JZ: Is the historical attitude of Indigenous womxn/femmes toward Spanish male colonizers an often contended issue in Ecuador?

AE: Let me illustrate the nature of the problem of what “contending” means in this case. First, if you understand how Colonial society was structured, you will see how difficult it was for Indigenous womxn to contend dominant, male and Spanish narratives. The Colonial society majority was kept illiterate. Indigenous womxn were denied an education until the 1970’s in Ecuador. For this reason, womxn were excluded from public life and directly participating in institutions. As a result, I do not know of first hand written accounts from Ecuadorian Indigenous womxn that can speak directly to this issue.

However, a new wave of researchers, such as Catherine Komisaruk, has unearthed the archives of judicial proceedings of the Spanish Royal Audience in Latin America to address recorded cases of rape. They are surprisingly few. In Central America, for example, from 1770 to 1823, out of a sample of 300 court cases, only five were reportings of rape. Although they are not first hand testimonies, they point towards the reality that Indigenous womxn experienced in the Colony.

Secondly, until the 19th century, the judicial colonial system had no name for rape or violación, as the coersion of sexual activity that we understand today. Referrred to as estupro, sexual violence was relevant to courts only in cases where girl’s virginity was “corrupted” or “deflowered.” For the courts, this was an easier feat to prove. How could society condemn an act for which there was no name for? What does this say about how we conceive femme sexual integrity? How can we remember something that at its time had no name?

The other cases in which womxn’s sexual integrity was infringed, hardly progressed at courts. The first limitation for Indigenous womxn was that justice was imparted by court magistrates, elite Spanish descending men, that privileged people of similar position. Courts judged based on ethnicity, race, class and social standing. The second impediment was that sexual infringement was hard to prove, especially when the voice of womxn had no weight. So the short answer is no, the historical attitude towards Indigenous womxn and Spanish colonizers has been an overlooked subject in Ecuadorian history.

JZ: I realized that I’m roughly equating the archive to the textbook, considering them both biased and imposing if not hegemonic. As a researcher or research-based artist, one is nevertheless entangled in records of sorts, each equipped with its own individual perspective. When one deconstructs a document, in order to make meaningful work, they also tend to create a new document. And this new text often replicates tendencies of the previous.

How do you juggle between the criticism that you create and the criticism that your process of creation makes you prone to?

AE: Yes, thank you for the question. I think that it is important to clarify my position behind this piece. I am speaking as a mestizx. Without growing inside Indigenous culture, it means that I have become responsible for the stories that I have learned, to expose the failures, blindspots and limits of Official History as a partial archive.

Although I am making space for silence, I cannot fill it. I cannot take the voice or authorship of Indigenous womxn. We have to hear it from them their own stories, which I am sure will exceed the format and conventions of the history book. Claiming historic truth is not about correcting a sentence in a book. Rather, it is about imagining other forms of archives.

JZ: This body of work seems to be particularly filled with emotions. Your alignment with the people whose voice has been taken away and a condemning gesture toward the establishment. Would you say that this body of work or your work at large is activist?

AE: In South America, we call activists “militants,” and it is because they devote their life efforts to their cause with tenacity. It is not a term that is taken lightly. Feminist activists are the ones that organize, mobililize, educate and put their bodies forward. As a citizen, I try to participate in their marches and protests. Although as an artist I work in the semiotic trenches and try to give a good symbolic fight, I consider our practices to be very different. Activist’s work (and rage!) definitely influences my own. They are for example: Luisa Lozano, Pacha Queer, Ni Una Menos, Cocha Batukada, La Yeguada, and more recently, Lastesis. Have you seen their video “el violador eres tú?” It was a performance born in Chile denouncing sexual violence and rape. Through local feminist groups, it has travelled around the world. It has raised a lot of awareness and gotten many conservatives pissed off, and that always makes me happy.

JZ: What is on the horizon for you and your work?

AE: In the near future, I’m excited to be driving with my partner down to New Mexico for the AIR residency at Carrizozo, which is managed by my darling friend Paula Wilson. It’s always incredible to be parachuted into a new location. It means having the chance to respond, to adapt, and experiment unrestrictedly, with no expectations. As a massage therapist, performer and dancer, my partner is teaching me to trust the sensations and knowledge from the body. I’m thrilled to be joining our creative efforts in the desert. It feels expansive!

On a more distant horizon, I am finding ways to bridge the conversations between the womxn of Quito and Chicago. Especially in these times of political unrest, it is important to be open to learn from each other. The future of what happens in South and North America are intricately related. Because I haven't defined on which latitude I will be, wherever I am, I want to continue making art that can honor the stories of womxn.

JZ: What do you hope to evoke with the silence you have created by cutting out the sentence from the page?

AE: To make something more apparent, sometimes you have to remove it. Absence speaks quite loudly when it becomes clear, defined and audible. For two reasons, I have redacted the sentence from the page. First, I want its contents to be scrutinized. Four Dimensions of a Monolith is accompanied by a text-based piece in which the passage mentioned before can only be read if the viewers position themselves in close proximity to it, evaluating every word intently. Secondly, through my materials, I want to give shape to historic omissions and materialize absence to make it visible.

Silence is necessary to perceive absence. Different meanings and practices of silence interest me. As an auditory phenomenon, silence evocates emptiness, yet it is not total absence. Silence becomes the most powerful when it can take up space. As a social phenomenon, tuning down dominant narratives allows for lower frequencies, like alternative stories, to emerge. There, we can pay closer attention to what hums and what is in the shadows. As an interruption, silence is also a form of contestation. My friend Brittany Laurent informed my conception of silence. She has a beautifully quiet demeanor. Brittany taught me to understand silence as a place for deep thought and slow time. In funerals for example, we allow for a couple of minutes as a tribute for what has been lost and that which cannot be named. Silence is also a form of mourning. As with Four Dimensions of a Monolith silence is the preliminary moment before regrouping, reconfiguring and action.

JZ: The inverted, hanging tripod in one of your installations subjects the likeness of the textbook page and its void to a ray of examining light. What’s added to this project with this light? If you have to assign the light to someone, whose light is it?

AE: Historically, we often associate light as illuminating thought. In the West, we love light. Think of the Period of Enlightenment, in which Eurocentric views posed reason as the driving force of progress. Enforced in Latin America during colonization, this view initiated an epistemic genocide that annihilated many native world views and cosmologies. This piece challenges that which the Eurocentric rationale obscures.

When the author of the textbook frames colonial rape as an instrument for social advancement, he is enforcing the logic of the Spaniards, he is speaking from power. For this reason, the light from the hanging tripod stands as the dissecting and unmediated force of colonialist history. Passing through a stack of resin casted books with an opening shaped as the passage, light is funneled directly onto the floor. Simultaneously, light also acts as a metaphor for the ubiquitousness of power.

Power, when at operation, is rendered transparent and goes unperceived. Because resin is translucent, I chose it as my material to cast my history textbook. The resin, however, is not totally clear: it contains hair collected from my favorite Ecuadorian salon or peluquería in Chicago. I think of the materiality of hair as the physicality of femme bodies and the concreteness of their lived experiences. The stories of these bodies, arranged as a fibrous network, are set against this dissecting light of history and cast a shadow. Kevin Young’s essay “The Shadow Book,” from The Grey Album, was influential in conceptualizing this shadow. Every publication we have is haunted by unwritten, removed and lost books.

There are a lot of inverted relationships in this piece, of light & dark, foreground & background, high & low, up & down. I was thinking a lot on how power relationships and dominant narratives can be inverted through the idea of the monolith. Monoliths hold their weight on their shorter side. Destabilizing them can mean shifting light and the perspective in which they are seen. Destabilizing monoliths can also mean relativizing our sense of direction. Also, I went quite literally when making the destabilization concept apparent - the metallic projector is missing a leg.