Art Metropole

#16027

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

Editor

Miguel A. López

Date

2023

Publisher

Sternberg Press

Format

Monographs

ISBN

978-3-95679-637-1

Size

17 × 24 cm

Length

256 pp

Genre

Indigenous Art & Artists

“And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?” wrote the Chilean poet, artist, and feminist activist Cecilia Vicuña in the early 1970s. Vicuña 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 a joint exhibition of the same name of Kunsthalle Wien and Wiener Festwochen, 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.
This publication includes a folded A2 poster: SPIT! (Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together! / Carlos Maria Romero, Carlos Motta & John Arthur Peetz), We The Enemy (poster), 2017. Courtesy the artists.