Laryssa Machada and the Phantom Limb: Symptom of an ancestral amputation

Abstract

In a kind of nostalgia for ancestors, as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui puts it, this essay speculates, through image combinations of the works Paula (2012), Senti uma leve brisa, depois veio o vendaval (2019), Cosma e Damiana (2019), Em decorrência do desmatamento e de inúmeras queimadas, caipora é vista na praia (2021) Before You Love Me, She Was Already Loving Me (2022), Grande Boca de Canal (2023), by Laryssa Machada, on a circumscription of absences in pre-invasion representations of Amerindian territories in the Global South. These absences run through lesbo-affective narratives of indigenous and Afro-diasporic bodies, as a process of modification of the Pindoramic territory, as Laryssa states. A parallel is drawn with the Phantom Limb, a symptom experienced by people who have had a limb amputated, but who continue to feel it, as if it had only been transmuted into a non-visible state. This exploration seeks to understand the extent to which the fabrications and image fabrications in the gaps of the archive allow access to the sensitive mapping of these amputations of the ancestral record, through a technoxamanic ritual that generates a space where representation, in a simultaneity of movement, occupies and reveals absence, incorporating it.

Kewyords photography, decoloniality, spectrum, archive, pro-memory