CROSSING INTO DREAMS
Crossing Into Dreams By Sofia Saavedra
My dreams often sneak into my waking life. I’ve fallen in love in my dreams. I have met other dreamers there. My dreams have flooded material reality with a sense of intention and opportunity. There have been those who don’t believe my wet, liquid dreams. All dreams are wet. If dreams were a state of matter, they would be the liquid state. There, where it’s possible to float, navigate, sink, submerge, drown, disappear. Perhaps they ascend to a cloud so they can rain on wet ground. Dreaming can be a crawling return to the primal ocean, to the amniotic fluid in which our bodies coagulated—our mortal, sentient, dreaming, imagining, desiring bodies. Dreams are liminal and subterranean like the Acheron. They flow through ambiguous and indecisive channels where everything and nothing are possible. Dreams inhabit the body and are the refuge inscribed in the body to leave itself, to free itself for a moment from matter, gravity, and weight, while retaining—treasuring—the faculty of feeling. This is the wild, untamed region where Sofía positions herself as a dreamer. A witch who sees souls and their bodies in the transit and fluidity of daily rehearsals, who celebrates the impossibility of being only one thing in one place. Once, Sofía revealed to me a golden path that meant movement for both of us. That movement has brought us to port here and now. Our dreams—the collective dream! —take my hand and operate it so that I can write these lines. In «Crossing into Dreams,» Sofía translates the seductive and irresistible song of the sirens to immerse us in the water mirror from which we can rebuild the world and wash it clean of its hostilities, injustices, omissions, and violations; resist and heal after each attack; create better futures; resist. For Sofía, dreams are still a political dimension. It’s not such a deranged idea. For a dream he had and shared with millions, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life in Memphis, fifty-three years ago today.
Painting is the magical artifact chosen by Sofía to conjure the crossing of migrating bodies and souls into dreams, all intertwined like fibers in an unconscious utopian collective. In addition to being an artifact, painting is a magical act, a ritual performed by the body of the visionary artist. It is her body where creative, matrical magic materializes. Her body allows her not only to paint, but also to dispense with painting and be pure expression in movement, in warmth, in presence. Her body, like all bodies, is an instrument of resistance. Her body, its image and likeness, swarm among the dreaming figures that float like water nymphs on Sofía’s canvases, undifferentiated from one another, undifferentiated from masks, undifferentiated from the non-human species with which they hybridize in a chimerical way. Sofía, painting with the colors and strokes in a trance whispered by her intuition, carries with her, like an elixir, the water pregnant with dreams and intermediate creatures— like a shaman who returns to the land of the living to recount what she saw beyond. Deeper. In our own flooded depths where savage powers dwell, along with rebellious organs and chthonic deities that undermine everything to force us to new beginnings atop the ruins of the prisons of yesteryear.
-Pedro Marrero Fuenmayor, Caracas, 4 de abril de 2025-
Cruce hacia los sueños por Sofía Saavedra
Es frecuente que mis sueños se cuelen en mi vida despierta. Me he enamorado en sueños. He coincidido con otros soñadores allá. Mis sueños han inundado la realidad material con sentido de la intención y la oportunidad. Ha habido quienes no me creen mis sueños mojados, líquidos. Todos los sueños son mojados. Si los sueños fueran un estado de la materia serían el estado líquido. Allí donde es posible flotar, navegar, hundirse, sumergirse, ahogarse, desaparecer. Acaso asciendan a nube para poder llover sobre mojado. Soñar puede ser un regreso a rastras al océano primario, al líquido amniótico en el que cuajaron nuestros cuerpos – mortales, sintientes, soñantes, imaginantes, deseantes. Liminales y subterráneos como el Aqueronte son los sueños. Fluidos por cauces ambiguos e indecisos donde todo y nada son posibles. Los sueños habitan el cuerpo y son el refugio inscrito en el cuerpo para salir de sí mismo, para liberarse por un rato de materia, gravedad y peso, aunque conservando-atesorando- la facultad de sentir. Es esta la región salvaje, no domesticada, donde se posiciona Sofía como una oniromante. Una bruja que avista las almas y sus cuerpos en el tránsito y la fluidez de ensayarse a diario, que celebra la imposibilidad de ser una sola cosa en un solo lugar. Una vez, Sofía me reveló un sendero dorado que significó movimiento para los dos. Ese movimiento nos ha hecho tocar puerto aquí y ahora. Nuestros sueños -¡el sueño colectivo!- me toman de la mano y la operan para que yo escriba estas líneas. En “El cruce hacia los sueños”, Sofía traduce el canto seductor e irresistible de las sirenas para sumergirnos en el espejo de agua desde donde podemos recomponer el mundo y lavarlo de sus hostilidades, injusticias, omisiones y violaciones; resistir y cicatrizar después de cada embate; gestar futuros mejores; resistir. Para Sofía, los sueños no dejan de ser una dimensión política. No es una idea disparatada. Por un sueño que tuvo y que compartió con millones, dio la vida Martin Luther King en Memphis, hoy hace cincuenta y tres años.
La pintura es el artefacto mágico elegido por Sofía para conjurar el cruce de los cuerpos y almas migrantes a los sueños, todos entrecruzados como fibras en un utópico inconsciente colectivo. Además de artefacto, la pintura es acto mágico, ritual ejecutado por el cuerpo de la artista vidente. Es su cuerpo donde se materializa la magia creadora, matricial. Su cuerpo le permite no sólo pintar, sino también prescindir de la pintura y ser expresión pura en movimiento, en calor, en presencia. Su cuerpo, como todos los cuerpos, es un instrumento de resistencia. Su cuerpo, su imagen y semejanza, pululan entre las figuras soñantes que flotan como ninfas acuáticas en los lienzos de Sofía, indiferenciadas unas de las otras,
indiferenciadas de las máscaras, indiferenciadas de las especies no humanas, con las que se hibridan, quiméricas. Sofía, pintando con los colores y los trazos en trance que le susurra su intuición, trae consigo como un elixir a cuestas el agua preñada de sueños y criaturas intermedias, como un chamán que vuelve a la tierra de los vivos a contar lo que vio más allá. Más adentro. En nuestras propias profundidades inundadas donde habitan las potencias salvajes, los órganos rebeldes, las deidades ctónicas que horadan todo para obligarnos a nuevos comienzos sobre las ruinas de las prisiones de antaño.
-Pedro Marrero Fuenmayor, Caracas, April 4, 2025-
The crossing is a place of transit—a non-place, more accurately—specifically denoting the margins, the edges of the centers of great power.
The crossing toward dreams is walking around uncertainty, dancing around uncertainty, crafting poetry and carnival around uncertainty. It is seeing ourselves eye-to-eye as a majority within chaos—and within that chaos, sitting down to speak of human movement and diversity as a hymn to life. As a natural and inevitable pulse. As a great power.
This corridor called the crossing is a threshold. It is a home from which we reinvent our own freedoms.
The movement of living bodies is the seed of creation. This disordered movement is raw material for the creative and symbolic universe—a resistance in a world where creation is forbidden and reproduction is mass-produced. Chaos is a place where creation germinates.
Through painting, I see chaos as a fractal of the immeasurable—a construction of possibilities within the possibilities of the human. To examine chaos is, at the very least, a crack that allows doubt about the world’s apparent political order. It permits a rupture with the «rational» order of civilized life (where war is permitted).
The crossing is the place of all movements, where all these bodies meet day after day. Moving from one side to the other to reimagine existence. To cross is to challenge death as much as life. Yet the crossing is driven by the desire to create life (to live)—an imaginary escape from the hegemonic limits of «eligibility.»
This pictorial poem’s song sees dreams as liberated territory. Dreams are a shared, human space—the possibility of releasing the body to become creative and symbolic flesh.
I can only narrate from what my body materializes: a Latin American woman, a Venezuelan mother. This thought converses with painting about other playful, erotic, symbolic possibilities of bodies. I need to think through painting in a playful and creative way—to see myself through dreams in order to re-create (delirious dimensions) in visual and theoretical languages.
Chaos has been hidden in shame. My proposal is to see it as one who gazes into an echoing mirror. Within chaos, we inhabit infinite creatures of untamed nature—a human multiplicity existing, complaining, sometimes believing we are moths polluting the pristine illusion of wellness in great cities. Yet no one speaks of the potential to BE in difference. (This paragraph is Powerful.)
Poetic Rite of Passage
Crossing into Dreams
(a home in transit and a ritual of nomadic identities)
there is a majority, it exists at the crossing,
at a border
I am one of them
I am always at the border
I AM, at the border
I always look from the border
from the border among the other beasts
sometimes a beast is a beautiful cockroach
there are so many borders
I have learned to live with them
I don’t know how to pray – I make up my own prayers
I whisper
There is a crossing that takes us to our dreams; we keep walking at the
border without falling
We are going towards dreams!
Dreams are the little hidden door that takes us to that warm and intimate
place of the soul
I close my eyes, unable to heal the wounds of this city
much less of this world;
I only try to heal the wound of this body-soul-cosmos of mine
(The word soul is an immortal word, a word of the breath;
the word
soul possesses an interior light: sunlight)
To be born: that is the first crossing, to cross a body and another and
another
Looking for life, howling
Being born
like somebody who arrives at a place without time
(peace is not a word)
Those that are born, are born
Sometimes one is born alone
one is born in a dump, one is born in a house or in the cold water of a river
but, who could ever deny our birth?
to be born is to break the word intimacy
to be born is to levitate and to be part of the cosmos
To be born is also to die
One crosses, one is born.
dreaming is still a good refuge
but dreaming is also a great power to be awake
Just a drop of stars
to attend a party of pleasure, pleasure climbing the gray wall of war
We are no longer willing to allow the pleasure that has been stolen for
aroused machos with the license
to kill, We no longer want religions or cults higher than life
we sing and we raise dust
we travel together by train (because planes are not accepted)
old men and women, fat women, slim men,
black women and men, Indigenous people, brown, pink, green, blue, violet
people
sissies
queers, marginal people, migrants, neurodiversities, disabilities
and other beasts that inhabit The Crossing
determined to go across the limits of the body
to cross towards the embrace
Tenderness is the field of our total insurrection
In our dream,
standing as goddesses on top of the cosmos of possibility
there
nomadic, furry, skinned, frumious beasts
diluted and embosomed in each other
we sow and we respect the stations of memory.
Cruzando hacia los sueños
(un hogar en tránsito y un ritual de identidades nómadas)
hay una mayoría, existe en el cruce,
en una frontera.
Yo soy uno de ellos.
Siempre estoy en la frontera.
YO SOY, en la frontera.
Siempre miro desde la frontera,
desde la frontera entre las otras bestias.
A veces, una bestia es una hermosa cucaracha.
Hay tantas fronteras…
He aprendido a vivir con ellas.
No sé rezar, invento mis propias oraciones.
Susurro.
Hay un cruce que nos lleva a nuestros sueños; seguimos caminando en la frontera
sin caer.
¡Vamos hacia los sueños!
Los sueños son la pequeña puerta oculta que nos lleva a ese lugar cálido e íntimo
del alma.
Cierro los ojos, incapaz de curar las heridas de esta ciudad,
y mucho menos las de este mundo.
solo intento curar la herida de este cuerpo-alma-cosmos mío
(La palabra alma es una palabra inmortal, una palabra del aliento;
la palabra
alma posee una luz interior: la luz del sol)
Nacer: ese es el primer cruce, cruzar un cuerpo y otro y otro
Buscando la vida, aullando
Nacer
como alguien que llega a un lugar sin tiempo
(la paz no es una palabra)
Los que nacen, nacen
A veces se nace solo
se nace en un vertedero, se nace en una casa o en el agua fría de un río
pero, ¿quién podría negar nuestro nacimiento?
nacer es romper la palabra intimidad
nacer es levitar y ser parte del cosmos
Nacer es también morir
Se cruza, se nace.
Soñar sigue siendo un buen refugio,
pero soñar también es un gran poder para estar despierto.
Solo una gota de estrellas
para asistir a una fiesta de placer, placer escalando el muro gris de la guerra.
Ya no estamos dispuestos a permitir el placer que ha sido robado para excitar a los
machos con licencia
para matar. Ya no queremos religiones o cultos más importantes que la vida.
Cantamos y levantamos polvo.
Viajamos juntos en tren (porque los aviones no son aceptados).
ancianos y ancianas, mujeres gordas, hombres delgados,
mujeres y hombres negros, indígenas, morenos, rosados, verdes, azules, violetas,
maricas,
queers, marginados, migrantes, neurodiversos, discapacitados
y otras bestias que habitan El Cruce,
decididos a traspasar los límites del cuerpo,
a cruzar hacia el abrazo.
La ternura es el campo de nuestra insurrección total.
En nuestro sueño,
erguidas como diosas en lo alto del cosmos de las posibilidades,
allí,
bestias nómadas, peludas, desolladas, furiosas,
diluidas y abrazadas unas a otras,
sembramos y respetamos las estaciones de la memoria.