What do you think?
Rate this book
And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?: Aesthetic Responses to Extraction, Accumulation, and Dispossession
An exploration of the realities of environmental and social catastrophe through art practices.
“And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?” wrote the Chilean poet, artist, and feminist activist Cecilia Vicuña in the early 1970s. Vicuña countered anthropocentric and hetero-patriarchal urges with healing and appreciation, reviving the aesthetic and spiritual bonds between human and more-than-human entities and worlds. Revolving around this vision of interconnectivity, this book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Kunsthalle Wien, seeks to create a collective dialogue around unequal distribution of power, sovereignty, and social and ecological justice.
The exhibited works and written contributions reflect on the rationale of exploitation, the fast-paced mining of raw materials, and environmental destruction as a colonial legacy. They deconstruct Western anthropocentric models and enduring colonial and racist discourses, trace the stories of indigenous struggles for collective survival, and celebrate encounters defined by solidarity in their resistance to capitalist extraction, misogyny, imperialist violence, and dispossession.
This publication includes a folded A2 SPIT! (Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together! / Carlos Maria Romero, Carlos Motta & John Arthur Peetz), We The Enemy (poster), 2017. Courtesy the artists.
“And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?” wrote the Chilean poet, artist, and feminist activist Cecilia Vicuña in the early 1970s. Vicuña countered anthropocentric and hetero-patriarchal urges with healing and appreciation, reviving the aesthetic and spiritual bonds between human and more-than-human entities and worlds. Revolving around this vision of interconnectivity, this book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Kunsthalle Wien, seeks to create a collective dialogue around unequal distribution of power, sovereignty, and social and ecological justice.
The exhibited works and written contributions reflect on the rationale of exploitation, the fast-paced mining of raw materials, and environmental destruction as a colonial legacy. They deconstruct Western anthropocentric models and enduring colonial and racist discourses, trace the stories of indigenous struggles for collective survival, and celebrate encounters defined by solidarity in their resistance to capitalist extraction, misogyny, imperialist violence, and dispossession.
This publication includes a folded A2 SPIT! (Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together! / Carlos Maria Romero, Carlos Motta & John Arthur Peetz), We The Enemy (poster), 2017. Courtesy the artists.
256 pages, Paperback
Published April 25, 2023
18 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 11, 2023
necessary, interesting, sad but hopeful
Displaying 1 of 1 review