Through the lens of contemporary art, this book focuses on social ecologies and those spaces that are characterized, on the one hand, by a high degree of biodiversity, and on the other, by a long history of the extraction of resources, (neo)colonial relationships, and extractivism.
Contributors discuss the importance of ignored knowledge practices and systems, as well as alternative designs of the world that reach beyond simply thinking about progress. Chapters posit that contemporary art and ethnographic objects reflect extractive practices and the potential for regeneration in very different ways. In dialogue with one another, both art and the ethnographic object reveal alternative perspectives of agency, critical historiographies, and possible forms of living together in a new way. Foregrounding emerging environmental aesthetics, the book also critically engages the historical documents and artifacts collected by museums that bear witness today to knowledge gaps and the politics of resource transfer.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, ethnology, exhibition and museum studies.
Table of Contents:
1. Arts after Extractivism PART I: Aesthetics and Extractivism 2. Inmundo. Unspecific Aesthetics and the Arts of Survivance 3. Pharmakon. Aesthetic Practices, Submerged Modes, and Plant-Human Entanglements 4. Sensing Extraction. Visualizing the New Geography of Extractivism in Venezuela PART II: Ethnographies Otherwise 5. Fieldwork Notebooks 6. Creating Pluriversities – Education to Protect the Earth. A conversation between Hernando Chindoy Chindoy and Ana Cristina Rodríguez Muñoz 7. The Encounter of Two Feather Cloaks. A conversation between Glicería Tupinambá and Alexander Brust 8. To Feather the Shock. Extraction, Copying and Rebreeding of Ethnographic Materials for Museum Collections PART III: New Ecologies and the Arts 9. Poetic Postnatures. Pyropoetry and the New Ecologies of Megafires in the Paraná Delta 10. Towards a Pedagogy of Healing and Reparations 11. Learning from Artemisia. A Conversation between Uriel Orlow EPILOGUE 12. Cultural Extractivism. A Few Comments on a Key Document
About the Author :
Liliana Gómez is Professor of Art and Society at University of Kassel/Kunsthochschule Kassel, documenta Institut.
Alexander Brust is Head of the American Department and Curator at the Museum der Kulturen Basel, Switzerland.
