Note from the Publisher

This is the second anthology from the Beyond series by our imprint Laberinto Press. Our aim with this volume is to showcase the talent of some of the best literary professionals in the Hispanic Canadian community. The purpose behind the Beyond series is to engage our readers through the senses. Our first anthology, Beyond the Food Court, revolved around the sense of taste, associated with memory, politics, and language. Beyond the Gallery, a commentary on our hidden visual canons, requires from our readers seeing with more than our eyesight. The present anthology echoes Laberinto’s dual objectives. The first one, the English translation of the texts originally written in Spanish, demonstrates our commitment to the production and dissemination of World literature in translation. The second, offers the readers a web of intersecting and diverging pieces of fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and academic research, a labyrinth of visual experiences. We invite you to consider Hispanic Canadian literature as Canadian literature, beyond the confines of Magical Realism, and the official English-French bilingual model, and to see yourselves in these pages.

Luciana Erregue-Sacchi Publisher Laberinto Press

Introduction: Brian O’Doherty described the history of modern art as “intimately framed” by the gallery space. He argued that by 1986, when his book Inside the White Cube was published following his ground-breaking essays in Artforum, we had “reached a point where we see not the art but the space first”. The exhibition space as described by O’Doherty provides cues to the viewer that legitimize the cultural object as art. Once outside it, he noted, “art can lapse into secular status”. In this anthology, we explore art that exists beyond the exhibition space criticized by O’Doherty, and interrogate how we relate to art unbound from the gallery space. We ask: how do we experience art online? On our skin? On a mountain? During a sporting event? To answer these questions, this anthology groups essays by eight Hispanic Canadian authors who write in English and Spanish. As bilingual and diasporic Hispanic Canadians ourselves and in our role as editors, we wanted the anthology to challenge conceptual constructions of borders (the frame, the wall, the imaginary line between two countries) that define cultural categories both within and without the gallery space, and in doing so, center the views of people who have crossed borders physically and linguistically. We also felt it was important to include both emerging and established writers, as well as writers who primarily create in their mother tongue. We decided to keep the original Spanish texts and to publish them alongside their respective translations in English to remind us of the growing cultural and linguistic diversity of the Canadian population. There are over 500,000 Spanish-speakers in Canada. In Alberta, we comprise over 60,000 and the number of monolingual English households is declining faster than in any other province. Despite the significant growth of the Spanish-speaking Canadian community, this segment of the population continues to be underrepresented in Canadian literature, as the publishing infrastructure available to writers creating in languages beyond English and French is nonexistent. Our goal was to create a multilingual and interdisciplinary anthology exploring the intersection of the visual and literary arts. Stepping beyond the institutional confines of art galleries and museums, we invited contributors to reflect on their experiences of the visual, articulating alternative and often underrepresented worldviews. The texts in this anthology address experiences of seeing in different forms. The first three texts examine the symbolic and cultural weight of mark-making on substrates that range from ephemeral skies and monumental stone to living human skin. Award-winning Mexican/Canadian writer Antolina Ortiz Moore poetically weaves together skywriting, sculpture, migration, and grief. Canadian-Colombian environmentalist and author Carlos Andrés Torres writes with reverence of his visual encounter with massive pre-colonial murals painted on the stone face of Chiribiquete, the world’s largest tropical rainforest national park, now threatened by extractive industries. Cuban-Canadian writer Ana Ruiz Aguirre advocates for the inclusion of tattooing within contemporary gallery spaces. Contributors address so-called fine and applied visual art objects alike, focusing on their makers’ lived experiences, creative processes, and object histories. Spanish journalist Juan Gavasa delves into the connecting stories of celebrated Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla and graphic designer Francisco Belsué, the largely unknown Spanish immigrant who designed the iconic logo for the Toronto Blue Jays. Argentinian Canadian multidisciplinary artist Marcelo Donato tells the story of the stage set Pablo Picasso designed and created for Sergei Diaghilev’s famed Ballets Russes in 1917 and its still mysterious sojourn in Buenos Aires during the Second World War. The last three works explore the world-building potential of images. Mexican-Canadian writer Laury Leite’s curious tale of invisible museums playfully challenges boundaries of truth and myth in archival records, reflecting on ongoing dialogues of old and new worlds. Observing the flow of Cuban revolutionary posters to mainland North America since the 1970s, Cuban-born cultural worker Liuba González de Armas explores the afterlives of political images and questions the implications of archival presence and absence. Puerto Rican emerging curator Bettina Pérez Martínez shares her experience of curating from the diaspora in an account of her path to crafting an immersive community-grounded digital exhibition about the contemporary Caribbean in the midst of a global pandemic.

We thank Laberinto Press for entrusting us with this opportunity. As emerging editors and translators, it has been an honor to work with each of the writers and to engage with a broad range of literary practices in Hispanic Canada. Our gratitude to designer Cecilia Salcedo and Spanish-language copyeditors Ángel Mota and Carlos Andrés Torres for their work and commitment to excellence. We take earnest pride in the fact that this project was spearheaded and executed by a team of Hispanic Canadians. We hope to continue building a literary community of multilingual writers and providing content for an audience that has been largely ignored in Canadian literature: Spanish-speaking Canadians.

Ana Ruiz Aguirre & Liuba González de Armas Editors

Antolina Ortiz Moore Mexico

Antolina Ortiz Moore has been shortlisted for the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Literary prize in Venezuela (2020), and the Nadal Literary Competition in Spain (oldest literary prize in Spain, and one of the most important in Spanish Literature). Her last novel, Seda araña won the First Mexican Woman´s Short Novel Competition in Mexico (2019). Her first and second novels received the José Eufemio Lora y Lora & Juan Carlos Onetti International Award (Peru, 2010). Her first published book derived from her social work thesis at the Universidad Iberoamericana, in Mexico, and was prologued by Elena Poniatowska, selling over fifty thousand copies.

Kristjanna Grimmelt

Kristjanna Grimmelt is a writer, educator, playwright, researcher, and translator. She is the former editor of the Peace River Gazette and former Vice-President for Western Canada of the Literary Translators Association.

Light at Dusk Translated by Kristjanna Grimmelt

The five airplanes drew crystals of ice in the atmosphere. Their great wings began another synchronized turn. The dust rolled from one end of the cabin to the other. “Like ash,” Lola thought to herself, “The ash of my hope.” She thought of the children. Her airplane was halfway through its formation. The sky below, the land above, the sea like a prayer lost in her throat. The condensation trail fixed her art, ephemeral on the cobalt canvas. The clouds were tinged with mauve at dusk. As a girl, Lola used to look for god among the stars. Her mother would be there as well, her aunts in the village, in Mexico, had told her so. “Even though you can´t see her,” they said, certain of themselves, “even though you can´t hear her. There are things too small to sense, niña, or to touch. You have to have faith.” And Lola searched above her, as in a treasure map. But she found only the surprising beauty; that expanse of space where the planets are a hundred times larger than the earth and appear only as light in the void. Lola felt she was falling. The wings of the five airplanes tilted again, writing “Breathe” in the sky. Lola thought of her father, of his strong but defeated body beneath the sheets, in the hospital, before the transplant. His heart in the hands of another. The doctor. The leap. The jump into space. “We are always alone,” her father had told her that morning, smiling, tired. “We are always alone, Lolita. Although sometimes we feel others are with us.” Both crossed borders that morning. Now the sound broke the silence, the five motors, their ink in the sky. “We are,” they wrote, mauve clouds on the cobalt canvas. “When life ends, life ends,” Lola thought. “So, why can’t we…?” The children were light at dusk, down below, far away, in the void. The airplane straightened out. The formation followed in unison; it seemed stuck in time, motionless. But the countryside slipped by below and behind them, fast. Lola let go of the controls for a moment and took a photo to document the largest ephemeral work of art ever made. The unease persisted in her body. The sun dotted the windows. “We are,” said the fragmented glints in the fuselages. “Breathe,” Lola savoured, wanting to know how it felt to be anesthetized, her chest open, her life in the hands of another. Helpless. And to stop breathing. The sun clinging to the window. Lola savoured the words. The vapour escaped from the airplane. “Lolita,” her father had said to her shortly before he died, releasing control of the airplane for a moment as he did, “The void holds us up,” he said, teaching her to fly. “Like this.” He showed her. “Like this.” Her father, smiling, took the controls back. “Your name is Dolores,” her father had told her, “because what I love most is also what hurts the most.” Now, the children saw the words the airplanes drew up above. And far off in the distance, like a second horizon, the border wall that sought to draw an impassable line on the earth. A Caesarean scar that doesn’t heal on the womb that gave life to us all, that gives birth to us. “This ‘problem’ that we have become,” Lola thought, “our heart in the hands of another, beneath the sheets, waiting for a transplant.” A long time ago, Lola learned to swim in the ocean, in the cold, between California and Baja California with her mother. It was like flying in a liquid, freezing sky, between laughter and seagulls. Back then commercial airplanes passed over them, so close. The route went up north. One after another, they went. “There goes your father”, her mother would say each time they saw one go by. And in the afternoons the trails they left in the atmosphere were arrows pointing north, towards the destiny Lola followed with her father, when her mother died. Sometimes Lola imagined she was a pterodactyl. They found the bones on the dunes, on the beach, soon before they buried her mother. The bones came out of the ground that her mother went into. Then her father. “And one day me,” Lola thought. “Did the pterodactyls leave trails in the sky as they flew?” she wondered. Lola stopped looking for god in the stars. She found art. The stones taught her their material devotion, dense and heavy as existence. First in the cemetery, next to the tombstones. Round and flat, each stone different from the other. Their beauty was an homage to her mother, to her passing through the world. “They are things so small that, in fact, you can sense, you can touch,” Lola said, “you have to observe”. And sitting on the dunes, she placed them, one on top of the other, in time. The curved form revealed the missing presence of her mother on the sand, a trail of condensation in the atmosphere. “The pterodactyl bones on the beach were bones that once flew,” Lola thought. Now they were bones next to bones, on the beach. Lola hung them from a mobile, beneath an olive tree on the coast, old and twisted. That was her most famous installation; the wind shook the ancient wings next to an empty sea that spread beyond itself. The five airplanes, those five pterodactyls with metal bones, flew over the centres where the children were detained. The drops of condensation wrote words. “I breathe” and “You breathe” in clouds. “Below, war; here, silence,” Lola thought. “So much, so much space, between horizon and horizon, between birth and death; I only hear the voice, the voice: that voice.” The night, the moon, her body, and the sea, and the wind, and the planets were the voices that Lola found with the treasure map above her. A stone, a star on the beach. Ephemeral. Concentric circles on the dunes. Something that never wanted to be permanent, but did not wish to die—petals. “Because we are”—Lola says—“So, why can’t we…?” The vapour trails evaporated behind the airplanes. The five drew clouds. The roll angle changed again. Dust from the shoes rolled to the other side of the cabin. The ashes shone in the sun. Below, the thousands and thousands of children watched the sky. Their hope could be found with the first star—or rather a planet—a hundred times larger than the earth. The airplanes tilted their great wings, beginning their descent to the sea. Off in the distance, on the horizon, the real horizon—the curved, the sensual, the majestic horizon—light could be seen in the void, an arrow on the beach, on the hospital bed, on the stones; those ancient birds searching for the beauty in everything, searching for meaning. That voice, that voice, and its silence.

Carlos Andrés Torres, The Paintings of the Jaguar-Men Translated by Luciana Erregue-Sacchi

Years ago I read that it was beauty, not usefulness, that directed the soul of man towards the gods that had created all things. As a young student of engineering this idea shook my understanding. That same phrase, however, ended up illuminating my artistic preoccupations, to the point of uniting me with writing, music, and landscape photography. This sort of polygamous arrangement, has made me a slave to my love for them. This love has shaped my soul with words, sounds, and images revealing to me the unity of the universe from where we all originate and where we will inexorably return.

It has been in the great natural spaces where I have experienced such a revelation, with all the force and beauty of forms, colours, harmonies, meanings. The joy of the beautiful and the spiritual has manifested as something useful to my inner self. Many are the mountains, rivers, forests, lakes, deserts I have trudged. Many are the emotions and mystical expressions. Nothing can be compared to that time I was invited to a sacred site, situated in the centre of the world in the middle of the jungle. One of the remaining places on earth, where secluded, solemn plateaus called tepuis, have from time immemorial transformed into canvases. I am talking about one of the most extraordinary art galleries in the world, the Serranía of Chiribiquete, the secret gallery of the Jaguar-men.

This national park comprises an enormous territory closer in surface area to Switzerland. It is located in the Northwestern part of the Colombian Amazonian jungle. The park of more than four million hectares, is dominated by the fabulous contrast between the green arboreal canopy and the great rock formations at elevated altitudes, isolated from one another, in vertical slopes and relatively flat cusps. These elevations are known by the name of tepuis, erect as if they were protective deities, covered in fruits and magic wilderness. Chiribiquete also houses an exuberant variety of habitats and climate conditions, making possible the development of all of the ecological and evolutionary processes of their flora and fauna. The convergence of Andean and jungle species in the park’s biogeographic borders have also contributed to the emergence and development of a notable number of new species of butterflies, fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and more than a hundred varieties of plants. That richness makes this mega reserve one of the most biologically diverse spots on the planet. Its intrinsic configuration, its strange orography, its ecological complicity, as dynamic as sustainable escapes comprehension within the day-to-day, limited parameters of civilized man. Perhaps that is why the great Amazon explorer Richard Evans Schultes described the area as “The workshop of God,” the place where the Creator might have conducted the first tentative experiment leading up to the origin of the world. Just one visit is enough to confirm Schulte’s opinion.

Ours began once the ancient DC-3 took off from the city of Villavicencio. Flying in one of those aircrafts, emblems of modern aviation is quite the privilege. Even after almost a century, these legendary planes are still crisscrossing the air in a few parts of the world. Andrés Hurtado García, my mentor and companion during this trip, describes them as adult eagles who die fighting as they fly. Although many of them are warehoused in hangars full of debris, there remains a considerable number still in service, in the certainty they will fall sooner or later from the most remote skies. Almost all of the DC-3- flying over the Amazon jungle have crashed, and the sum of all those accidents has become a mythical compendium in local aviation circles. Before boarding our flight someone asked “Where is this plane heading?” to which one of the operators spontaneously retorted “Wherever it falls!.”

Two hours after flying over the immense natural canyon of the Caquetá River, next to the airport, we landed in the town of Araracuara─we did not fall by sheer luck!─There, was renowned biologist Patricio von Hildebrand, one of the three main names behind the exploration of Chiribiquete. The other two ─whom we would meet in later trips─ were his brother Martín and anthropologist Carlos Castaño Uribe, whom we owe the most conscientious findings and studies on the paintings of the Jaguar-men.

Thanks to their work, we know that Chiribiquete is a term original to the Carijona peoples, that can be translated as “The maloca (hive) of the solar swarm” The origin of the name has a profoundly spiritual origin referring to the path to ultimate wisdom. A story from the cosmogony of the Carijona community, speaks of how from the union of Father Sun and his daughter, the Moon, their son the Jaguar was born. He became their representative here on Earth. The jaguar thus became the most relevant animal in the Carijona’s worldview, and the most important to the ecosystem of the area. This feline has played, and still plays a role balancing and controlling the peoples of Chiribiquete and their environment. They copy his traits, seek his essence, and try to become him, to access the ultimate knowledge which manifests in other dimensions. Such transformation can only be achieved by commmuning intimately with nature. Through rituals with local plants like yagé, yopo, and other sacred species, some of the inhabitants aspire to become powerful beings, Jaguar men. Since the beginning, the Carijonas have depicted this experience in stone drawings, a sort of living knowledge, an eternal mark.

Early on the day after our arrival, we decided to make good use of our time there, because, like Thoreau wrote, we could not waste time without mistreating eternity. We embarked on a journey up the river, which would take us to the very heart of Chiribiquete. The Caquetá river morphed into the Yarí river, which later transformed into the Mesay, to finally become the Cuñaré. After several weeks of navigating, torrential rain, dreamy photography, intense sunshine, crossing streams, sightings of fleeting animals, and daytime stars, we were allowed access to the Southern area of the park. Turning back was not an option, even if the circumstances of our adventure had made us think otherwise. The gods of Chiribiquete had made a pact with our patience and perseverance. We had fulfilled our end, and faithfully having followed their precepts, they finally ushered us into their pristine gallery.

Chiribiquete’s murals total seventy to date, containing around seventy thousand paintings with Indigenous motifs. It is one of the largest concentrations of rock art in the world. The murals rest on the rocks at different distances in relation to the base of the tepuis. Many of them were executed at such heights that it is impossible to reach except by rappelling or climbing. This has disconcerted the specialists, who cannot explain to this day how it was possible to create such sophisticated works at such distances from the ground, and in such hard to reach locations. The choice is no mere coincidence. In some cases it obeyed the breathtaking panoramic beauty of the Amazonian forest; in others, the geological characteristics of the tepuis determined placement, since it is not possible to draw on all of the rock formations. The chosen spots offer fairly flat surfaces, susceptible to priming through percussion and the chiseling of slabs, with the aim of obtaining a flawlessly finished work, and preserving the works over time. That is the reason for the high degree of preservation of the decorated panels of Chiribiquete in comparison to other rock paintings in this part of the continent.

We spent several days visiting some of the exhibition spaces of this natural museum. I would not wish to offer our impressions of these works. Even if the descriptions were accurate, emotions render them impossible to narrate. The mystic becomes part of daily life, and language loses all its descriptive weight. Let’s just say that to admire each mural means facing their sovereignty, transporting us to an alternate time and space. It is to observe beyond the sensory delineation of ourselves as individuals, as unique as similar to one another, a sum of entities clearly defined in the map of the universe. To contemplate those works is to open the door to harmony with our surroundings. The force behind each ideogram, their messages, their mystery, their novelty, makes lives relative, teaching us we are all part of the same whole. Andrés, pensive as he contemplated the paintings, only offered one of his retorts: “Lord, give my dreams the reality of life and offer my life the beauty of dreams.” Certainly, his request was granted.

The scientific expeditions to Chiribiquete not only have showcased the enormous natural riches of the region, they have also put into question the most widely accepted anthropological theories on the origin of population groups in the Americas. The paintings of the Jaguar-men date from the earliest human settlements in the continent. Several studies have established earlier dates of human habitation, earlier than previously researched. This has generated a fair amount of debates, since the earliest data on population in the Amazonian jungle goes back between twelve and seventeen thousand years ago. In Chiribiquete there is pictorial evidence dating back to twenty thousand years, which has forced scientists to reexamine all prior knowledge on the subject. In 2018, UNESCO declared this park a dual World Heritage site, due to its sum of natural exuberance and cultural riches.

Thanks to comparative research on the paintings based on several chronicles dating back centuries, like those of Phillip von Hutten, and the few registers obtained through oral tradition, we can infer that the rock paintings were created by nomad communities from several corners of the American continent. Shamans from different regions left us a codified language of symbolic and spiritual dimensions, explaining the moments and elements where all things originated. The location of Chiribiquete coincides with the exact half of the world, according to them, the site of the beginning, and original creation. The Jaguar-men, like pilgrims, left us their visions and day to day lives in paintings dating before the development of agriculture. They may have been gatherers, fishermen, nomads. All the scenes depicted on the rocks tell us as much: from scaffolds where people paint, to hammocks with men at rest, young shaman apprentices, the jaguar in his magic canoe flying towards the sky, the shamans and their cosmic sojourns, and a universe of rituals extending for millennia. If we speak of Egyptian settlements dating back twenty seven centuries, Chiribiquete offers us two hundred centuries of evidence. Since there is no proof, however, that the place supported permanent or even temporary settlements, all we can surmise is the ritual function of the area. Yet, this ritual aspect must have been tremendously powerful to have sustained over time to this day. Yes, there exist registers of rock paintings well into the 1970s of the XX century.

Our stay lasted almost two months. However, our visit to the gallery of the Jaguar-men was not as long as we had hoped for. The routine of civilization was demanding our return. Although we must remain here, we do not belong to it. Our existence is closer to the great natural spaces. Chiribiquete is one of the highest ranked in our nomad heart. And even though this natural park may seem perfection itself, the park’s current reality is somewhat different. The guides we encountered told us several stories, compounding the sense of foreboding about the future of the paintings we felt as we saw them from the air. The White man is closer than ever, threatening their permanence. The White man sees the jungle as a green representation of Hell, a chasm. For the Jaguar-men, the jungle is a world to be read on the daily, a site of dialogue. Birdsongs indicate the distance to the spring; the presence of flowers, a date; the croaking of a frog, tells time; men eat fruit and they let the seeds fall to the ground from where new fruit trees sprout, which in turn signal paths. For the White man, as I was saying, it is wasted space, undesirable in that state, important as long as it serves the ends of production. Chiribiquete is an enormous territorial extension with an economic potential whose value seduces financial ambitions. Deforestation, illegal tree cutting, fires, and the illegal traffic of all that can be extracted threatens the paintings of the Jaguar-men, sentencing them to a viable economic future or to their destruction.

Even today they are hidden the best way possible: in plain sight. We are beginning to recognize their importance. Very few of us have been fortunate to witness their beauty and elevate ourselves spiritually. Of their usefulness, only the Jaguar-men have fully known. Of their eternity, only the White man will be capable of altering their destiny in an instant. However, I swiftly change my mind, refusing to believe they will disappear. Art lasts a long time, life is brief. It has been this way, and it will still be. Rock art is the original art, the first considered such, the art of the genesis that allowed humanity to think freely. Perhaps that is why Picasso said once that since Altamira art has been in decline; I have no doubt had he seen Chiribiquete he would have taken his own life.