Multispecies interruptions and interferences. The redistribution of agency in contemporary artistic practices

Abstract

From the point of view of contemporary philosophy, the notion of agency has served both as an indication of the anchoring point of the notion of the human in an anthropological project that has it as its foundation, and also, more recently, as an operator of a renewal of the languages of relationality inherent to the modes of existence that inhabit the earth. In the latter sense, collaborative modes of existence have come to the fore not only in the elaborations on what exists in general (ontological perspective) but also in artistic practices in particular, especially insofar as they are focused on underlining, imagining and/or contesting the relations between the human and the non-human in the explicit context of environmental emergence anxieties. Our aim is to review some aesthetic devices produced in the Latin American context which, concerned with the configuration of worlds that include the living, often advance or assume a certain notion of "nature". This hesitancy between different concepts of the natural (either in its totalising versions or in its specific alternatives) provides an opportunity to map a zone of current tensions regarding the way in which the living is embedded, inserted, interferes with or interrupts a particular anthropocentric manner in which the art/artifice/nature relationship is conceived.