Beyond a linear logic There is a form of logical thinking, but it is an indigenous logic, which is much more precise, more diligent — both in linguistic and philosophical terms — than Western logic, from my perspective. And, of course, there are many other forms of memory: the memory of the earth, the memory of water, the memory of beings that live beyond death. All of this is part of indigenous knowledge, a knowledge shaped through interaction. It is very interesting that quantum physics is now beginning to admit that the only reality is the reality of interaction (that is an indigenous thought). An interaction in which forces collaborate, counteract, and readjust each other on a continuous basis. So that makes these different forms of logic and different forms of memory to be always in motion, to be always creating realities — whether in contraposition or in collaboration. And it is not either one or the other, it is one and the other. That is the most interesting part and it is one of the reasons why it has always fascinated me: because one dimension does not exclude the others but considers them, includes them. Whether it is — as I was just saying — on the edge, in the presence of what is felt without being fully present as absence, as semi-absence, semi-presence. In other words, there is an infinitely rich range of potential perceptions and interactions. As you say, cultures and their knowledge are awaking. What areas of knowledge are still colonized? Absolutely all of them. Where is there an uncolonized area? Within art and poetry, within some philosophical thinking, but not all of it. Decolonizing thinkers are not a majority yet, there is one here and one there. But they exist, especially now that there are new generations of indigenous mestizos. For that liberating, decolonizing thinker exists — the way I see it — from the very moment of the conquest and the colony. Among hegemonic structures As part of an authoritarian educational system, imposed methods have determined a vision of what being human 'is'. In Latin America, many national policies have developed "modern" educational programs for indigenous populations without understanding their culture, their needs, their cosmovision. What can a school do to "educate" without indoctrinating around westernized thinking? That is where the invention of my School of Listening, the Oysi School, comes in. Precisely because this form of imposition is sustained and constant in Latin American education. So, for example, what did I come up with when I had access to teaching in a rural school in Chile? That was not long ago, in 1995, when I did my first workshop in such a school. I got rid of the idea of the person, the outsider, the foreigner, the expert who comes in to teach I arrived — as they say in Brazil — fantaseada, transformed into an absurd being. They had all the children lined up, waiting for the teacher sent by the Ministry of Education to arrive and no teacher arrived, it was this being transformed into something else that arrived And I came in singing and making noise, undoing the order that was there. The children quickly found that I was ridiculous, they began mocking me, they all began to make fun of me! Through that teasing came what I call the evening out. That is, we became equals. By evening out, I was able to start wor king. It was an entrance that broke the structure of the knowing person and I became the person who knows nothing. From there, from not knowing, I ask them to say what they are, what they think, what they do And so what children can never say begins to bloom, because in those rural indigenous schools everything is "be quiet, little kids!", that is education. “Silence, everyone!” You see? I began to reverse that order. And that reversal yielded extraordinary results. Education through Architecture Well yes, I kept thinking about that after I told you, about the origin of it. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family of artists and intellectuals with amazing book collections, and with a tremendous sense of reverence and passion for art. I was about 11 years old when my dad went with his mom and some of his siblings on a pilgrimage through Europe, in which they visited gothic cathedral after gothic cathedral throughout 2 or 3 countries in Europe. As a child, I was going along with the tour and I was learning by heart which and how these cathedrals were through books (there was no internet or anything at that time). So, that passion for knowing what the cathedral was saying to medieval people, and the infinite effort to build (for a century, sometimes even for two centuries throughout which everyone worked) to raise a supernatural building somehow grew on me. That text I wrote titled “Educación por la Arquitectura” [Education through Architecture], is a contemplation on what a building teaches someone who enters the building. And it was from the perspective of a little girl. So wherever there was a well, wherever there was an architrave: what was that architrave telling the body? When I finished high school and had to choose a career, I said: I obviously have to study architecture (even though I was already a poet and already knew I was an artist, but it did not seem to me that neither poetry nor art had to be learned or studied). But architecture was different. I went to a school of architecture because I thought it was the art that integrated all the arts, operating in the transformation of society and creating other realities, new ways of relating. How did I think it and name it at that time? Through the precarious. My precarious works. I made my first precarious installation in the transition from high school to architecture school. I was 17 years old when I created a small city out of litter on the beach for the sea to erase. I recall that it was a project of remembering what an ancient civilization could have been like or what a new civilization could be like. Architecture was all that for me. You also mentioned that you were very quickly disappointed in architecture education at the time but that you have a different take on it now. I am sure that there have been many schools of architecture in Latin America that would have been perfect for what I imagined architecture could be. But I chose precisely one in which they did not think like that, so I lasted very little, only a few months. I realized then that I had to go to an art school, just to be given the space to think and be as I was and not be forced to follow a program. Later, over the years, I found out that around the same time I finished high school and began to make my precarious work, the School of Architecture of the Catholic University of Valparaíso began to function in this way and Ciudad Abierta [Open City] was founded. As you see, it is interesting that I invented the precarious less than 4 kilometers away from where Ciudad Abierta was founded, but neither Ciudad Abierta knew about the precarious nor did I know about Ciudad Abierta. “La Ciudad Abierta de Amereida” (as the poem goes) wanted to find the meaning of America. There was a a profound interest in the local, in the territory, in the site. It is an interest that has been maintained, not only in Chile, but also throughout the Latin American tradition of architecture. There is something about the ephemeral and the body that you mentioned about learning in architecture. How can this knowledge be transferred to education? How can the contributions of Ciudad Abierta be taken up again? I am not one to say because I was not a participant of Ciudad Abierta, although in some way we have had some very wonderful encounters, for example at Documenta 14, the only Chilean guests were Ciudad Abierta and myself. But I can tell you that the precarious is, somehow, already from its conception, a form that unites and merges the potential of architecture and the city but in the daily life of a city or the countryside. There is a sense that the poetic and the architectural exist in precariousness. However, Ciudad Abierta did not create the concept of the precarious, even though they practiced it. I was the one who created the concept of precarious art. That is why I find that there is such a deep confluence, but Chilean society has not been able to recognize or grasp that because the precarious has no category in the face of architecture. So that devaluation of the precarious is just beginning to be transformed through the fact that now global culture has started saying that life itself is becoming precarious. We still need to bring all these currents together, so that they really have the transformative effect of education and architecture in general, and are not just islands of creativity. This cannot be the culture of a school. It has to be a universal school of looking for an explanation of the precarious and the work with the territory. Which is by far the truest indigenous heritage, not only in the Americas but of all indigenous traditions. The precarious is a driver of change in Latin America. I also a reality we cannot escape, but it becomes a stimulus to work with minimal resources, for creativity, for survival... What could be its relationship with our educational systems? Well, what you’re defining now is very important. What does precariousness consist of? In that everything disappears. That is the core of creation in precarious art. It is an art that is aware of its own disappearance. So, how does that relate to Latin American popular cultures? In Latin American popular culture, all the favelas, all the cayapa settlements, are all forms of precarious architecture and creation. But has there been a school that gives true meaning and value to that precarious way of survival and coexistence of Latin American indigenous and mestizo culture? This philosophical leap has not been taken yet. Although it exists already and has always existed. It is part of colonization. How could this be integrated into education? There has to be a philosophical and historical perspective of the meaning of the precarious. Since the Spaniards and the Portuguese arrived in America, they came to destroy the worldview and order in which all the various balances at play flowed and swayed. This precarization is experienced as violence, on the one hand, and on the other hand, as a reparation, as a healing, as finding a way out against all odds. I believe that, if this endless search of precarious creation — which is happening all the time — is given value, it can transform education. If, instead of teaching only fixed contents, education also includes contents that are created in/by the moment. There has to be in education a system that includes improvisation, that makes room for error, failure, search, and exploration. Thus, education would become precarious in the creative sense and not precarious in the sense of not having funds. Because now if you say 'precarious' it means that you have no money, but money is not a fundamental factor in education or in any other value. The fundamental factor is how one sees the situation. If you see it as a loss, that is one thing. But if you see it as the possibility of creating another variant, it changes everything. What you have said is very interesting and it is very rarely discussed in the way we are discussing it. Because what happens? Precarization as a topic arises in academia in the northern hemisphere. From there, it contaminates the academia of the southern hemisphere. And this is very interesting as a trajectory of the concept of precarization because, before that, from Latin America, we had always talked about it as a lack, not as a power. Since you touch on this subject, it opens the reflection to something very interesting as well: In the North, they have been interested in these issues from theory but we have come to these issues from experience and reality. They are completely different approaches. Exactly. As a child, I knew it already and I named it, as a girl, as “the precarious” — but the precarious backward. Not as lack or poverty but as transformative potential. A convulsed territory To be a creature of the sixties (before the dictatorships arrived) was something fundamental for me. Because in the sixties there was a moment of immense creative potential in Latin America. You see that the revolutions that took place in Cuba, Brazil, and Chile were in fact possible, I mean, there was a whole period of a quest for the transformation of social structures. That transformation was happening — as it always does — in art and poetry from before. That is to say, the disintegration of the colonized languages had already begun. That investigation into the given structures as a structure to be disrupted, dismantled, and reassembled was already in art and poetry. Somehow, it precedes the idea behind revolutions, the idea that societies must also be transformed and readjusted, so that there is dignity, justice, and balance between all parties at play. How did this confluence between the social revolution and the poetic revolution affect my work? In a total, radical, and absolute way. I perceived poetic invention as part of that revolution, not as two separate things. I never had the idea that politics and poetry go on different roads. By that moment in the 20th century, we also find a high point of the feminist movement. I understand that, for some time, your "narratives" were not accepted by radical feminist militants. In a way, your language has always been steps ahead of your time. What is your understanding of feminism today and how was it at that time, in the 60s? How do feminism and ecology coexist? Yes, it is very true that the feminism that I came across first — I mean, I felt a feminist from the moment I knew that the word 'feminism' existed, which was when I was a little girl. Not because I read any books but because it started appearing in magazines. There was something called “the feminists” who burned their bras. That seemed like a poetic act to me. I said to myself, "of course, I'm a feminist too" and I knew that all my friends had to be feminists as well. But when I started to come across the theorization of feminism, it was a completely Eurocentric theorization. And because of that Eurocentrism, my generational fellows practiced feminism as theorized from Eurocentrism. That is why I was never perceived as a feminist. But what has happened is that a new feminism has arrived, one that is lived starting from little girls who are 6, 7, 8 years old and are feminists already. For them, there is no Eurocentric theory or anything like that anymore. They feel for themselves, from their own experience. They are empowered to be themselves. It is a completely different kind of feminism, which totally connects to the girl I was in the 60s and 70s. Because we have this common desire to discover what it is that we are, beyond definitions. That is a powerful desire as a transformative force, and I see it in action now. For instance, in the indigenous movements, in the ecological movements which are creating forms of participatory art as we had envisioned it in the 60s. But now they are imagined in a far more political and radical way because the moment demands it. Because it is an urgent moment, in which we know that human culture could rapidly become extinct due to the destruction that the extractivist culture is creating in the world. I find the current radicalization dazzling, and I find that it connects with what animated the spirit of profound rebellion of Latin American poetry and art from the beginning. You have talked about how hopeful you feel for activist manifestations such as those of the feminist collectives in Chile, the decolonial movements, and other groups that seek to generate an impact on the conscience of those who witness their actions and images. These are situations that point out and denounce particular problems but they also educate a collective. What core values can be extracted from these manifestations, to understand the change they exert on the conscience of individuals? The wonderful thing about all these manifestations is that they are recovering a way of acting and being in collective, which is something inherited from the mestizo indigenous culture. For example, I started making mingas. The minga is an indigenous concept, apparently from Quechuan origin that means “to undertake a common work for a specific purpose.” I made a minga to bring back to life an extinct species. A lot of people came and danced for this species to come back, and it did. So, does all this interest in collective practices in Latin America find its roots in indigenous traditions? Of course, and that is beginning to be acknowledged. Not all Latin American artists have had the possibility to experience and feel what that really means, because the discrimination and separation of the mestizo culture of cities from the indigenous culture have been quite violent, traditionally very violent. For instance, you know that the vast majority of Latin Americans are mestizos and yet very few of us, still a minority, choose to feel from both sides. And, moreover, to give the space of wisdom to the indigenous. I believe that in Latin America there still exists the possibility — as these collectives are proving — of reorienting culture towards another state of consciousness. It is a state of consciousness that is shifting in this generation. They have a completely different interest in the native and indigenous, it is no longer a source of shame. It is a reason for pride and empowerment. For example in Chile, only in the year 2019 with the social outburst of October were the flags of the Mapuche people seen flying in the squares of Chile. It took almost 500 years, more than 500 years, for that to happen. For the mestizo people of Santiago to feel the dignity and the need for dignity to transform the square. I swear that moves me in an indescribable way because when I was young, at the time of the popular unity and Salvador Allende, that sense of the people’s dignity was as potent and powerful as the young kids have it now. And the few old men and women of my age who have been able to participate in that, we participate as if it were a rebirth of what was erased with utter violence. So we return to the trauma of the first part of our conversation. I believe that the young people who today are being persecuted with such violence in Colombia, in all of Latin America, this trauma that they are experiencing will continue to sow. It is going to continue to create new realities in the generations to come. And I see that happening all the time. The trauma of erasure It is not only about the new generations, but also about the relationship between these protests and education. It is not for nothing that they are initiated by student movements. Exactly, and notice that this devaluation of education is associated with the institutionalization of State-controlled education. The understanding that artists, poets, thinkers, have to participate actively with questions in the configuration of what education is, that is starting to happen everywhere. There is a chance there. And what is education for you? You see, the word education is 'e,' which to me means movement and energy, and 'duc', What is the duct? The energy of the duct. The duct is human perception. How does that perception work? We are just beginning to figure out how the neurons of sight and thinking are interwoven in an absolutely creative way from the perceiver’s perspective. That is education, the perception of the learner. Now, for example, the latest quantum physics is saying that we all live in some kind of hallucination. That is, the reality that we have created as reality is an agreement. So, the possibility of transforming reality, why does it happen through education? It goes through admitting that I am educating you and you are educating me. Not necessarily through words, but through acts and behaviors. It is the doing itself that educates us. You just mentioned a recurring idea: transforming realities. Is that a property of art or of education? It is naturally a virtue of both. There is no need to make an effort to make it a property of both. That is, the effort of education itself as potential is different from education as it is conceptualized now. Education is still conceptualized as something inculcated. Eventually, there will come a time when education is a process that is happening mutually, as Paulo Freire used to say. He formulated it in a completely futuring way. You often speak of the failure of humanity as a species, in regard to the destruction not only of cultures but also of their habitats. I believe it is true that powers continue to fail. All agreements are null and void and are minimal in relation to what is needed. In other words, the possibility of extinction is still dominant. As long as there is no transformation of the political and economic order, we are going straight towards destruction. But this feeling of hope that you sense in me is precisely because of the young people. I know that there are artists and educators generating these forms of effective love, transformative love. As long as that exists, there will be at least a tiny glimmer of hope.