Visual dialogues on neoextractivism Situated works and environmental conflicts in three contemporary female artists

Abstract

The extractive model runs through the history of our continent since the beginning of colonization. Throughout these centuries, accumulation patterns have considered various modalities based on the development of monocultures distributed by regions, the extractive mining of metals and minerals, as well as the massive and systematic use of cheap labor. Since the beginning of the 21st century, productive reconversions consider new activities such as fracking, agribusiness and the extension of clearings with the consequent loss of biological and cultural diversity. Faced with these realities, the visual productions have been part of the collective responses, developing their own repertoires of resistance and resignification that in many cases show, denounce or recover from the materiality the crisis of the civilizing model.

The objective of this article seeks to review a set of contemporary artistic productions linked to the neoextractivist problem by presenting possible dialogues between the responses implemented by three female artists during the last decade: Marcela Magno, Diana Dowek and Dana Prieto.

Based on the material analysis of their works, it is sought to reconstruct the historical and political contexts of production, reviewing some of the artists' explorations in order to make visible political aesthetic experiences. From the need to incorporate a critical local perspective into the analyzes of the Anthropocene, the contribution refers to thinking about the specificities that the current configuration of ecopoetic and critical visual responses, fundamental when it comes to thinking more just and respectful worlds of the biodiversity.