Aesthetics in the “Extractive Zone”: Rethinking Art Making and Spectatorship in Contemporary Chile

My current research project analyzes the emergence of new forms of artistic involvements with the environment in contemporary Chile. More specifically, it examines the ways in which, at a time of ecological urgency, contemporary Chilean artists have had to come to terms with the limitations of established visual and narrative languages when addressing the conjoined effects of extractivism, colonialism and climate change on the country’s varied landscapes. In this project, I first examine the stakes that such limitations have meant for the visual arts in the light of the existing literature on artistic practice and the Anthropocene. Second, I identify the existence of four artistic strategies in contemporary Chilean art which, I argue, seek to articulate new modes of art making and spectatorship. In doing so, I draw from New Materialisms, Affect Theory and Ecofeminisms to examine a selection of artistic projects, each one situated in a specific landscape of the Chilean territory. From the Northern desert zone and its minerally charged landscapes dominated by the mining industry, to the agrobusiness-saturated Central Valley and its focus on monocultures, the eucalyptus wood industry of the Lake District and the disputed Mapuche territories of the South, these artistic involvements with local environments seek to shape more material, embodied and open-ended forms of art making. In turn, the outcomes of these works also offer a renewed approach to spectatorship, shaping more collective and dialogical narratives as a way out of the aporia that is making – and experimenting – art in the Anthropocene.

Starting from the critical concept of the “extractive zone” coined by Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017) to identify the interrelated effects of extractivism and colonialism on the shaping of the Latin American landscape, this project looks into contemporary approaches and work methodologies currently developed by Chilean artists working around and on the Chilean territory. Looking closely at empirically-grounded work projects, it examines the articulation of work methods involving collaboration, the suspension of intervention, symbolic acts of return (“devolución”), the implementation of sensorial environments (aural, embodied and embedded) as critical and auto-critical forms of engaging with human and non-human lives. By appealing to non-linear conceptions of time (including mineral and vegetal temporalities) and indigenous cosmovisions, among other things, these artistic involvements with increasingly moribund territories activate new proposals and sensibilities to account critically for climate change and articulate scenarios of survival geared towards troubled futures. In turn, the project examines the ways in which the articulation of these methodologies impacts on established approaches to spectatorship and relations to the institution at large.