Heterotopías

In this new issue of Heterotopías (number 14), in addition to its usual sections, we present the dossier “The gaze endorecida: El dorado, a heterotopia”, coordinated by Marcela Cecilia Marín (editor of our magazine) and Pablo Julián Méndez (artist and curator). El dorado permeates the borders between fiction, myth, imagination and history and encompasses multiple modes of existence that turn our gazes golden. Dazzled by the enjoyment of reflections, they project (and return) forms of value and greed that feed the blind belief in infinite accumulation and extractivism, without considering the ways of life or the possibility of counting the inhabitants that make up each golden heterotopia and feel their existence affected. Marín and Méndez invite us to think about what is El Dorado? How many El Dorados exist and existed in different geographical coordinates, but with similar ways of life? We know that El dorado functions as a colonial operative, but how many times have we stopped to think about the materiality and the agents involved in this history and in its perception? what does desire do in the acting potentialities of El dorado, what does gold, its brightness, the golden, the reflections, the sun, what does courage do, what do the dead do (ecocides, terricides, epistemicides, genocides)? How do the blood in the earth, the interrupted inheritances, the mineral offerings to the gods, what does the language do, what does the malinche do, how do these agents (among many others) participate in the territorial continuity of El dorado? These issues, among others, accompany the various articles that make up the dossier.

The cover image of this issue, El árbol financiero, is the work of artist Martha Berzano and is part of the series “Árboles de la Vida Argentina” (Trees of Argentine Life).