Beyond Extraction: Poetic and Artistic Perspectives in the Latin American and Australian Environmental Imaginaries

• In Event: Asia, Oceania and the Americas: Cultural and Artistic Crosscurrents

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the work of artists and poets from Latin America and Australia, such as Cecilia Vicuña (Quipu Menstrual, La sangre de los glaciares), Eileen Chong (Rainforest), Emilio Longhi (Cola de ballena jorobada), and Nicholas Mangan (Termites economies) through the frameworks of Ecopoetics (Nixon, Puig de la Bellacasa), New materialisms (Barad, Bennett), and Posthumanism (Braidotti, Haraway) connecting them to the discourses of environmental aesthetics and highlighting how their visual and textual languages can be approached as counter-archives of more-than-human kinship and ecological consciousness. Rather than approaching nature (land and water) as passive resources, these works bring to the foreground their historical and material entanglements with colonial dispossession and capitalist extractivism. Engaging with frameworks of slow violence and decolonial ecology, this paper analyzes how these artistic practices generate cross-regional dialogues that challenge Western narratives of nature and question the systemic logics of exploitation, proposing interconnected, plural modes of ecological relation across the Pacific.

Author

• Carolina Davila-Diaz, NYU