Drosophila melanogaster and their active forgettingwriting to kill the exhausting dance

Learning politics with animals is trying to forget the human condition; the ingrown colonialgestures, the engraved discipline, the erasure of the assumed verticality of the vitruvian man andhis opposite thumb: an attempt to engender a bacterial education in a queernnes to become.

It has started before this text. It is about the future now. Far ahead the words began. The wound thatgoes on and on, and from top to bottom entrenched in the endless colonialist project as an over-lasting looping repetition of the unnamed past in disappearance. As a fabulation of a deleted past;following Guaman Poma de Aylas’s translation methodology of negotiation for survival; based onthe Revolutionary process from the Malês in the Northeast of Brazil (black muslim slaves whoproclaimed their own monarchy based in their beliefs and have urged the death of the whitepopulation including violent acts as decaptation); inspired by the Zapatistas: The negotiationprocedure of loosing your memory, after going around over and over in a ritual to become slave toreinforce forgetfulness of their existence, or to engage with the magical power of the Iroko tree, thelarge hardwood sacred tree which holds the spirits, the enchantment of bringing life to the unborn.Some must be beheaded. To become.

When two individuals swallow microquantities by licking, sinking, melting in every pipe and holeof each others bodies, there is a nonhuman epistemological turn. I am ingesting you instead ofgetting touched by, or being with you, attuning or cohabiting with you. There is always abecoming something else in a microbiome perspective. To dwell in decentering the human in favorof a turn toward the invisibility of the bacterias, ghosts , spectralities, cosmologies and other beings,is the failing attempt of this discontinues and disruptive writing. It is presented here as a profoundmolecular reform that depends on the decolonization of our cells, gestures, acts, language andconsciousness.

Taking in consideration Leonardo’s da Vinci attempt of minor mondo with the vitruvian man thatrepresents the universality concept of cosmos which relates man to nature by gathering the analogyof the human body to the cosmos/universe has nothing to do with this failed attempt. Here thejourney goes from fruitflies to bacterias - makes a crack, a slit that unveils inhumanity. What is itlike not to be Human, or to feel that you do not belong? In the in-/non-human condition the firstattempt of becoming another possible being or living organism fabulates a possible archive ofimages, sounds and humans gestures as a choreographic procedure to be destroyed as adecolonization act through embodied, printed, colonizing wounds. In the (in)human conditions,there is not a claim for a hegemonic concept of humanity, or a path to belong -- but in fact, there is arecognition of the failure of the Human/White Man statement, its unsustainability and obsolescence.The representation of the Human through natural selection and the obliteration of racial differenceas juridical economic process in coloniality, defines Man as the center of the idea of race; whichcan differ Man from non-European, from the others and also from non-humans like animals,fruitflies and bacterias, thus reaffirming the naturalization of the colonial relation. The art ofsurvival in bacterias resides in the membrane resilience, their shifting skills in relation to shapes andfunction, ways of feeding themselves and reproduction. From the fruitflies the spell potential restsin the forgetting knowledge to live the moment in its fullness.

(I feel I am about to disappear and I must bring to foreground those who hadn’t vanished yet- longsigh- how to forget the things I do not remember?)

As recovering the archive is not a possibility, as reparation is no longer an option, as the unborn isnot claiming humanity the following steps were generated in chaotic, random, failing and fallingattempts to breathe without air: The stain of slavery is encarved in the unborn, and the inheriteddisappointment, the feeling of not-belonging, the burden of the non-history, in a mixed sensation offree-fall nausea, fearlessness and terror about the slave trade details floating around is the mortar /plaster of these constructions without squares. The flesh itself carries the grooves and the footprintsof slavery, in a detachment arqueology enfleshed. The queerness forbidden in the transatlantic ships,the remembrance of the smell of pain and death, blood, fluids, fecal matter, wounds with pus andscars mixed with frozen screams, whisper, pleasure and joy. To become a bacteria or a fruitfly as awonder from an indignation capacity grounded in an unstable invisible rebellious affection practicein the dark cellars. Acknowledging that the constraints of desire has shaped and delimited what ishuman and that took out all the irredeemable, inhuman, beasts, monsters, entities and othersinvisibilities and immaterialities from what we call the art of living.

The basic desire is that those words could function as a reward stimulus, a glitch of a memory thatwishes to survive or to disappear; coping with the dedicated mechanisms of fruit-flies to forget. Byforgetting faster, the traces can reduce the odds of missing future rewards, and finally highlight themovement in its intimate, passionate desire to exist, to dance not to die. The endless dance producesdopamine which is essential to forgetting, a neurotransmitter that confer motivational salience thatpropels on individual behavior towards a perceived event, an outcome in choreographical terms as adance state itself. Dancing is the practice of forgetting, a risk that an individual is willing to take inorder to embody a temporary absence of goals, a temporary blissful forgetfulness of the mainhegemonic goal, to reach the art of living. But surviving as a dance state deals with a commonmotion awareness, which here means to pull trough, outlive, stay alive. Forgetting is the flip side oflearning. It can also be perceived as a resistance technology. To forget what you cannot remember;an unacknowledged learning process, an ontological tyranny. The mechanism assumes then not torepeat the names and gestures as a development of sweeping counterhegemonic strategy. To surviveas a displacement that takes place just before the words began and its logic methodology of namingand categorizing.

Would it be possible to recover an unacknowledged past that floated in a queer transatlantic shipand remained as a ghostly spectral memory embodied within a forbidden, mutilated, violated,foreign, queer body? A dance state in absent presence would function as a memory of forgetting as areward of what can not be repaired? Could a collective public machine of forgetfulness make theshort life that the inhuman is addressed to live pleasurably and fulfilled; moving to forget the burdenand the stain?

The inhumanity inhabits a disruptive incessant diasporic rhythm, a countertime which owns theincantatory power of spoken broken words and that enables the invisible to take place in theabsence present. To evoke the invisible that has not yet been born through devices that shift spatialnotions (the perception of inside / outside, the perception of verticality, the ontogenetic interfaceswith the parasympathetic control) thus allowing the unknown to take place, the unborn to become,the brain cortex to be replaced by the anus bottom up.

The digestive tract is a large beautiful folded up tube from the mouth to the anus and the other wayaround, it will be framed here as the habitat of the invisible. Actually, it is a embodieddecolonization project or a micropolitical turn in a cellular sphere; the slave regime produced a

territorialization of the mouth as a place of torture and non-speech, the norm of compulsoryheterosexuality produced the ass as a place of excretion and non-pleasure as Jota Mombaça andGrada Kilomba would say. The cecum, close to the appendix, is considered to be the beginning ofthe large intestine and from the Latin caecus means blind; it is a place full of bacterias. The cecumas the dead end of the colon could be the “mask of speechlessness” of the microorganism world thatdrives desires and the anus as a cortex would be pictured as an epistemological disobedience. Theneural channels between the intestinal tracts and the brain are designed to go one way, mostly fromthe bacterially induced messages into the brain, and very little the other way around. This imagethat does not exist could compose a picture of the bacteria's invisible riot against abstraction infavor of the expanded, exhausting, enormous extension of folded tissues of sensation.

Considering the embryological process to fold, stretch, break out; the children who are born bynormal delivery have already contact with the mother's fecal microorganisms when passing throughthe vagina. In this way, the baby ends up being colonized by a series of bacterias. Not all of us arecolonized; either colonizers, scales, territories, quantities, performatives and subjectivities should bealso taken in consideration. Equally important is the relation to the digestive tract and theconcentration of waste material remains in focus instead of the desire and agencies to become. Forthe fruitflies the mother places feces in the egg pouches to establish a microbial composition in thelarvae intestines. The ontological texture to become in the invisible is an interconnection of flows,adding and sketching other compositions, not as visible considering the integrity, separability andindependency of the human figures. The tissue remembers the data and all the imprintedexperiences and it is by forgetting that you can fully dance in the present: The fruit flies learn toforget within their short life living existence. To learn the forgetting mechanism is to be able to fly,to become a bacteria. In addition, the experience is outlined of a bacterial body to become as aliving organism that enters dislogically in a displacement due to another embodied invertedverticality. As a result of the processes of hygienic behavior, the grammatisation of movement andthe asepsis of the visible as opposed to the invisible world of bacterias. On the one hand, the visibledefines us as a cultural obsession with cleanliness, disinfection, the preservation of our owncharacteristics such as identity, gender and race; on the other hand, when emulating bacteria andcontamination, there are other processes of translation, transmutation, transition immersed in dirt,putrefaction, harmful, rotten, aseptic. Understanding how contact with a greater quantity anddiversity of bacterias works

as a positive stimulus for the immune system helps to protect and generate life. Not only, therelationships involved in these alterations of the bacterial micro-world are designed as a way torethink artistic creation but also to stimulate the path towards the end of the world that never ends,the one invented as a collective illumination called Humanity. As a result, it reflects on thosehumans that allows all the bacterias to die in the current conjuncture. It is a genocide. The utopia ofthe bacterium rubs the normalization of the bodies, provides indiscipline and non- hierarchization ofthe parts. Others dances and possible ways of being existences to come.

Making science instead of art is a placebo. In this apocalyptic future / now, the nature of somebacterias, through the excessive use of antibiotics, enables a new possibility to emerge in theplurality: QUEER Bacteria, SUPER Bacteria, TRANS Bacteria, NANO Bacteria, POST Bacteria,PORNO bacteria to inherited a (non) archive in a choreopolitical assumption within scores.Fruitfliesand bacterias are intimated related with anaerobic processes that take place in the absence ofoxygen, digestion and putrefaction. The life in suspension, sliding like a dolphin in apnea or acorpse under the sea.

Furthermore the reinvention of the past and the archive by the becoming bacterial speculation is anirruption, in a clairvoyant imaginary, that facilitates illusions and delirious visions as well as anintimacy to non-human materialities, smells, textures and sounds. The repetition here has apedagogical approach, its insistence to forget after all. The intimate relationship between memory

and the choreographic scores called Attempts to Survive in Apnea are made to generate a discreteontology that rejects imperialists technologies to light up what needs to be forgotten, to stay alivewhich includes the stories we will never know. These attempts to move in inversions, with no air, inconstraints of inhalation or exhalation, working with body volumes and images which shiftsperceptions are a result of a deep submersion in the blind dark cecum. This sunken choreography isrelated to analog and digital technologies aiming to hack the body, by its implosion, penetration,diffraction, dissonance, disappearance. In this case a dance can work as a subtle cue that can triggerthe memory and turn a movement or a dramaturgical gesture score in a ritual. An incessant dancepresented here as an expanded failure due to it having been framed inside an epistemologicalcapture that derives from hegemonic, logical, and conceptual and scientific statements whosegrounds are currently being dismantled by anti-colonial, indigenous, intersectional, queer and blackstudies theories. Thus, attempts to survive in apnea is a decolonizing hacking process -- whichincludes the utopia of a collective embodied aesthetic experience, a paradox of finding structuresand a method to build a shared and common machine to communicate with spectrality, with theinvisible, the ghostly, magical absence, and the unknown to disappear to leave space for somethingto become. For instance it could be a hallucination of a methodology (the aseptic world of theEmpirical) immersed in a dazzling creativity, whic

h has been (un)learned from and with inhuman bacterias in order to investigate an epistemologicalturn, or to become as a (compositional) procedure: a training method for the world that is about toend but which in fact never disappears. Tragically, the methodology includes the enslaved, queer,disabled, unnamed and indigenous ancestors speaking from the bottom and the surface of the ocean,in between the falling sky, among those never considered fully human. The scores makes use of acontrol group in order to separate the subjects, hence an empirical experiment with humans, aninvestigation in how this group can be torn apart from the other by isolating the variables of theembodiment dancing process to explore and enlighten an utopian past as a future to be written.

(I feel I am about to disappear and I must bring to foreground those who hadn’t vanished yet. Howto forget?)

Forgetfulness is a device to deal with the constraints of desire that has shaped and delimited what ishuman and that takes out all the irredeemable, inhuman, beasts, monsters, entities and othersinvisibilities and immaterialities. (Do you still remember? Repeat the phrase) Forgetfulness is acontinuum trial once the future that existed only for certain beings has been lost, once started,undoing vanishing is not an option, and to face back to the past is to look at a forbidden and erasedpathway that has been burned, slaughtered, decapitated, tortured, dilacerated, disemboweled,murdered, raped. Maybe, it could be an opportunity to achieve consciousness, to be aware of whatcould have been, or to experience a cosmovision that does not take reality as an assumption. Thisattempt is based in a suppurated wound that never heals but that nevertheless has its own joy inmovement; a glimpse of happiness in the middle of a smoking storm. An attempt to survive inapnea can bring to foreground and emphasize, in our daily necro-political state, those who cannotbreathe, who had to forget to exist or the 50 days life that fruitflies live.

The constraint that paralyses the parasympathetic system in order to reprogram or hackphylogenetic memory. The body has recognized now that it is predestinated to death among the socalled southern epistemologies, evokes phantasmagorical elements to explain a profound andinvisible anguish. A curse that allows a non-previously existing practice to emerge; that allows anentire vocabulary displaced from the canonic to be built, due to the only exiting archive is made byhumans.

(due to the only archive that I am attached to is not mine, and will never be...)

The not belonging, not being immersed and related to the undocumented people stripped bare froman archive that has been removed, forgotten, suppressed , ignored and made irrelevant. How tounlearn imperialism that compresses peoples and worlds as raw materials? How to create an attempttowards the non chronological logic, to bring the original violence that silenced all the monsters tocome?

“Unlearning involves understanding that what was taken by the unstoppable imperial movement,and held as if naturally owned by Western institutions, cannot be parsimoniously redistributedthrough charity, educational uplift, or humanitarian relief.” (Ariella Azoulay)

The challenge comes from changing the paradigm and in-depth diving, soppy, flooded by thecreatures watery-logged.

“Wake: the track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimmingor moved, in water; it is the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbedflow.” ( SHARPE P.3)

At the same time, it will be always about the sea and trying to survive in apnea, to dance inasphyxia, to dive in the ghostly transatlantic memories. It seems that we have to go back andforward and repeat in exhaustion. To find ways to translate what was not named and those who havelost their “stone of memory” who are circling around the forgotten tree.

(Am I also looping and repeating?)

How to recover from this huge apnea? How to retrieve the time lost in the deep wet and dark ceco(from the digestive system) as a blind hole as synonym of the time lost in the transatlantic transactin a somatic practice? The ‘self-knowledge’ of unknowing reveals memories as the constitutiveforce of re-enactment existences, maybe? When identifying the colonizing practices and disciplinesimposed on the choreographic/ choreopolitical processes it is possible to enable skills that brings toforeground forgetfulness and indiscipline once recovering the archive is not a possibility, asreparation is no longer an option, as the unborn is not claiming humanity.

The steps presented here were generated in chaotic, random, failing and falling attempts to breathewithout air: The stain of slavery is encarved in the unborn, and the inherited disappointment, thefeeling of not belonging, the burden of the non-history, in a mixed sensation of free-fall nausea,fearlessness and terror about the slave trade details floating around is the mortar/ plaster of theseconstructions without squares with the anus wide open.

(end of repetition - trigger to forget)

A science fiction, a speculative fabulation of a future that did not come, that is not yet written orimagined as a projection of a technological world that would improve life, was wrought and beatenby the one in which non profitable lives are wiped out. How to develop skills and technologies tocommunicate with the invisible, with ghosts, through the white noise and its resonance, retrievingfrom the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean what must be overcome. A scientific methodology thatconsiders the bacteria membrane resilience that finds cognition in a metabolical empirical sense as atranscendental aesthetics, inside/outside the membrane. It is definitely an aesthetics revolution. In adynamic system approach, the pathway of forgetting is understood as a multiple, mutual, andcontinuous interaction of all the levels of the production/ creation / imagination/ fabulation /thoughts / environmental system. Thus the molecular bacterias can unfold many tentacular scalesand fractals in order to unveil unstable images. It can also be a chaotic system with complexbehavior as a nonlinear thinking that feedbacks the initial condition, floating and changing ,

combining , exploring and transforming in a dynamic way. Radicalizing science in art as a way ofcreating a wild field of future possibilities.

Not forgetting would be a problem which might disable the pleasure of the experience. Theassociation procedure could block the surprising chemical messages of the unknown, of the ...apnea and the lack of, the plasticity of the synoptical encounter. The more often a memory isrecalled, the stronger its neural network becomes. Over time, and through consistent recall, thememory becomes encoded in both the hippocampus and the cortex. Eventually, it existsindependently in the cortex, where it is put away for long-term storage. In this sense to acquirelessons of experience needs a full non stop forgetful procedure within a failing attempt toremember. You can picture this much like a message written in sand, with every ocean wave thatflows over the shore making the writing less legible until it eventually disappears entirely.

(I am about to disappear due to I am always remembering, failing to forget)

In this case every time it becomes thicker, the scare deeper, until it bleeds. To forget would turn theruins of the disappearance future in a fading landscape. Something that is and it is not at the sametime.

At the same time (repeats), the unborn, the upcoming, ignites an explosion, provokes an eruptionthat cracks the image of the individual, and underlines the fractures of deconstructed, erased,disrupted, denied, and silenced memories. Is it possible to fabulate what cannot be recovered?

(is it possible to do anything else with what cannot be recovered, other than forgetting? Why is italways so violent?)

With the sunlight the landscapes were unused and not visible anymore, starting to fade, todisappear. The language and the sounds in the decay of time were unheard. The humans are built upto forget, to survive. To set everything on fire in a boat as a restarting point? To hold a state of beingin the wake?

(Let’s burn us all.)

The unborn is about an immense and deep sorrow, so profound that seems to be here before me andthat will remain in afterlife. It highlights a pain whose weight sinks the self to the bottom of the sea.(A burden which I can’t get rid of. )
The sound of the chains, the unheard screams. How to create structured scores by choreographingthis blind time? How to bring to foreground the sense and awareness of precariousness.of theafterlives of slavery? How to experience the power of the wake? How to be sitting with the onesthat are dying over and over again? How to dislocate the pain and the sorrow of death as a way ofmarking, remembering, and celebrating a life in a choreography? How to we dance to forget?

Forgetting is an afterthought. The art of surviving instead of the art of living, The existence as adetachment, as a lack of air that improves dopamine, not stopping, increase arousal, wakefulness...

(Do we dance to remember or not to forget ? Dance as memory or forgetfulness , forgetting inremembrance)
The invisible as a source that provides knowledge about magical procedures, ghosts presence andthat materializes the souls that are floating around and over the ocean. Maybe over our heads andtheir magnum foramen. The implicit relation between the aesthetics expression and the biologicallifeHow to make them visible? The potential performative unveils scores as a metaphor out of the

exploratory investigation and it envelops an alert state; creative attention. What is waiting to bewritten? What is there to be listen? How to defrost the silenced voices? To drill what is to come.(Better to start over again- the goals of a disappearance, failure, ruined dances- not the dancer)Drawing a choreography of time that was not experienced. To score a performance that hasn’texisted. To increase an analytical and critical skill. To communicate with the wondering souls. Tohear the dead. To be in the wake.

( a felling of being dissolved into space, turning into fruit flies flying)

“To be “in” the wake, to occupy that grammar, the infinitive, might provide another way oftheorizing, in/for/from what Frank Wilderson refers to as “stay[ing] in the hold of the ship.”(SHARPE, P.22)

The ghost is the mark or trace of an absence.

AZOULAY, Ariella Aisha. Potencial History.Unlearning imperialism.Verso. London NY,2019.

AHMED,Sarah. Queer Phenomenology. Orientations Duke University Press, 2006.SHARPE, Cristina. In the wake. On blackness and Being. Duke University Press. 2016.

TINSLEY, Natasha Omise’eke.Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the MiddlePassage. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 14, Number 2-3, 2008, pp. 191-215