Decolonial liminalities; an autopoietic-allopoietic approach to Isabel Aguerrebere’s work; Between the scyborg and the new mestiza

This paper provides a complex conceptualization of the decolonizing practice of the Mexican movement-artist Isabel Aguerrebere, in conversation with Maria Lugones’ theory of liminality, as developed in her article “On Complex Communication”. The purpose of this theoretical exploration is to consider the potential for creatingcommunicational spaces using art for developing autopoietic/allopoietic coalitions between different living entities. Building such spaces entails both critically/sensibly approaching and inhabiting liminal spaces (as exemplified by Aguerrebere’s movement exercises), as a means to help bring individuals to emancipate themselves from their discursive subjectivation. Producing alternative living-relational spaces requires critically resisting the hegemonic capitalist/colonial paradigm, which stigmatizes non-normative difference and inferiorizes individuals through the punitive implementations of Modern categories for identity and sociality. The main argument of the essay orbits around Lugones’ (2006) concept of the limen, which draws from Gloria Anzaldua’s earlier concept of the borderlands, and that was later developed into her notion of nepantla (2015). The limen implies the enabling of complex types of communication between different kinds of oppressed peoples, in order to build effective decolonial coalitions. Lugones’ liminality entails what she calls a process of poiesis, or a type of self-construction. I consequently develop an argument from the perspective of Humberto Maturana (1994), who developed the concept of autopoiesis/allopoiesis and cognition. I thus entangle these considerations, albeit from the perspective la paperson’s concept of the scyborg (2017), which builds on this liminal logic of the third space, to formulate its critique of colonial technologies of social organization and knowledge production.