ABSTRACT
In the circuit of exchange between the wink that’s about to occur and the death that’s imminent, in the exchange between the absurd and the official, the art of the naive and the ingenuous gathers its wherewithal, fast-frozen in the image on the wall of the school, police station, prison, and popular shrine. Here is where the crucial exchanges occur, the same exchange of powers that occurs between the spirit queen and the Liberator, icon of the state-founding violence of the anti-colonial wars now washed away in wave after wave of infantilizing kitsch, while she, in her nether-space of wildness and margination, in ways obvious and oblique, also maintains the presence of this founding violence.
