Counter-Cartography, Radical Pedagogy and the Critique of Extractivism

By the early 2000s, leftist governments had risen to power across South America in what is known as the Pink Tid. An important leftist critique of them – as articulated by social movements and professional intellectuals – addressed their reliance on extractivist models of accumulation to fund their redistributive economic policies and expansion of social welfare programs. In Latin America, extractivist industries further the enclosure of the commons and separate direct producers from their means of production or livelihoods. Place-based popular movements have organized around the defense of land against the territorial dispossession and environmental destruction caused by extractivist industries, with the continental indigenous movement serving as the leading edge of popular class mobilization in these struggles. This paper examines an experimental and collective art practice that directly addresses these dynamics. Founded in Buenos Aires in 2005, the Iconoclasistas brings together approaches from critical design practice, social cartography, popular education, and militant research. Their collectively-produced maps show how place-based social conflicts that have arisen in Latin America in the past 15 years are contesting reigning models of development, while also addressing the deleterious consequences extractivism has for the working and popular classes and the environment. The collective production and the form of the maps enable their producers and viewers alike to perceive and analyze connections between what oftentimes appear to be disconnected phenomena. Moreover, the Iconoclasistas’ work suggests that recent social conflicts entail struggles between competing worldviews as these pertain to territory, nature, history, and human collectivities.