Text by Gwynne Fulton

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“Worldwide,” writes Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar, “multiple struggles for the reconstruction of communal spaces and for reconnecting with nature are giving rise to political mobilizations for the defense of the relational fabric of life.” We see these struggles across the so-called “Americas”—continents constituted through interconnected colonial histories of genocidal conquest and plunder—from the pine forests of Kanehsatà:ke, Québec to the Atacama salt flats of present-day Northern Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, where the Atacameño Lickanantay people continue to defend their ancestral territories, ways of living and knowing. These resistance movements require experiments in “worlding,” commoning and collectivity, but also aesthetic languages—cinematic and otherwise.

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Taking as its title the prefix “infra-,” Latin for “below,” Malena Szlam’s first Canadian solo gallery exhibition develops a poetics of the material world in a process of transmutation just below the threshold of human perception. The work gathered in the exhibition Infra— initiates collaborations with natural phenomena through analogue processes. Her cinematic geopoetics explores human and non-human relationships with earth, or what the Atacameño call Pachamama. Szlam’s work is attuned to subterranean turbulence. Attentive to the incessant rhythms and rumblings through which the earth communicates, her images listen for the seismic signals and molten flows in the belly of volcanoes. Translating these hidden dialogues, her images unravel a shimmering underworld that Escobar, drawing on Andean cosmovisions, calls “el mundo de abajo,” or infraworld. 

A restless camera stutters across irregular forms of an ancestral desert-world. Images pulsate with the celestial vitality of dream-worlds. At once breathtakingly beautiful and beset by interconnected registers of ecological, ontological and political violence, Szlam’s images of land and sky heed a present, haunted by absences and omissions—of lunar time and its vernacular cultures of storytelling and the desert’s ongoing colonial histories of extractivism.

Lyrical, expanded, embodied, feminist, phenomenological: Szlam’s work belongs to these avant-garde lineages of experimental cinema, but also to another framework grounded in the Latin American decolonial movement. If aesthetics (a term that comes from the Ancient Greek concept aesthesis) has been dominated by a Western tradition, Latin American decolonial aesthetics reclaims other ways of sensing, perceiving and relating to nonhuman worlds. Drawing on magic-realism and the space-time of contrasts that belongs to ukhu pacha—earth’s invisible inside, whose “eyes” are caves, volcanoes and mines—Szlam’s films experiment with syncretic ways of organizing sonic and visual spectra of sensory experience below the threshold of human perception. Hers is an aesthesis of the infra-.

Silver plays a central role in Szlam’s infra-aesthetics, linking Canadian multinational mining companies to dusty red mountains of silver, lithium and other strategic minerals scattered throughout the Andean region, to Kodak factories on US soil: to filmstock, semiconductors, touch screens, and the (human and more-than-human) labour that sustains capital. Szlam explores the “natural world,” yet this is not “Nature” as it has been understood under the scientific horizon of instrumentalism that transforms “world” into “nature” and “nature” into “resources” when it links mineral-(under)worlds to “world markets.” Reimagining our relation to the nonhuman world, here nature too is sentient. Perhaps silver has its own aesthesis, its own way of perceiving. The very mineral matter extracted from Andean mines travels through a global network of exchange to end up suspended up in celluloid, the flesh of cinematic worlds, to be exposed once again by silvery rays of the moon, or to expose the wretchedness of earth. Film is an ambivalent medium: both a hallucinogenic material witness and active agent in the predatory global capitalism that continues to feed on the open veins of Latin America.

Without escaping complicity, Szlam’s geopoetics explores ways of relating to the nonhuman world. The moon dances frenetically across the screen, enacting fugitive time that transgresses the linearity with which Western thought attempts to discipline it. Spaces and times collide against one another, opening new dimensions of agency and imagination. Silence is filled with infrasonic noise. The present is inhabited by past and future worlds, breaking the “hellish cycle” of what Fanon calls “colonial temporality.” As you navigate this body of work spanning nearly two decades and a dizzying array of analogue processes, consider how this syncretic entanglement of sensory worlds mobilizes for the defense of the relational fabric of life.

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Gwynne Fulton is a theorist and independent curator based between Tio’tia:ke/Montreal and Bogotá. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on visibility and violence in critical thought and contemporary art. She holds a PhD in Philosophy and Art History from Concordia University, where she is currently a postdoctoral researcher. She is a contributor at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. Her writing has appeared in esse, Mosaic, In/Visible Culture and Dazibao editions.