By Ariana Ibañez

I have played it on my computer several times already BeingI think about how I am going to start writing. Writing as a vital process, as a mutable imprint of my place-time of enunciation that could be another. That is, if I were to write this text tomorrow or had written it before, it would be another text. I watch the short documentary that lasts a little more than three minutes with attention again and again. We had to adjust to that time precisely, Marian Garcés told me when I met him. 

In cinematic terms, Being It is an experimental short film shot on celluloid – which I saw for the first time on the documentary tour Walking during his time in Querétaro. A documentary that I found absolutely beautiful and intimate. The focus on hands that weave a braid, which is woven with small filaments that show an analog recording and which, in turn, is woven with a voice like a dream from the living archive (or living).

In emotional terms, the reminder of the constant mutation from multiple times and the material and immaterial record on my body, my skin, my energy, my perceptions, statements, emotions, in the territory, in the seeds, in the summer rain, in the memory of water and mountains. It has been complex to choose the path through which to write about Being. This time I don't want to theorize about concepts I've read and borrowed. Although my writing, of course, is about linking: my writing is not alone. But this time I want – and choose – to give myself over to the sensation of seeing, feeling and hearing again and again. Being. I find in that sensitivity more questions than I can perhaps put into this text. That perceptive, tactile, affective, sensorial language that is only found in the intangible of the sensitive experience. Like the rain that caresses the rock. I am the rock, in this case, in front of the 3 minutes in black and white that I observe on my screen. Or so I want to believe. 

Being as a continuous manifestation of the body, of the course of affective, energetic, physical fluctuations; always changing. Being like the expectation of an imminent event, transformation, perhaps. Being as (im)permanence, as recognition and interconnection with life and its manifestations, with that which makes it possible and which does not end; as the Tibetan monk Thích Nhất Hạnh says: manifestation is simply a change of form. The form is continuous and interconnected, like Marian's voice that resonates within me: the trans experience through the ages; and I think – and feel – that this experience is the memory that precedes us, it is ancestral and it is endless. 

Estando was part of the Ambulante festival program, which visits San Miguel de Allende this weekend with La danza de los Mirlos, which will be presented at Salón Semilla on Saturday, August 31 at 4 pm. Tickets are already available through Salón Semilla. 

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ariana ibañez

Contemporary artist, writer and editorial designer. His practices intersect around the care of life, the recovery of ancestral knowledge, intuitive knowledge and the word, through the accompaniment of sensitive, corporal and energetic processes. Through art he has generated pieces of action art, installation, performance, writing and video. His work has been presented in several museums and galleries, as well as in anthologies and individual plaquettes. Founder of the fanzine publishing house antifutura and of Casa Tanit, a space where he accompanies art exercises, writing and practical philosophies. He is co-founder of the audiovisual-experimental exhibition project Destroy, says they. He studied the Master's Degree in Gender Studies at the Faculty of Arts at the UAQ. He responds to the pronouns ellx/ella/elle.