Tonatiuh Lopez on ReDirecting: East 2020

I'm a drug-love-sex addict faggot. I brought that to the seminar. I brought myself to the seminar. How? I tried to show the others how I wish to love. I tried to dare them to do it. I map my city – Mexico City – with the places where I used to find bodies to act out love with. I tried to make the people of the seminar occupy that city together with me and their beloved ones. I tried to make them trace out a map in the rooms where they have been locked in. I try to think about those spaces as a universe to explore. I realise, and I hope they did too, that it is possible to wander the digital space looking for others that respond to your gaze, and to open their bodies, rooms and cities to find love.

This experience was quite a big discovery to me. I'm always sceptical and suspicious about the online realm, I would even confess to being a bit technophobic. My whole life can be defined as an anxious search for physical contact with people, combined with periods of complete isolation, so technology is unimportant. I thought I was prepared for the situations that this pandemic could bring, but I was wrong, and it has hit my life and mental health terribly in unexpected ways. These past months I've been forced to exist in a space that I was rejecting; I lost my apartment and returned to the town where I grew up. There I had to invent for myself a digital voice and body. Reluctantly, I started to "connect" with people that way. This seminar was the climax of that connection; when I attended the first session, I discovered that we can inhabit the digital space together, that we can dream there together, that we can make it a space for cruising and discover how others love, sharing our lives and resisting politically. Digitally, together we stand.

Participants of the seminar are answering two questions: what was their contribution to the seminar and how has taking part in the seminar influenced their perception of the online realm.
Photo: Ania Bystrowska

Tonatiuh Lopez on Re–Directing: East 2020