In Técnicas de control, Zulema Gutiérrez (Holguín, 1982) constructs a poetic artifact that does not follow preestablished paths. Her book assembles itself as it progresses, channeling information from the technical to the delirious. Published by Casa Vacía in 2024, this is a textual device that dismantles the human body—head, arm, foot—to investigate the systems that govern the political, the mental, and the affective. In this interview, Gutiérrez discusses the techniques that run through his writing: rhythm, montage, glossary, control, and a conception of poetry that dispenses with the subject to embrace noise, fragment, and fissure as powers of language.
Did you conceive this book as a long poem or as a literary artifact with its own systems of control? What would those techniques be?
This is a system that is not so much thought out as organic, which built itself as a machine to translate/encode/describe the disaster of a society or individual X. I have never been a map writer: there is an internal compass, a seed or hunch that I allow to follow its own path, an intention that takes total autonomy over the process/book (curiously derived from an autonomous and conscious mechanism). My technique is to flow awake before the process; to channel from a multidimensional informational field where “EVERYTHING” already exists and is available to anyone.
Is the structure of body parts—head, arm, foot—a form of symbolic anatomy, a writing from the body, or a way of dismantling the human?
Let’s say a mixture of all of the above. The body is a limit, an end, and a boundary. It delimits existence in the space in which it finds itself (whether symbolic or material), so without bodies, over what would control be exercised? Who would exercise it? Every act requires a body, not only as a limit, but as a manifestation of existence. In a book, the body is the set of things that are said, with the exception of the indexes and preliminaries. According to Descartes, “the body is a machine that moves by itself.” So this body/text is itself a portion of matter with characteristics of its own, such as solids, liquids, or gases, and also subtle characteristics such as the emotional, mental, and spiritual. Each of the parts of this book can be independent, although connected as a group of soldiers to their respective officers.
Which authors, texts, or aesthetic-political imaginaries are in dialogue with Control Techniques in the background, even if they are not cited?
Everything dialogues here: mechanics manuals, social science books, or any medical book I had on hand. Podcasts on neuroscience, geopolitics, and channeling. Quantum physics, various philosophical texts, Pink Floyd, Björk, Instagram reels, Wikipedia, news reports, headlines, dictionaries, and even detestable communist pamphlets. (All language is valid).
There are moments when technical language becomes delirious, mantra-like, spectral syntax. What place does rhythm occupy for you in this type of writing?
Central. When writing becomes technical, complex, delirious, or spectral, rhythm is the element that keeps everything afloat: the reader’s interest and the balance or accessibility of the text. Rhythm functions as Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinthine construct of language which, without order or concert, acts as a tangle of demanding reading, far removed from conventional lyricism that seeks to be attractive and hypnotic for an ideal reader, one who does not enter the dance expecting explanations or longing for a romantic encounter, but with the hope of being challenged. That reader is assured an experience (more or less effective), a being (or not) of the text and its expiration date. Let’s say that between the poem and its analysis, assembling languages stand out, not lyrical, but rhythmic, to highlight all the appeal. An emotional experience in which another beauty is found, exploding from the language furthest from poetry, where only rhythm, and not meaning, acts as a conductor of current to mark the passage or cold suspension.
Do you believe in the possibility of poetry without a subject? Does this book operate in that direction or is it a coded self-portrait?
I believe in the profoundly liberating possibility of poetry without an “I” that limits the cosmic experience of an abstract universe. Stripping the text of identity to let language and its textures speak, like a current that does not need a defined origin to exist.
I believe in the profoundly liberating possibility of not attributing merit to myself in this causal (not casual) tangle, so there is no self-portrait in any way, because I do not intend to exist within the text. Although, half-sideways, perhaps I am, not as a deliberate self-portrait, but as a shadow cast on the work that does not intend to be inhabited. I believe that this tension between the absence of a subject and the inevitable traces of the writer are part of what makes poetry, even in its most stripped-down form, remain human.
How do you think about montage, fragments, and glossaries within the poetic gesture? Is writing for you like editing a corrupt file?
I understand the aforementioned gesture as an act of creation that transcends mere writing and becomes an intervention that finds in montage, fragmentation, juxtaposition, resignification, remixing, or collage an essential mechanism of assembly to create new meaning. I also think of it as an act of resistance against homogeneity and linearity; a raw material that is torn from its original context and, when inserted into a new fabric, is transformed. As in collage, the fragment is not “waste,” but a seed. According to Benjamin, fragments are not just what remains, but what allows something else to be constructed, because when they are decontextualized and freed from their original function, they become elements with which a new discourse can be constructed. From this perspective, I manipulate gesture as an archaeological and futuristic action that unearths and projects; a map that does not explain, but only dialogues with its parts; it does not close meaning, but only expands it. Remixing is not mixing: it is intervening, subverting, recontextualizing. Let’s say it is a powerful exercise in harmony with dominant narratives. As in a collage, each cut is a political and aesthetic act. Meaning is not given: it is constructed.
A corrupt file, on the other hand, is a text that has lost its “original order,” that is broken, and in that break there is an opportunity. Writing, in this sense, is not restoring the file to its original state (what would that state be in a poem?); it is working with corruption and errors (this is also valid for me). Embracing corruption, noise. These, my ways (and those of KTP-3 in general) of approaching the aforementioned gesture are, without a doubt, an act of freedom. At the end of the day, what use is a writer? A function of more or less effective specializations; a series of operations, obsolete system factors (look at your discretion). What use is writing? (look at your discretion).
If you had to hide this book on someone else’s bookshelf, would you put it next to the biomechanics treatises, in the contemporary Latin American poetry section, or under the category of “unidentified objects”? Why?
The third option. I believe in freedom, plurality, democracy. In anti-labels. And this book could be read as a treatise, a manifesto, a novel, a pamphlet, a declaration of principles…
