Rematerialization: Anticolonial Collective Memory through Latinx Digital Art Available to Purchase

In this essay, I examine memory optimization as both a fundamental component of digital operations and a feminist form of cultural resistance to digital colonialism through a multimedia installation by the Latinx artist collective Cog•nate Collective. Through close reading, I demonstrate how their 2021 installation And will be again…transforms the work of memory optimization through an ecofeminist countermapping of the US-Mexico border and its histories of data extraction through dispossession. I analyze the various components of the multimedia installation, including the collaborative process of Indigenous language translations of an eponymous passage by Gloria Anzaldúa. I frame my analysis through a sociotechnical reclamation of the computer science term rematerialization. In doing so, I reorient the term rematerialization to showcase how Latinx artists recompute historical data of the US-Mexico borderlands to produce anticolonial collective memories as spiritual technologies of resistance.