Creating Worlds Otherwise , livre ebook

Creating Worlds Otherwise
Performing Latin American and Caribbean Identities
KATHRYN BISHOP-SANCHEZ, series editor
This series is a forum for scholarship that recognizes the critical role of performance in social, cultural, and political life. Geographically focused on the Caribbean and Latin America (including Latinidad in the United States) but wide-ranging in thematic scope, the series highlights how understandings of desire, gender, sexuality, race, the post-colonial, human rights, and citizenship, among other issues, have been explored and continue to evolve. Books in the series will examine performances by a variety of actors with under-represented and marginalized peoples getting particular (though not exclusive) focus. Studies of spectators or audiences are equally welcome as those of actors—whether literally performers or others whose behaviors can be interpreted that way. In order to create a rich dialogue, the series will include a variety of disciplinary approaches and methods as well as studies of diverse media, genres, and time periods.
Performing Latin American and Caribbean Identities is designed to appeal to scholars and students of these geographic regions who recognize that through the lens of performance (or what may alternatively be described as spectacle, ceremony, or collective ritual, among other descriptors) we can better understand pressing societal issues.
Other titles in the series:
Atenco Lives!: Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in Mexico by Livia K. Stone
Creating Carmen Miranda: Race, Camp, and Transnational Stardom by Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez
Living Quixote: Performative Activism in Contemporary Brazil and the Americas by Rogelio Minana
Creating Worlds Otherwise
Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism
PAULA SERAFINI
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee
Copyright 2022 Paula Serafini
All rights reserved
First printing 2022
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Serafini, Paula, author.
Title: Creating worlds otherwise : art, collective action and (post)extractivism / Paula Serafini.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021056677 (print) | LCCN 2021056678 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826504555 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826504562 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826504579 (epub) | ISBN 9780826504586 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Art and social action--Argentina. | Arts--Political aspects--Argentina. | Environmental degradation in art. | Agricultural industries--Social aspects--Argentina. | Mineral industries--Social aspects--Argentina. | Natural resources--Management--Social aspects--Argentina.
Classification: LCC NX180.S6 S48 2022 (print) | LCC NX180.S6 (ebook) | DDC 701/.030982--dc23/eng/20220331
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056677
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056678
To Fran and Isa
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Territories in Conflict: Art and Territorialization
2. Our Bodies, Our Territories: Ecofeminism and the Ethics of Care
3. Human Rights and the Rights of Nature: Generating Public Narratives
4. Reclaiming the City: Urban Extractivism and Contested Cultures
5. Our Place in the World: Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Narratives of Self-Determination
6. Worlds in the Making: Postextractivism and Ontological Design
Conclusion. Art and (Post)Extractivism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE THING I always aim to do with my research is to work from the stories. This book does not try to prove a hypothesis or evidence a theory; rather, it aims to document the forms of collective action and creative practice that emerge in response to the advance of extractivism, and to offer new, useful tools for understanding them.
The first acknowledgement therefore goes to all the people who were part of this project (those featured in the book and those who are not), who with great generosity gave up their time to tell me their stories and explain what was happening in their territories. This includes the community of Vista Alegre; members of the Asamblea del Algarrobo in Andalgalá; activists and artists from different parts of Córdoba and specially the people at Revolución CC and Casa 1234; organizations like Observatorio Petrolero Sur, Museo del Hambre and La Boca Resiste y Propone, collectives like Proyecto Squatters and Etcétera, and artists like Azul Blaseotto and Eduardo Molinari for continued collaborations that have enriched my work greatly. I particularly thank Sergio Martínez, Milton López, and Revolución CC for their hospitality during my travels.
I would like to thank my former colleagues at CAMEo Research Institute and at the School of Media, Communication and Sociology at the University of Leicester for being fantastic humans and for allowing me to bounce ideas off them. I also thank the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani at the University of Buenos Aires for kindly receiving me as a visiting researcher and allowing me to share the process and outcomes of this project with them. I specially thank Gabriela Merlinsky for her support and friendship during this project and during other shared ventures. I am very grateful as well to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for supporting the period of fieldwork that led to this book, and to my current colleagues at Queen Mary University of London, for supporting and trusting my vision to make this work the basis of new teaching.
A sincere thanks goes to those I regard as my past and present academic mentors (whether they willingly accept the title or not): Mark Banks, Doris Eikhof, Alison Harvey, Tim Jordan, and Ross Parry, all of whom have provided valuable advice as I prepared this book. I also thank Zachary Gresham and Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez at Vanderbilt University Press for their dedication and input from early stages in the development of this book, and Joell Smith-Borne for a careful and detailed editing of this work. And a heartfelt mention goes to the late David Graeber, who generously provided guidance and support on my first steps as a researcher many years ago, and whose brilliant insights and teachings will stay with many of us for years to come.
This work, while based on research I carried out in Argentina, has been influenced as well by conversations, collaborations, and militancy with activists and collectives in the UK, my current home. I am particularly grateful to Shake! and Platform London for many years of shared work and joyful exercises in creating worlds otherwise. I also thank my co-creators at PLANK for wonderful conversations and joint projects, and fellow actorvists from BP or not BP? for many years of beautiful and fierce art activism.
Lastly and most importantly, I thank my family and friends in Buenos Aires and London for their love and encouragement always.
INTRODUCTION
WE FIND OURSELVES in the midst of runaway climate change, in addition to rising inequality, new pandemics, the upsurge of far-right and white supremacist movements in different parts of the globe, and long-standing injustices, such as hunger. Most governments acknowledge the need to tackle climate change, including vows to reduce emissions and transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy. However, governments, world organizations, and corporations are not acting fast enough, and furthermore, they frame their responses within a green capitalist logic that assumes the continuation of perpetual growth. This logic rests on ingrained modern ideas of progress and categories that condition our position as humans in relation to other beings and ecosystems, categories that were constituted and enforced through, and as a result of, colonialism. 1 Furthermore, since the turn of the century, we can also identify a further shift from modernity to globality, 2 as advances in telecommunications and free movement (of capital) transformed the global economy, deepening, in many ways, forms of global inequality.
In 2020, as we reached record temperatures, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as a clear consequence of an unsustainable relationship between humans and their wider ecosystems. The pandemic also exposed some of the crudest forms of inequality and oppression in the world and revealed that the way we organize basic systems for the sustainment of life, such as health care, are deeply flawed. Mainstream solutions to the world’s greatest problems continue to be framed within the same paradigms that drove us to where we are in the first place. And indeed, a significant portion of the population is not in fact in denial about the world’s problems, but are actually, as argues Irwin, “unsure about what they can do,” 3 given that there is no clear political or infrastructural support for individuals and collectives to contribute to rapid, significant changes in crucial areas from production to welfare.
However, in Latin America, proposals for worlds otherwise are cracking through the concrete, building on and from ancestral knowledge, revolutionary histories, decades of indigenous, peasant, and worker organizing, and more recently, the rise of feminism and of youth climate activism. Furthermore, amid the suffering, the interruption of the system generated by COVID-19 compelled many of us to fundamentally rethink what kind of world we want to live in, and how we can make that happen. Indeed, the pandemic has forcibly created a moment for questioning issues such as prosperity indicators, currently based on economic growth. While capitalism’s ability to make the most out of a crisis should not be underestimated, we must also consider the context in which the pandemic found us: already in crisis, and with mass mobilizations awakening. Perhaps we are indeed at a turning point at which we might begin to transcend the paradigm of extractivism, development, and growth following a period of growing tension between the unfulfil