The Brooklyn Rail

In the dream I walked out into the backyard to see the yellow wildflowers held in the web by my window—“salieron flores salvajes y no habían ojos humanos todavía.” This first line is taken from an email that I wrote to Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola in October 2023. I was describing a vivid dream image that occurred after a long phone call between us the night before, during which we discussed the work gathered in her debut book, The Telaraña Circuit (Tender Buttons, 2023). The second line, from her long poem “Toponym,” appears only in Spanish. I opened to it when I returned to her book nearly a year later. We called shortly after I finished my first summer living in Mexico City, where I became close with Lucía and her partner, the novelist Diego Gerard Morrison, facilitated by our shared literary affinities and mutual community. Lucía performs often and in a variety of settings around Mexico City—I first saw her reading upstairs at Pulquería Los Insurgentes at an event which included an unforgettably daring performance by La Congelada de Uva; and not long after, I was in her audience at the small gallery Pequod & Co., where she performed her score-poem “Sonoro Rugir (Anti-himno)” on the floor surrounded by synthesizers, rocks, texts, and instruments, and Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta also read. Toward the end of the summer, we read together among other dear friends on the roof of Francisco Fenton’s infamous Librería Escandalar, a place where all roads inevitably converge for poets in Mexico City.

Since then, Lucía’s range of activity has been matched only by the sheer diversity of artistic output that her practice encompasses. In November 2023, she mounted All These Entangled Voices, a major two-person exhibition at Vernacular Institute, which included an ensemble performance, “Rewritings of Invocation,” that recuperated scores anonymously written by Mexican nuns in the 16^th century. We reunited in New York in early Spring 2024 for a reading that Tessa Bolsover and I hosted at Ciera BrittonGallery, which coincided with Lucía’s solo show Sonando el suelo/Sounding the Ground at SVA Flatiron Project Space (her alma mater); and over the past few months, while together again in Mexico City, she’s given performances at the sonic gallery Centro316, with Columbian musician Ricardo Gallo; staged a cinematic collaboration with Chloe Zimmerman and Concepción Huerta at Centro de Cultura Digital; and a solo performance at Centro Cultural de España.

The Telaraña Circuit, a book that spans a decade of writing, visual art, and performance stills, offers one point of entry into this constantly morphing, while always highly integrated, body of work. At once a selected poems, a collection of scores, and a testimony to the significance of intergenerational feminine creativity in her life, The Telaraña Circuit makes of the book a kind of devotional object that radiates with the force of multiple artistic lineages focused through the voice of a singular inheritor.

At the heart of The Telaraña Circuit is a poetics of mediumship: of the poet-artist’s role in activating latent potentialities between media for composing new sensorial realities, and of the poet herself as a conduit or resonator of experiential forms that traverse the ordinary temporal and spatial coordinates of the human environment. “Memory,” Lucía writes in a short preface to the book’s eponymous section, is “a transitional state,” existing within conditions of shifting loss and accretion, contingent and contested in its proximity to living communities and its vulnerability to historical extraction. “Our opacities,” she continues, “inhabit immeasurable perceptual relations.” Like the quietly epiphanic act of poiesis in Lucía’s work, memory lives at the vital crossroads of concealment and revelation through recurrent performances of subversive perceptual expansion, bound as they always are by interrelated power enactments taking place across the various terrains of political, socio-cultural, and spiritual realities. The zones of opacity that she cultivates are those areas of embodied knowledge and relation rendered invisible, seemingly unreachable, and ultimately impermissible by the violences of borders (national, conceptual, sensorial) that fracture our capacities for communality.

Such a transgressive effort to resensitize personal and collective awareness among the interstices of imposed boundaries is not aimed at a reparative transformation of the opaque into transparency—of the fragment into the whole or a recuperation of the absent—but the inhabitation of the shadow of the contemporary world’s pervasive regimes of dispossession: “even the fundamental is / erased to be found to be erased we must be lost keeping track looking for / the absence of all things inhabiting this erosion of mind.” And it is a shadow that continuously gains in gradation a density of meaning as matter that refuses to ever be absolutely lost, instead persisting as the very basis of the regeneration of the living—“its unbroken / medullar body is in the minerals of your blood still in correspondence / with your astral body all phenomena are symbols from somewhere else / like this cosmogenic unfolding that is / permanently hiding.” Or as she writes in the short poem “Friction / Frontier,” in which transgression augurs insurgency:

Named and unnamed spirits guide the work of The Telaraña Circuit, which Lucía describes as a “fieldwork method.” Nearly half of the book gravitates around the archaeological site of Huamelulpan, two-thousand years ago a major Mixtec city, today located in northwest Oaxaca. The book, Lucía writes, is “dedicated to women archeologists,” and contains a portrait of her deceased aunt, Margarita Gaxiola González, young at the time of the photograph, on site at Huamelulpan where she lived and worked for years. Margarita’s published study, Huamelulpan: Un centro urbano de la Mixteca Alta, is illustrated with diagrams of tepalcates, painted ceramic fragments, which in Lucía’s reproductions appear like notations from an anonymous or unknown score. It’s in this sense that Lucía receives these images, as if transmitted to her by way of her aunt’s lineage as an aural map or impulse to Huamelulpan as a terrain of receptivity.

The long, intermedial, and ongoing works “The Telaraña Circuit” and “Toponym” emerge as elemental registrations of her own retracing of her aunt’s past presence at Huamelulpan, attendant especially to somatic apprehensions of the work of wind as both inscriptive and abrasive, an environmental texture in which “archive and erosion commune”—“archivos tejidos // por el pulso del viento.” Authorship operates here as an elusive constellation of voices, human and otherwise. Archaeological fragments crafted and decomposed over centuries bear the residual presence of their unnamed makers. Over millennia, telluric metabolism has drawn the contours for hieroglyphic letterforms of an evolving living language. A generation ago, Margarita sequenced these characters into graphic grammars that only amplify the opacities they’ve come to harbor across time. The subterranean, that privileged realm of archaeologists, is approached in Lucía’s work as a templum of hermetic poetic processes that unfold in excess of—by undergoing—the impoverished topology of modern knowledge.

The fieldwork that Lucía speaks of is a choreography for contexts of collaborative performance in which the remoteness of transtemporal participants is never eclipsed by the intimacy of their encounter. Distance and proximity integrate in the generative porousness of ellipsis. Vibrances itinerant across layered geographies and whole eras of planetary life are embedded in matter and material in perpetual recomposition, charged with spectral ecologies animating a consciousness of place as “ecstatic awareness”: “bajo la oración de sus cráteres // mineralesubterráneos // brotan / alfabetos / escrituras / asémicas.” “Consciousness,” she writes in the poem “Chemical Language,” “is / waste // (a metabolic byproduct).” Transposing archaeology to poetics via expanded lineages of feminine care, Lucía repositions the archaeological artifact, no longer merely evidence of an inert past under the lens of a vampiric discourse of knowledge extraction, but as a talisman for “re-cognition” that addresses and calls to us.

Telaraña translates to spiderweb; it is a sieve as interface, entanglement, and conductor of overlaid frequencies of sensation. By creating receptive networks of subtle emanatory signals through aesthetic media—poems, scores, and visual channels at once—the web as book, as instrument in a larger practice, becomes an architecture for attunement. Much more than devices of capture, spiderwebs manifest a prosthetic sensorium as vibrational transmission structures that translate the environment into currents of music. Tensile weaves composed of various density silk threads are constantly adjusted by spiders to modulate scales of attention, creating sensate orchestrations of space. Not unlike poems or the human nervous system, they are stress circuits co-regulating through an immersion in significatory flux. An arachnean sensibility of permeable woven realities informs The Telaraña Circuit, alerting us to an alternative music at play in the world, of which the poet’s role is more arranger than creator. I think of the experimental intellectual Fernand Deligny when he wrote, “Can we say that the spider’s project is to weave its web? I don’t think so. We might as well say that the web’s project is to be woven.”¹

When Lucía writes “all phenomena are symbols from somewhere else,” she places us in the interplay of entanglement and emanation. She tunes us to an outside or elsewhere that rings in words as immanent presence rather than severed origins: “las palabras son poemas fosilizados,” intonation’s grain rubbing against our own speech in choral impressions of otherness. Her performances ritualize collective audition of such a sonic plenum, of our capacity to speak as heirs of a communal ancestrality that continues to emerge. “We evoke a prayer,” she writes, “from the longitude of a note the sound has already / disappeared but its frequency is still held… the / resonance of what’s hidden is the question that must remain open like a / note that never / ends.” It’s in this sense that I think of her work as a practice of syncretic vitalism refusing a colonially fractured world through the transmutation of time, space, cultural realities, and artistic media as elements of a larger living entity. Or better still, a ch’ixi vitalism, to borrow an Aymara term from Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, which evokes “the idea of something that is and is not at the same time…”

The ch’ixi stone, therefore, is hidden in the bosom of mythical animals like the serpent, the lizard, the spider, or the frog; ch’ixi animals belong to time immemorial… The potential of undifferentiation is what joins opposites.²

Or as Lucía writes in an unpublished lyric essay, “Towards a Poetics of Friction,” “Orality, like weather, traverses the rock-word.”

Her performances, be them filmic, sonic, or graphic, realize a contentious animacy “within intervals of marking and absence,” emitting mantric frictions by which the degraded and decayed might be experienced as feedback of the inarticulable: “en una nube de murmullos / me dijeron // … en un golpe de viento // … sonido en retroalimentación.” Compositional ceremonies, her performances conjure feedback loops (retroalimentación) that enact the disintegration of words as efficient means of communication in order to amplify vibratory reserves of phonemic particles in kinetic, creative motion. The elemental, she insists, is a reservoir of sounding bodies in relation; the seeming ambience of space scaled to another order, teeming and dense with connectivity:

There is a drama of mysticism being practiced here. Lucía’s handling of words, inscriptions, and gestures imbues them with the import of talismans: “If you learn to read it /… symbol[s], / amulet[s] // blinking to separate / … interference or incision.” Against the monumentality of historical loss and the inflicted amnesias of manufactured memory, Lucía intones the emergent possibility of what she calls “future memory,” that poetic hearing of the past’s vitality as it ferries us toward an unforeclosed reunion with all that’s composed us—

“where is the echo? // she asks // it is at / the interface / coming / with the / currents.” In the dream I walked out into the backyard to see the yellow wildflowers held in the web by my window. “where are these flowers from? // they are an echo”