ABSTRACT
Informed by Sylvia Wynter’s proposal to engage ceremony to disrupt the foundational structures of catastrophic “monohumanism” and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s analysis of the ways that bodies have long been used for “metaphysical technolog[ies] of bio/necropolitics,” in this essay, Firmino-Castillo asks how body-based performance as a form of onto-corporeal experimentation might be practiced without reproducing the death-worlds of anti-Black and colonial violence. Firmino-Castillo reflexively engages this question through Oxlaval Aq’b’al (Ixil Maya: Thirteen Twilight), a performance she coorganized with artists taisha paggett and Tohil Brito in response to George Floyd’s extrajudicial assassination and other acts of anti-Black and colonial violence that occurred in 2020. The essay focuses on a segment of Oxlaval Aq’b’al’s improvisational score in which there is an impasse between two bodies—taisha paggett’s and her own—an impasse that seemingly reperformed necropolitical spatiotemporal tropes. Firmino-Castillo and paggett explore this impasse, and Firmino-Castillo’s initial (mis)interpretation of it, through a dialogical hermeneutic that paggett likens to dream interpretation and water slipping through fingers. This hermeneutic exchange—as well as Firmino-Castillo’s reflections on her embodied actions and the words and movements of collaborators paggett, Brito, Almah LaVon Rice, Lukas Avendaño, and Samuel Briseño—contribute to a reflexive consideration of the onto-epistemic opacity that, as Wynter argues, perpetuates catastrophic worldings. The essay considers the potential that body-based performance has to clear this opacity as a step toward cognizing and breaking with the onto-corporeal technologies of bio/necropolitics.
