WHAT IS ENTRESURES?

Entresures is an initiative based on an approximation between Latin American communicators, artists and writers, conceived by Jeannine Diego during the first semester of 2004, the 5-year strategy of which has been outlined during a first meeting held in Buenos Aires, between Jeannine Diego (Mexico), Gustavo López (Argentina) and Gabriel Restrepo, (Colombia), which took place from October 28th through November 5th.

What does Entresures mean?
The name is coined as a neologism composed by the preposition entre (inter- or between) and the plural of sur (south: souths); loosely translated as BetweenSouths.
The preposition entre (inter-) indicates connection, according to the Larousse Encyclopedia, and the scope of its use covers five large semantic categories:

1. medial situation pertaining to two or more persons or things. Given this connotation, the initiative is an instrument of cultural mediation undertaken by writers with regard to several borders: those of the 40 nations inhabited by 500 million people that comprise the region of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as those regarding the inter/mediation of scientific, pedagogic, aesthetic and philosophical understandings, via the literary craft, and in both cases, with the purpose of promoting cultural re/cognition and integration among Latin American and Caribbean States.

2. temporary interval from one moment to another. Within this context, Entresures has taken into account two moments between which the exercise of thinking and rethinking Latin America and the Caribbean can be immensely fruitful: the moment of the declaration of independence and founding of States (1808-1824) and the moment of its re/memorial re/founding within the framework of the celebration of the bicentennials (between 2008 and 2024). Entresures wishes to emphasize the role of the writer in the imperative task of the re-founding of States, one which, upon involving artists, comes about not within the political sphere which isn’t theirs, but rather within that of rethinking and renaming our complex reality.

3. relationship or comparison. Entresures undertakes the mobilization of writers and literature between countries in order to set in motion the links of cooperation, hospitality and recognition.

4. denoting the collaboration of each in what several do in unison. Entresures is conceived as an effort that enables virtual and physical correspondence in order to achieve synergy in the craft of writing/distribution/reading on behalf of thinkers and writers, so as to empower Latin American and Caribbean expression, as an exercise of unity amidst diversity.

5. place within which. Our place, the place of Entresures, is a true place and an imaginary place. The true place is the geographic and political space that brings together 40 States and 500 million people, with traditions both common and different, in urgent need of internal economic and political integration in order to assume, simultaneously, a greater balance of economic and cultural integration with the world. The imaginary place of Entresures is the notion of Latin America and the Caribbean as Utopia (in its etymology, a non-place), named as such from More to Enríquez Ureña.

In order to enable cooperation beyond virtual correspondence, the hospitality project of Entresures has been designed, as annexed to this document.

THE ENTRESURES PROJECT OF HOSPITALITY

“I came and knew
that to any other place
upon going, I’d return.
I came and knew that only being here
Everything is far.
I came and knew
That put in my fixed place I get lost.
Well inhabited
No one would say
“I’m going home”, “that is home”. (1)

“And in the hour of glass, in the thickness
of solitary stars,
I crossed cities, forests,
fields, ports,
from the door of one human being to another,
from the hand of one being to another being, to another being.” (2)

Objectives and phases. The project is outlined in five phases. The first, of electronic dialog, via a virtual forum (2004 - ). The second, a phase of itinerant hospitality (2005). A third, the creation of a shelter in Mexico City (2006 - ). A fourth, the possible creation of shelters in other Latin American and Caribbean cities (2007 - ). A fifth, the bringing together of previous experiences and others, within the framework of Latin American and Caribbean gatherings held in view of the bicentennials of independence (2009 in Quito – May 22nd and july 20th, 2010 in Argentina and Bogotá - 2011 in Santiago de Chile, among others, without forgetting the bicentennial of Mexico, which coincides with the centennial of the Mexican Revolution).

In its first phase, the electronic dialog brings together writers, thinkers and communicators from different regions of Latin America. As a starting point, a meeting between the organizers is held in Buenos Aires, in November 2004, with the purpose of defining strategies, as well as the philosophical and theoretic base of the project.

In its second phase, the project is centered on the idea that a writer from a certain country serves as host to another writer from a different country, in order to collaborate on a text based on the discovery of a living memory, incarnated in the figure of a senex (3) (male or female), chosen by the host and which he/she feels to be an adequate subject of significant anamnesis (4). In other words, each writer will travel to another region with the purpose of working with a writer in residence of the host region, who will in turn function as cultural and contextual translator and collaborate with the visiting writer in the elaboration of a text with reference to and basis (whether metaphoric, theoretic, philosophic, or anecdotal) on a senior subject previously chosen by the host writer. Likewise, the host writer will, at a given moment, travel to another region whereupon he/she will assume the role of guest, for the same purpose. Upon conclusion of this phase of itinerant hospitality, a collection of narrative texts will have been produced as a result, to be published and distributed within the participating countries and abroad. As a point of departure, a general meeting between participants and organizers will be held within the framework of the Book Fair in the city of Bogotá, Colombia.

In a third phase, a donation or property in trust will be obtained from Mexico City government authorities, a physical domicile denominated Alúna, the operation of which will be undertaken with the cooperation of international support, and which will function as an open house of intraregional and global exchange; a center of hospitality which will host and shelter literary, artistic and cultural expression. As a symbol of hospitality and the creation of a local, regional and global weave, the shelter will house a loom, the fabric of which will be endless and woven, stitch by stitch, by each of the guests.

During the fourth phase, the third phase will be broadened, with the propagation of Alúna in other Latin American and Caribbean regions.

The fifth phase will entail the gathering of the experience, with a projection to the future, on occasion of the bicentennials of the independence movements.

Concept and background. The concept of hospitality is much more broad than the derivative use of words such as “hospital” or “hospice”, or other similar terms such as “hotel”, “hostel”, these places – non-places- that take in the ill or travelers. An examination of the etymology of the noun “guest” helps to understand the richness of this term. The voice comes from the Latin root “hospes”, although a conjunction of two more ancient voices is made, stemming from the Indo-European root “hospis-pet-s”, a term which, according to the now-classic Emilio Benveniste, means “the master of the guest”(5).

To summarize, this means that the “hosti” – from which the English word “ghost” stems, as well as the German word “Gast” which designates the invitee – signifies the stranger or foreigner, one who may be hostile or foe (and hence must be defeated until the death or subjugated as slave), but also one who may be a friend or friendly. Therefore, the face of the guest remains ambiguous until it is deciphered.

As can be inferred, from this simple womb of Indo-European nomenclature, stem infinite understandings: those related to war, for example, whereupon fearsome strangers are, if not murdered, domesticated as slaves; also those related to economy, since the stranger can become benevolent via the rituals of exchange of offerings and counter-offerings; those related to psychology, because in psychoanalysis, the crucial notion, of the “ghost”, finds its enclave in the subtle margin between the familiar and the unfamiliar (6); those related to religion because it is an understanding that attempts to reconcile the distant and the near, the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Likewise, the ambivalent root “hosti” as friend or foe is at the base of all urbanism, for example, in the well-known manual authored by Manuel Antonio Carreño, built upon the economy of living room and dining room hospitality and that attempts to –although within the confines of these intimate spaces- reduce or, further, subdue, social hostility by way of a manual for “good manners”.

Intellectual hospitality has been decisive in the processes of national and international cultural integration. In the Middle Ages, minstrels and poets acted as a type of pollenizers in their travels from court to court. In modern times, the figure of the invisible community of thinkers was shaped by the vagrancy of intellectuals (Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau). In more recent times, the distension between Germany and France in the postwar era, found a crucial component in the exchanges between scientists, artists and literary figures. More can be said regarding the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe and about the creation of the European Community.

In Latin America, the idea of hospitality was already key in the entreaty, though failed, on behalf of Bolívar, for the creation of a Hosting Congress. It later became common practice for countries to grant asylum to refugees or travelers from other countries, Bello and Sarmiento in Chile, Florentino González in Chile and Argentina, Rubén Darío in Colombia and Argentina, Martí, Alvaro Mutis and Gabriel García Márquez in Mexico. But perhaps it is wise to focus from a strictly literary point of view on two examples which illustrate two types of hospitality: on the one hand, Canto General by Pablo Neruda, in which the kindness of the poetic hospitality of Latin America and the Caribbean is condensed. The other example is Jorge Luis Borges, whose work represents the greatest deed of a cosmic hospitality from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Given the processes of political and economic integration, cultural integration can find a foothold in the cultivated practice of hospitality in literature and the arts.

Basis and justification. Alúna, according to the mythology of the Kogui community of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, means being in thought and thought at a distance with the force of existence. It is a concept that corresponds with another, “Yuluka”, which means “to agree”, to come to identify with the wholeness of the being, something very apropos with the later thinking of Heidegger. In more specific terms, alúna means “spirit, memory, thought, life. Will, soul, intent” and as a verb, it is “to want, to desire, to love, to cohabit, to like… the word is possibly derived from the notion of fertilization or creation… although the word ‘love’ doesn’t exist in the Kogui language, it is translated, should one ask, as alúna.” (7).

These days, the closest is oftentimes the farthest. Telecommunications draw the distant nearer, but also may infinitely distance what is most proximate. This occurs because spatial proximity due to the speed of communications media makes us concomitant between generations within a coextensive space, but severs in the diacronic dimension, those who for diverse reasons remain anchored to a past of significants. When the home has become the world and the world the home, it is about finding these proximities and distances in the disclosure of the memory of the city/world, in a living figure who registers in his/her memory a kind of palimpsest of the city within spaces and times that have seemingly expired. It is about disclosing the signs of the living memory of the city/region/world in a person that appears to have lost a sense of the present and that only finds meaning in remembrance. And this, in order to find codes and ciphers of the constitution and destitution of our floating identity.

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(1) De Nápoli, Cristian. 2004. Palitos de Agua (Water Sticks). Buenos Aires, Eloisa Cartonera, cartonero books (jsbarilarohotmail.com)

(2) Neruda, Pablo. 1976. Canto General. Caracas, Ayacucho. Page 255

(3) Concept of Karl Jung, designating the polarity of the elder in any person, independently of his/her age, but aluding to the densely-lived experience.

(4) We make use of this Greek concept in order to speak of a radical memory, in this case of a broad journey or extended breath/breadth.

(5) Benveniste, Émile. 1983 (1969). Vocabulary of Indo-European institutions. Madrid, Taurus.

(6) In Freud’s already classic body of work Das Unheimliche (1919), literally “what is strange to the home”. In the same body of work, Freud attempts to examine the equivalence of names in other languages, among which are “ghastly” in English, and the Spanish sospechoso, de mal agüero, lúgubre, siniestro (suspicious, bad omen, ghostly, sinister), the latter of which is oftentimes used to translate this body of work. However, this name is not quite exact, since the marvelous paradox of this text (contemporaneous with the postwar era and of fundamental texts such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle) is to demonstrate that what is “strange to the home” (the sinister, the ghostly) in reality stems from the very bottom of the home itself, it is the most proximate, but something so dangerously proximate that it is pushed away, it is banished, placed far away. Freud, Sigmund. 2000. Das unheimliche. In: Studienausgabe. Psychologische Schriften. Band IV: 241-274. Frankfurt, Fisher Verlag. Subject which should serve to explain what lies at the root of all violence against strangers or foreigners. And point upon which correspondence could be found between Freud and René Girard.

(7) Reichel- Dolmatoff, Gerardo. 1985. The Kogui. Bogotá, Procultura, two volumes. Volume two, pages 95-96.