Spontaneous Cosmic Becomings: El Paso Spontaneous Shrine and Cosmic Generator Cut Together in Conocimiento

Abstract

This paper considers Mika Rottenberg’s Cosmic Generator alongside the El Paso spontaneous shrine constructed after the August 3, 2019 mass shooting to examine the material conditions of difference with which we are entangled and construct meaning. This paper utilizes an entangled methodology to explore connections and complexities produced by reading these two works together in order to produce complicated understandings of politics, race, and capitalism. This is done while expanding new materialist methodologies and border studies’ application in art education to include discursive notions of making. This making involves the generative creation of understanding (conocimiento), where unlike works are read or held together in their difference to create new understandings and resist difference as ossified. We are left with a deeper understanding of the border as a space of cosmic possibility juxtaposed against a notion of racism complicated by an economic system, that we are all implicated in.