are central and dominating strategies of the Western world.
Take it; let those rusted ties fall apart. If I run far enough will they no longer tint my wrists with stubborn nonsense and circular logic? I want less purity I want differences to reconcile I want the safety of opinion without the belligerence of belief.
I run and swim; if I stop to listen when the minaret sings the call to prayer brings tears to my eyes. I revel in difference and let my soul scream sorry sorry sorry as if my guilt will change anything.
As if my thoughts mean more than my blood.
Look I'm fearful - my thoughts keep returning; they’re fighting pink robots climbing hemlocks bathing in freshwater they burrow by the foot of the blanket. My thoughts run more circles than my legs looking for relief in chance and choice.
We are witnessing the reentry of forgotten and unforeseen parts of geography and history, we experience how historic concepts and events are reenacted.
They're watching us in forthcoming textbooks, touch screens map the bloody fall of this empire you cling to. Look, I’m fearful - I try not to sprint and I'm already tired.
Hence the powerful forces that once led to the global hegemony of the West – namely, the nation-state and capitalism – are threatened from within.
Your hate is a construct running only as far as your fear, tied to a web carefully woven by a dying breed that twitches at all corners. They must know you can’t attend them all.
When contemporary art changes the Western canon, it must be possible to identify reasons for these transformations both inside and outside of the art system.
Choose, how many get this chance? They will read about us and you, my blood, and I will leave you to them. I will leave you in the pages of the lost leave you on the wrong side of what the future learns; you had this choice. Look, I’m fearful - in inclusion in exclusion there is a deadly vision.
Postmodernism, therefore, takes the place of modernity at the historical juncture when capitalist production and the colonial condition come to an end.
You were born with everything and they will take it from you, I am sure. Such times force us to decide, give it willingly or stand stubbornly on your side of the line.
We were given this choice and I’ve made mine.
| Portrait Jorell Legaspi
Peter Weibel, "Globalization and Contemporary Art," in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, eds. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe, Germany: Center for Art and Media, 2013) 20-27.