Cluster

GeoSemantics II / Introduction: Excavating Earthly Memories and Inhuman Becomings in the Latin American Archive

By Estefanía Bournot & Azucena Castro
Chonon Bensho, Jene Noma (spiritual woman of the water world) – Embroidery (colored threads on fabric) – 90 x 120 cm

“Everything that surrounds us participates in a form of language, in a kind of cosmic semiotics that we must learn to listen to.” These are the words of Chonon Bensho, an Indigenous artist from the Shipibo-Konibo people in the Peruvian Amazon forest. In the personal testimony she delivers through her husband’s writing, Chonon explains how her Kene designs channel a connection with the different “spiritual worlds that inhabit the forest.” This mediation between the human and non-human (or “more than human”, in Marisol de la Cadena’s terms) is perhaps one of the most revealing functions of art that we can access after the material and geological turn. The re-distribution of agency, as stated by Jane Bennett,1 or as in the “pluri-perspectivist” logic of Amerindian cultures (Viveiros de Castro ), opens up a whole new possibility of “geocosmic semiotics,” i.e. geocosmological forms of expressions speaking from the extractive zones of the Global South.

GeoSemantics began as a conversation on Geological Writings at the Latin American Environmental Humanities Platform in March 2022. On this occasion, we discussed the ways in which geological matters—rocks, minerals, and fossils—were pressing into different artistic expressions and critical vocabularies. As we noted a new geological aesthetics emerging from the Global South’s socio-ecological realities, questions arose regarding the critical frameworks we use to understand established notions of matter. How are geological materials connected with art, colonial histories, and climate justice? Could these geological emergencies open a new field of cultural enquiry?

This cluster explores GeoSemantics, which we understand as the multiplicity of meanings that emerge from artistic and critical engagements with the Earth in the Latin American archive. We have gathered a set of creative and critical contributions that deal with a broad range of expressive geological forms. While the first part of this cluster addressed Geological Affects and Autoethnographies of Extractions within a broad range of geo-cultural areas in the Global South, this second part is devoted to Fossil and Mineral Subjectivities and Archives of Dispossession in Latin America.

At the heart of GeoSemantics is a methodology of desedimentation proposed by the material and geological approach of Cristina Rivera Garza, as outlined by Carolina Sánchez’s review essay in this cluster.2 Rivera Garza instructs us to “excavate” (“Hay que escarbar”) to uncover violent grammars of power accumulated as geological strata. She understands desedimentation as an artistic practice that brings to the surface the social life of the earth intertwined with the necropolitics of late capitalism. This cluster’s GeoSemantics highlight vocabularies, narratives, and methods that expose brutal histories in “extractive zones.”3 By digging into layers of soil and sediments, art can help us reconnect with the “earthly memories” that unlock the archives of dispossession and oppression. In this sense, the notion of desedimentation facilitates an ethical engagement in art practices that seeks to expand the notions of truth and justice, as developed by Paulo Tavares or Eyal Weizman in their notions of “forensic aesthetics.”4

The fossil and mineral subjectivities in zones of intense extractivism dismantle the modern separation between life and nonlife (“geontopower”, as Povinelli calls it). As we can observe in many of the contributions grouped in this layer, matter dissolves into text and text pulls us down to earth and back to language. Ana Laura Cantera takes stones as art medium, envisioning a kind of “sessile poetics” composed of living agents and mineral entities that problematize its material locatedness. Salomé Lopes Coelho follows up the inquiry to rocks through the moving image of film. By dismantling the anthropocentric perspective, the essay suggests that cinematic engagements with inorganic inhuman matter “may hold the key […] to imagine relations to geological rhythms that do not sustain the extractive and anthropocentric logics.”

This fossil subjectivity is also at the basis of Ana Llurba’ s short story on “new ancestral” fracking cosmogonies, which speculates about Mesoamerican underground Gods taking revenge on humans for the extraction of oil in the Texas desert. At the same time, Alex Saum’s visual poem makes us aware of the “terms of service” of data by bringing to the fore the extractive materialism behind the virtual sphere.

The mineralogical and geological emergencies excavated by art and theory in these interventions reflect a multiplicity of temporalities in a ground that “does not stop moving,” constantly generating new earth assemblages and kinships: inhuman becomings.5 On the one hand, these becomings entail the transmutation of humans into geological matter; on the other hand, matter defines geological subjectivities. Understanding ourselves as geological subjects does not only mean that we have absolute power to impact the Earth systems (as the Anthropocene thesis states), but, as Kathryn Yusoff suggests, that we “have something in common with the geologic forces that are mobilised and incorporated”, and in this way, it is possible to recognize the kinships and assemblages that “enact corporeal and planetary (de)sedimentations.”6

This cluster’s second part, Archives of Dispossession, refers to a group of contributions that deal with the aftermath of environmental disasters and the frustrated hopes of modernity in the extractive zone. The landscapes depicted in these pieces showcase the other face of progress and globalization: the “un-world” (inmundo).7 These landscapes archive and expose the afterlives and vestiges that can no longer conform to one coherent image of the world or the subject. Within this layer, a series of interventions deal with mining as “digging into time” that can reveal anti-human violence. Regarding the inhuman conditions of extractivism, a group of essays stress an archive of dispossession that seeks evidential traces of environmental devastation. Joel Flores and Flor Cervantes’ photo reportage on the Peñasquito Newmont, the mining complex in Zacatecas, Mexico, eloquently shows the environmental impact of silver and gold mining on thousands of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Also Silvia Noronha’s and Anais Karenin’s piece is situated in the aftermath of a mining disaster, the Bento Rodriguez dam break, in the Brazilian State of Minas Gerais. In a visual and textual essay, the artists reflect on the “healing” process of the earth and the community of survivors. What does life look like in a damaged zone? Sebastián Wiedemann’s speculative visual composition addresses the challenges of living in a “World in Ruins,” as a crisis of perception.

Maria Teresa Johansson’s essay showcases the rough exposure of earth and human bodies to extractive mineral activity in the Atacama by digging into the diaries of Latin American travelers and dialoguing with Victoria Jolly’s piece Umbrales Atacama. The text exposes the Chilean desert as a corporeal palimpsest where the toxic residue coalesces with mineral memories of industrialization. Through a speculative video-essay covering five historical locations for Peruvian mining during the twentieth century, Diego Orihuela Ibañez presents different extractive phases that Peru has gone through in global markets. The piece focuses on the exploitation of geological and indigenous bodies, to stress the chthonic presence of apus (from Quechua “mountains” as living beings) and engagements with a perforated geocosmos.

Lastly, Damián Galvez and Allison Ramay offer an essay on the poetry of the Mapuche Indigenous writer Maria Isabel Lara Millapan and a first-time translation into English of her poems. The selected pieces, rendered in three languages (Mapuzungun, Spanish, and English), connect the “wounded history” of the Mapuche People in Chile, who have been victims of colonial violence and erasure, and the wounded territory. Here again, as in Chonon Bensho’s testimony quoted at the beginning, there is an invitation to read the language of the more-than-human: the “language of the land” that expands the semantics of earth beyond its material contours.

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Fossil and Mineral Subjectivities

  1. Ana Laura Cantera: “Poetic Materialization of Disaster: Strategies from Art and Minerality”
  2. Salomé Lopes Coelho: “What Would Rocks say if Cinema asked the Right questions? Extractivism and the Inorganic Matter in Latin American Contemporary Moving Images.”
  3. Ana Llurba: “Frackquake. A New Cosmogony”
  4. Carolina Sánchez: “A Review of Cristina Rivera Garza´s Material and Geological Writing”
  5. Alex Saum-Pascual : “Terms of Service: Untitled (rock) form 3”

Archives of Dispossession

  1. Joel Flores & Flor Cervantes: “The Town that the Mining Company Disappeared: A Travel Report to Salaverna, Mexico”
  2. Silvia Noronha & Anais-Karenin: “The Contaminated Soil is Also our Feet”
  3. Sebastian Wiedemann: “Notes in Defense of the People of Light and Whispers”
  4. María Teresa Johansson: “ Mineral Writing: From the long sixties to Umbrales Atacama”
  5. Diego Orihuela Ibañez: “Anti-apus: A Video-Essay”
  6. Damián Gálvez & Allison Ramay: “Está herida la historia todavía”: Notes on the Poetry of María Isabel Lara Millapan”
  7. Chonon Bensho & Pedro Favarón: “The Sacred Web of Existence. An Indigenous Woman’s Good Word”

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Endnotes

  1. Jane Bennett (2009). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.
  2. Rivera Garza, Cristina (2022). Escrituras geológicas. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert.
  3. Gómez-Barris, Macarena (2017). The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press.
  4. Tavares, Paulo and Eyal Weizman articles included in: (2013). Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, Edited by Etienne Turpin. Michigan Publishing, Open Humanities.
  5. Gabriel Giorgi. “’O Chão é a Grande Pregunta’: Non-Human Temporalities in Nuno Ramos”, 2017 Journal of Lusophone Studies 2(2), 86-100.
  6. Yusoff, Kathryn. “Geologic life: prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013, v. 31, pages 779–795.
  7. Andermann, Jens (2018). Tierras en trance: Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Santiago: Metales pesados.

  • Estefanía Bournot

    Estefanía Bournot is Post-doctoral Research Affiliate at the Centre for Inter-American Studies of the University of Bielefeld (Germany) and APART-GSK Grant holder of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her work focuses on contemporary cultural expressions from the Global South, comparative Latin American and African literatures and environmental humanities. She is the author of Topographic Turns: (Re)Writing Space in Latin American 21st century Narrative (2022, Potsdam UP), and various articles published at Letral, CLS Journal, Iberoamericana, Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, among others. She is currently working on a project that explores artistic translations of the Geological Turn in Latin America, and a monograph on 20th century South Atlantic Cross-readings.

  • Azucena Castro

    Azucena Castro is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm University and at the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University working with the Focal Group materia. In 2021, she was a Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography, University of Buenos Aires working with the Study Group “Nature, Culture, Territory”. Her research connects environmental and energy humanities with Latin American cultural studies. Some of her publications include the co-edited dossier “Law, Literature and Art from Latin America” (Cuadernos de Literatura, 2022), and essays in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Humanities, Tekoporá. Latin American Journal of Environmental Humanities and Territorial Studies, Ecozon@. She is the editor of the book Multispecies Futures. Kin-Making Practices for Planetary Emergency (Bartlebooth, 2023).