Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, The Telaraña Circuit

 

i am looking for the formshe said or the raw material specifically from the plane of its existence itwas a search for a perceptual practice like the sensation of matter over thesurface of your skull or water as the architecture of memory a game of awarenessor profusion allow the ecstasy of thought to come inside the pipes while yourjaw is locked thinking of perception expanding like a future transmission orthe actuality of mystery now i see her tactile mind flowing in the conduit ofexperience

Self-describedas Mexico City-based Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola’s “first book of poems” is TheTelaraña Circuit & other poems (New York NY: Tender Buttons Press,2023), a descriptor that doesn’t even begin to hold the multitudes within thisexpansive multimedia conceptual work that includes lyric, performance,photography, visuals, descriptions of video stills, typewritten script andphysical experimentation. As she writes, early on in the collection: “experimentthe moving shape of memory the archaeology of sound this vacuum is / our threadrelation a series of questions that are also open like breath to breath your /deathbed in your mother’s room your whole life an archive of inhalations you were/ unearthing a city covered in / deep time [.]” There is a way through whichthis collection exists as a collage-experiment on form itself, working perceptionand shaping that seek out its form through a collage of overlapping approaches,almost as changing states in mid-stream, from one to another. This is a bookthat studies form, means, memory and perception; if hers a book of water, it isone that includes rain, evaporation, lakes and tears, snowfall and the glacier.The Telaraña Circuit & other poems exists as not purely collage, buta kind of layering, one that sees further layering through a foreword, “ANTEMANO/ BEFOREHAND,” by poet Carolina Ebeid, that offers:

The Telaraña Circuit openswith a video still of the poet’s hand performing a ritual at the mouth of acave in the archeological site of San Martín Huamelulpan. In the recording, we hearrhythmic scratching on the site wall as Lucía’s fingers transcribe the bits oftepalcates, ceramic and rock patterns from an archaeological illustration andtext her aunt, Margarita, produced decades before disarticulated kinship storytold in palimpsetic time, as they both, years apart, inhabit the same slantedlight hitting the wall in jagged angles. It’s an ancient music, the scratch-scratch,recorded in these poems. We also sense it in the scans of her handwriting, thecrisscross back and forth of the eraser the hand impressing itself on the page.“Every mark on paper is an acoustic mark” Susan Howe affirms. Lucía’s workitself proposes that to listen involves the whole body.

AsGaxiola describes, early on in the collection, this collection, this project,is an examination of, and even a collaboration with, her late archaeologistaunt’s archive and work. “Some of these works were triggered by my aunt’sarcheological investigation from 1974. Margarita Gaxiola González. […] Her investigationbecame a map of intimacy, a generative symbol of fragmented memory (both intimateand historical) locating an impulse during my poetic/somatic research. I translatedsome of the book’s archaeological illustrations into scores: a notationalmethod to create and reimagine her exploration as sound, as open energy, ascontinuation. This document transmuted into direct experience as I startedworking with the tracing and erasing of memory, and simultaneously working onother projects, using poetry as a fieldwork method.” There is something quitefascinating in Gaxiola’s approach, and one might even see this collection as simultaneouslyeither or both the final product of a large, ongoing project, and the fieldworkreport of her investigations.

I’malways intrigued when poetry titles appear from those from a visual artbackground or perspective, often providing far more expansive considerations ofform and structure, whether Andrea Actis’ full-length debut Grey All Over(Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], Kenyatta A.C.Hinkle’s SIR (2019) [see my review of such here], Michael Turner’s Kingsway(Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp, 1995) or even any of the work by Canadian poet Christian Bök (an artist I’ve long considered to be a conceptual artist who happens towork within the considerations of the poem). There is something in how thevisual, the image, is shaped and approached, well beyond the boundaries oflanguage itself. These are not simply words on the page, but the page itself asa visual, concrete and conceptual space. As she writes towards the back of thecollection, as part of her “notes on sound encapsulating the conditions ofremembrance”:

Some years ago I starteda process work that turned into a series of rituals. The first one was titled cámeracrema / nueva. These were two old metallic suitcases that belongedto my father. For many years, he stored his 35mm cameras in these suitcases. Oneof them was labelled cámera crema and the other nueva. I decidedto place film-slides of family images that were shot in Mexico in the year 1993in cámera crema and pour water over them every day for a year. Thesuitcase could contain the water that began to transform into the images,absorbing their colors and smells. Once all images became part of the water,creating rivering, fluorescent colors, I decided that the transparent slidesbelonged in the other suitcase, the one labeled nueva. I then wateredthe plants in my studio with it: they survived. Through the plants resilience, Iwas surrounded with disembodied images that were alive. How is a process of degradationrecorded? And where is absence located. Memory has a vibratory aspect whichextends beyond the image and our experiences as individuals. It amplifies whilelistening because every time we remember we are listening. Can we produce morememory with its residue? An archive might record its own decay.