Note: This artist’s project by Johan Mijail, originally produced as a zine designed by waldo baez, was published in Spanish and in an English translation in X-TRA Volume 24, Number 2. The English translation (below) is by manuel arturo abreu. Our website is limited in presentation; for the fullest experience of the project, order a copy here. And for the online version of the project in Spanish, click here.
Vegetal love means experimenting with foregoing one’s sense of reproductive sexuality in favor of spending time looking up information on how earth and sea plants collaborate among themselves, with the goal of not thinking of an analogous sexual institution here. In this way, we betray the romantic love learned in the bosom of the heterosexual family where many of us were raised, the bosom where we also learned to understand our desire as a distraction, as a shame, as a pathological disrespect, as something unnatural. Vegetal love means asking your friend to let you cry. Taking away a story from the building of the morality of nation states and their ideas of home, nation, aging.
Vegetal love is like a technology to create oneself, and as such we consider the residue as a space of the possible. A transmilitant feminism constructed in the contradictions foundational to wanting to be reciprocated. A slip of the romantic tongue for being cyborg, a slip of the symbiotic tongue because it is collaborative, a slip of the semiotic tongue because it has a distinct relationship to signs, and a slip of the semantic tongue because in its phrases the subject always appears in metaphysical lowercase so as to appear more like the predicate, that is, resembling more the stature we have within our own bodies with respect to the world of phenomena, all with the idea of generating some sort of line of flight, some modification and/or interruption in the flow of history. It is, as such, a stutter when we speak about speech acts, when speech acts affirm scientific results. In this way we problematize and embarrass those who ask in online chat:
Who are you?
Where are you from?
How long is your dick?
Vegetal love is a gif where the nouns PERVERT, SHAMED ONE, NUTJOB are written in all caps while listening to a playlist of sad music, perhaps Mexican, perhaps Latin American.
Vegetal love is the virility of the African clitoris, and I write African to avenge myself. Because for me to write and show a relationship with the continent is a response to what has been denied me. I write African knowing the potency of the drum, of waists. Possessing nothing, like any good African, I go on experiencing losses, smiling all the while. With nothing more, with everything stolen, I invent my own imaginary, with my damaged blackness, which is always transsexual and embodied. Yesterday, with no ajayu,1 without patience, I write llamp’ uchuymani,2 mixing everything I have, inventing a possibility. The conclusion is a drunken image, a picture of my aesthetic and artistic process and of my trans identity.
Vegetal love is a privilege that allows one to take stock of how important artists are in this hyper-materialized world. A planetary chain of doubtful forms and function. To make a silence, this is vegetal love: the silence of plants that I keep in this small house. Masturbating here is vegetal love.
Eating here is vegetal love. Reading, writing here is vegetal love. Thinking of yourself as though you are a fragment, a deformation, a beggar of the Caribbean, without a human sex, a fist in the ass, a delight.
That which works for nothing, does not work at all, refuses to work: that is vegetal love. Vegetal love is a different plan, experimentation where we know that the only things we have are our affection for each other and for everyone else. Loving you as long as we are never the same is vegetal love. Vegetal love is pornoterrorism.
TO FEEL IS VEGETAL LOVE
TO SIT IS VEGETAL LOVE
TO LEAVE IS VEGETAL LOVE
TO DREAM IS VEGETAL LOVE
TO JUMP IS VEGETAL LOVE
TO SOB IS VEGETAL LOVE
It is also to detach as a way of knowing that every day dawns and tomorrow is a good moment to keep dancing, even if one lacks the desire to. To cry and dance is the fundamental methodology of hopelessness proposed by vegetal love.
Vegetal love is investing time in leisure, in knowing that we will never understand each other. Vegetal love is essays that try to explain that there is no founding origin and that the body is a terrain where power anoints itself, smells itself, looks at itself. It is when you begged me to say: “Pack your bags, we’re leaving,” to geographically transform ourselves in a migratory process that was illegal and full of adrenaline and new experiences. A migratory process that intends to show the country you were born in that borders and sterility and nationality don’t unite anyone, they only separate.
To say goodbye to heterosocial rigidity is another necessary technology for the comprehension of vegetal love, because the knee is a dildo, the head is a dildo, the dick is a dildo, the vagina is a dildo, dildos that gestate and produce fluids where we will walk falling sick with syphilis. Regardless, happy and sad. Bipolarity is vegetal love, along with the negation of gender dysphoria, the negation of the attention deficit, and the promotion of previously mentioned “diagnostics” as forms that also produce valid and dignified lives. Attention on an almost parasitic stance that becomes house, island, universe.
Every anus is a hope in the possibility of ending the empire of the binary and a vital proposal of vegetal love. Invention or fabulation is a queer ethic, negating the monoliths of homonormativity and psychiatry.3 Invention or fabulation is a friendly ethic that refuses the negation of both cis and trans women in a revindication of actual history.
Vegetal love is being created.
Vegetal love does not aspire to results; to feel disgust toward what is connoted by “inclusion,” “consensus,” or “integration” is vegetal love.
Vegetal love is an option that has the possibility of inviting one to imagine, to walk through the streets knowing that our place is to be inventing, to be arriving, but that, as time goes on, we inhabit an intense “here,” a locality confused and confusing, itinerant, a lovebird, a bird of love, a tree of love.
To open one’s heart is the most important value of vegetal love. To ask science and culture about women is a fundamental method of the hopelessness of vegetal love. To ask about lesbian women is to ask about “multiple bites and contaminations: of pleasurable fluids, of secret touches, of eclectic readings, of imagined obsessions, of pornographic images, of non-reproductive sexual practices, of multiple lovers, of lesbian political experiences, of the memory of injury, of the suffering of ourselves and others, of spilled blood, of unspeakable violence, of broken affections, of erotic gushing, and of vulnerable moments.”4
Vegetal love is an interpretation of the present, a passionate reflection on semiotic and semantic transformation. A place to write in difficulty. A new program to reject the perverse inclusion in consumer society. Moreover, it is a gift of signs that have nothing to do with the production of money. A failure. An anus opening and enjoying its fissure; a place of decolonial celebration with much wine, glances, and falls over a table, falls in life, too. To cry sitting on a staircase for another organism that serves no purpose. To cry sitting on a staircase.
Vegetal love is not antagonism, not vegetarianism, not veganism. It is turning off the light to sleep in another’s arms.
Transfeminism is vegetal love.
Vegetal love is a critical operation that puts delirium at the center of its politics. Decentering the classical manner of modern rationality. The comprehension of vegetal love is instilled through periodically reading its points of view, what it proposes, what it becomes.
Vegetal love resists identity, aspires to a symbiotic relationship where ritual materializes drinking and dancing. With a space where the subaltern subject actually speaks, where the trans subject speaks of the contradiction of placing life and death in the realm of politics. Vegetal love takes you, shows you, affects you, and lets you go. It invites you to the uncertainty of an orgasmic, organic, aesthetic herd. It becomes a book and a negation of the constant attacks of our culture of verification and binary—show a penis: man, show a vagina: woman. Vegetal love is thus a relation, never an identity.
Vegetal love is a temporal discontinuity. The discontinuity of my personality, of my unstable identity, of a subjective process and transformative desire. It is a non-antagonizing feminism, an anus opening before the force of the sun’s rays, on the strength and manic rage of the thunder, the sounds of all marine animals and plants. A train moving from the center of a city to the periphery, to Latin America: this is vegetal love. The displacement that I understand constitutes for me a transfeminist performance, which shows me, every day, that I don’t need power; rather, I will continue strengthening this deep love toward others, toward the animalism that is yet to come.
Vegetal love is a process of mitosis that occurs inside of cells that constitute me as a political organism. There is absolutely no other body that experiences it this way, because it is my outside, my egocentrism, which only by luck is not white, not heterosexual, not bourgeois. Vegetal love can live as a process of extension, if I want it to. It is a species of structure that allows me to have a metaphorical relationship with the life I am living on this earth, with my trans becominghood. It is what is unexpected.
*
I wrote about the end of vegetal love. But meanwhile, I will await emails with files that register different actions where I will discover the aesthetic potential of this intense process of creative reconciliation with myself. We cannot ignore the mention of a text by Paul B. Preciado and how his trans process makes sense to me in relation to proposals of vegetal love. When he tries to explain his new voice, which not even his parents recognize at times, we should not understand Preciado’s voice as masculine due to the administration of testosterone; rather, it is masculine because it sounds like whales or thunder.
He says: “If we had dedicated as much research into communicating with trees as we have dedicated to the extraction and use of oil, perhaps we could illuminate a city through photosynthesis, or we could feel plant wisdom running through our veins, but our western civilization has specialized in capital and domination, in taxonomy and identification, not in cooperation and mutation. In another episteme, my new voice would be the voice of the whale or the sound of thunder, whereas here it is simply a male voice.”5
I also think about this dream that I had last night where my mouth was disfigured, losing my teeth, which, according to information I searched on the internet, reflects “fears and insecurities.” But perhaps it is my own process of transsexuality. Where this body that I was taught is human, at least in fictions of writing and dream, goes on to lose the privileges and trappings of colonial humanism and anthropocentrism. In short, vegetal love without the provision of hormones or surgical interventions, as in ancestral ways, is apparently a process of poetic, political, and aesthetic transsexuality where I build my fiction myself, my path to face the fears and insecurities that this heterosexual culture makes you face when you experience yourself within your abnormal sexuality.
Vegetal love met its end precisely three weeks ago, when the grey aura of that organism that ultimately served as motivator of all of this made itself visible. This was, as such, an intensive creative process that concludes with the production of images and a transfeminist linguistic register and textual archive. Vegetal love did not exclude itself from the inherent tendency of all organic life, and as such it continued being an emotional and paradoxically rational pulse, which became death. While vegetal love is a position to possibly live a more livable life, for a “here” to live in crisis with dignity, a pang, it also has, like all hopeless methodologies, an “until here.” In the end, it was a cycle that concluded with white and yellow flowers emerging from an anus, from a glass of water, and from an altar where Shangó, Yemayá, Felipe Camiroaga, Santa Marta, La Mano Poderosa, El Químico, El Sepia, Antonio, Enrique, Mamá Tingó, Anaísa, and Samuel all rest.
This appears to be an endosymbiotic false alarm because, if not, the association between the organism with its (current) aura of pain and discomfort and myself must become lodged in our interiorities for eternity.
As such,
Was there never emancipation?
Has this been a simple heterocentric homosexuality?
Johan Mijail is a writer, performance artist, and editor-in-chief of Catinga Editions. Mijail studied journalism. In 2011, Mijail published the illustrated book of poetry Metaficción and was an actor in the film Sister, by the Lewis Forever collective in Berlin. Mijail published two books with Editorial Desbordes: Pordioseros del Caribe (Caribbean Mendicants, 2014) and, with Jorge Díaz of the University Collective of Sexual Dissidence (CUDS), Inflamadas de retórica. Escrituras promiscuas para una tecno-decolonialidad (Inflamed with Rhetoric: Promiscuous Writing for a Techno-Decoloniality, 2016). She has performed in the United States, Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Germany, and Colombia, with work that invites a decolonial transfeminist imaginary. In 2015, Mijail received the Migrant Scholarship of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Chile and the Catalytic Scholarship of TEOR/éTica in 2020. In 2016, Mijail participated in the tenth meeting of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics: “ex−centric: dissidences, sovereignties, performance,” (University of Chile and New York University). Mijail has contributed to the anthologies Sin pasar por Go. Narrativa dominicana contemporánea (Without Passing Go: Contemporary Dominican Narrative, edited by Rita Indiana, 2015), Vivir allá: antología de cuentos de la inmigración en Chile (To Live There: Anthology of Chilean Immmigration Narratives, 2017), Afectos y disidencias sexuales jota-cola-mariconas en la Abya Yala (Jota/Cola/Maricon Affect and Sexual Dissidence in Abya Yala, 2018), and Inflexión marica. Escrituras del descalabro gay en América latina (Queer Inflection: Writings of Gay Disaster in Latin America, 2019). Mijail recently exhibited in Todos los tonos de la rabia (All Shades of Rage) at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León (Spain) and Colirio in the Cultural Center of Spain (Santo Domingo). In 2018, the Chilean press Los Libros de la Mujer Rota (Books of the Broken Woman) released Mijail’s first book, Manifiesto Antirracista. Escrituras para una biograf a inmigrante (Antiracist Manifesto: Writings for an Immigrant Biography). In 2020, she published the chapbook Santo Domingo Is Burning, by Catinga Editions, and in 2021, Mexican publisher Elefanta Editorial released Mijail’s first novel, CHAPEO.
manuel arturo abreu is a non-disciplinary artist from the Bronx who lives and works on lands of the Pueblos of Multnomah, Cowlitz, Chinook, Kalapuya, Klackamas, Grand Ronde Confederation, Siletz Confederation, and other First Peoples of the Pacific Northwest. abreu works with the everyday in a process of magical treatment, with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics. They received their bachelor’s degree in linguistics at Reed College. Since 2015, they have co-facilitated home school, a free pop-up art school with a curriculum of non-genre-conforming multimedia edutainment. abreu also composes worship music under the name of Tabor Dark. Recent projects include AB Lobby Gallery, Portland State University; Yaby, Madrid; MoMA and MoMA PS1, New York; NCAD Gallery, Dublin; AA|LA Gallery, Los Angeles; Center d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Rhizome and New Museum, New York; Palazzo San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare, Italy; HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Graz, Austria; Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna, Austria; Veronica, Seattle; and Athens Biennale 7. abreu has published two books of poetry, List of Consonants (2015) and transtrender (2016), and a book of critical writing, Incalculable Loss (Institute for New Connotative Action Press, 2018).
Eugenia Vargas-Pereira, a multidisciplinary artist born in Chillán, Chile, lives between Santiago de Chile and Tucson, Arizona. She has an extensive international career in performance, installation, video, and photography. Her approach is based on the themes of gender and the natural environment. Her work has been exhibited in various cultural settings, such as the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York (2021); Mercosul Biennial 12, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2020); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); Biennial of Contemporary Art, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia (2016); Biennial of Casablanca, Morocco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Bogotá, Colombia (2014); Venice Biennale (1992); Biennial of Photography, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and the Contemporary Art Cultural Center, Mexico City. She has also presented her work in the Havana Biennial, Cuba; Pérez Art Museum Miami; National Museum of Fine Arts, Caracas, Venezuela; Pompidou Center, Paris; Zendai MoMA, Shanghai; Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City; and the Mexico City Bienniale of Photography. In 2003, she represented Chile at the Venice Biennale.