Ecology, Art, and Performance in Contemporary Latin America

Ecology, Art, and Performance in Contemporary Latin America
Professor Sebastián Calderón Bentin
ssc7@nyu.edu
THEA-UT 801.001
Tuesdays 2:00-4:45 pm

Global ecological catastrophe is fueled by the persistent commodification of social and environmental life at a planetary scale. The colonization of the Americas helped entrench the conceptualization of human and more-than-human life as property in ways that sustain exploitation and extraction. This commodification has resulted in structural ecological collapse, crisis, and violence resulting in endless catastrophes. Confronting our global ecological catastrophe requires pairing civil disobedience, non-compliance, and direct action with constructive modes of community-building and world-making as practical alternatives to existing modes of domination, oppression, and ecocide. Accordingly, this course is a survey of contemporary artistic and activist practices from Latin America / Abya Yala that critique extractivist modernity while contributing to the biocentric creation of alternative systems and livable futures pertinent to other parts of the world. We will engage with artistic and scholarly work by Eduardo Gudynas, Aílton Krenak, Eduardo Kohn, Marisol de la Cadena, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Mary Louise Pratt, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Una Chaudhuri, Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, Emerson Uýra, and Patricia Domínguez, among others. Class topics will include the Anthropocene, buen vivir (“good living”), neo-extractivism, epistemological diversity, metabolic rift, biocentrism, sentipensar (“feel-think”), solarpunk, and disanthropocentric performance.