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Feature

Kira Xonorika (b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and futurist. Her work explores the connections between sovereignty, techno-science, temporality, world-building, and magic.

A year before the word “gender identity disorder’’ was officially removed from the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Classification of Diseases, trans activists, policymakers, and artists from around the world gathered in Buenos Aires with a common purpose: to strategize around depathologization. The year was 2018, and the atmosphere at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Symposium was as tense as the realm of policy-making can get. This was a decisive moment for trans advocates. It was also a moment that took its toll on the bodies of the activists, and the many trancestors who, in proving their humanity, got too close to the systems that perpetuate wounding. 

It was at this gathering that I met Fran Demétrio—a brilliant decolonial philosopher who has since passed away. Fran, who is Black Brazilian, was the first trans woman professor at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia. Not only was Fran wise beyond her years, but she was also a lovely and caring human. We met, of course, while smoking at the corner of the Hilton with Lua Stabile—an activist focusing on decolonial trans liberation and the decriminalization of sex work in Brazil. In a gesture of camaraderie, we called ourselves _travestis fumadoras da esquina do Hilton._

I remember attending a panel where Fran addressed the importance of considering epistemic rights both within and beyond juridical frameworks. At the time, the notion of epistemic rights was a new concept to me, but I instinctively understood what she meant. Colonization in the Americas involved European powers forcing ideologies based on empiricism and reason onto colonized peoples. [^1] The violent universalization of medieval Europe’s separation between science and magic has contributed to the demise of Afro-Indigenous spiritualities deemed demonic and anti-Christian. 

In the context of Guaraní populations—my peoples who live in the southern regions of South America—epistemicide and acculturation has resulted in our histories of gender expansiveness being denied, erased, and forgotten. Researchers trained in Eurocentric academic methodologies studying the gender of the Guaraní people who inhabit Paraguay often portray them as binary populations. I am wary of those who have studied anthropology but do not interact closely with Indigiqueer individuals. 

Despite the supernatural conditions of epistemicide and its surrounding infrastructures, Guaraní gender expansiveness managed to survive. Trauma isn't the only thing inherited across generations. There are still those strategies that help us recentre ancestral knowledges that colonialism could never fully suppress. Unexpectedly, I have been able to reconnect with the gender-expansive symbolic worlds erased in my culture through the process of creating images with AI. But to understand how such an AI-mediated reconnection was even possible in the first place, we need to consider magic. 

*** 

The year is now 2022. My life looks very different. I’ve shed some layers and am about to enter my Saturn return. I’m working at a non-profit impacting global policy in trans human rights. At the time, I love it. I have a sense of purpose. In the span of a year, I may hate it all. To the NGO, the only solution to colonial epistemicide seems to be philanthropic intervention—a framework that is utterly insufficient for the kind of ancestral recovery work I am interested in. And so, I make a major life decision: I'm heading to Tongva land. 

A month before moving, I came across the work of Edgar Fabián Frías, a Wixárika luminary, brujx, tarot reader, and multidisciplinary artist who was then based in San Francisco. I was drawn to a workshop Edgar led on art-making as a kind of spell-casting. Participants explored incantation across different mediums. The digital images I created in the workshop blended abstract atmospheres: bloomings, rivers, and moons, all in reference to the land and cosmos. Here, I was influenced by Edgar’s practice, where Indigenous futurity felt at once absolutely different from the current order of things, and still, incredibly close. 

I want to think with one work by Edgar: _Kïïka_ (2023). Exhibited as part of the “LIFELIKE” (2023) exhibition at Vellum LA, _Kïïka_ is a digital image that draws as much from internet archives as it does from plural cosmologies. Vibrant colours alongside Wixárika and popular iconography guide the eye in Edgar’s affective cartography. _Kïïka_ is alive, pulsating with images of altered states and hyperconnectivity to the cosmos. Edgar’s work follows a long tradition of Wixárika explorations of multiple dimensions, embracing transculturality to resist and (re)exist. In this way, Indigenous art senses the planetary. 

A month after attending Edgar’s workshop, I began to play with text-to-image AI applications. Six months later, the result was _Paradise_ (2022)—a series of images that were like postcards from a future world where the biosphere was a place absolutely conceived in coalition with the invisible. Most images include multicoloured and shapeshifting bodies interacting with each other in the landscape. Another series of images I created, _Cycles_ (2024), represents trans Indigenous bodies generated from the programming of a world instructed in Western origin stories. It follows that the imges I created through AI were already prediscursively tainted by the semiotics of colonialism. On this topic, scholar Mashinka Firunts Hakopian introduces the term “algolinguicism” to describe how the archives of the internet’s memory reflects the values of hegemonic cultures while simultaneously minoritizing others through language. [^2] English, for example, is the dominant language in AI usage, and often the entry to its code. How does one transcend such semiotic conditioning? The intention with which one writes the text prompt used by AI to create an image is fundamental. Intention carries the power to become data, and later, an algorithm. The role that words have in constructing systems of knowledge is vital. Words reverberate, echolocating with the threads of existence. Through metaphor, language functions by invoking and attracting what one seeks to communicate. This metonymic function of language, wherein we only arrive at meaning through approximation, highlights the inherent instability of colonial grammar. Under such language, Guaraní gender expansiveness is purported to no longer exist. And yet, through my text prompts, I was able to articulate Guaraní lifeways using the same colonial language that sought to eliminate them. In the era of AI prompts, words are road maps to brighter constellations: declarations are incantations. 

A month before travelling to Turtle Island, or even knowing that was the name of the land, I saw turtles and tortoises everywhere. When sea turtles hatch on beaches around the world, they embark on multi-year, epic migrations at sea. During these voyages, they navigate by sensing the invisible lines of the magnetic field; each part of the coastline has its own unique magnetic signature, which the turtles remember and later use as an internal compass. After sea turtles reach sexual maturity, they might come back, in about 15 years to lay their own eggs. This process is both laborious and ancestral. 

Like the sea turtle, Indigenous knowledges re-emerge across generations, despite colonial algorithms. Even when languages have been colonized and pushed underground, their pulsing persists underneath it all. After all, what returns to the earth has the capacity to re-emerge. Something happens when magic is activated; if you pay attention, you start seeing signs everywhere. 

“Technology” stems from the Greek “tekhnologia,” meaning discourse about skilled making. It combines “tekhnē,” the art and methods of creation, and “logia,” signifying a systematic study. Originally referring to the knowledge and skill behind crafting, “technology” now encompasses the application of scientific knowledge to create practical tools and machines. Returning to the originary etymology, storytelling is a kind of technology. Origin stories hold profound significance across cultures and civilizations. They are narratives that explain the beginnings of the world, providing insights into the cultural beliefs, values, and worldviews of a particular society. Think of the story of Adam and Eve, and how it might inflect the patriarchal and Abrahamic biases in contemporary algorithms that place woman after man, good before evil, and purity before sin. When the conditions of this biblical equation were unfulfilled, the result was land displacement. Most origin stories from the colonial West appeal to a history of dividing one against another. What would it look like for an algorithm to be informed by Guaraní storytelling, for instance, which values animacy, sensitivity, emotion, and circular knowledges that, unlike Western teleology and linear logics of progress, thinks alongside cycles of land? In creating with AI, I remembered the beings that inhabit the forest. I remembered how to create another world with them, and _we_ gathered. 

In Guaraní cosmologies, Tupã Tenondé is the deity of creation, often presented in symbiosis with the hummingbird. [^3] Hummingbirds, after all, are absolute cross-pollinators. The generative eros of the hummingbird is world-building. Put differently, before colonial knowledge is love. The hummingbird’s fecundity, like the act of communing in soil, facilitates future cycles of blooming. Here, I also think of the Guaraní word _tekoha_, which means “the place where we are who we are.” For Guaraní gender expansiveness, _tekoha_ is a sacred site where we have the right to be ourselves, with oxygen, water, and care. Any language I use to create AI-generated images will always be informed by this constant process of blooming, where mutualist ecologies allow for life to exist. 

[^1]: Scholar Viviane Vergueiro Simakawa, for instance, has written extensively about how Eurocentrism defines permanence as a sociocultural and institutional norm for understanding cisgenderness. See Viviane Vergueiro Simakawa, “Por inflexões decoloniais de corpos e identidades de gênero inconformes: uma análise autoetnográfica da cisgeneridade como normatividade” (master’s dissertation, Federal University of Bahia, 2015), [https://repositorio.ufba.br/handle/ri/19685](https://repositorio.ufba.br/handle/ri/19685)
[^2]: Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, “A New AI Lexicon: Algolinguicism,” AI Now Institute, October 21, 2021, [https://ainowinstitute.org-publication/a-new-ai-lexicon-algolinguicism-2](https://ainowinstitute.org-publication/a-new-ai-lexicon-algolinguicism-2)
[^3]: Kaká Werá Jecupé, _Tupã Tenondé: A criação do Universo, da Terra e do Homem segundo a tradição oral Guarani_ (São Paulo: Editora Peirópolis, 2001). 

Writer

In _C Magazine_’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

In C Magazine’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

Almanac

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Storytelling

Technology

Kira Xonorika uses magic as a lens to understand how an AI-mediated reconnection with Guaraní gender-expansive worlds is possible by exploiting the instability of colonial English grammar. 

AI Incantations for Sovereignty and Gender Expansiveness

Chloë p.f. Lalonde is a synaesthetic artist, writer, cultural worker, and caregiver based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. With a background in art education, anthropology, and art-science practices, Chloë’s research is slow and circular, placing an emphasis on sustainability and accessibility in the arts and exhibitions as places of learning.

The pink moon appears in the early springtime a month following the equinox in the northern hemisphere. In the sky, the moon is not pink: there are no changes in the atmosphere, no astronomical events that affect its colour. This moon is referred to as “pink” because it occurs around the times that pink wildflowers bloom. The strawberry moon then arrives in the summer, followed by the corn moon and the harvest moon, and later, the hunter moon. 

The names given to these full lunar cycles have been popularized by _The Old Farmer’s Almanac_, which attributes them to Indigenous cosmologies, and colonial American and European sources. [^1] These vernacular names have been used as a way to keep time, inherently entangled with agriculture. 

_“What’s in a name?”_

In Western astrology, named astrological ages reference the position of Earth in relation to the sun and constellations. As Earth orbits the sun, the sun also moves very, very slowly through space, passing through one constellation (from our point of view) approximately every 2000 years. Each constellation is associated with one of 12 zodiac signs, forming a clock-like calendar, or map, of our accessible/visible cosmos. The characteristics of each sign are said to inform developments in human society and culture. [^2]

The current Age of Pisces is characterized by finding solace in the belief in a higher power and the prevalence of religion across societies. In 2024, some say, we are supposed to feel a shift toward the Age of Aquarius, long revered in Western culture that popularized the term for its utopian promise of social progress, advancements in communication, cognition, understanding, freedom, equality, and justice for all. 

In outlining these periods of time, Western astrology seeks to integrate with the cosmos to understand why everything is the way it is and to predict what will happen. Similarly, how might an artwork’s date, name, and seemingly subjective visual and material language still objectively represent the times? 

For Danny Kostyshin, a potter in his 70s based in Vancouver, dating his work is for more than personal archiving purposes, but to infuse the work with its horoscope, embodying time. Since the ’70s, his pottery takes the forms of plates, bowls, and condom boxes that track gay rights, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, safe sex practices, same-sex marriages, and notable figures who challenged this socio-political progress and who challenged popular culture and his friends. I encountered Kostyshin’s work as part of an artist talk, hosted by Craft Parlour, a working group I was part of that was organized by Rebecca La Marre for her artist residency at Western Front. There, I had the pleasure to exchange with many artists who work with earth, performance, activism, artefacts, language, and symbolism. 

Expanding from Kostyshin’s practice, I am interested in looking at how different elements of an artwork, even its name, can be a “horoscope” of the times. In other words, how might abstract symbols, colours, and forms come together to embody a supposed shift of the times, like toward the Age of Aquarius? 

Élise Lafontaine is a painter who works with synaesthesia. She documents a place in time by painting sound that resonates through her body in places of solitude. Her exhibition at Pangée in Montreal, “Lombrives” (all works 2024), recalled memories of her experience in a French grotto of the same name. Forms, like something bodily, appear and reappear from the form of the grotto itself. In some paintings, like _Le grand dôme_ [_The Big Dome_] and _La Carène_ [_The Hull_] there is a straight line that divides the canvases, sometimes painted, other times cut and sewn. A direct channel of sound, or the indication of a presence. An iris-like form appears on many of her smaller canvases: some are named to illustrate specific sounds and sensations, like _Violet noise_, or times of day, like _Un soir à Ronchamps_ [_A Night at Ronchamps_] and _Un matin à Ronchamps_ [_A Morning at Ronchamps_]. The names of larger canvases like _La Galerie Blanche_ [_The White Gallery_] ground her sound studies in specific parts of the grotto. 

How does a name become infused with, embody, and predict social and cultural developments? How does naming become a way of knowing, a way of timekeeping? 

My siblings and I spend a lot of time colouring with our mother, who, at 54 years old, has quite progressed early onset Alzheimer’s. On her own accord, she will only colour in purples and blues. Every other colour is too bright, overstimulating. She makes a gesture with her hands blocking her eyes and ears, kind of shaking her head. My sibling created a playlist of songs for her, titling it _Purple Period_. We play these songs for our mother because she likes to sing along, and it helps her focus, even just for a few minutes. Now, her purple colouring pencil is a short nub, and she has moved on to pink. My sibling made a new playlist: _Pink Period_. At an exhibition at the Maison des arts de Laval, my mom named elements of the artwork—some marks on a painting were decidedly “stinkles”; another sculpture, “Gus.” Is the naming of astrological ages or artworks just as arbitrary as, for instance, neurodegenerative time marked by pencil crayon colours? 

The poetics of a name insinuate a certain metaphor, calling to the art of language that is embraced by an artist. A name serves to create a digestible, tangible link between an abstract work and a viewer, summing up an idea that grasps at something beyond words, solidifying it otherwise in the colour and form the name represents. Some names point to a story, hint at a way of knowing, or embody a sensation. Some are more poetic, the language and composition of words as much of a work as the artwork itself. 

_“That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”_ [^3] 

Under any name or interpretation, an object or a symbol represents the thing itself; what we call it matters not. In considering form as fact, I turn to intuitive drawing, or doodling, as a way of articulating complex ideas. 

Drawing tests are used in various forms of psychology and neurology to reveal cognition, personality type, and individual ways of perception, and to understand or predict behaviour. In dementia diagnoses, drawing a clock is a defining factor; the numbers trailing off a wonky circle reveal that something in this person’s mind is not working the “right” way. The Rorschach test is meant to reveal something about a person’s mind based on what they see in ink blobs. The Wartegg test asks you to complete an image from a simple shape, and where you place your own lines is meant to reveal something about you in relation to a symbol. Tests like these have often been used as a screening factor, like for arriving immigrants to Ellis Island. But where did the symbols involved in these tests gain their meaning? Who has agreed that a wavy line represents emotional capacities, a square represents the home, or a circle your sense of self? 

#####A visualization experiment, or, a drawing test: 

One shape sprawls; round edges of plump tentacles spread, breathing and absorbing like droplets of water becoming one large, flexible, and changing berry-coloured mass. It moves slowly. 

The other is yellow or red, sharp, edges pointy like a star, spiky like a club. Though it’s no weapon, the prongs deflate quickly on contact, like a blow-up toy castle, or an Inflatable Tube Man. 

One is Kiki; the other is Bouba. The names for either shape are arbitrary, determined by neuroscientists, but they do speak to the ways in which English speakers associate sounds with matter, shape, form, gesture, and colour. The stimuli we absorb exudes through our lives, practices, and works in similar ways. 

Common shapes may often be used as symbols of familiar items, and the act of drawing entices a certain set of questions in the drawer’s mind influenced by the size of the shape, and that person’s general experience. Colours add a layer of subjectivity to a drawing; they may provide direct context tied to a material reality or allow the mind to drift, letting senses, intuition, and somatic movements speak for themselves. 

In a figurative painting, the curtains in it might be blue to suggest sadness, or a chair might be on fire to represent an unstable environment. But in a non-figurative painting, the globular shape at the centre might be a pulsating yellow, not because it represents happiness and warmth, or hope for a dark world, but because this is the colour of the sound the artist knew it to be in part of a grotto, or a sort of chartreuse green because it makes my mom want to crack her foot. 

To what extent are we manifesting our own realities? At one time, someone looked to the sky and said, these are constellations, this is the zodiac, we are in the Age of Pisces, and that prior time, that time full of war, was the Age of Aries. 

And this green makes my mom want to crack her foot, and this sound, Lafontaine knows it to be violet. That there is water, and that constellation, that drawing in the sky, is just a bunch of stars. 

An instinctive impulse, a personal truth that becomes materialized—garnering colour and form to create symbols. Yet, subjective to others: that chartreuse green might not make you want to crack your foot, it might make you nauseous and remind you of the colour of the walls inside your dentist office as the plaque was being shaved off your teeth with a mechanical tool, making your entire spine shiver. 

Colour and form can be considered universally evocative because no matter what the initial intent behind them was, you will be able to connect a memory of some kind to them; without being attached to a visual image, they make a mental one appear. 

Thinking through life happenings in colour, form, and symbols holds space for processing multiple cosmologies and temporalities. Naming, an act of language, further adds a contextual framework, like the names of lunar cycles. 

I think of other forms that are seemingly ubiquitous or universal, like the grid: the city as a grid, our streets blocked out, our electrical systems and circuits, pixels on screens, pattern-making, blueprints, macOS Launchpads, calendars. Each square equal to the one next to it. Could it be a symbol for a utopian dream? The grid as a way of seeing, a drawing tool, was popularized by Albrecht Dürer’s 16th century sighting grid. Ancient drawing machines such as Dürer’s were similarly used to facilitate the replication of images: the void grid to be filled one square at a time. 

Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman’s colourful paintings in “Praises Unsung” (2024) at FOFA Gallery appear as part of softly sculpted blankets and plushy duvets, often formed from grids. The hands of caregivers sometimes extend past the paintings, becoming larger than life. A narrative unfolds in these hands, among the gestures and bodies present: a familial tale, an eldest daughter’s plight, her safe space. Yet, painted white and grey grids on some works’ edges suggest an absence, akin to subjects with missing backgrounds in image-editing software. This could suggest the image in question might be altered further. 

The grid also appears in Catherine Desroches’s delicate drawings in “Dans ses reflets, le Monde est beau deux fois” [“In Its Reflections, the World Is Beautiful Twice”] (2024), also at Pangée. In shades of grey, sepia, and colour, Desroches’s grids become foundational structures in flux with concrete architectural elements such as staircases and archways. Drawing without an intent to instil meaning, Desroches makes marks that serve the containing and suggestive purpose of parentheses. Suggesting a desire to ascend, to transcend, such symbols like the grid carry an objective, dissociating power, one that contains multitudes. 

As a weaver I have an inherent bias in favour of this symbol, this way of organizing time—grids block my patterns, when I follow patterns. I colour-code phrases from my journals within grids, draw grids when I do not know what else to draw. But try as I might, my grids are always wonky, warped, waving. 

In this constellation of ideas, I think I’m getting at seeing the grid as an example of a default symbol, a baseline. But ever more so, intuition and bodily knowledge take over and make the grid something else beyond material structure—its edges aren’t hard and defined.
 
Just as the simple truth of humanity passing through time told by the sun and the moon has been layered with symbols and stories in the stars, the same can be said about abstract symbols in artworks. Artworks, framed by the names they’re given, record intangible information, embodying the time and unpacking the ways in which people can perceive the world. As we see with drawing tests, scientists have already been creating informed diagnoses based on a person’s association to arbitrary colour and form. The associations are there. You guessed right: Bouba is the bulbous shape and Kiki, the spikey one. 

What if, instead of resisting or othering these intuitive urges—wanting to crack your foot because of a certain shade of green—we leaned into them? If the grid represents what we are, have been, striving toward in the Age of Pisces, is going off-grid how we get to the great Age of Aquarius? 

[^1]: Catherine Boeckmann, “Full Moon Names for 2024,” _The Old Farmer’s Almanac_, April 11, 2024, [https://www.almanac.com/full-moon-names](https://www.almanac.com/full-moon-names) 
[^2]: Celeste Longacre, “What is the Age of Aquarius?,” _The Old Farmer’s Almanac_, June 3, 2024, [https://www.almanac.com/what-age-aquarius](https://www.almanac.com/what-age-aquarius)
[^3]: This line and _“What’s in a name?”_ are from William Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_ (c. 1597). 

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Sensory

Memory

Chloë p.f. Lalonde considers how artworks, framed by their names, dates, and personal and universal symbols, might record intangible information about the period and conditions of their conception, by discussing the works of Danny Kostyshin, Élise Lafontaine, Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman, and Catherine Desroches.

Green That Makes You Want to Crack Your Foot