Get Out

Via a Samborondón

I will have to dissapoint you (and also you)
Many many times.

Electric Nerves

While the system of gates and the limited access to public streets limits and controls who enters into the neighborhoodsand in doing so more or less achives the promise of security in face of buglary it also, inevitably, limits access for all its members to move as well. Meaning that if you inherit these circumstances (say as a kid born and raised), you are placed in a physical infrastructure that voluntarily restricts you from possibilities of diverse encounters, not to say the possibility of random encounters that can bring diverse points of views which you could in turn follow in order to find your way.

With a highway serving as the main road, enclosed areas of private access, shopping malls and a few streets to transit, the amount of crossings, are very limited, not to mention the possibilities of hanging out in a place without a purpose. The suspension of direction is hard to find, outside ones houses and bedrooms.

When you enter the public sphere aligned direction is strongly suggested by the hostil transit infrastructure. Pedestrians face afast 10 lane-two way street of fast cars and very scarse zebra crossings, as well as little shade provided to undertake the heat and the sun, directing you to the shopping mall, a place with A/C.

Buses have the main purpose of connecting big bus stations to the neighborhood with an unspoken understanding that the system connects people working for the commercial areas and the residents and not the residents themselves. It is an unspoked understanding that residents of this area must own a car. You can see this because the public bus system stops at the entrance of each gated community and they don’t offer any internal bus service either. Lizzards.

A car is an incubation machine. And with all the residents riding a car, and the service riding the bus, and everyone riding in the same direction without spaces to stop and linger, it seems like there is no place to stop and wonder if this is anyways the life you want. No friction from converging directions, no cross polination, no ferment me with your accent, no convince-me. Direction is then not only moving you, but in being so prevalent it is protecting itself. Such strong direction is protecting direction itself by making it very hard to diverge this type of life is protected and reproduced. If you want to follow another direction you can, but it will most probably have to be outside of the neighborhood, in distance with all the people that you might have come to love.

“Thinking about the politics of “lifelines” helps us rethink the relationship between inheritance (the lines that we are given as our point of arrival into familial and social space) and reproduction (the demand that we return the gift of the line by extending that line). It is not automatic that we reproduce what we inherit, or that we always convert our inheritance into possesions. We must pay attention to the pressure to make such conversions. We can recall here the different meanings of the word “pressure”: the social pressure to follow a certain course, to live a certain kind of life, and even to reproduce that life can feel like a physical “press” on the surface of the body, which creates its own impressions.”²

Imagine you want to deviate from the straightness of this line you have inherited. But this line. I mean. Is so big its walls are so dominant. You could have gotten used to them by now... and after following this line so many times... it can seem that by an act of magic, some things are reachable and others remain or even become completely out of reach. You might have gotten blind to it, to the possibility of being otherwise. It could seem that by an act of magic you become straight, pelucona, aniñada, a mother, either a believer or a sinner under catholic church. It could seem... that by an act of magic that is your ‘nature’. Oh well. And how will you find friends, peers and lovers, inspiring people across class. And how will you reach Queer Love, or even a place to have sex since it is not allowed at your parents house?

How can I look for something if I don’t know it exists
6 of 17 one-line drawings
Gel pen on school math notebooks after screenshots on different spots along the way in Via a Samborondón

Flight Map:

1. Ahmed Sara, 2006, Queer Phemenology, Duke University Press