Devuélvannos el Oro: Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales. Colectivo Ayllu. Madrid: Matadero. Centro de Residencias Artísticas, 2018

Abstract

Devuélvannos el Oro: Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales brings together the results of more than a year of workshops, exhibitions, public interventions, reflections, and artistic manifestations by the Colectivo Ayllu. Located in Spain, this action group brings together collective research and artistic and political intervention from racialized migrants and queer, sexual, and gender dissidents from former Spanish colonies all over the world. Devuélvannos el Oro includes more than thirty documents of this work, many of which were included in the exhibition of the same name organized in Centro de Residencias Artísticas de Matadero Madrid in 2017. Across a wide variety of genres and styles, the collection comprises photo-performances, poems, visual interventions, personal reflections, and essays. Many of the documents, like their creators and the collective itself, resist being included in the traditional categories with which we have been taught to understand the world, performing the very disruption that the book aims to describe and prescribe, a “shifting/orgasming [corrimien to] of the normative forms of rationalist and intellectualocentric knowledge” (10). The character of this resistance is already graspable in the concept of “ayllu,” which gives the collective its name and is invoked as the central image of the book. Ayllu is a Quechua and Aymara form of community that has existed in different regions of the Andes, in what today is known as South America, before the extension of the Inca empire; it still exists today. The word refers to the form of political organization in place (the shared distribution of labor in an area, not necessarily self-sufficient, based on relations of solidarity and exchange with other ayllus), but also to community ties: ayllus comprise people who see themselves as sharing a distant ancestry, and thus constitute a form of extended family defined by their location in the mountains and not necessarily by blood ties. This last element speaks eloquently of the character of those included in Devuélvannos el Oro, and of the collective itself. Their tenuous location in the “Kingdom of Spain,” particularly Madrid, sometimes makes it impossible for them to be identified as racialized migrants rejected by the racist Spanish society, undocumented and othered, exoticized and fetishized. Yet there a kind of family tie summons writers, artists, and activists to the book and to the workshops and interventions of the collective, which can also be extended toward different territories colonized by Spain in the Americas and Africa.