From Embodiment to Emplacement: Artistic Research in Insular Territories of the Guanabara Bay (original) (raw)
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innovative study broaches the topic of Brazilian contributions to ecopoetry and Earth art through the detailed analysis of the works of four contemporary poets and four visual artists. He takes a comparative approach by effectively pairing these poets or artists in a series of chapters that not only elucidate key commonalities in their respective oeuvres, but also detail important stylistic and conceptual differences with respect to how they engage the environment through their art. While attentive to the uniqueness of each of his subjects, McNee explains their shared tendency to question and unsettle boundaries between human and nonhuman subjects through their contemplation and renderings of the natural world.
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The research "In Between Art, Architecture and Landscape" investigates contemporary practices in the expanded field, especially those of a site-specific character. Our group has practiced some gestures of research-creation, inspired by situationist and contemporary artistic tactics in flux – "dérives," "événements," poetic images, montages and play-elements – in the suburban neighborhood of Encantado, in Rio de Janeiro, with the aim of investigating its sense of history and atmosphere and raising questions about its possible reinvention. The article presents our artistic actions as the collective "Re-Encantado," with the engagement of local residents: "Atlas of Encantado," a 'montage' of past and present images, and "Where is Encantado River?" – événements and videos.
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Vol. 10 No 20 (2023): Vida quotidiana, experiències i conflictivitats soci territorials en espais de costes i riberes, 2023
This article addresses forms of artist protest against the massive fires in the wetlands of the Paraná River delta. Citizens are fighting not only the unbearable smoke but also the commodification of nature (Svampa, 2014).A new wave of social environmentalism (Gutierrez & Isuani, 2014), organizations and actors has formed around these events. Thise heterogeneous environmental movement comprises actors ranging from citizens, university students, leftwing political groups, conservation activists, and feminists, who are attracting attention with massive acts of protests in which they express a repertory of new ‘languages of valuation’ (Martinez Alier, 2006). In this essay, we look at the artistic forms of protest of the Thigra Collective, which go beyond the nature/culture duality with their index based (Peirce, 1973; Gell, 2016) signs: artworks and performance actions. Our reflection on Thigra’s performance work aims to show that anti-modern images and meanings are expressed in their artistic interventions, through which the group breaks away from modern ontologies (Latour, 2001; 2022). In addition, the artists’ work stages the association of human and non-human elements (Latour, 2001), through which they generate an intrusion of objects and performative actions in the everyday life of the city.
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Revista VIS, Vol. 18, No. 1. Brasília: UnB, p.165-168. , 2019
Ainda sem tradução para o português, a obra reúne um conjunto de reflexões que problematizam proposições artísticas que discutem o uso político da paisagem. Esta, é abordada como o resultado das complexas relações sociais e econômicas contemporâneas. Os projetos e textos catalogados (alguns escritos pelos próprios artistas) partem do ponto de vista norte americano; porém, também incorporam referências teóricas e análises de práticas que ocorrem ao redor do mundo, em âmbito local ou regional. Os autores buscam responder a diversas questões: "de que formas a terra, formada ao longo do tempo geológico, também contemporâneo, é formada pelas condições do presente?", "como o ambiente e as estruturas econômicas estão relacionadas?", "como a arte pode estimular maneiras mais sutis de pensamento e sobre a interação com a terra?" e "como a arte pode contribuir para a expansão da justiça espacial e ambiental?" (p.16). Nota-se nestas inquietações que o termo "terra" substitui em muitos momentos o termo "paisagem". A substituição é justificada pelo caráter político atrelado ao "valor de uso" da terra, por razões práticas e ideológicas. Embora se reconheça o peso que o conceito de "paisagem" tenha na História da Arte, os problemas de representação são abordados de maneira diversa dos modos de representação paisagística tradicional. Assim, o conceito de landscape (paisagem) é retomado no sentido etimológico, que origina do holandês landschap. A este está atrelada a idéia de "mútua formação e modelagem da terra e do homem", noção da qual a história se distanciou pela confusão conceitual notada pelo antropólogo Tim Ingold. (p.19) O enfoque na representação pictórica privilegiou a ideia do "olhar" em detrimento das práticas habituais de manuseio da terra, características de uma comunidade agrária.
Critical Times, 2023
Like plantation slavery, Indigenous servitude on Bolivian haciendas raises crucial questions about the afterlives of colonial subjection. Engaging questions of colonialism, unfreedom, and emancipation across the Americas, this article examines how Quechua Bolivians remake landscapes defined by continued material traces of subjection and abiding racial inequalities. Rather than inhabiting this landscape as one of passive historical repetition, Quechua Bolivians use narratives and spatial practices to alter landscapes—including elderberry trees where kin were whipped, high mountain lakes constructed by forced laboring kin, and ravines and valley crevices that offered routes of escape from indentured labor and political violence. Such practices point to a politics of lo abigarrado (the motley), a term used to describe people whose labor itineraries and affective attachments have not been constrained by the frames of Mestizo citizenship and timeless Indigenous rootedness to place. Through this spatial poetics, Quechua families thwart nationalist paradigms of propertied redress to forge alternate plotlines of emancipation based on keeping time, and places, open to the demands of a violent past.
Sensitive Territories: Performative research and artistic interventions
This paper presents the actions in the Project Breeze: sensitive territories, contributing for the discussion about democracy and social actions in the public sphere. BREEZE is a research project and artistic creation inserted in the fields of art, politics, science and nature. Methodologically founded on the Performance practice as research, we propose that political, poetical, aesthetical and cognitive issues may emerge from immersive experiences as a field of creative possibilities and of construction of critical thinking, contributing to the methodologies of research in Arts and to new mechanisms and creation devices. By proposing itself in this research field, BREEZE aims to dialogue with the Arts issues in the Anthropocene area, investigating new methodologies and practices about the relations of art with and for the nature and discuss social actions in the public sphere. As Chantal Mouffe (2007) says, the “public space” is not a place of consensus, but rather a battle camp where different hegemonic projects confront each other (…); the public spaces are always plural. We can also say they are complex territories, as proposed by Richard Sennett. Rather, sensitive territories permeated by subjectivities and sensorialities. Composed of a transdisciplinary research network which involves artists from different areas such as audiovisual, body arts, art and technology, visual arts and music, technologists, geographers, urbanists and residents of the studied regions, the project proposes a collaborative practice of investigations and creation.
Art beyond the horizon | Pivô São Paulo | 29-30 September 2018
Art beyond the horizon proposes a critical reflection on the intersections of artistic, aesthetic and political practice to rethink notions relevant to future directions of contemporary art. In recent years contemporary art has been subject to a series of theoretical and practical incursions from both within and without that call into question its models of practice and the structures that sustain them, the hegemony of a geographically located canon of works and the porous nature of art’s autonomy itself. In both institutional and extra institutional spaces, there has been a proliferation of artistic and curatorial projects that propose public space as a sphere of activity and the artistic work as a post-material experience. Accompanying this shift in focus that gestures towards dimensions of sociality, works that directly challenge the contemporary art systems of hegemonic countries have gained greater visibility, proposing unexpected pathways to engage with traditional architectures and putting forward artistic practice as a means of knowledge production. In parallel, theoretical propositions have emerged that put forward artistic practices as ‘ways of doing’, which intervene in the general order of daily life while also identifying a consequent oscillation between the inevitability of art’s insertion in society and its desire for autonomy. Importantly, these recent directions are intrinsic but also extrinsic: they are situated simultaneously on the inside and the outside of existing paradigms, but even if originating from an exterior position, they still seek to act upon that interior position as a whole. Such transit means that these issues play out in a liminal and contested field, so how might we understand the relationship between artistic practice and activist intervention, particularly with regard to urban space? Do such practices foster new modes of critical and creative thinking in their interaction with dimensions of sociality? How might the reconfiguration of Eurocentric canons be proposed as a result, if that is at all possible? Is it the case that we can make such a division between dependence and autonomy, art and society? And to where do these new directions point, what might lie beyond the horizon of contemporary art in its current incarnation? With contributions by Wura Ogunji, Jonas Tinius, Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Catalina Lozano, Pedro Cesarino, Luiza Crosman, Bruno de Almeida, Isabella Rjeille, Juliana Caffé, Yudi Rafel, André Mesquita and Virginia de Medeiros amongst others. Organized by Alex Flynn (Durham University), hosted by Pivô in cooperation with the Goethe Institut São Paulo.