Critique of the Exploitation of Women and the Natural Environment in the Work of Eugenia Vargas-Pereira

Eugenia Vargas-Pereira (b. 1949, Chillán, Chile) was based in the United States in the 1970s, where she was informed by feminism, and moved to Mexico in the mid-1980s. Her work has been considered, in part, for her early concern with environmental degradation. Taking a selection of Eugenia Vargas-Pereira’s performance work and photography from the 1970s and 1980s as a starting point, this presentation will examine her representation of her own body, use of organic material like soil, animal parts, and materials evocative of post-industrialization to critique the exploitation of women and the natural environment. This inquiry will be contextualized within a broader review of how women’s bodies have been visually represented in relation to the natural environment, care, and liberty. I will take inspiration from Verónica Gago’s Feminist International: How to Change Everything (2020) in evaluating the violence waged against women’s bodies and the potential of women’s bodies as sites of collective resistance, positioning the conversation in relation to Gago’s expansive reframing of labor. In this presentation, I will explore arte ecológico alongside considerations of labor as care and resistance.