Arde Córdoba A collective cry to denounce the ecocide in Córdoba

Abstract

In a beautiful text about the passenger pigeon Vinciane Despret invites to her readers to think about what names evoke, what names make us sensitive to. In the same way this article offers an alternative, among many possible ones, about what Arde Córdoba suggests and makes feel. We propose a story composed of visual and textual records and some theoretical readings to reflect the power and limits of that experience.

Arde Córdoba is the name of a group, an action, a reality, an experience. Arde Córdoba is the name of an attempt to dispute what we can imagine and do after the devastating fire, not only the way of naming the catastrophe. From july to october 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a series of forest fires affected more than 300,000 hectares in the province of Córdoba. The native forest burned and the devastation wasn't natural, it was political-economic-financial and had media coverage. In this context a series of artists, researchers, activists and citizens in general agreed to promote a collective cry that would forcefully make visible the ecocide we were suffering.

In front to restrictions of movement and organization of meetings, we composed other forms of intervention in public space. The nets we weaved, and their power, allowed us to do a proyectorazo to make visible the flames in the forests and the pain of the communities. If the provincial State dedicated itself to preparing the ground for real estate, mining and agro-industrial extractivism, from Arde Córdoba we seek to promote another narrative, another way to continuing with the trouble (Haraway, 2019). Nothing was more fertile than a devastated territory, turning the mountain into devastated land, a tabula rasa to install something else. We try to prevent this devastation proposing another map and we shout loudly: ¡Donde hay cenizas, habrá monte! ¡Donde hubo incendios, habrá bosques!