How to be many on earth?
An emotional affair or... building worlds through differences by Mario Barrantes Espinoza
For the opening essay of Kaaitheater's January-June brochure, we asked artist Mario Barrantes Espinoza to dive deeper in the question 'How to Be Many on Earth?'
...love, sex and friendship have become my companions. They remain with my body despite the taxing years of study, work, and above all, bureaucracy in the Global North. When trembling at the thought of appearing overly sentimental, rendered as a predictable cliché of Latinx ‘affective excess’, I listen to their words... ‘it’s not so much that your Latinx affect is excessive, but that the affective performance of normative whiteness is minimalist to the point of emotional impoverishment’. Fears are gone. We are already many. An existence-in-difference among the living, the non-human and inorganic. Within ourselves. Through our friendship and sexual encounters, through the exchange of bodily fluids and the emotive, we become fluent in other political and erotic modalities, in other ways of caring for each other on this planet...
Mario Barrantes Espinoza is a Costa Rican-Nicaraguan artist based in Brussels. Their work articulates performance, the (re)writing of texts, and the use of voice, with materials sourced trom pop culture and mainstream media. They will perform FLESH CAN'T CAN' T NOT'T 'TIS FLESH H ... on 27 and 28 April at De Kriekelaar.