2024 - On-going
Theoretical grounds of the Research
Cannibal Enfleshments research project is supported by a theoretical framework that interweaves posthuman philosophy, queer studies, decolonial thought, and Amerindian cosmology. This conceptual framework allows for reimagining cannibalism not as an act of barbarism, but as a mutating device, a strategy for subjective, political, and ecological transformation. The starting point is the conception of the nomadic subjectivity developed by Rosi Braidotti, who expands upon Deleuzian concepts of nomadism and becoming. For Braidotti, nomadic subjectivities are subjectivities in constant flux, in a perpetual state of “in-process.” Within this framework, although “the subject might be physiologically embedded in the corporeal materiality of the self, the nomadic subject is kind of in-between, simultaneously interconnecting and transcending external and internal influences and affects.” Under this theory, an individual is no longer seen as an isolated, embodied fixed identity, but rather as a mutating entity that serves as a vehicle for diverse energies, connections, imaginaries and desires; within the ‘self’, multitudes co-exist.
From 2010 to 2014, while working as a policy maker, I witnessed how an individual’s life experience transformed into resistance movements and collectives. The organization Santamaría Fundación in Cali, for instance, was born as a vindication act of the life and passing of trans woman María Paula Santamaría, who was killed due to her sexual identity. This tragic story shifted and incarnated in the lives (purpose) of other queer people who still demand for social justice today. Along the same lines, drag performance also embodies multiple lives and experiences on stage. It does so by presenting dissident forms of representation and symbolism through music and dance. The performer incarnates the singer, the activist and the segregated, the glamour and drama of the spotlight, while zooming in where queer lives have been misrepresented and silenced. These practices challenge and destabilize static identities through queerness, aligning with what Paul B. Preciado calls, as a post-identitarian movement in charge of critiquing the exclusionary and marginalizing processes created by fictional identities and categories.
Queer activism thus forms nomadic subjectivities in a process of becoming, mutual contaminations, and fluid energies and affects that resonate across life experiences and transmute from one being to others, creating radical solidarities (and kinships). This production of the political -the way in which we relate to each other and how power is distributed among all beings- intertwines with feminist theory, a fundamental basis of queer thought, where authors like Silvia Federici show us how women have historically sustained relationships of cooperation with the natural commons and the more-than-human. This articulation is evident in today’s environmental struggles coming predominantly from the global south and led by indigenous and Afro-descendant women, who propose an ecological way of inhabiting based on responsibility and interdependence. The urgency created by the current environmental crisis has mobilized queer thought and political practice, once again activating other forms of radical solidarity, proposing other ways of inhabiting the world, and subverting dominant systems based on reproductive and extractivist principles. In this way, queering transcends heteronormative critique to become a comprehensive ecopolitical proposal: “a collective adventure to redefine the status of the human within the extended ecosystem of interdependencies in which the human exists.”
This intersection finds its resonance in Amerindian cosmology, where the ‘self’ is not an isolated entity but belongs to the cosmos. Within Amazonian ontology, all beings—whether corporeal, incorporeal, or inert—possess a perspective, are capable of transformation, and contain multiplicity. As Viveiros de Castro asserts, indigenous politics is inherently cosmopolitics, describing “a universe inhabited by different types of actors or subjective agents, both human and non-human (…) gods, animals, the dead, plants, meteorological phenomena, objects, and artifacts are all endowed with the same general set of perspectival, appetitive, and cognitive dispositions; in other words, with similar souls” that may transform their bodily form and affects by becoming-other through ritual, shamanic processes, alliances and symbiosis. Within this ontological and epistemological framework, to know is to acknowledge that all beings see the world from their own perspective; it can also mean seeing through the eyes of another, personifying the other, eating the other. It is from this profound relationality that cannibalism emerges as a fundamental transformative practice. For the Tupinambá, it was a means to devour the enemy’s alterity, appropriate their perspective, and consume their virtues to fortify the community. Similarly, in Arawete cosmology, divinities devour the souls of the dead as “a prelude to the metamorphosis of the dead into immortal beings.”
This ontological Amerindian frameworks were distorted by the colonial project. According to Suely Rolnik, Latin America—especially Brazil—was permeated by indigenous anthropophagy in its production of subjectivity. The conquistadors instrumentalized accounts of anthropophagic communities, creating the “founding myths” that legitimized exploitation and the imposition of Western systems of thought, categorizing indigenous peoples as savages. The very etymology of “cannibal” (from Caribs) operated as a discursive device of subjugation. These myths were re-signified by the Brazilian modernist vanguards in the 1920s, who proposed anthropophagy as an act of critically devouring Western hegemonic culture, advocating for a hybrid and syncretic cultural and aesthetic identity.
These conceptual frameworks, which I approach with deep respect and admiration, inspire the extension that Cannibal Enfleshments makes of cannibalism as a mutating device that serves as a queer political and ecological strategy. My engagement with these Amerindian epistemologies is driven by a personal intention to decolonize thought and to engage with non-Western knowledge systems, particularly those from the Latin American (Abya Yala) context with which I feel a profound bond. It is crucial to clarify that the project is informed by these systems but does not directly represent Amazonian Indigenous practices or thought, as I am not in a position to address that knowledge directly. I do not speak on behalf of Indigenous communities—I recognize there is much more to learn. Instead, I am following the advice of Taita Chindoy to polinizar el pensamiento (pollinate thought) by amplifying indigenous messages. Following Rolnik's and Taita Chindoy’s invitation to learn from and to build bridges with ancestral thought in order to amplify its historically invisibilized critical capacities, the project insists on the existence of other possible ways of inhabiting the world: other forms of governance, relationships, solidarities, and symbioses.
Special thanks to:
Postnatural Independent Program
This work has been shown in:
West, Contemporary Art Center, Den Haag (2025) as part of the show Life on Earth, Art and Ecofeminism curated by Catherine Taft.