CALOR

CALOR is the story of secession and withdrawal, trauma and overcoming, disentanglement and return to oneself.

CALOR is the story of secession and withdrawal, trauma and overcoming, disentanglement and return to oneself. It is an investigation of the relations among regions within oneself, and their relation to worlds that are ‘other’ - the kaleidoscopic whole in which they exist and by which we are all connected - through the reflective journey of a person in the real and imagined regions. During this epoch of worldwide change and systemic restructuring, CALOR is a story of travel through landscapes that problematizes the ostensible polarities and dualities permeating the cultural milieu of our epoch. It is a journey that shatters all virtualities and the self-perpetuating modalities of rigidity through an exploration of the imaginary, through a reconfiguration of the self. CALOR is story ossified thought dissolving. All brittleness plasticized. It is the fire at the edge of the forest extinguishing the past; the heterotopia wherein ego is overcome by practice, where the self contracts to a point and vanishes, then reemerges beyond the persistence of memory.

Through the composition of poems, prose, and images, this project presents a story about the inner restructuring of an individual as they move through ideational landscapes invert the logic to which they are networked. Our lives are, to a large extent, characterized by the various sets of practices, habits, and rituals that we repeat every day. CALOR pursues the traumatic cracks in the formation of the ego, the spiritual fragmentation of the American topography which open unto often surreal worlds.

This project explores so-called “heterotopias,” borrowing a concept developed by Foucault, which have arisen in the time of Covid. These are spaces that remain “other” in relation to the cultural space surrounding them, which defy assimilation in some essential, idiosyncratic way. These created spaces are scattered among the networked regions of day-to-day life, and somewhere in-between the utopias and dystopias of our individual and collective imaginations. They remain apart because they abide a logic and set of rules that is cannot be ideologically assimilated by the surrounding culture. Heterotopias are spaces of retreat, refuge, and return that mirror the culture in which they exist but remain internally autonomous. On their journey through the disorienting world that unfolded in 2020, our story delves into worlds that lie outside of the weirding stream of modern life. It finds a shore, so to speak, where one can rest and reflect on the web of entanglements that structure life, where the illusions that perpetuate dissatisfaction emerge and lose their deleterious impact.

CALOR is a collaborative project between writer Michael Weber and photographer Hanna Quevedo. Together they convey the silence that lie in a multitude of dwelling spaces that defy the logic of the world surrounding them. The project will continue this summer when Michael and Hanna come back to the United Stated (they both work and live in Mexico City) and the output of the final compilation of texts and images will be a photo book that will present around 100 photos taken between July and December 2020 and July and December 2021.