2025
Lecture
Romanisches Seminar, Zurich University, Switzerland
How does contemporary art talk about the environmental and civilizational crisis? What dialogues does it establish with the various forms of technology? These questions—and their possible answers—take on particular inflections in Latin America, where the plundering of natural resources, the extermination of Indigenous populations, food contamination, and neo-extractivism tragically update cyclical social and political crises. At the same time, the weak faith in progress—characteristic of a modernity that was never fully realized—complexifies the relationship with technology in the contemporary post-industrial landscape.
In this pesentation, I address a series of contemporary Latin American techno-aesthetic practices (photography and video). These works explore new potentials for acting, imagining, and thinking about the planetary crisis from situated and committed perspectives in the face of the diagnosis of the “end of the world.” I propose that the materials that make up these practices, through their material and medial logics of existence, trace an ecology capable of outlining a non-anthropic sensitivity. Likewise, I examine how these material agencies configure a material micropolitics capable of reinscribing the codes of modern aesthetics, through which poetics and politics have been conceptualized in the region’s art. The body of work under consideration includes pieces by Roberto Huarcaya (Peru), Erica Bohm and Sebastián Hacher (Argentina), and Claudia Andújar (Brazil).
