tectonics_of-_otherness
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 polimorphic 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 shitfing, transforming from day to day as the residency and exhibition unfolds .
The Tectonics of Otherness was initiated and led by Marlon Barrios Solano (Venezuela/USA) and María Luisa Angulo (El Salvador/France) and was developed 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 6 artists an evolving field of encounters — a shared ecosystem of stilness, 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., introducing what we call a Synthetic Media Space — a hybrid environment animated by a playlist of AI-generated music videos inspired by German techno. This sonic landscape channels the forces of the “Dark Enlightenment,” techno republics, and other vectors of otherness. The music drives the lights, rhythms, and atmospheres of the room, creating a strange, ironic techno party — a site for embodied reflection, dancing, and spontaneous interventions by the artists and audience.
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. Images from creation process and festival: