the earth is ground, heart to heart
Mônica Hoff
Se habla lo que se siente
[Speak what one feels].
Brus Rubio
When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully.
bell hooks
BIXI AWO’TAN
[What does your heart say?]
Juan Lopez Intzín
Body ground heart
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Between one word and another, an abyss. Between one word and another, what is felt and its historicity—the way they acquire valence, temporally or geographically, something changes.
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Body ground heart: three words, one episteme.
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The smell of fried dough tossed in cinnamon sugar, prepared daily at 3 p.m. in the school cafeteria. Climbing the bookshelf in the living room at my grandmother’s house on Friday nights to get the books from the top shelf. Time spent with textbooks in the library, in the little house in the back, formerly a chicken coop, where I’d escape after lunch. The lemon-bergamot juice that accompanied every autumn, every winter. Why does the sound of the letter A correspond to the shape of the letter A? (Why does) the painter have to paint? Miss, can you tell me more about the sublime, please?
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Body ground heart – three nouns, five or more memories, a poem, or a piece of land to work.
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Lemon- bergamot, galego, clove, caipira, devil, horse, rose, vinegar – eight names for “the same thing”, radically different.
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Body ground heart or the vestiges of the unpronounceable present in moments that announce more than a memory, reveal a scenario formed by affects, architectures, climates, smells, gestures, landscapes, temporalities, geographies.
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Body ground heart: the relationship doesn’t fit into its semantic individualities; what comes into existence the moment one (word) infiltrates the other. More than a dislocation, a translation—by enchantment.One word relating to another, activating in itself, and in the other, what they cannot say alone.
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Body ground heart. Alone: nouns. Together: community.
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Body ground heart: a world-word.
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Body ground heart: A, B and C.
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A resembles B which resembles C. C does not resemble A. – Wittgenstein might say?
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What does the dissimilarity between C and A cause in B, which is similar to both?
What does the similarity of both with B produce in their dissimilarity?
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– Lituraterra – Lacan might respond?
– Perhaps.
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Trembling– Glissant might toast?
– Probably.
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“[The thought of trembling] is not uncertainty, nor is it fear. It is not something that paralyzes us. [It is] an instinct, an intuition of the world that we cannot reach with imperialist thoughts, with thoughts of domination, with thoughts of a systematic path that leads to a presupposed truth. It is something metaphorical, but also real, concrete.”1
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Amuyt’aña: pensar com el chuyma : think with the upper organs: heart, lungs, liver. The body’s thinking in its breathing and rhythm – present in walking, in a ritual, in dancing, in working the land.2
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“Body ground heart”
(like a drum that marks rhythm, counter-beats, cadence, movement)
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Like the trembling that leads us to reject all forms of fixed or imperative thinking, inviting us to find another way of being and not being in the world-system.
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The body – this great motive of the soul for the Greeks: a great reason: a colony: a product: a territory of defense: a set of forces in constant becoming and relation – traversed by the insurgency of the ground, dislocated by the epistemologies of the heart.
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El corpo es tierra [the body is earth], Lorena Cabnal gestures.
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The earth is ground, bell hooks tells us.
Heart to heart.3
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Add more words to the Portuguese language, Antônio Bispo dos Santos would say, sow seeds that are ours and that are not, transform our minds into farms.4
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Knowing how to “merge into the most diverse living environments, and take advantage of their accidents,”5 teaches Dénètem Touan Bona.
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Body ground heart: a tangle of vines that obstructs the linear, the rational, the harmonious.
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Body ground heart: “a rugged territory […] suitable for a freedom that is invented in the moment, without provisions and in total ‘opacity.’”6
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For a lekil kuxlejal,7 or a life in fullness, dignity and justice, with the consciousness of community.
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Being with/being of8 the cosmos together with other beings: ch’ulel,9 life in everything.
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Bring the heart back to the cosmos.
As knowledge. As insurrection.
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Like someone dancing, like someone painting, planting, and singing. With a tongue of fire, as Gloria Anzaldúa suggests.10 Driving language mad, pouring their guts out onto paper, like someone choreographing uncontrolled beats, lack of rhythms, dancing the accidental present in the encounter of words-world.
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Poetry – “the only thing capable of connecting the concert of the world to the fantasy of the world”, as Glissant tells us.11
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Like a theater-forum body ground heart rising up.
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As a way of being together:
in helplessness
in poetry
in the street
on a Wednesday in 1968, on a Sunday in 2025.
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Because neither Brancusi nor any engineer “managed to reach the level of precision and polish of the fragile materiality of a chicken’s cloaca.”12
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Nor the taste of love offered by a lemon- bergamot, galego, clove, caipira, devil, horse, rose, vinegar.
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Because neither poets, politicians, philosophers.
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Because the earth is shaking. There are no straight paths anymore.
No place for fixed ideas.
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Because, today.
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September 21, 2025, 2:43 PM.
The sky is shaking the order at 29 degrees of chaos.
[It’s too early… or too late.]
The people are in the streets. The people are in the streets!
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Guapuruvus, aracuãs, capuchin monkeys announce storms
the little dog seems to be predicting something since yesterday
rivers and mountains come together
it rains, and feet hit the ground hard
for over 500 years.
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Earthworms have no peace.
***
Mônica Hoff is an artist, curator, and researcher. Her PhD in Visual Arts from the State University of Santa Catarina (2019) focused on artist-run art schools and how artistic methodologies become institutional pedagogies and become schools. In her Master’s in History, Theory, and Art Criticism from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2014), she focused on the phenomenon of the educational turn and the Brazilian art context. In her work in the arts, through various curatorial projects and publications, she investigates the relationships between curatorial, artistic, and educational practices and how these contribute to, conflict with, and/or determine institutional policies and pedagogies.
1 Edouard Glissant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Conversas do arquipélago (Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2023) 101-102.
2 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo ch’ixi es posible: Ensayos desde un presente em crisis (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018) 121-122.
3 “heart to heart” alludes to the title of the last chapter, in bell hooks. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (Routledge: New York and London, 2003).
4 Antonio Bispo dos Santos. A terra dá, a terra quer. São Paulo: UBU/Piseagrama, 2023.
5 Dénètem Touan Bona, O levante vegetal das zonas de incerteza ofensiva negra. Performance conference presented at the Pivô Pesquisa Study Program, on June 21, 2023. Accessed September 2025 https://pivo.org.br/blog/o-levante-vegetal-das-zonas-de-incerteza-ofensiva-negra-denetem-touam-bona/ >
6 Ibid.
7 Juan López Intzín. Sp’ijilal O’tan : Knowledge or Epistemology of Corazón. In: Resistant Strategies, edited by Marcos Steuernagel and Diana Taylor (Duke University Press and HemiPres , 2019) Accessed September 2025 https://resistantstrategies.hemi.press/spijilal-otan-knowledges-or-epistemologies-of-the-heart/
8 T.N. The verb “to be” in Portuguese is translated as both “ser” and “estar”. The first is used when referring to more permanent or defining characteristics and the second with more temporary conditions or locations. The original text uses both “ser” and “estar,” suggesting simultaneously a sense of permanence of being of or from and of being with as a temporary condition.
9 Ibid.
10 Gloria Anzaldua, “Falando em línguas: uma carta para mulheres escritoras do terceiro mundo” in: A vulva é uma ferida aberta & Outros ensaios (Rio de Janeiro: A Bolha, 2021) 43-62
11 Edouard Glissant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, 94.
12 Reflection by artist and educator Mariana Berta, January 2021.
