Suely Rolnik's keynote address

Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, arts/culture critic, and curator. She is Professor at the PUCP-SP (PhD in Clinical Psychology) and faculty member of the independent study program (PEI) at the Museo d'Art Contemporani in Barcelona (MacBa). She is the author of Micropolítica: Cartografías del deseo in collaboration with Félix Guattari, which has been published in seven countries.

The 8th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute sought to examine the broad intersections between urban space, performance and political/artistic action in the Americas. From the critical poetics of body art to the occupation of public space by social movements, the event invited participants to explore the borders, identities and practices through which subjectivities, hegemonies and counter-hegemonies are constructed in the spaces of the city and beyond. From a micropolitical perspective, the unconscious repression of the knowing-body is the greatest violence of the colonial enterprise. This keynote lecture examines how this violence is in the marrow of the modern Western culture that continues to structure our lives. Today, the toxic effects of this unconscious repression have reached a critical point, generating the vast crisis in which we are now immersed. In order to return to the knowing-body - free from the effects of trauma - it is necessary that we resist the actual state of things. This is not a matter of futurology, for signs of this return are emerging throughout the 'Global South' - a South that is multiple and whose borders are not geographically limited. These signs of return are blasts of oxygen at points where thought has been asphyxiated - a tireless redrawing of landscapes, an endless work. Is this the real political potency of art?