Video for this track was originally published in Unmute Magazine's Winter 2/22/22 Edition. The audio track is included in my audio storytelling album Sfumato. The poetry is an excerpt from my micro-poetry collection Ninety-Two Surgically Enhanced Mannequins.
Artificial Intelligence created the artwork for the video and I designed the soundscape and poems, which tackle the absurdity of what it means to be human and honor how moments, not plots, compose our lives.
The piece is an attempt to capture these fleeting moments, while also trying to remember the intensity of the mundane and the abyss of the beautiful. It also directly confronts colonial forms of storytelling, so I designed the environment as a form of resistance. I wanted to create a dreamlike experience where everything conceivable and inconceivable could happen at once, and where time is not linear.
As I continue my journey to connect with my Indigenous roots, I am reminded of the different forms of storytelling throughout all of our nations that don't align solely to the plot/narrative arc forms of storytelling. As Emily Aguilar, an arts educator and community leader working to ignite Indigenous sovereignty and gender and racial justice, stated: "Euro-centric storytelling guidelines limit storyteller creativity. They also limit our understandings as recipients of stories. Some stories are shaped like an arc, but this isn't the only way. Not all stories have a beginning, middle, and end. Not all stories have a main character." Aguilar reminds us that some stories are shaped like water, a tree, fire, constellations, or the wind.
lyrics
Curly-haired girls dance salsa
as they hang the laundry.
Long, red peasant dresses
wrinkle tightly
to their hips.
They feel men’s eyes rhyming in the air
like vultures
flexing their talons.
Unshaven lips thaw in the heat.
In the colonial alley
the Inquisition’s residual agony
torments those leaving
the torture museum.
Bones fracture the fragile mind
of the French tourist
when the docent cracks his
swollen knuckles—
a latent prayer
to his pagan ancestors.
The wrinkles around her eyes
matched the ones on my cheeks.
We tried not to laugh
as we counted.
Senile
we lost track of age
so for fun
we used our smile lines
as tree rings
memoirs
chronicling our most sublime
moments.
The plaza’s voluptuous
Botero sculpture
calls street lamps
and flowerless trees
into battle.
They line up according to height
and are ordered to play freeze tag.
At their feet
it is unclear if pigeons
chase
shadows
or shadows pigeons.
Feeling detached
I sat beside myself and spoke.
Turned my shoulder
to meet myself,
shake my own hand
but to no avail.
No response.
Upon you I called to share
what cannot be shared:
our solitude.
The field of our embrace yellows
as the distance of our silence
grows.
In passing
our eyes shook hands
with a glance.
I looked up at her lunar palm
and placed within its hold
a mere glimpse
of what she could embrace.
I blinked.
Her grip lingered.
Ornery, churlish seagulls
encircle the light house.
Engulfed by alabaster fog,
Alcatraz resurfaces—
a steamship anchored
in the middle of the bay
awaiting parole.
I once supposed Truth
to be a woman
but I was wrong.
Instead, I found Hope
and she bit me
leaving teeth marks
on all my sides.
They prayed for the asteroid
to not fall on their shaven heads.
But faithandhope combined
are frail
and weigh less
than an infant’s tears.
A shield carved hollow
from a rotten log
or the embrace
of a stranger’s grandma
provide better protection.
First to rise
Mother punched the dough
releasing lifelong aggression
regret
for having birthed nine children
all too dumb to learn Latin
the language of the élite
and Holy Saints.
Her morning pastries—
sprinkled with distant swears
only she understood.
The government outlawed fun
so we dressed as clowns
took up balloon animals
and with laughing gas bombs
revolted.
My ears have scars to prove
her whispers
linger
like echoes
(like echoes).
Invisible moon
the sky weeps in your absence.
Hung over, I stumble,
loitering
on the open palm
of your shadow.
credits
from SFUMATO,
released January 31, 2022
“Surgically Enhanced Mannequins (1-13)” was also published in Unmute Magazine's Winter 2/22/22 Edition.
Julián Esteban Torres López, a divergent polymath and multi-hyphenate artist, explores how we engage with, make sense of,
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