Distributed for UCL Press
Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art
Projects that bring the sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few have focused on regions beyond the Global North. This book assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens. Page shows how these artworks also “decolonize” science by resisting the exploitation of the natural world that has attended the creation of knowledge in western contexts. Instead, the artists featured in this volume emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. Establishing critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, this book interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas.
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of figures Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. A planetary art beyond the human
I. Inhuman agency
II. Seismic encounters and the acoustic sublime
2. The atmosphere as a planetary commons
I. Breathing a common air
II. From the Anthropocene to the Aerocene
3. Art and environmental change: beyond Apocalypse
I. Art and geodesign for climate change
II. Environmental futures beyond precarity: symbiosis and resilience
4. Science in an ecology of knowledges
I. Indigenous cosmologies and cognitive justice
II. Transgenic maize: between the milpa and the monoculture
5. Interspecies communication and performance
I. Plantbots and the logic of vegetal life
II. The language of cetaceans
III. Microbe music
6. Revising systems art: biological time and the ethics of care
I. Slow robotics and the art of bioremediation
II. Curation and care
7. Sensory worlds and the pluriverse
I. Spider/webs: from connection to coevolution
II. Myrmecology and multispecies communities
Conclusion Bibliography
Index