Dancing with the Shaker in the Hand. Cosmopolitical Performances for a Burning Planet

#8 2025 Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 1 AMANDA PIÑA Dancing with the Shaker in the Hand. Cosmopolitical Performances for a Burning Planet Since 2014 the artist Amanda Piña has been pursuing a longterm artistic research project entitled Endangered Human Movements which deals with the current loss of cultural and biological diversity. In recent years she has increasingly turned her attention to the topics of extractivism and climate change, focusing on the violence resulting from the modern colonial ontological divisions of bodies, humans, non-humans, nature and culture. In this artist statement she reflects on her encounter with First Nation epistemologies and on her latest work To Bloom () Florecimiento (2024) which envisions the ocean as a living archive of ancestral knowledge. Extraction Ecology Post-/Colonialism Cosmology Performative Strategies Indigenous Epistemology Amanda Piña Dancing with the Shaker in the Hand. Cosmopolitical Performances for a Burning Planet INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 2 “Hold the shaker in your hand, at first sight it will look like a simple musical instrument, make it sound, ‘sh sh sh sh sh’. While you keep on shaking it, now enter the shaker with your dream eye: do you see the seeds inside the calabash? They move in circles, ellipting like the planets, they circle around an empty center, the sun.” Juan José Ramírez (Katira)1 FIG. 1 Amanda Piña, To Bloom () Prácticas de Florecimiento [Blooming Practices], 2024, performative sculptures, Middelheim Museum of Sculpture, Antwerp, Belgium. FIG. 2 Amanda Piña, To Bloom () Prácticas de Florecimiento [Blooming Practices], 2024, performative sculptures, Middelheim Museum of Sculpture. Antwerp, Belgium. FIG. 3 Amanda Piña, To Bloom () Prácticas de Florecimiento [Blooming Practices], 2024, performative sculptures, Le Alleanza dei Corpi, Milan, Italy. Since 2017, I have learned from First Nations teachers – especially the Wixarika elder and Mara’akame Juan José Ramírez (Katira) – who have guided me in ritual practices grounded in relationships with non-human beings. Through this apprenticeship, I have come to understand performance not as spectacle but as an onto-epistemic and cosmopolitical2 force: a way of knowing, relating, and world-making. Learning with Katira, I encountered a lineage in which dancers and shamans and community at large use dance and ritual practice to remember and honour the ancestral human and more-than-human beings that sustain human Amanda Piña Dancing with the Shaker in the Hand. Cosmopolitical Performances for a Burning Planet INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 3 existence. Dances and rituals that weave reciprocal relations with other beings, bodies of water, mountains, ancestors, the sun. In these practices, people acquire a different body, a different face, partially transforming to allow ancestors and the more-than-human forces to inhabit them and become present through dance, song and ritual. In Wixarika ritual practices this is done through the mediation of vegetal allies like Hikuri (Lophophora Wiliamsii), Tobacco and a longstanding relation with corn. The vegetal realms are understood as sentient, as having culture. A plant is a spiritual being, with agency. An other with whom to relate socially. An ally and an ancestor, not a product, never a resource. “Everyone has an eye, a hand, and can speak. It might see with a different vision, it might touch differently, it may speak in a different language,” my teacher Katira says. Colonial modernity has weakened the cosmopolitical dimension of performance by reducing it to re-presentation. Colonization has devalued local forms of knowing that happen through the body and through identification as lesser forms of knowledge. In the west, forms of embodied knowledge present in art and dance have also been disempowered through this process of historical devaluation. Museums and theatre institutions often preserve this narrow view, obscuring the embodied, relational knowledge that performance carries – knowledge that colonization across Abya Yala worked to suppress by banning dances, songs and ceremonies. Knowledge that managed to survive. The misunderstanding of embodiment with representation lay at the heart of the colonial encounter. Europeans assumed Indigenous dancers were representing gods – an act they condemned as idolatry. But these practices were not re-presentation; they were forms of becoming, of knowing through proximity, identification and embodiment. Bodily onto-epistemic encodements. The European settlers also imposed a notion of “God” that was very particular, pure disembodied transcendence, never immanent, dis-embodied. Yet, what the natives were doing (and continue to do) can bebetter understood through the Nahuatl concept Ixiplatl3: ixi(tl), “face,” and platatl, “earth.” Ixiplatl is the face of the earth – the act of lending one’s body so that ancestors, spirits, rain, mountains, or stars may take human form, speak and see through us. To become, for a moment, the earth’s face, the ancestors body. Performance here is not depiction but relation, transformation, and knowledge in motion. Amanda Piña Dancing with the Shaker in the Hand. Cosmopolitical Performances for a Burning Planet INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 4 FIG. 4 Amanda Piña, To Bloom () Florecimiento [Blooming Practices], 2024, performance, DeSingel Kunstcampus (Rode Saal), Antwerp, Belgium. FIG. 5 Amanda Piña, To Bloom () Florecimiento [Blooming Practices], 2024, performance, DeSingel Kunstcampus (Rode Saal), Antwerp, Belgium. In the making of the performative sculptures within the performance cycle To Bloom () Florecimiento, that my team and I have been developing since 2023, we worked with a definition of whiteness that extends beyond its conventional understanding as an identity category tied solely to race or ethnicity. Instead, we approached it as an onto-epistemic condition – as an embodied ideology that remains invisible to itself, re-producing a monoculture of thought and practices. The artistic research of To Bloom () Florecimiento deals with oceanic ancestor animals, like cnidarians, echinoderma and diatomea (jellyfish, corals, sea stars and sea urchins, micro algae). They are thought as ancestors since their calcarean and silica bodies are metabolized in our bodies as well. We are composted. In this artistic research we relate with the impacts of capitalocenic (onto-epistemic white) climate change in marine ecosystems, for example the bleaching of corals and the erosion of the oceans. This framework of thought we defined as whiteness is identified by decolonial scholars as modernity and by contemporary anthropologists as naturalist ontologies. It is historically universalized through the coloniality of knowledge4 and enacted through institutions such as the university, the museum and the theater (among many others). This system of thought is described as the belief that the existence of ‚nature‘, conceived as an external and objective realm, represents a universal truth shared by all. Modernity/coloniality, naturalist ontologies, or whiteness manifest in the assumption that there exists a single, universal world of sensing and meaning, and multiple (exclusively human) cultures only asperspectives about it. One of those perspectives is positioned as superior to all others, namely the Western one. This embodied ideology does neither need to be overtly racist to be discriminatory, nor openly violent to be supremacist. Dancing with the shaker in the hand, as Katira has taught me, enacts the possibility of entering in relation with the cosmos through embodied practices. It reminds us of the possibility of entering in relation with all the beings our Amanda Piña Dancing with the Shaker in the Hand. Cosmopolitical Performances for a Burning Planet INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 5 existence is entangled with. Giving back agency to what the west has reduced to objects, natural resources, nature, the environment, voided of culture, ready to be extracted. These forms of relational performance can be seen as forms of Cosmopolitics, as a dance that re-members a body of knowledge that has been dismembered. The performances I have developed in the last years are perspectivist5 which means that they approach nature-cultures in Amerindian terms. This implies the following: One culture: People, sentient beings capable of sensing, of thinking and relating. Many natures: as the many habits of each of the being we share the world with. These kind of performances and performative practices are places in which to enact other forms of thinking, other ways of sensing and thinking our bodies and what bodies are. These other modes of sensing the living earth go beyond naturalist ontologies and the monoculture of whiteness. FIG. 6 Amanda Piña, To Bloom () Florecimiento [Blooming Practices], 2024, performance, Yemayá y Oyá (Layza Soares and Nyandra Fernandez), DeSingel Kunstcampus (Rode Saal), Antwerp, Belgium. FIG. 7 Amanda Piña, To Bloom () Florecimiento [Blooming Practices], 2024, performance, DeSingel Kunstcampus (Rode Saal), Antwerp, Belgium. The performances, video installations, and sculptural works I create with others, are not about reconnecting with nature.The existence of one nature and Amanda Piña Dancing with the Shaker in the Hand. Cosmopolitical Performances for a Burning Planet INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 6 many human-only cultures is in my eyes a deadly concept, vital for the reproduction of the narratives of modernity, which are grounded in forms of separation and supremacy that enable extraction and de-earthing. My work is also not about relating to ‘landscape’, nor about ‘the environment’ – since landscape is a concept embedded in coloniality, environment is thought without us. In my work I am interested in recognizing the fullness of spaces, always inhabited and living, and in thinking about them as pedagogies. From their situatedness, their agency as People-earth.6 To create ways in which to remember and activate the relations that make us all exist. In the performative series To Bloom () Florecimiento we re-member our bodies as composted, made by animal ancestors which have developed bodies that have maintained worlds through eons of time. The performance is cosmopolitical in the sense that it gives agency to non-human ocean animals, relating their existence to our material bodies thus bringing them into the realm of the political. The performance invokes the Symbiocene (instead of the Anthropocene) as a future geological era in which humans and non-humans live in collaboration and symbiosis. Dancers, performers, and shamans like my teacher Katira, embody the brilliancy of experiential knowledge. Performance, dance, song and ritual practice are forms of knowing. Today in the technocratic mediated world of information overflow and in the face of the disruption of the climate systems of the earth, our forms of knowledge are gaining relevance. A performance can create new knowledge, collective experience and collective thinking. As such it is a world-making practice and therefore it is important to ask ourselves which worlds are worth enacting. In my artistic and academic work, I have developed a set of tools meant to think and create beyond naturalist ontologies, modernity/coloniality, whiteness. As a response to the modern colonial onto-epistemic condition that continues to shape the artistic practice of composition, I put forward the concept and practice of compossession.7 In my research on mountains and rivers, I introduce the site sensitive8 as a mode of decolonial listening, supported by embodied practices that cultivate eco-somatic relations and can be enacted outdoors or in the studio. Together, these concepts and practices form my contribution to the field and to a decolonial turn in the arts – one that strives not merely to perform critique, but to transform modes of thought and practice within institutions and beyond. Our world is getting warmer. We have reached the tipping points produced by a monoculture of thought and practices that pollutes and disrupts biological and cultural diversity, undermining Earth’s capacity to regulate itself. The ocean is acidic and also heating up day by day, corals are bleaching, whitening Amanda Piña Dancing with the Shaker in the Hand. Cosmopolitical Performances for a Burning Planet INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 7 and so are political discourses in Europe. Whiteness has not been able to listen to the earth as a mother, nor to relate with its many beings as peoples. Our collective ears have been wounded by the tongues of modernity, and with that wound our capacity to listen and to communicate with the earth has been weakened. It is urgent to move beyond whiteness as an onto-epistemic monoculture. May we be the stones that sharpen the tools that will clear spaces within the monoculture of thought and practice – so that diverse forms of life and art may flourish. So that futures not yet imagined may take root: A world where many worlds fit.9 Please cite as follows: Amanda Piña: “Dancing with the Shaker in the Hand. Cosmopolitical Performances for a Burning Planet.” In: INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries, no. 8, Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17931676. This contribution is licensed under the CC-BY-NC-ND License 4.0 International (Creative Commons, Attribution, Non Commercial, No Derivatives). The reuse of material from other sources may require further authorizations for use by the respective copyright holders. NOTES 1 Mara’akame (shaman) from the Wirrarika (Huichol) community of La laguna Mezquitic Jalisco in nowadays Mexico. 2 Stengers 2010. 3 Cf. Taylor 2003, p. 38. 4 De Sousa Santos 2009. 5 De Castro 1998. 6 De la Cadena 2015. 7 Piña/Vadori/Gillinger-Correa Vivar 2019. 8 Piña 2026. 9 Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) 1996. BIBLIOGRAPHY Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” In: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute , vol. 4, no. 3, 1998, pp. 469–488, DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3034157. Marisol de la Cadena: Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Amanda Piña/Andrea Vadori/Claudia Gillinger-Correa Vivar (eds.): Endangered Human Movements, Vol. 3: The School of the Jaguar . Vienna: Federal Ministry of Movement Affairs, 2019. Amanda Piña: “Performance Is a Form of Knowing: Cosmopolitical Choreographies for a Burning Planet.” In: Aisthesis (ed. by Goran Petrovic Lotina/Francesco De la Puppa/Anetta Stojnić), 2026 (forthcoming). Boaventura de Sousa Santos: Una epistemología del Sur: la reinvención del conocimiento y la emancipación social . Mexico: CLACSO/Siglo XXI, 2009. Isabelle Stengers: Cosmopolitics I . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Diana Taylor: The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN): Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle . Chiapas, Mexico, 1996. CREDITS Fig. 1–2: Courtesy of Amanda Piña and Middelheim Museum of Sculpture, Antwerp, Belgium, photo: Michel Jimenez. Fig. 3: Courtesy of Amanda Piña and Le Alleanza dei Corpi, Milan, Italy, photo: Michel Jimenez. Fig. 4–7: Courtesy of Amanda Piña and DeSingel, Antwerp, Belgium, photo: Michel Jimenez. Amanda Piña Dancing with the Shaker in the Hand. Cosmopolitical Performances for a Burning Planet INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 8 AUTHOR Amanda Piña (*1978) is a Chilean-Mexican-Austrian artist. Her work is concerned with cosmopolitics, and it includes performance, music, video installations and sculptures that exist in the context of the theater, the museum and beyond. Piña is a multifaceted artist working through choreographic, performance and dance research, creating, curating and working within university and artistic educational frameworks, writing and editing publications around what she refers to as ‘endangered human movements’. Her work is grounded in Indigenous forms of knowledge and world making/maintaining practices that can offer alternative modes of relating with the living earth. Her work has been presented in theatres, galleries, museums and cultural centers around the world.