The Brooklyn Rail

My art was born in Con con, a site by the sea that conceals and reveals itself in its name.

In Spanish con, means “with,” but in the ancient language of the site, Kon was

“sea,” “chaos,” “darkness,” and “life force,” the forgotten name of a feminine deity.

The Akonkawa people created double names repeating words to intensify meaning and increase the fertility of language and land. Con con is at the meeting point of river and sea. The encounter of the eye and the sea, the sea and the awareness of the sea, the sea seeing us seeing it.

After colonization, the meta poetics and the knowledge of the Akonkawa people was erased—and the site became Con con. Now it is a contaminated town oblivious to the pain of an oil refinery on top of the ancestral cemetery, a beach resort that looks away—while the sea slowly dies.

Long ago I wrote “a site is not a place but a relationship to a place.”

My father says I was conceived at Agua Santa, not far from Con con, so even as a babe in my mother’s womb I was already in its field.

The sound of the waves hitting the sand instructing me before I could speak.
The waves that speak in movement and sound, in—out, like breath.
Each sound distinct, yet all waves weave themselves into one sound.
I close my eyes and I can still hear that sound imprinted in my soul.

Con con/Kon kon was an ancient ritual site, connecting visually the Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, to the sea. It was a fishing town for millennia, a site where Sonido Rajado, Torn Sound flourished: a complex dance of flutists who play in opposing (entangled) pairs for their sound to clash, creating harmonics created by sound itself. A dissonance where all sounds become one, healing people and earth.

I was a teenager, half naked on the beach when I saw the wind not just passing through but embracing me. I turned around and “saw” it “seeing” me. The sun and the sea were “seeing” me too, and I realized I was aware because all was aware around me. I bent down and picked up a stick lying in the sand and stood it up to tell the wind, the sun and the sea, “I see you.”

My arte precario was born as a response. My arte precario was born as a response, to speak to the sun and the sea, in a language they could read. I created tiny assemblages of debris, “cities” to be erased by high tide.

I return to Con con like the wave to the beach.
I pick the debris and smell its rot.
I sing its death, and I dissolve.
Who is dying, the little stick or my bones?
I am this debris. The shape of my death.
I am debris. Its sound is my breath.
Who breathes in its breath?
Is death alive, or lives in its breath?

The sea is hurting. Its sound is rage.
Rage and sorrow.
The shape of my love.