ROUTES OF CULTURAL CONTRABAND

Routes of Cultural Contraband is the territory of investigation that activates transgenerational memories and invisible transmission routes between Galicia, Brazil, and beyond

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Introduction

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Routes of Cultural Contraband is the conceptual territory of the work of researcher and artist Paloma Klisys for projects and creative processes related to the connection with Galician culture. It is not defined as an isolated project, but as the foundation for the development of creative projects and processes in the short, medium, and long term. It is configured as a conceptual framework for tactical transit between Galicia, Brazil, and other territories, where ancestrality and technique circulate through autonomous exchange flows, yet in dialogue and interdependent, transboundary, transgenerational, and trans-language construction.

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Conceptual Territory

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This territory activates the mapping of knowledges that operate beyond geographic borders and conventional linguistic classifications. Situated within the axis of Galegofonía, Paloma establishes a transoceanic network that connects Galician culture and language to the Brazilian territory and other latitudes, recognizing the potency of a common cultural matrix in a permanent state of invention and expansion.

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The conceptual foundation of this practice finds its genesis in the artist’s family history: her Galician ancestors originated from Florderrei das Portas Abertas, a village in the municipality of Vilardevós, located exactly on the historical contraband routes of the fronteira seco-raiana (the dry-land border). This territory of passage and informal exchanges—where goods, people, and knowledges circulated outside official circuits—serves as the inspiration and bedrock for her artistic practice.

 

The logic of transboundary transit, which characterized the lives of her ancestors, is now transposed into the fields of culture and technology, where the artist maps and activates invisible routes for the transmission of knowledge, memory, and creation. The research does not seek to recover the past as a form of nostalgia, but as a tool for activating collective memories that remain alive in bodies, voices, and gestures. It is a mapping of flows that cross oceans, generations, and languages, resisting attempts at erasure and classification—just as historical contraband resisted border controls.

 

Lineage, Update, and Invention

As the first woman artist of a Galician matriarchal lineage, Paloma operates through her work and her propositions. Memory is converted into poetic magma, artistic gestures, creative processes, and contemporary records. As the first woman of this lineage to assume the role of an artist, she utilizes this conceptual ground as a port of embarkation and disembarkation that consists not only of heritage, but of memory updates and the creation of new records.

 

"Contraband" here is the deliberate transposition of ancestral elements into new languages. Interactive and generative art, code, and sonic and audiovisual manipulation are characteristics of a practice that is, simultaneously, recovery, discovery, and invention. There is no hierarchy between the ancestral and the digital—both operate as instruments of transmission and transformation. Just as her ancestors transported goods through clandestine routes, Paloma transports knowledges, memories, and techniques through contemporary languages, creating new paths for the circulation of knowledge.

 

Methodology: Trans-languages and Transboundary Processes

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Research within Routes of Cultural Contraband operates through trans-linguistic processes that recognize language not merely as a system of communication, but as a territory of resistance and creation. Galician, Portuguese, Spanish, and other languages coexist in a space of continuous negotiation, where meaning emerges not from linguistic purity, but from encounter, friction, and synthesis.

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The creative processes developed within this conceptual territory utilize multiple languages—sound, image, performance, code, writing—as ways to activate and document these flows. Each project is a sensory cartography of routes that exist outside official maps but deeply structure the relationships between people, cultures, and territories. The methodology privileges experimentation, participation, and continuous reconfiguration, recognizing that all transmission is also a transformation.

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Interdependence and Collective Construction

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Routes of Cultural Contraband is not a solitary practice. It is configured as a space of interdependent construction, where individual research dialogues with collective knowledges, communities, and other artists and researchers. Interdependence is not a weakness, but a potency—it is the recognition that no creation exists in isolation, and that all invention is always a reinvention of something that already exists elsewhere, in another form, in another language.

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This territory welcomes collaborations, exchanges, and encounters that continually expand its conceptual borders. Each new project, each new creative process, and each new dialogue adds layers to the mapping of routes connecting Galicia, Brazil, and beyond. Paloma’s practice recognizes that cultural transmission is always a collective act, even when performed by a single individual.

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Contemporary Manifestations

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The projects and creative processes developed under the territory of Routes of Cultural Contraband assume multiple forms: audiovisual performances, interactive installations, generative works, sonic records, publications, and more recently, digital artifacts that explore permanence and transmission through blockchain technologies.

Each manifestation is an update of the concept, a new way to activate the routes, document the flows, and invite diverse audiences to participate in the continuous construction of this territory. Technology is not seen as a rupture with the past, but as a continuation of the transmission strategies that have always characterized border cultures.

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Invitation to Participation

Routes of Cultural Contraband is also an invitation. An invitation to recognize the invisible routes that connect us. An invitation to participate in the transmission of ancestral knowledges through contemporary languages. An invitation to understand that cultural contraband is not a crime, but a form of resilience—it is the way cultures travel, mix, transform, and remain alive.

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Through Paloma Klisys’s practice, the historical contraband routes of the seco-raiana border gain new life, not as nostalgia, but as an active tool for creation, research, and cultural transformation.