Copyright
Joanna PagePublished On
2023-06-14ISBN
Language
- English
Print Length
296 pages (xviii+278)Dimensions
Weight
Media
OCLC Number
1389615774LCCN
2022361788BIC
- HBT
- HBTR
- WN
- ABA
- 1KL
- RNA
- RNT
BISAC
- HIS000000
- HIS024000
- POL045000
- ART044000
- SCI020000
- HIS054000
LCC
- N6750
Keywords
- contemporary artists
- Latin America
- collecting nature
- organizing nature
- displaying nature
- new aesthetic
- political perspectives
Decolonial Ecologies
The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art
- Joanna Page (author)
In Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art, Joanna Page illuminates the ways in which contemporary artists in Latin America are reinventing historical methods of collecting, organizing, and displaying nature in order to develop new aesthetic and political perspectives on the past and the present.
Page brings together an entirely new corpus of artistic projects from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru that engage critically and creatively with forms as diverse as the medieval bestiary, baroque cabinets of curiosities, atlases created by European travellers to the New World, the floras and herbaria composed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists, and the dioramas designed for natural history museums. She explores how artists develop decolonial and post-anthropocentric perspectives on the collections and expeditions that were central to the evolution of European natural history. Their works forge a critique of the rationalizing approach to nature taken by modern Western science, reconnecting it with forms of popular, indigenous and spiritual knowledge and experience that it has systematically excluded since the Enlightenment.
Drawing on photography, video, illustration, sculpture, and installation, this vividly illustrated and lucidly written book (also available in premium quality in hardback edition) explores how these artworks might also deconstruct the apocalyptic visions of environmental change that often dominate Western thought, developing a renewed understanding of alternative ways in which humans might co-inhabit the natural world.
Endorsements
Against the “one-world” orientation of much environmental criticism, Decolonial Ecologies offers a wellspring of neobaroque aesthetics: artistic interventions that challenge the schemas of natural science mobilized by European explorers and thinkers, from Pedro de Mendoza and José Celestino Mutis to Carl Linnaeus. The cosmotechnics of contemporary Latin American artists take us into an alternative Enlightenment - the age of Humboldt 2.0. To great satisfaction, we experience the resurgence of living agents and relations as they break out of the frames, cabinets and discursive parameters formalized during the Enlightenment. As Joanna Page shows, though inhuman geographies continually threaten, it is nevertheless possible to see alternative ecologies of consciousness shine through.
Amanda Boetzkes
Author of 'Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art' and the 'Drive to Waste and The Ethics of Earth Art'
Additional Resources
Contents
Introduction
(pp. 1–24)- Joanna Page
1. Bestiaries and the Art of Cryptozoology
(pp. 25–62)- Joanna Page
2. New Cabinets of Curiosities
(pp. 63–92)- Joanna Page
3. Floras, Herbaria, and Botanical Illustration
(pp. 93–136)- Joanna Page
4. Retracing Voyages of Science and Conquest
(pp. 137–163)- Joanna Page
5. Albums, Atlases, and their Afterlives
(pp. 163–200)- Joanna Page
6. Taxidermy and Natural History Dioramas
(pp. 201–236)- Joanna Page
Conclusion
(pp. 237–248)- Joanna Page
Contributors
Joanna Page
(author)Joanna Page is Professor of Latin American Studies and the Director of CRASSH (the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of several books on cinema, graphic fiction, literature and visual art in Argentina, Chile, and Latin America more broadly. Many of her research projects focus on the relationship between science and the arts, but her interests also include posthumanism, new materialism, decoloniality and environmental thought in Latin America. Her most recent monograph was Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art (UCL Press, 2021). Other books published in the past few years include Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (co-edited with MarĂa del Pilar Blanco, University Press of Florida, 2020) and Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America (co-authored with Edward King, UCL Press, 2017).