Travesías Terremoto vol. II: The Chant of the Chaos-Monde

Travesías Terremoto II: The Chant of the Chaos-Monde
Travesías Terremoto is a research residency program for Latin American artists developed by the decade-old contemporary art magazine Terremoto. With each edition fully funded and rooted in a different territory of the Americas, the program focuses on a specific research theme and unfolds through a transdisciplinary framework that includes local collaborations, site visits, workshops, editorial content, public talks, and other context-based activities.

Launched in 2024 with its first edition in the Sonoran Desert, Travesías Terremoto now enters its second chapter: The Chant of the Chaos-Monde, which will take place in the Dominican Republic in 2025.

Drawing from the archipelagic thought of Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, this edition embraces ambiguity, fragility, derivation, and incompletion as tools to explore Latin American narratives linked to ritual, the sacred, and diverse notions of ancestral knowledge emerging from spiritual imaginaries and their economic, political, and social contexts. Curated by Luis Graham Castillo and Terremoto, the program recognizes the Caribbean as a constellation of fragmented histories, insular ghosts, complex identities, and overlapping imaginaries.

This residency embraces contemporary complexity as fertile ground for collective reflection. It revisits Glissant’s concept of chaos-monde—a term he uses to describe “the entangled collisions of cultures that ignite, reject each other, disappear, persist, slumber, or transform at sudden or glacial speeds. These bursts and flashes are forces of transformation, yet we have barely begun to understand their foundations, structures, or unpredictable momentum.”

Hosted in San Cristóbal, Santo Domingo (RD) and México City, The Chant of the Chaos-Monde convenes artists, curators, and thinkers from various disciplines to challenge dominant notions of knowledge through embodied encounters, conversations, fieldwork, and interactions with diverse subjectivities. Glissant’s chaos-monde becomes a lens for understanding the world through complexity, imagination, and interdependence—tools for resisting colonial and neocolonial oppression, and for fostering solidarity, creativity, and transformation.

Chaos-monde is an invitation to rethink our ways of being, embracing complexity, opacity, and interconnection as essential elements of community life. Like the sea that surrounds the islands, human, cultural, and historical relations flow beyond singular directions, celebrating the vastness of existence and fostering new complicities.

Grounded in this approach, the program raises critical questions such as what ancestral strategies of emancipation can guide us in navigating the present? How do Glissant’s notions of chaos-monde and poetics of relation open new pathways for addressing contemporary struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean? How have Indigenous, African, and European belief systems shaped contemporary spiritual traditions?  In what ways have migration and globalization transformed Caribbean magical practices beyond the region? What roles do oral traditions and storytelling play in transmitting esoteric and ancestral knowledge?

About the residency
The Chant of the Chaos-Monde is a space for exploration and critical thought, combining research, experimentation, and direct engagement with diverse communities in the Caribbean and Latin America. During the residency, participants will engage with thinkers and knowledge keepers through activities such as: workshops on collective creation, guided walks through historical and natural landscapes, visits to sites of cultural and spiritual interest.

The program includes immersion in syncretic spiritual communities, conversations with historians on Afro-Caribbean resistance and indigenous heritage, hands-on learning with local participants, and discussions on the Caribbean’s ecological memory and its ties to identity. Additionally, residents will engage with artistic communities and self-managed spaces, exchanging ideas and creative processes. 

Resident artists
Following an open call, five Latin American artists were selected to participate: Julianny Ariza Vólquez (Dominican Republic), Miguel Cinta Robles (México), Edizon Cumes (Guatemala), Luisebastián Sanabria (Colombia) and Carla Sobrino (Chile). Selection committee was comprised by Sarah Hermann (Dominican Republic), Tania Candiani (Mexico), Maya Juracán (Guatemala), Luis Graham Castillo (Dominican Republic) and Helena Lugo (Mexico).