Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology

Description

Amazonia as a place, a subject, a point of view, and a socio-ecological world. Amazonia- Anthology as Cosmology is devoted to Amazonia, its peoples, allies, and nonhuman spirits, and their myriad material and immaterial practices, from certain cosmopolitics and visual languages to past and present forms of resistance. In all their various lines (and circles) of ecological and epistemological thought, the artists, elders, writers, theorists, shamans, curators, poets, and activists whose ideas, images, and struggles compose this book, are concerned with Amazonia as both a place and a point of view. Through the weaving of voices, myths, ancestors, and territories, and all their radical subjectivities, we understand language in this anthology in an extended sense- as testimony, textile, painting, river, forest, animal, ancestor, song, spirit, and sacred medicine. Amazonia- Anthology as Cosmology inquires into decolonial feminisms and Indigenous temporalities, externalized memory and erasure, sacred plants in the shadow of pandemic corporate-state extractivism and systemic violence, the activist possibilities of the mythic imagination, and the common visual matrices of the Amazonian universe. The book also weighs the Western imaginary of the Amazon, both its colonial roots in racial capitalism and its corporate, technological, paternalistic present. Centered, however, is Amazonia itself, in all its many and numinous worlds and languages-visual, oral, botanical, ancestral, cosmological-by which it becomes narrated, passed on, and then narrated again.

Kateryna Botanova is a Basel-based cultural critic and curator from Kyiv, Ukraine. She is a cocurator of the multidisciplinary cultural festival Culturescapes (Basel, Switzerland). Quinn Latimer is a writer and editor. Her books include Like a Woman (Sternberg Press), Sarah Lucas, and Film as a Form of Writing.