We live like trees insinde the footsteps of our ancestors
“We live like trees insinde the footsteps of our ancestors,” explores a range of artistic practices from Latin America and conceptual frameworks engaging with ecological sensibilities, pedagogies, and knowledge systems that move away from Western-centered and colonial notions of nature. Adopting decolonial, ecocritical, and more-than-human approaches, this book weaves together historical and material conditions and environmental struggles, examining how these come to bear on contemporary Latin American artistic production. Linking neoliberal exploitative economies, extractive practices and the failures of colonial modernity, the publication aims to shed light on alternative ways of understanding nature and interspecies kinships, and to resurface other epistemologies, which critically reflect on the schism between nature and culture.
With contributions by Jens Andermann, Mariana Cunha, Sara Garzon, Lilian Fraiji, Marianne Hoffmeister, Renata Padovan, and Marianna Tsionki. Design by K. Verlag with Wolfgang Hückel & Katharina Tauer.
Incomputable Earth: Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis
Looking afresh at the Anthropocene, this open access volume investigates how the capitalist engineering of the earth is not only accelerating, but is doing so in parallel with the expansion of digital technological systems, including so-called ‘artificial intelligence’.
Against the backdrop of new regimes of data positivism, algorithmic classification and prediction, and even the emergence of unexpected forms of collective intelligence, Incomputable Earth addresses the crucial need to rethink the meaning and inter-relationality of such terms as ‘extraction’, ‘computation’, and ‘planetarity’.
Beyond the theory, it also asks what cognitive and political capacities we need to grapple with the implications of this parallel intensification of datafication and the Anthropocene. Examining new forms of subjectivity and resistance, this timely volume tackles a range of urgent topics, from the racialized politics of climate change to feminist ecologies and planetary financialization.
Botanical Readings: Erythroxylum Coca
Botanical Readings: Erythroxylum Coca is an installation by the artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca (Peru, 1980), presented at proyectoamil in Lima, 2019. The piece was a hydroponic structure for the cultivation of coca plants, whose leaves—and their divinatory ancestral possibilities—answered the questions that visitors had about their own future. This publication reviews the different historical and visual layers that make up the cultivation of coca, where the coca is inserted as an agent whose circulation, consumption, and cultural significance resists the ever-modulating colonial capitalist machine.
This publication was supported by proyectoamil, Galerie Gisela Capitain, and 80m² Livia Benavides for its production. Edited by Ana Gabriela García & Jesús A. Villalobos Fuentes. Texts by Sara Garzón, Catherine J. Allen, Florencia Portocarrero & Ximena Garrido-Lecca. Designed by Iván Martínez / studioivan.ml
Temblores Publicaciones
ISBN: 978-607-98750-5-3
Laura Huertas Millán: Curanderxs . After Nature Prize
Her exhibition, Curanderxs, includes the eponymous multi-channel projection newly produced in 2024 as part of the After Nature. Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize as well as two further video installations. In her new work, Huertas Millán takes the initial prohibition of the coca plant by the Spanish while colonizing Latin America and develops a speculative narrative with a group of femmes who secretly distribute coca leaves in the seventeenth century. In response to the limited existing sources, the artist uses fiction as a strategy to imagine a fragmentary narrative about the colonialist appropriation of nature. Using an aesthetic of early silent films that references the archive’s silence, bold actors emerge from the dark depths of underground landscapes, offering support to enslaved indigenous workers by secretly distributing coca leaves.
How Rivers Think or How we Know What we Know
The exhibition Raíz was curated by Jorge Sánchez & Eduardo Carrera at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito, Ecuador.
The exhibition brought together the work of 22 contemporary artists and artistic collectives from the Andes, the Caribbean, Central America, Southeast Asia, and the United States. The curatorial research was divided into three interweaving constellations: Knowledges of the body and the flesh, Displacements of territories, and Savage Gardens, with works produced from 1998 to 2021. It was curated by Jorge Sanchez (jsanch04) and Eduardo Carrera. Contributors include Sara Garzón, Ángel Burbano, Duen Neka’hen Sacchi, and Mag de Santos.
Reclaiming Resilience
Reclaiming Resilience was published by La Casa Encendida in Madrid. This reader wraps up a research and exhibiton projects curated by the Lithuanian aristtic duo Pakui Hardware. The book critically explores the term of resilience with authors invited by us and the four artists alike. With contributions by Mark Neocleous, Serene J. Khader, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Lisa Parola, Sara Garzón and Rose Vidal.
Resilience has become a buzzword of the last couple of decades. The deepening climate crisis, social, economic and, finally, territorial insecurities, have put resilience on the top list as a form of coping with the permanent emergency. The concept was quickly coopted by the neoliberal regime, in which resilience was transformed into a personal quality, a specific trait of character. According to a philosopher Mark Neocleous, such framing of this notion has a deeply political agenda – to put the responsibility on individuals in dealing with shocks in systems (ecological, political, financial): it wants us to learn to become resilient, to learn emergency planning, rather than changing the dysfunctional or crumbling systems themselves.
Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience
This is a monographic book about the artist Deborah Castillo edited by Jesús Torrivilla. The publication constitutes the first book dedicated to the career of the Venezuelan performance artist and includes a series of critical essays by Diana Taylor, José Luis Barrios, Sara Garzón, Gisela Kozak, Adalber Salas.
The article “Political Iconoclasm and Other Forms of Civil Disobedience” looks at Castillo’s engagement with the glorification of South American Liberator Simón Bolívar. The artist’s treatment of Bolívar’s figure as displayed in works like Sísifo (2013), The Emancipatory Kiss (2013), Slapping Power (2015), and Detritus (2015), underlines the dimension of national fervor for war heroes, specifically military leaders who are emblematic of the patriarchy of the state. In her performances, the artist violently confronts the bust of Simón Bolívar to challenge his masculinity and his multiple ideological significations. Thus, as if confronting history itself, the artist aims to modify the past by questioning Bolívar’s iconicity as father of the nation and symbol of unity and order.
