The Tectonics of Otherness
Reloaded · October 2025–ongoing
This project investigates the tectonics of otherness — the deep, shifting forces that shape relationships between coloniality and postcoloniality, self and other, human and machine, memory and speculation. We understand these forces as dynamic vectors, continuously in motion, intersecting across bodies, lands, and epistemologies.
The most constant element we have discovered through this research is movement — migration, displacement, and transformation.
Within this framework, we have created a polymorphic, mutating physical and epistemic space, traversed by artificial intelligence, where the knowing of self and other becomes entangled in networks of power, memory, perception, and imagination. This tectonic space is alive and shifting, transforming from day to day as the residency and exhibition unfolds.
The Tectonics of Otherness is a project María Luisa Angulo (El Salvador/France) and I (Venezuela/USA) initiated and led. We developed it during the residency Beyond Gravity at DIPOD / Theater im Depot in Dortmund, Germany, within the Beyond Gravity Festival and Symposium (October 1–5, 2025).
The space created welcomes the participation of four international collaborators:
- Lenara Werle (Brazil/Germany)
- Marcel Gbeffa (Benin)
- Vera Rivas (Mexico)
- Oliver Walton (Australia/UK)
Together, the six artists form an evolving field of encounters — a shared ecosystem of stillness, movement, sound, text, affect, and synthetic imagery.
Visitors are invited to engage through an array of interactive interfaces, activities, and applications, designed as portals for encounter. Each app or installation functions as a conceptual node, part of a living and adaptive ecosystem.
The project opened on October 1st at 6:00 p.m. with Dark Enlightenment, the rave: Techno-republics and Other Vectors, dancing within the storm.
Throughout the festival (October 1–5, 2025), the installation hosted moments of activation, including:
- Real-time interactions with AI chatbots
- Live generative imagery using Stable Diffusion and streaming models
- Low-latency AI companions for speculative conversations across temporalities
- Participatory performances inviting visitors to sense, move, and think with the shifting tectonics of otherness
The Tectonics of Otherness proposes an ever-changing field of inquiry — a space of migration, speculation, and embodied cognition, where the ground itself moves, and we move with it.