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‘Territorios en resistencia’, Artistic Perspectives from Latin America

Rosa Jijón & Francesco Martone (A4C), Sofía Acosta Varea, Boloh Miranda Izquierdo, Anamaría Garzón
 

The following conversation took place between Ecuadorian artist Rosa Jijón and Italian Ecuadorian activist Francesco Martone, founders in 2016 of the artistic platform Arts for the Commons (A4C). Currently, the collective – also a member of the Art For Radical Ecologies platform initiated by the Institute of Radical Imagination – is focusing its work on critiques of the Anthropocene, Rights of Nature, and resistance to extractivism, in collaboration with various movements in Latin America. Sofía Acosta Varea is a Mexico-based artist and activist on Indigenous rights and against extractivism; Boloh Miranda Izquierdo is a video-maker and artist working with Indigenous communities and movements in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and Anamaría Garzón is a curator and art historian who works at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Essex, UK. The conversation is part of the publication Art for Radical Ecologies (Manifesto).

Arts for the Commons (A4C): We would like to start this four-way conversation on artistic practices and activism in Latin America by quoting Uruguayan artist and educator Luis Camnitzer, who in a recent article delved into the relationship between art and politics:

If you want it to be art, it has to have a plus. When you dedicate yourself to serve a cause, you are leaving the plus aside. There is a lot of political art that ignores the plus and then, for me, it is no longer art, it can be effective as propaganda, pamphlet or expression of my opinion, but in reality nobody cares, or nobody should care.1

As a collective, we attempted to offer a partial overview of some Latin American artists’ practices on issues related to struggles against extractivism, territorial ecofeminisms, Rights of Nature and Indigenous cosmologies in an article published in Radical History Review,2 and in an interview with Bolivian activist and practitioner José Carlos Solón, published on The Abusable Past.3 Our continent, with its vibrant social, Indigenous and environmental justice movements, and innovative approaches such as Buen Vivir (Good Living) and Rights of Mother Earth, now represents an exciting and challenging space of experimentation and convergence between cultural and visual practices and grassroots movements.4 As Latin American artists and curators from Ecuador – you, Sofía, are currently living in Mexico; Boloh in Quito; and you, Anamaría, in New York – can you explain how your work relates to ecological struggles and territorial resistance?

Boloh Miranda: When I was part of an anti-mining collective, I had a first encounter with extractivism and the violence that exists in Amazonian territories. Since then, I developed an artistic practice based on social struggles and defence of the territory, whereas nature and underlying concepts are considered in non-Western ways and in connection with social movements.

Anamaría Garzón: My practice as a historian and curator is related to issues of environment and climate justice in various manners, one of which is Art + Activisms, a laboratory of pedagogies that I co-direct with Giuliana Zambrano, at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Sofía is also one of the founders of the project. A+A is an annual event that, since 2018, convenes Latin American creators to discuss issues like the right to migrate, ways of being in the present, the power of translation. In addition to inviting colleagues to give lectures, we are interested in creating toolboxes, so that our students and other creators have more methodological resources to do their work. For this purpose, we had sessions on critical cartographies and creative expeditions.

Sofía Acosta: I imagine the relationship between art and activism as a liminal space, a ravine, where I have to be careful that if I go one way I’m going to fall and if I go the other way I’m going to fall… Being on that tightrope is the objective, that opens up many possibilities. For example, the work I am doing on the right to air arises from very concrete practices of installing a radio in the Ecuadorian Amazon. My initial intention, however, was to make a radio to communicate with my son, which then morphed into a very political proposal meant to think of other ways to communicate and reduce the distance. Then I asked myself how these two aspects come together. This is how the idea of installing VHS radios powered by solar panels for Indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon came up in collaboration with Rhizomatica. To me, art and activism are parallel paths, but different. When I do an artistic project I am generating many more questions, but when I work as an activist the intention is rather to offer concrete answers. However, there are times when the two lines meet. One is the line of extractivism and the defence of the territory, and the other is that of the body as a territory (or, as we say here, cuerpo-territorio).5

A4C: Sofía, readers of this essay might not be familiar with the concept of the

body-territory, embodied in what Argentinian sociologist Maristella Svampa named ‘territorial ecofeminisms’.6 Could you elaborate in a little more detail?

SA: Just as another Argentinian feminist activist and scholar, Rita Segato, says, it is very important to understand how you inhabit the body from being territory and how to be territory at the same time. A project we did with Boloh during the UN Habitat III Conference in Quito came to my mind, when we gave some workshops for the counter-march organized by movements. Many women came from the Cordillera del Cóndor,7 a territory in resistance against mining, and one of them, and her women’s collective, created a piece of art in the form of a sleeping mountain-woman saying ‘we need to rest’. They went on to say:

What happens is that we cannot rest because the mountain is not resting either. Since they arrived for the exploitation of the mine, we are not resting, the mountain is not resting, and the mountain is us too. There is a relationship between the mountain and us that is not leaving us, the mine works twenty-four hours and what we want is for that woman to rest.

For me it was important to think about how to relate to the other, not only the human, but also the nonhuman.

All images, video stills, A4C, Rosa Jijón & Francesco Martone, #Quitosinminería, 2021, 7 min.

A4C: This helps us to understand more about the relationship of communities with their places of origin, territories to be understood in a much broader way. In Ecuador and Latin America, we understand that there is more than a universe, notably a pluriverse, a concept that helps in reconciling culture and nature, thereby ‘fixing’ the epistemic fracture represented by modernity. Our alternative is based on sentipensar (or ‘feeling-thinking’), notably the construction of affections between humans and nonhumans.8 The hierarchy of the visual was also imposed as a colonial project, discrediting the other senses and the capacity to put us in the space of affection. How do you think Latin American art relates to the polycrisis characterized by new forms of broader and more aggressive extractivism?

BM: The biggest challenge in dealing with territories and extractivism is not to fall into extractive modes, which can also result from art-making. My work is linked to struggles and people from the territories. This does not give me the right to speak on their behalf, but this does not mean that I refrain from talking about these issues. You need to be careful about where you speak from. I find it extremely challenging to translate these issues through my works when they should rather be spoken by voices from Indigenous communities and their leaders.

SA: Younger generation artists indeed show great interest in issues related to extractivism. However, they are also talking a lot about more personal crises resulting from environmental destruction, the polycrisis that you refer to, and that lead to the creation of works that are very existential. This is also the result of the pandemic. However, on the issue of extractivism there are several collectives of younger generations of artists (under twenty-five), which I find amazing and that I support and accompany at times. A Colombian artist that I admire a lot, Carolina Caycedo,9 once said that artists are not the ones who are in the front line but the ones who can be right behind, supporting that frontline so that it walks stronger. I agree with her.

A4C: The work that you, Sofía, and Boloh did on the Indigenous guard in the Amazon comes to mind. The polycrisis is not exclusively happening in rural territories, but encompasses a wider debate on the relationship between the human and nonhuman, between people’s rights and the Rights of Nature.10 When shifted on the theoretical level and hence detached from embodied conflicts and struggles, this attempt to solve the historical rupture between nature and culture risks being co-opted or used as a form of ‘greenwashing’.

SA: Several issues end up being co-opted. Some of those words can be found in artists’ statements, and works that are just destined for commercial spaces and not meant to generate questions or challenges. Myself, I always embark on self-criticism about where I am speaking from: Who am I to say this or that? Who am I to work on these issues? Self-criticism is crucial for an artist, also to prevent contradictions. This is the approach I followed in the work I did with Boloh and Nixon Andy, and with Tawna,11 a collective active on territorial issues. At that time I was also working on the radio, and on issues of activism and archiving,

from the land, the soil, the minerals, the water. Both of us never thought that air is also a space of power that is being controlled and has hence become a space of surveillance.

BM: The work we did on the Indigenous Guard, together with Sofia and Nixon Andy, who is part of the Indigenous Guard of Sinangoe,12 contributed to a victory for Indigenous peoples whose rights to land, territories and resources were eventually recognized. This result was obtained thanks to the Amazon archive, the work of the Indigenous Guard and the use of camera traps and drones. The latter were used to take footage of invasions by illegal miners. We facilitate radio communication, through antennas, and a security system for communities. In parallel we explore new monitoring and communication systems adopted by the Indigenous Guard to protect their territories. A product of this participatory work is a two-channel video installation portraying a portrait of the Guard, a single body and the relationship with the territory.

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