Title: 6 Questions Before The Beginning Of Something Else
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First edition of the unlimited and freely available online version
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Special edition of the interview, conducted by Kim Engelen in spring 2020, during the lockdown in Spain.
Questions No. 1-5 were asked by Engelen. No. 6 should be proposed by me. The idea behind No. 6 was to offer the person asked a 'wild card', considering that the questions of an interviewer often relate first to the interest or understanding of the person formulating the questions, which does not always correspond to the one who is asked. However, it will remain unanswered and I will pass it on to you as the reader.
As I see it, the radicality of manifestation lives in a liminal space—something that floats between the rigor of science, the expressiveness of art making, and the expansiveness of all that escapes categorisation. My path through anthropology was fueled by a relentless drive to ask questions, a hunger for understanding life in all its pluriversality. But, ironically, the scientific impulse to claim definitive knowledge often veils other ways of being, suppressing modes of existence that defy objectivity. Anthropology, which positions itself still often as an authority on "otherness," if so, ends up reducing lived experiences to something evaluable, something manageable. This approach is, in a way, colonial; it dictates what qualifies as "truth" and discards all else.
My shift to art arose from a desire to communicate without that implicit arrogance, to transmit my experience and understanding with openness rather than sovereignty. Art-making allows me to radiate what I perceive in ways that resist fixation—gentler, subtler, even more ambiguous. It doesn’t impose itself; rather, it extends a hand, invites a shared gaze, and allows for interconnection without the need to classify or judge. The act of creation here is relational, evolving, rooted in coexistence rather than analysis.
This is why I ultimately stepped away from the academic gaze that anthropology often holds so tightly. Science demands solutions, it claims understanding, but there are layers of reality, of feeling, that remain untouched by its reach. Art, on the other hand, values the form, the movement, the radiance of thought beyond its content. It invites me to explore not merely what I understand, but how I express and embody that understanding, how I shape it into something others might inhabit with me.
To communicate is, then, to connect—to craft a language that extends rather than confines, that radiates possibility rather than asserting fixed truths. I seek this in art not as a means of representation, but as a way to inhabit and share the world, humbly, creatively, and in an endless, transitioning polylog with all that coexists.