Synthesize the boundless. A possible dialogue between the artists Liliana Maresca and Soledad Dahbar

Abstract

The current environmental collapse manifests itself in various ways according to the historical and territorial particularities of each place. The long history of destruction and looting of natural assets in Latin America constitutes a possible reading key for understanding the processes of commodification of nature through extractivist and neo-extractivist dynamics.

In this framework, visual productions recover many of the critical elements from their own repertoires that point out, warn or denounce established narratives. This article aims to reconstruct the historical and material ties of the productions of contemporary artists Liliana Maresca and Soledad Dahbar around the extractive issue, proposing possible formal and symbolic dialogues between the responses implemented.

On tune with Jason Moore's (2020) remarks about the need to incorporate a long-term temporality into the analysis of the Anthropocene, the contribution refers to think about the historical and material continuities in the current configuration of critical visual responses, relevant when it comes to dispute the ways of formulating the problem in order to build creative alternatives from there that overcome impotence in the face of so much destruction.