In my first draft of this letter, I guessed at what this magazine would mean to me and what the title Interespacios truly meant in the context of my life and studies. But, as with many things, the process of involving myself into this undertaking, the days of contacting authors and artists, the reading of portfolios from across the Americas, and the designing of a website to unify these sometimes-disparate voices, revealed so much more than I expected.

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The art that makes up the majority of the aesthetic of this website came from the portfolio João provided for us. João and I met in a context much like the interespacio that we name ourselves after. In a language exchange in Madrid, I, a US citizen, was about to leave the gathering when this tall Brazilian man in a cowboy hat complimented my style. We left for another bar to chat and met many times over after that encounter finding a parallel desire to move to Germany by the middle of 2018. As João says in his interview, the chosen form of art is that which can best represent the original idea to an audience. From this, he performs and paints and draws and brutally pursues an idea in any manner to grab at the idea and to capture its “original atmosphere.”

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Schuyler, another Madrid contact I met in a liminal space, hits on other key ideas of Interespacios in his work titled, “Instructions for Reading this Prose Poem.” In it, we find a critique of and acquiescence to the crushing of these liminal states through criticism and definition, just as the chicks are defined by their gender in the work. So, there is a questioning of narrative that comes into the work of Interespacios, a questioning of industrialized spaces and ideas of progress and efficiency. Whether exploring these threads in cosmological bodies or ants, MG interrogates formative narratives of their life and the erasure of individuals in the process of discovery and scientific progress. Without this interrogation of our perspective, we have definitions that fail to capture the chaotic structure inherent in the way humans form meaning and connection. We don’t consider that Norys, a Venezuelan poet, in an arid climate could reinterpret, love, appreciate, and transfigure the poetry of Blake about lambs and the wet, dreary climes of England into images of goats and cacti. Aldo goes entirely in a different direction with his work. Like the constant formal transformation of João, Aldo combines illustration, writing, and soundscapes to create rich and complete environments of horror and science fiction. His creation of the hypothetical and phantasmagoric cracks the foundations of our daily lives to confront us with moral limit experiences.

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The nonfiction works we present here also string along this thread I have been sewing here. The work of Omar, the nonfiction editor and co-founder who started this revival of Interespacios, on the history of Chile originated as an encapsulating work of the history of politics in the country up to the current day, but it began expanding and gaining a life of its own. With the current uncertainty of the future of the country, Omar found more and more value in interrogating one of the most uncertain times in the history of the country. Sometimes when searching for the grand narratives, we fail to perceive the archetypes and micro-narratives that place themselves like a template over our own times. We found the same to be true in our discussions with Jesús “Chucho” García in “La historia y el futuro de reparaciones en las Americas.” Chucho spoke to us of wounds that had never healed in the history of the Americas and new wounds created out of this lack of rehabilitation.

 

I apologize if I have tried to make this idea too big or encapsulating, this idea of uncertainty. My original draft came with the image of the uncertainty principle in physics and a warning of making critical interpretations of the works herein. I will repeat that by saying, as we try to position and find the location of these moving creators, we lose sight of their momentum and influence. Conversely, if we only focus on their momentum and change, we lose sight of their position and environment. With this, I humbly present you Interespacios, a work that could not have been completed without the amazing contributions of authors, thinkers, artists, and creatives from across the Americas. Welcome to Interespacios.

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While we share the name Interespacios with the previous project from the Center for Interamerican Studies, we do not share any personnel or contact. Instead, we continue the theme of Interespacios because academia exists in a process of dynamism, transformation, coalescence, and accord. The project we put forward here may be of a different timbre, but it is played in harmony.