Cristina Schiavi is a restless artist; she finds it difficult to remain still for too long, and so she constantly moves from one place to another. We don’t really know why: it may be an exercise to prevent ossification in her thinking and in her work, or it may be the only way to dodge the risk of institutionalization in life and in subjectivity. Her movements can be inscribed within what philosopher María Lugones called “world”-traveling, a path for conceiving multiplicity and difference. In a society that demands increasing degrees of homogeneity and status quo, we travel to get to know the world of others through their way of seeing, and with any luck, to broaden our own along the way.

Like Lugones, Cristina does not move physically, nor does she travel long distances to reach a destination: instead, she moves through poetic and immaterial territories, from which she reconfigures scenarios of reality and imagines different ways of inhabiting them, always permeated by a rejection of stereotypes and the violence of normativity and all the dominant structures that regulate our lives. 

Thanks to renovated artistic and epistemological genealogies, today we can recognize a series of rotund gestures in Christina’s work that disarm languages historically associated with representations of the political. As opposed to the logic of purity—in material as well as symbolic terms—and always eluding the literal, Cristina appeals instead to tenderness and humor as the unexpected vehicles for constructing a world that is more just, more amiable and more democratic.    

Mundo fofo (Fofo World) is not an anthology, nor does it aim to span her extensive trajectory. It is rather an encounter with a few of the territories that Cristina has explored over the course of her career, and an invitation to approach them more closely, from a perspective that is rooted in their present moment: to go beyond traditional ways of understanding the human as an essential part of a feminist project that is now also posthuman.