During the performance Bom Retiro 958 metros, Diana Taylor convey a recurrent sensation of estrangement. It seemed an experience of confusion, astonishment, and bewilderment which forced her to stay present, in the active practice of observing. It seems that no previous knowledge could be pertinent to guide her experience; “It’s hard to gauge what matters and what doesn’t, to know what to look at or what I’ve missed.” (Taylor, 7). It is the immersion into space which it is at the same time familiar and unknowing. This narrative invites me to think about the possibilities of our understanding to evaluate and relate with the unknowing, with the desire to open our perspective to other ways of understanding the world. How can we keep following the path of the decolonial thought from the uncertainty and the inevitable self-reference? Is it possible to access to another cosmovision without fall in the trap of project our gaze on the “Other”?
Viveiros de Castro warns us of the risk of approach to thinking about the alterity imposing our framework and interpret the difference under our agenda;
“By always seeing the Same in the Other, by thinking that under the mask of the other it is always just “us” contemplating ourselves, we end up complacently accepting a shortcut and an interest only in what is “of interest to us”-ourselves.” (Viveiros de Castro, 41)
Here we would end up no more than reproducing the colonial exercise of spotlight aspects responded to our own interest and concerns. The anti-narcissus gaze that we should practice may start in a simple exercise. Accepting, as Taylor did, the confusion, the disorientation. Falling, like her, in “the quandary in which the more I see, the less I know.”(Taylor, 4) And using that as a starting point a non-subordinated relation. It is exercising the cannibalism thinking with ourselves first, deglutination process of our intellectual authority and bring space “into a “self-displacing” (Viveiros de Castro,18). Only then appears the possibility of the decolonize endeavor of absorption of the “other.” The cannibalism act of acquiring a piece of knowledge which is impossible to be reduced to our logic. “We don’t have other tools to think with or know how else to articulate thought.”(Taylor, 15) We must embrace tough the experience of the practice of observing as a methodology. Looking at everything as it would the first time, accepting that this process has an end on itself. A practice of concession which activates the anthropophagic movement: “Against Memory as source of habit. Personal experience renewed.” (de Andrade, 94)
de Andrade, Oswald. "The Cannibalist Manifesto." Third Text 13. 1999. 92-95. Taylor, Diana. "Dead Capital: Teatro da Vertigem, Bom Retiro" . . : , 2018. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For Post-Structural Anthropology. Trans. Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014. Print.