On Tears, Excess, and the Academic Conference

This is the second time I’ve seen someone cry at an academic conference. The first one was earlier this year during a highly anticipated panel of feminist rockstars. The place was extremely hot and crowded and after two great presentations the third presenter—a senior, well-established and very influential scholar—rose and began by sharing something extremely personal. And traumatic. Her voice cracked, tears started running, and her 20-minute narrative was intermittently interrupted by bursts of emotion, silence, and shame, becoming increasingly painful and incoherent. Should we take this as a radical feminist gesture—I desperately wondered—and stay to witness this display of fragility and irrationality that completely shattered expectations of mastery and authority contained in her figure, making us all utterly uncomfortable? Or should we feel offended—even, disappointed—by her subjecting us all to something, an excessive something, that should have stayed in the privacy of a therapy session—as I overheard a group of attendants muttering by the end of the talk?

The second time was a few weeks ago at the conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), held at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Pratt Institute in New York. This year, the conference theme was Not a Luxury. In reference to Audre Lorde’s famous contention that “poetry is not a luxury,” the conference was structured around issues of “beauty and pleasure” as well as “excess, need, and access,” and asked: “What does luxury mean? Who is able to luxuriate?” Hypothesizing that even “time itself has been reconfigured as a luxury no longer available amid the cascading polycrisis,”1 the conference was filled with panels around slowness, rest, excess, gardens, karaoke, and crying—all variously attempting to delineate other ways of doing, speaking, producing, researching, and, presumably, conferencing. But how is this effort compatible with the neoliberal model of the large-scale conference and its fast-paced, unaffordable rhythms?

Crying is certainly an excess, even more so if it happens at the rigid premises of a national academic conference. Tears—an excessive materiality themselves, a bodily waste, a kind of liquid surplus released by the body as a consequence of crying (but also yawning, cold, laughing, and allergies)—evince the watery constitution of our bodies, threatening what Astrida Neimanis describes as the “dry myth” of “discrete individualism.”2 A myth that is particularly tangible in the conference space—with the name tags and the small talk and the networking and the walking fast for the next thing and the endless pursuit of recognition and status, all enabling the proliferation of dryness, and rigidness, and distance.

And yet, who hasn’t cried at a conference? I like to imagine everyone has. That conferences are in fact a massive event of collective weeping and crying—that people actually go there to cry, running across the hallways and into the restrooms and hotel rooms to explode into tears. That the total amount of liquid that is produced could very well fill at least one of the conference rooms—the smaller ones, most likely, those that are difficult to find and are often given to graduate students, like me, to deliver their papers. Conference dehydration is real.

This reminded me of two Chilean folk tales that I will now tell you if you allow me the luxury of deviation. They both involve the Virgin Mary and television. The first one haunted my entire childhood. It is about a statue of the Virgin Mary inside a church in a northern Chilean town that every night would shed tears of blood. Actual blood. I first found out about this story while watching TV—it was an ad of a show about paranormal stuff I was certainly not allowed to watch, featuring an episode of the blood-crying Virgin Mary statue with actual photographic evidence. I would have recurrent nightmares of this image. Then, I discovered this was a rather common phenomenon, that every now and then a miraculous blood-crying Virgin Mary would be found in churches across Latin America and Spain. While crying statues are uncanny—especially when it is the saintly figure of the Virgin Mary who cries—the fact that it is blood spreading out of her inanimate eyes is particularly disturbing. As if the semi-transparent, elegantly opaque condition of the tear was substituted by a sickly, dirty, gory kind of excess.

The second tale, cited in Raúl Ruiz’s La recta provincia—a film he made for Chilean national television in 2007—is narrated by the Virgin Mary herself. The story is about a serial killer in the Chilean countryside who felt absolutely no remorse for his terrible crimes. After several attempts to make him feel regretful without success, the Virgin Mary’s ultimatum to the man was that he must fill an entire barrel of tears in order to be eligible for salvation. But he was unable to cry. Because the Virgin Mary really wanted the man to be absolved of his sins, she went door to door throughout the entire town to recollect the tears of its inhabitants, so they could all collectively save the serial killer from hell. Since the barrel was too big it never filled, and people continued to cry at the barrel for generations to come. Tear recollection became a tradition, and the town’s name was changed to La Llantería (the weeping place).

While we hear the Virgin Mary’s extra-diegetic voice concluding the story, the film shows us images of water, creeks, cascades, and rivers surrounding the village, not only prefiguring, with irony, the Catholic trope of ‘the valley of tears’ but further suggesting an interchangeable connection between the weeping human bodies-of-water inhabiting the town and a broader, more-than-human ecology.

This whole preamble about crying, conferences, and excess is to introduce you to my own attempt to think of excess as methodology, through a panel I organized for the ASAP conference Not a Luxury. Titled “Methodologies of Excess in the Latin American Southern Cone: Practices of Imagination, Fiction, and Contagion,” the panel primarily asked: What does it mean for a methodology to be excessive? What kinds of practices, forms, and trajectories does a methodology of excess allow? And what modes of elusive and uncapturable knowledge might emerge from such methods?

To approach these questions, I invited researchers and cultural practitioners from the Latin American Southern Cone working across a variety of disciplinary and thematic fields that in one way or another employed an unconventional “methodology of excess” to approach their often-excessive objects of study. We initially understood these methods in terms of interdisciplinarity, trans-mediality, experimentation, and relationality, as well as modes of doing that—instead of subtracting, simplifying, and disaggregating—are structured around operations of intensification, addition, and proliferation.

Our panel was scheduled for the first session on the first day—an unfortunate time slot that ensured the audience to be anything but excessive. It opened with Camila Galaz—an artist and researcher based in New York—and her presentation, “The Water that Reached me with Every Wave: Artistic Research Across History and its Borders.” Sharing three of her artistic projects, Without Shores, Without Boundaries (2022); REDES: bread and justice, peaches and bananas (2021); and “Vecino Vecino” (2022)—an experimental documentary project that explores “second-generation post-dictatorship trauma through layered and juxtaposed archival media”—Camila shared how her art practice embraces complexity and multiplicity through “interwoven narratives and cross-disciplinary influences,” in order to “challenge reductive interpretations of history.”3

Connected to the problem of interpretation and history, the next presentation titled “Neuroancestral imaginations: How to deal with exceedingly speculative (potentially colonialist) scientific knowledge?” by Hugo Sir, an assistant professor of Sociology at the Universidad de Playa Ancha (Chile), proposed a methodological model of “critical intensification” of scientific narratives around the “ancestral origins” of Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Emphasizing the fictional and controversial components of a well-established evolutionary hypothesis that genetically links ADHD individuals with hunter-gatherer populations existing 40,000 years ago, Hugo asked: what if, instead of disregarding these narratives due to their ‘untruthful’ character, we intensify their speculative dimension in order to imagine other worlds? What modes of collective production of scientific knowledge might emerge from this operation?

In a similar attempt to develop other modes of knowledge production that escape the western model of academic inquiry, I offered a performative visual narrative titled “How to make my little white body sink? Preliminary notes for a methodology of submersion.” Simultaneously speaking as an artist and a scholar—or a kind of hybrid between the two—I delivered a performative talk that combined a visual narrative projected on a screen with live reading. Combining embodied, first-person experience, with audiovisual montage and close reading of aesthetic objects, my talk attempted to address an elusive and largely silent matter, both personally and at a social level: the problem of whiteness and white embodiment in the Latin American Southern Cone. Interweaving personal archives with found internet footage and the films of Lucrecia Martel, I examined the aesthetic and methodological possibilities of submersion as a mode of disarming and embodying whiteness otherwise.

The panel closed with the talk “Granulometry of memory: Beyond the pathetic fallacy of a landscape covered by ashes,” by Samuel Espíndola Hernández—a writer and PhD candidate at Stony Brook University. Tracing the metaphorical and environmental figure of the ‘ash’ in a variety of media—from literature to art and film in Chile and Brazil—the talk interrogated “the place of matter in a poetics of memory,” articulating a “granulometry of memory”4 that permeated a wide range of scales and registers, from the intimate to the political to the environmental and planetary.

By placing these talks and their different modes of approaching excess-as-methodology together, we were looking for frictions and encounters that would themselves generate some kind of excess. Yet as soon as something—an encounter, a conversation, an unexpected something—was about to emerge, thanks to the intervention of our moderator, Mariano López Seoane, and a few great questions from the audience, we ran out of time. We were always out of time, indeed, surpassed by a pace and a format and an architecture that overdetermined—and overrode—our attempts to think and perform other modes of doing, researching, and presumably, conferencing.

While it might be too much—or too naïve—to ask the neoliberal model of the academic conference to be anything different than what it is, despite a thematic focus on questions of slowness, excess, accessibility, and non-productivity, and despite the fact that in many ways ASAP provided some answers to it, several important questions linger: can we think of other conference formats, architectures, rhythms, and containers that are more conducive to meaningful encounters, frictions, resonances, and exchange outside of the instrumental, networking logics of dry, discrete individualism? How might we reimagine modes of producing, sharing, and disseminating academic knowledge that align more closely with the themes and content of that knowledge itself?

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Catalina Segú is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and PhD candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her work focuses on Latin American postdictatorship aesthetics, art, cinema, and atmospheric materialities, with an interest in experimental writing and videographic criticism. Her art practice is concerned with questions of spatiality and immersion, as well as with digital modes of subjectivation. She is a member of the sadcat045 collective, an art project dedicated to the appropriation of internet discourses, affective economies, and visualities.