ABSTRACT
Award-winning San Antonio-based Chicana artist and filmmaker Laura Varela, in collaboration with German artist Vaago Weiland, in their 2009 site-specific mixed media installation Enlight-Tents, challenged and reimagined the Alamo’s status as a “master symbol” during San Antonio’s annual neoliberal arts festival, Luminaria. Varela’s own marginalized status as a Chicana artist in a predominately White and male-dominated arts scene figured into both the material production of the installation as well as the subjugated knowledges it animated. I specifically argue that in Enlight-Tents Varela and Weiland revealed “alter-Native” histories and the complex ways in which the past continues to impinge on the present and future. In addition to Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s notion of the “alter-Native”, I draw on Anzaldúan concepts such as the “shadow beast” and “making face” to show how Enlight-Tents momentarily disrupted and redistributed this space—affectively, visually, and physically—to make space for other, heretofore histories and knowledges to surface, take shape within dominant registers of intelligibility. As such, I understand Varela and Weiland as contributing to a growing body of Latinx speculative aesthetics and utopian thought which disinters discarded pasts and reconnects them to the present and future in new and innovative ways in pursuit of social justice and transformation.
