Time Trafficking. Recurrences and Conjurations Maddie Butler, Coralys Carter, Nykelle DeVivo, Moe Penders. Collective imagination is constantly pulled to an immediate future by the media and mainstream discourses with their emphasis on innovation and creativity, the promises and dangers of artificial intelligence and space travel, and the imminence of an ecological collapse that feels all too present. At the same time, the renewed force of fascism in the Global North with its imperial nostalgia has raised the stakes in the battle for a collective memory that has long been disputed. Art’s ability for trafficking other temporalities takes centerstage in what we call the present. The haunting of past traumas brings about infinite returns of what was left unresolved and artists, as divers of the collective unconscious, materialize the ghosts in myriad ways. Other artists have kept in touch with atavic lines of flight and call upon the ancestors to join them in the everyday fight for survival and emancipation; art serves them as a site for quiet conjuring. In either case, these specters illuminate how things have been made what they are today but also how they could have been different and might yet, and always, be different again. I see these artists, brought together by the MFA program at the University of California San Diego, as sharing these concerns, albeit with great differences between them. Bless their singularities for they give us a strange but alluring show! We may start off with Maddie Butler who goes beyond the reminder that the cloud is anything but intangible and brings back the material debris of digital technologies to search for the light of fleeting yet cherished memories. What can be retrieved from the immediacy of programmed oblivion? Moreover Maddie weaves the grid that was made synonym of community during the inexhaustible Zoom meetings of the pandemic and lets us see it as a void frame that fragments reality. With Moe Penders it is the journey that surfaces with the difficulty of tracing what is left behind and what is created in each step. Moe faces the aporia of displacement and disidentification, how migrating troubles identity by both de-anchoring the body from its soil but also affirming a nomadic sense of self. May the silent memory of a tree guide us? May the depleted body find rest in the swinging movements of an in-between territory? Coralys Carter goes to where it hurts but also shows us what can be built from pain, from the acute awareness of the body as a site of memory and endless reinvention. She asks us: What does it feel? And then pulls from the threads of personal history and leaves them hanging, awaiting their weaving into a new fabric. In here, her works face the striking Californian sunlight and the anonymity of LA’s cityscape, like secret relics offered to the wandering transits of unknown lives. Finally, Nykelle DeVivo brings forth the true powers of Masquerade, not as a celebration of secrecy or a spectacle for alienated tourists, but as a collective force conjured to disrupt power dynamics. Channeling ancestral black rage, the conqueror is inverted and transformed into a duppy conqueror able to reflect and expand the light, shining from what has been historically obscured and misrepresented. Sacred violence manifests in a redemptive character, a demiurge bringing about a new Bing Bang. -Leandro Martínez Depietri