adical tenderness and feline agency as epistemic anchors in the art of Susana Salinas

This article conceptualises radical tenderness as a form of political insurgency against systemic violence and affective exhaustion, exploring how interspecies agency reconfigures the domestic sphere and the conditions of creative production. Situated within the precarious socio-political landscape of contemporary Mexico, the study theorises feline agency not as peripheral companionship, but as an epistemic anchor and a co-constitutive agent of situated knowledge. Through a methodology that synthesises biographical inquiry with formal visual analysis, I examine the dialectic between Salinas’s lifelong experience and her creative output, culminating in her most recent exhibition, En Morada (In a Home). By decoding the feline iconography not as a symbolic surrogate but as an active participant in the semiotics of the studio, this approach demonstrates how sustained interspecies intimacy enables a feminist 're-nesting' of the maternal. Here, care is detached from biological determinism and articulated as a horizontal, relational ontology. Furthermore, the analysis explores the materiality of the artworks as 'vibrant matter,' where animal presence dictates the rhythms of artistic labour. By addressing the emergence of non-biological kinship under conditions of structural precarity, the study argues that post-human relationality and affective labour constitute essential tools for reimagining resistance. Ultimately, Salinas’s work reveals that the domestic "nest" is not a site of private retreat, but a potent laboratory for collective survival and more-than-human solidarity in a world marked by ongoing crisis.