Diacritics

LINAJE >> QUAN ZHOU WU

With “Linaje,” I wanted to explore the fine line between fiction and lies. Fantasy.

I attended a workshop on embuste flamenco with artist Mateo Chica in Villanueva del Rosario. Mateo said that embuste is art, “that lie associated with oral flamenco, which is transmitted with a sort of distraction from real time, to be able to immerse oneself in a fun fiction, that leads to another possible place.”

Mateo explained to us that there are embustes that endure over time, like the mythical phrase about Lola Flores, “she neither sings nor dances but don’t miss her” from the New York Times that was never actually published, but immensely helped her in her career.

“Linaje” is a work that respects orality, the one that happened, and the one that never was. The stories lost for being lost in translation. The stories misunderstood due to our language barriers, and those we collected incompletely due to language interferences. Where, thanks to different artificial intelligences like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, and Chat-GPT, it has been possible to create that “almost real” universe, perceptible and concrete.

But above all, “Linaje” is a question:

Where will our memories remain?

Once my contract with the web server ends, once my hard drive rusts, my space in the cloud expires, where will this story remain?

Who will pick up the pieces of us, those of us who walk as secondary stories in this Western world?

What is truth? What is a lie?

In this piece, perhaps that does not matter. [End Page 7]

IMAGES >> QUAN ZHOU WU AND LINAJE’S GENEALOGY

Quan Zhou Wu’s followers will surely be struck—as I was—by the multisensory digital exhibit “Linaje” (“Lineage”), which was published in 2024 and departs, perhaps unexpectedly, from the artist’s previous well-established oeuvre. Before delving into the work in question, it may be fruitful first to have a glimpse at the artist’s iconic aesthetic. In 2015, and at the age of twenty-seven, Wu, a self-taught artist, debuted her first graphic memoir, Gazpacho Agridulce. The book commences with her parents’ newfound life in Spain after leaving Qingtian, a province of Zhejiang, China, to run a restaurant in Algeciras, a municipality of Cadiz. The opening pages of Gazpacho pack a punch, depicting Wu’s dramatic and untimely birth in a taxicab en route to the hospital.

Gazpacho’s publication initiated a crucial sea change in the predominantly white Spanish publishing world, which would soon after be rocked by a boom of racialized¹ authors penning anti-racist memoirs and other works of non-fiction.² Gazpacho would also eventually become the first of the author’s trilogy of graphic memoirs, which was completed by the sequels Andaluchinas por el mundo (2017) and the most recent La agridolce vita (2023).

Wu’s narratives capture the familial, identarian, and social conflicts that erupt from...