And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?: Aesthetic Responses to Extraction, Accumulation, and Dispossession

Description

An exploration of the realities of environmental and social catastrophe through art practices. "And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?" wrote the Chilean poet, artist, and feminist activist Cecilia Vicuna in the early 1970s. Vicuna countered anthropocentric and hetero-patriarchal urges with healing and appreciation, reviving the aesthetic and spiritual bonds between human and more-than-human entities and worlds. Revolving around this vision of interconnectivity, this book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Kunsthalle Wien, seeks to create a collective dialogue around unequal distribution of power, sovereignty, and social and ecological justice. The exhibited works and written contributions reflect on the rationale of exploitation, the fast-paced mining of raw materials, and environmental destruction as a colonial legacy. They deconstruct Western anthropocentric models and enduring colonial and racist discourses, trace the stories of indigenous struggles for collective survival, and celebrate encounters defined by solidarity in their resistance to capitalist extraction, misogyny, imperialist violence, and dispossession.

Miguel A. L pez is a writer and curator. He worked as chief curator, and later co-director at TEOR/etica (Costa Rica) from 2015 to 2020. In his practice, he focuses on the role of art in politics and public life, collaborative dynamics, and queer and feminist rewritings of history.