SOULLESS HUMAN BEINGS SERIES
SOULLESS HUMAN BEINGS FREE

University of New Mexico Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Angelica Serna Jeri presented a short story, “Ñawpapachamanta Rimanakunata Uqllanapaq,” in Quechua, Spanish, and English, on finding home in spirituality and language, and on the untranslatability of the indigenous Andean language, as in kunununuy, the onomatopoeic verb in Quechua, the sound produced by the movements of the earth. The readings that followed contemplatively bridged past to present, not-here to here, silenced to voiced. At its end, the performers prompted a collective lead-in to the building, as witnesses stirred the dust (literally, dispersed by the performers), activating the “soulless place.” This palimpsestic intervention breathed life into the “dead stone” of this settlement and opened into readings that meditated on the living present and presence of colonial legacies, and on life that grows through their cracks. A runner crossing the courtyard stopped, pulled out his headphones and sat on a bench to watch the performance, and stood up to intervene in a staged tug-of-war between the two performers. The performance itself-as Monique Blom and Arantxa Araujo became silent, moving statues that occupied the courtyard-answered the question: What does it take to stop, slow, interrupt and disrupt the circulation of bodies and the speed of productivity at Princeton? A group of people gathered and witnessed, a pensive and active silence blanketing the space. The performance, which took place in the same courtyard, brought garlands of foraged stinging nettle among other leaves and vines, an homage to what was once rooted there. The opening performance by the Do-Mystics was in many ways responding to the 2005 letter in the Princeton Alumni Weekly magazine by Gisela Kam, a cataloguer at Firestone Library, titled “A Soulless Place,” which describes how East Pyne’s courtyard was built over a garden, uprooting its poplars, ferns and various inhabitants. The night’s location, East Pyne Hall, bears its own entanglements with histories of transatlantic slavery and settlement on un-ceded Lenni Lenape territory.

SOULLESS HUMAN BEINGS SERIES

The series opened on Friday, October 11 with an evening of multi-lingual performances by academics and organizers, drawn from Princeton University community members and visitors from Saskatoon and Albuquerque.

SOULLESS HUMAN BEINGS FREE

Over the three days, we chose to offer an alternative form of exchange to the free trade agreements of the Americas that privilege the mobility of capital and commodities over that of human beings. Breathing Life into “A Soulless Place” By Vero Carchedi, 3rd-Year Graduate Student in Spanish and Portugueseīelonging(s) in Movement centered different historical and contemporary relationships to territory, belonging, and movement by placing indigenous and newcomer/migrant stories from the Americas in conversation with one another.

Soulless human beings