Literature

Entomancy

The Spell with the Insects of Breathless Lungs

Observing the behavior of insects to predict events is an ancient and urgent practice—not as superstition, but as epistemology. Juvenal Barría brings from the tailings of a gold mine in Copiapó the colorless vestiges of the apparent death of an ecosystem, presenting the situation as a symptom that prompts us to ask, through the body, what remains possible when the human is no longer enough. The question is not rhetorical. It is an open wound in the landscape.

The video performance opens with a birth. A trans body gives birth from its viscera to other species: extinct insects, continuations of life that colonial taxonomy never knew how to classify. Different corporalities inhabit a dystopian space that seeks not recognition but transmutation. Bodies expelled from the established order found in ritual a technology of collective survival. This lineage is reactivated: the Indigenous queer body as heir to that persecuted tradition, conjuring not to escape but to multiply, to return in forms that extractivism and colonialism did not know how to name—and therefore could not fully destroy.

The three sculptures are metal armors filled with translucent wax that preserve the remains of bee life. Here they function as amulets of the spell: a remnant capa-razón (layer-reason), inserts that do not correct but invoke new ways of inhabiting the living. In three photographs, they are worn by three bodies emerging from the sea. Entomancy does not predict the future; it negotiates it.

Carolina Arévalo

March 2026