Title
MOUTH OF THE EARTH: ANTHROPOCENIC EFFECT AND ECOLOGICAL VIOLENCE IN ARTIST PRACTICES
Tutors:
Prof. Margarida Brito Alves (FCSH-UNL) and Prof. Renato Sztutman (FFLCH- USP)
Scholarship FCT PD/BD/128483/2017
NOVA University of Lisbon – Art History Institut
University of São Paulo – Social Anthropology Programme
Key-words
Anthropocene, fabulation, fossil, geology, performance, poetry
Abstract
If artistic practices can serve as forms of research and knowledge creation, then a research project can also be experienced and traversed as an artistic process. In this work, I attempt to embody these ideas, focusing on performance — and particularly writing for performance — as an erotic and flexible zone interweaving art and theory, scientific reflection and poetic practice, lecture and performance, ecology and anthropology. My point of departure is the discourse and literature from the past two decades concerning the formalization of a new geological epoch — the Anthropocene — whose temporal definition is based on the inscription of human actions into Earth’s stratigraphic layers. By showing how this concept raises numerous structural issues — representation and representativity, spatiality and temporality, responsibility and accountability, nature and humanity — I counter-propose a speculative and fictional gesture that seeks to expansively and imaginatively explore the relationships among language, writing, authorship, speech, body, gender, and earth. Throughout this text, as well as the practical artistic process of the research, I engage with a series of writing practices and performance and curatorial projects developed between 2017 and 2023. These works incorporate, in their making and listening, the effects of current environmental instability and ecological violence from a historical and critical perspective. This empirical matter is, step by step, braided and expanded by a constellation of voices from the environmental humanities, the anthropology of the ontological turn, Indigenous anthropology and art in Brazil, decolonial ecologies, black studies, speculative fabulation, and poetry — rehearsing a linguistic, poetic, and theoretical transition shaped by a non-binary perspective and in open confrontation with the historical limits of hegemonic Euro-American concepts of nature and humanity. A text to accompany the Earth’s mouth as it speaks.