After sending the list to Raquel, I found that seeing the books listed made me think about what I am reading and where I would like future voices to take me. Sometimes I fall into books by inertia and they become difficult for me. For this proposal, I thought of books that bear witness from the body and its diverse and complex sensibilities—not necessarily from essay or academia, but from the poetic reinvention of realities quite far removed from what I experience day to day here.
Leonor Silvestri’s book Mutant Ethics has been one of the hardest books I’ve read, because of the density of its arguments, but above all because of the blows it delivers at the level of ableism toward non-normative bodies, the institutional systematization of harmful practices, and what all of this meant in a context such as the pandemic in Argentina.
Chilco is a novel by Daniela Catrileo, a story set in the outskirts of Chile’s capital, where living conditions place bodies under different urgencies. A story I can’t help associating with the 2019 social uprising, and how during that period everyday life and exhaustion fractured desire.
With the next book I have mixed feelings. That it was written during the pandemic in an apartment in Paris, with views of Notre Dame Cathedral, implies very fortunate conditions from which to speak about the spatial oppression of bodies. But a new understanding of virology and what we can learn from it seems spectacular to me. Dysphoria Mundi, Paul B. Preciado.
And this last one, for me, is a gem. Pedro Lemebel’s anthology, Poco Hombre. Read a couple of chronicles and pick it up wherever you can—it’s a book meant to have its stories read aloud at home. Its sensitivity is a deep well.
Three of the four proposals are situated within the pre-/pandemic/post-pandemic context, and imagining these books now on the shelf, I think this has to do with the fact that I’m still thinking about the consequences of that time for bodies—what questions it opens up. I hope you can share a little coffee with these books.
Lautaro Reyes, associate artist at Graner 2024–25 with the project Waves.
