Ecological Art from Latin America, 1960s–1980s

Session will present: In-Person

Cultural production that is critical of anthropogenic environmental degradation dates back at least to the nineteenth century, when painters showed how humans’ natural-resource extraction, in the name of progress and economic flourishing, destroys ecosystems, as in French-Brazilian Félix-Émile Taunay’s Vista de um mato virgem que está se reduzindo a carvão (View of a Virgin Forest that Is Being Reduced to Charcoal, 1843). Ecological art (eco-art) raises awareness of specific ecological problems and their disproportionate impact on marginalized communities or envisions different, post-extractivist ways of living. We examine how Latin America has been constructed and exploited as an “extractive zone” and reveal “the complexity of social ecologies and material alternatives [to extractivism] proposed and proliferated” by artists in the region (Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, 2017). While many scholars recently have highlighted Latin American eco-art in the twenty-first century, not much attention falls on such production from the late 1960s through early 1980s—a pivotal period during which growing environmental movements and neo-avant-garde practices first imbricated in their rejection of restrictive and harmful modernisms. This session helps to remedy the lacuna by attending to diverse examples of late twentieth-century eco-art by Brazilian, Chilean, and Colombian artists. Like Paula Serafini, we propose to apply “situated framework[s] of analysis for understanding how art and creative practices mobilize counterhegemonic narratives about extractivism ... and how they activate prefigurative socialities and economies and contribute to important ontological shifts” (Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism, 2022).

Field(s) of Study:
Geographic Area: Latin America
Time Period: Twentieth Century
Topics: Environmental Art
Field: Art History
Topics: Politics

Chair:
Gina McDaniel Tarver, Texas State University-San Marcos

Discussant:
Tatiana E. Flores

Abstract Submissions Closed