On the Requerimiento: Experimental film and nonhuman histories

Abstract

The Requerimiento was a declaration through which the Spanish Crown asserted its divinely sanctioned right to take possession of the territories of the so-called New World and to subjugate, exploit and, when necessary, wage war against their Indigenous inhabitants. Read aloud in the context of conquest, it performed the violence of colonial possession through language. This experimental 16mm short essay film critically approaches the Requerimiento, moving away from a strictly historical reconstruction toward the aesthetics of a mythological time inhabited by archetypal nonhuman beings and their material traces. Following the trajectories of a serpent and a fragment of meteorite, Requerimiento develops a narration that interweaves different epochs and cultures. Through these encounters, the film reflects on the ways in which histories of conquest, extraction and resistance extend beyond the human. How do nonhuman beings and materials carry or unsettle inherited narratives of violence, while opening a space for other temporalities and forms of relation?