Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, The Telaraña Circuit

 

i am looking for the form she said or the raw material specifically from the plane of its existence it was a search for a perceptual practice like the sensation of matter over the surface of your skull or water as the architecture of memory a game of awareness or profusion allow the ecstasy of thought to come inside the pipes while your jaw is locked thinking of perception expanding like a future transmission or the actuality of mystery now i see her tactile mind flowing in the conduit of experience

Mexico City-based Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola’s first book of poems is The Telaraña Circuit & other poems (New York NY: Tender Buttons Press, 2023), a descriptor that doesn’t even begin to hold the multitudes within this expansive multimedia conceptual work that includes lyric, performance, photography, visuals, descriptions of video stills, typewritten script and physical experimentation. As she writes, early on in the collection: “experiment the moving shape of memory the archaeology of sound this vacuum is / our thread relation a series of questions that are also open like breath to breath your / deathbed in your mother’s room your whole life an archive of inhalations you were / unearthing a city covered in / deep time [.]” There is a way through which this collection exists as a collage-experiment on form itself, working perception and shaping that seek out its form through a collage of overlapping approaches, almost as changing states in mid-stream, from one to another. This is a book that studies form, means, memory and perception; if hers a book of water, it is one that includes rain, evaporation, lakes and tears, snowfall and the glacier. The Telaraña Circuit & other poems exists as not purely collage, but a kind of layering, one that sees further layering through a foreword, “ANTEMANO / BEFOREHAND,” by poet Carolina Ebeid, that offers:

The Telaraña Circuit opens with a video still of the poet’s hand performing a ritual at the mouth of a cave in the archeological site of San Martín Huamelulpan. In the recording, we hear rhythmic scratching on the site wall as Lucía’s fingers transcribe the bits of tepalcates, ceramic and rock patterns from an archaeological illustration and text her aunt, Margarita, produced decades before disarticulated kinship story told in palimpsetic time, as they both, years apart, inhabit the same slanted light hitting the wall in jagged angles. It’s an ancient music, the scratch-scratch, recorded in these poems. We also sense it in the scans of her handwriting, the crisscross back and forth of the eraser the hand impressing itself on the page. “Every mark on paper is an acoustic mark” Susan Howe affirms. Lucía’s work itself proposes that to listen involves the whole body.

As Gaxiola describes, early on in the collection, this collection, this project, is an examination of, and even a collaboration with, her late archaeologist aunt’s archive and work. “Some of these works were triggered by my aunt’s archeological investigation from 1974. Margarita Gaxiola González. […] Her investigation became a map of intimacy, a generative symbol of fragmented memory (both intimate and historical) locating an impulse during my poetic/somatic research. I translated some of the book’s archaeological illustrations into scores: a notational method to create and reimagine her exploration as sound, as open energy, as continuation. This document transmuted into direct experience as I started working with the tracing and erasing of memory, and simultaneously working on other projects, using poetry as a fieldwork method.” There is something quite fascinating in Gaxiola’s approach, and one might even see this collection as simultaneously either or both the final product of a large, ongoing project, and the fieldwork report of her investigations.

I’m always intrigued when poetry titles appear from those from a visual art background or perspective, often providing far more expansive considerations of form and structure, whether Andrea Actis’ full-length debut Grey All Over (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s SIR (2019) [see my review of such here], Michael Turner’s Kingsway (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp, 1995) or even any of the work by Canadian poet Christian Bök (an artist I’ve long considered to be a conceptual artist who happens to work within the considerations of the poem). There is something in how the visual, the image, is shaped and approached, well beyond the boundaries of language itself. These are not simply words on the page, but the page itself as a visual, concrete and conceptual space. As she writes towards the back of the collection, as part of her “notes on sound encapsulating the conditions of remembrance”:

Some years ago I started a process work that turned into a series of rituals. The first one was titled cámera crema / nueva. These were two old metallic suitcases that belonged to my father. For many years, he stored his 35mm cameras in these suitcases. One of them was labelled cámera crema and the other nueva. I decided to place film-slides of family images that were shot in Mexico in the year 1993 in cámera crema and pour water over them every day for a year. The suitcase could contain the water that began to transform into the images, absorbing their colors and smells. Once all images became part of the water, creating rivering, fluorescent colors, I decided that the transparent slides belonged in the other suitcase, the one labeled nueva. I then watered the plants in my studio with it: they survived. Through the plants resilience, I was surrounded with disembodied images that were alive. How is a process of degradation recorded? And where is absence located. Memory has a vibratory aspect which extends beyond the image and our experiences as individuals. It amplifies while listening because every time we remember we are listening. Can we produce more memory with its residue? An archive might record its own decay.