Reading List: Yina Jiménez Suriel, la historia de las montañas

How can thoughts that are not yet structured to be communicated through a rational exercise such as writing be inscribed? Writing can be substituted with any other type of exercise to communicate ideas, and in all these possible questions lies latent the same starting point: how to materialise desire?

The following selection is a gathering of ideas manifested in different formats – sound, writings, podcasts, moving images, installations – that have been key to the development of the research ‘la historia de las montañas’ (2019-ongoing) whose axes are structured around the process of emancipation and the creation of imaginaries. The latter is understood as ‘structures of symbolic and material order that allow the organisation and management of the life of living beings’. At present, the project has been delving into the perceptual system of the human species and the ways in which it could expand through aesthetic thought. It has also focused on the ocean as a key space for contemporary emancipatory processes of de-domesticating subjectivities and reconciling with constant movement, materialising imaginations that assume it as a transversal aspect. This has been developed through the projects ‘de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas’ (with the support of Pivô, KADIST, and Delfina Foundation, and ‘otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua’ (supported by TBA21-Academy).

Yina Jiménez Suriel (b. 1994, La Vega, Dominican Republic. Lives and works in Santiago) is a curator and researcher and the TBA21–Academy The Current IV Curatorial Fellow, a three-years research project entitled ‘otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua’. She is the Adjunct Curator of the 14th Mercosul Biennial (2024) and the Associate Editor of the magazine Contemporary And (C&) for Latin America and the Caribbean. Her curatorial projects include: ‘Vehículos. Una revisión’ (2018) at Casa Quien (Dominican Republic); ‘one month after being known in that island’ (2020) at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger (Switzerland) curated with the artist Pablo Guardiola and co-produced by Caribbean Art Initiative; and research project ‘de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas’ (2022) at Pivô (Brazil) co-produced with KADIST with a screening programme in Cinemateca Nacional in Santo Domingo. The final chapter of ‘de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas’ will take place between three venues intentionally overlapping: KADIST San Francisco (October 2023 until February 2024), Delfina Foundation (January until March 2024), and through a screening programme at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila (February 2024). She was in residence at the Delfina Foundation, London (Summer 2022), part of the curatorial team for Opening at ArcoMadrid (2023-2024), and has contributed to various international art publications and artist catalogues.