Abstract
This article aims to contribute to a (post)extractivist aesthetics at a time of ontological shifts, meaning an aesthetics that focuses on the role of art in struggles for (post)extractivist worlds. First, it argues for a contextualized approach to the use of the extractivism framework and proposes that this framework is particularly productive for approaching the socio-environmental crisis due to the way it allows us to engage with the ontological basis of this crisis. The article then builds on empirical research conducted in Argentina to develop the concept of
Introduction
In the town of Andalgalá, in the northwest of Argentina, a local assembly has been leading the struggle against open-pit mining for over two decades. The murals of Andalgalá brightly display the history of this resistance through images and slogans, and they put forward understandings of nature, territory and prosperity that challenge the extractivist development paradigm: ‘water is worth more than gold’. At the march against the G20 summit in 2018, the collective La Ala Plástica descended upon the streets of Buenos Aires with a meters-tall totem of a plant native to South America. The performance, titled
As a phenomenon, extractivism is broadly understood as an economic model based on the intensive and extensive extraction of nature, mainly for export. As an analytical framework developed by activists and scholars in Latin America (e.g. Gudynas, 2009; Machado Aráoz, 2015; Svampa and Viale, 2014), it emerged as a way to make sense of the expansion and consequences of extractive activities beginning in the mid-1990s. In recent years, the term extractivism has gained popularity beyond Latin America and the Global South. Furthermore, while studies of extractivism have traditionally mostly originated from the social sciences, both the phenomenon and framework of extractivism have gained attention in cultural studies and literary studies and criticism: recent special issues on extraction and extractivism in
This article argues for a contextualized understanding of artistic practice in struggles against extractivism and for (post)extractivist futures, and proposes
A Note on Methodology
This piece presents a theoretical proposal resulting from several years of qualitative research on art and extractivism in Argentina, including multi-sited ethnographic research (Marcus, 1995) conducted between 2017 and 2019. This involved over 60 in-depth interviews and informal conversations and fieldwork across the country, in large cities such as Buenos Aires and Córdoba as well as small towns like Vista Alegre and Andalgalá, located at the frontlines of extraction. Fieldwork included participant observation in demonstrations, cultural events, and meetings, and facilitated spaces for conversation and collective reflection. The research also included the analysis of artwork (performances, installations, paintings, and murals), social media analysis, and critical discourse analysis of newspaper articles.
The approach to this research is situated (Haraway, 1988), and the development of theory is contextualized in a way that aims to understand the localized reality of extractivism while engaging with broader questions about the meaning and implementation of the framework of extractivism in other contexts and at different scales. The study therefore draws from and engages with aesthetics as well as political ontology and theories of extractivism, but proposes an understanding of (post)extractivist aesthetics that is grounded and emerges from the data itself (e.g. Charmaz and Thornberg, 2020).
Reconsidering, advancing and refining our understanding of extractivism and the ways it can be employed in different contexts, I suggest, is crucial in allowing us to better grasp a conjuncture characterized by intensive extraction and dynamics of enclosure and dispossession across the globe (Federici, 2018). Within this, looking at the relationship between art, extractivism and ontology is a pressing endeavour because art is one of the realms in which our capacity to let go of boundaries and reimagine the world is activated; understanding and nourishing such practices is particularly crucial at a time of ontological shifts.
Contextualizing Extractivism
In this study, I engage with extractivism in two ways. First, as an ongoing phenomenon in Latin America that originates with the colonization of the continent. And second, as a framework of analysis.
As a phenomenon, extractivism is defined by a prioritization of the extractive industries over other sectors of the economy, with the promise that royalties from these activities will fund development and modernization (Svampa and Viale, 2014). The way extractivism has taken shape in each country presents variations: while countries like Colombia and Mexico have in recent decades pursued a more neoliberal approach, the ‘pink tide’ governments of Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil have emphasized the importance of income from the extractive industries for fighting poverty and addressing inequality.
The direct effects of extractivism are many and develop at different scales. They include pollution and irreversible damage to ecosystems, alarming increases in human and other animal diseases resulting from water poisoning and direct contact with toxic substances, the demise of regional economies, displacement, and the trampling of indigenous rights (Álvarez Mullaly et al., 2017; Aranda, 2015). In addition, the extractivist model is characterized by the erosion of democratic mechanisms (Machado Aráoz, 2015), state and corporate violence against land defenders (Gudynas, 2013), institutional negligence and obfuscation of data (OCMAL, 2012), and the use of hegemonic media to perpetuate a narrative of development based on intensive extraction and attack any form of dissent (Gutiérrez et al., 2020; Riofrancos, 2017).
The continuity of extractivist policies despite political changes, as seen in Argentina with changes from centre-left to right-wing and back again in the past two decades, demonstrates that extractivism cannot be adjudicated to one particular political project (Andermann, 2018) but rather is engrained in the colonial imaginary of the continent and across different understandings of the capitalist state. This reinforces the relevance of the framework of extractivism in the face of changing political landscapes.
Although locating the origins of extractivism in colonialism, most studies of extractivism in Latin America refer to the current period commencing in the 1990s, what some have termed neo-extractivism (e.g. Acosta, 2013; Svampa and Viale, 2014). Following decades of intensifying extraction, this model has failed to deliver on its promises of development: while some pink tide governments have successfully directed revenues from the extractive industries towards alleviating poverty, such revenues are seldom translated into significant infrastructural and economic transformation projects (Martín García, 2016).
To understand the hegemony of extractivism, we must understand how it is rooted in a particular modern ontology that is defined by hierarchal dualisms such as culture-nature. The subordination of nature to humans allows its commodification as resource and its careless and limitless extraction (Leff, 2004). This ontological basis of extractivism was forcibly imposed in Latin America through colonialism and maintained in the social, economic and political formations that followed (e.g. most recently, the development paradigm) in a way that differed from other colonial projects. 1 As a result, the idea of nature as resource, and of extraction for export as the region’s natural destiny and role in the global economy, became deeply engrained in national and regional imaginaries (e.g. Grappi and Neilson, 2018). Because these ideas surrounding nature, extraction and progress are deeply rooted, it would be restrictive to think about extractivism in Latin America as a purely economic or environmental issue. Instead, the logic of extraction goes beyond the contour of the extractive industries, permeating different aspects of life in the same way as the coloniality of power and knowledge (Quijano, 2000).
It is for this reason that I argue that in contexts that have historically been heavily marked by extractivism, it is productive to extend the framework of extractivism to other spheres of the social. If used in a contextualized and situated manner, concepts such as cultural extractivism (Serafini, 2020, 2022) can be valuable for understanding how the logic of extraction is perpetuated in and through other economic, social and cultural spheres with the effect of legitimizing the extractive industries and their expansion, and how different dynamics of extraction and oppression connect (e.g. the urban and the rural, the cultural and the economic). Following this line of thought, and in their effort to understand the contemporary capitalist moment in Latin America
But while extractivism is global, and expanded approaches help us understand it in relation to other sectors of the economy, it does not develop equally everywhere. For instance, the UK is imbricated in neocolonial extractivism across the globe, but the effects of British companies’ extractive activities are intentionally not as present in the UK as they are in countries that remain in the role of ‘suppliers of nature’. 2 In places like the US and Canada, former colonies with a different economic and political composition to Latin America, we can see yet a different kind of dynamic: corporations are benefiting from the intensive extraction they carry out abroad – including fracking and mining in Latin America – and at the same time corporations and governments are pushing extraction on the territories of indigenous peoples within their borders, reproducing neocolonial extractivist dynamics at home (e.g. Preston, 2013).
At a time of intensified extraction and of the expansion of the frontiers of exploitation, identifying the translocation of extractivist dynamics can be useful in studying the neocolonial and imperialist nature of the global economy. However, it is paramount that in highlighting commonalities we do not erase the differences and singularities (Jazeel, 2019) in how extractivism is reproduced, experienced and resisted in different contexts. In its original sense, extractivism serves to describe a system rooted in specific geographies, colonial histories and histories of resistance.
Ontological Shifts and the Extractivism Framework 3
Many have claimed we are currently in the midst of a ‘crisis of civilization’ (e.g. Svampa and Viale, 2020: 19). For centuries, the hegemony of a modern paradigm that supports a nature-culture divide has allowed the commodification of nature as resource, and the global patriarchal, racist capitalist system continues to sustain and deepen inequalities at both global and local levels. 4 Moreover, ‘the ontologies of modernity that have shaped the global present’ have limited ‘our ability to imagine other futures’ (Wilson, 2018: 381), so it is no coincidence that ‘[o]ntology came to the fore precisely at the moment the ontological foundations of our civilization – and the unquestioned cultural supremacy of the peoples who founded it – are seen as starting to crumble’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2015: 8–9).
In extractive societies particularly, but not exclusively, we are witnessing an ontological shift, by which I mean an enhanced awareness of the profound differences in how worlds are constructed, resulting from the multiplication and intensification of socio-environmental conflicts that clash over the very nature of the issue at hand. In other words, conflicts have become less about settling matters like impact studies, damage control and compensation, and more about differences on what it is that is at stake in the first place (Blaser, 2009: 879; de la Cadena, 2015; Ulloa, 2015). This means that beyond disagreements in conceptions and parameters of valorization (Martínez Alier, 2002), which are indeed central to extractive conflicts, we see a clash of worlds. For instance, as seen in mining conflicts across the Andes, it is not only that a local community values the water coming from the mountain more than it does the gold that is extracted from that mountain; it is also that the community in question might inhabit a world in which the position and even agency of the mountain differs greatly from its position in the corporation’s world. This existing tension has become more visible as indigenous peoples have become more organized as political actors over the past few decades, and it also applies to a range of actors and communities in both rural and urban areas. In my fieldwork, I have witnessed the articulation of the ontological nature of socio-environmental conflicts across different territories: in places where indigenous ways of inhabiting the territory are disturbed by the violent, racist advance of the extractive frontier, as is the case in the ancestral lands of Mapuche communities, and also in settler communities where the devastating effects of extractivism have led to an increased engagement with local indigenous ontologies and given way to a complete rethinking of notions of nature, development and agency, as in the aforementioned town of Andalgalá fighting open-pit mining.
Ontological struggles must thus be understood as political (Blaser, 2009, 2010). This, as argues Viveiros de Castro, is because
they imply a situation of war – not a war of words, as per the linguistic turn, but an ongoing war of worlds, [. . .] in a context in which the world (‘as we know it’) is imposed in myriad ways on other peoples’ worlds (as they know them), even as this hegemonic world seems to be on the brink of a slow, painful and ugly ending. (Viveiros de Castro, 2015: 9)
Thus, the context of a crisis of civilization urgently calls for engagement with ontology because ontology is the route to understanding and challenging the dominant paradigms in our world: engaging with ontological issues opens the way for movements that are truly transformational on different levels (Eitel and Meurer, 2021: 4).
Considering the above, a question that emerges is how we can engage with ontological matters in the study of environmental conflicts in a way that does not neglect issues of materiality and the exercise of power. I propose that extractivism is a productive framework for this task precisely because – especially as developed by Latin American scholars – it centres the colonial origin of extractivism and is directly concerned with addressing its ontological underpinnings while also challenging the current manifestations of coloniality in extractive activities at the local and transnational levels, from the most blatantly violent (e.g. the persecution of Mapuche land defenders) to the most insidious reproductions of imaginaries.
The extractivism framework opens pathways for decolonial, political-ontological interrogations that begin by deconstructing modern hierarchical dualisms shaping understandings of race, gender, humanity and nature, and that highlight the existence of other ontologies, bringing to the fore matters of interdependence in a decisively political manner – which is key to avoiding the perils of idealizing relational ontologies, as argued by Swyngedouw and Ernstson (2018). This includes, for instance, the centring of indigenous ontologies that enact non-extractive relations between human beings, non-human beings and other entities in their environments, what de la Cadena (2015) has translated as ‘Earth beings’. Moreover, beyond decolonial pursuits and in adherence to a pluriversal perspective (Escobar, 2018), the framework of extractivism can also give place to ontological projects emerging from other traditions that espouse related goals, such as questioning the limitations of humanism (Deem, 2019; Mignolo, 2007; Povinelli, 2016) and engaging with the affirmative ethics of posthumanism (Braidotti, 2018: 41). 5 In such cases, extractivism is a framework that takes into account the multiple effects of extractivist models in a way that de-centres humans but does not neglect issues of oppression and the search for social justice. This is a significant point to make, returning to the issue of materiality, and I agree with Martín Arboleda in his precautionary clarification: ‘That nonhumans very often display certain forms of agency has now become self-evident [. . .] The challenge, then, is to problematize the forms of violence, exploitation, racial domination, and socioecological suffering that are mediated by human-nonhuman agencies in modern, capitalist society’ (Arboleda, 2016: 368).
Extractivism, Aesthetics and Ontology
In struggles against extractivism, ontological shifts are acted upon and nurtured through the envisioning and creation of worlds otherwise, from grand visions to everyday actions. Art is one of the fields in which our capabilities for envisioning and creating are enhanced, and as such, it is a key vehicle for resisting the advance of extractivism, and for living alternative worlds in the now.
In recent years, numerous philosophers, artists and art theorists have grappled with the question of what characterizes art at a time of intense environmental destruction and climate crisis (e.g. Lippard, 2014). Some have attempted to define an aesthetics of the Anthropocene (e.g. Ballard, 2021; Davis and Turpin, 2015; Reiss, 2019), pointing for instance to the environmental crisis as an aesthetic event, and to the naturalization of pollution and destruction as part of our daily and creative aesthetic experiences (Davis and Turpin, 2015: 11). Others have rejected the idea of the Anthropocene altogether, and argued for a more explicitly political approach to understanding art in an ecological crisis (e.g. Demos, 2017), in line with the critiques of social scientists (e.g. Yusoff, 2018). In the context of overlapping social, economic and ecological crises, art can allow us to express ‘languages of valorization’ (Martínez Alier, 2002) that challenge the roots of hegemonic discourses and practices, and to activate our capacity to imagine other worlds and other ways of being in the world – what some refer to as worlding practices (Haraway, 2016: 83) or world-forming (Holtaway, 2021; Nancy, 2007).
While they advance our understanding of global phenomena, many approaches to the relationship between aesthetics, nature and the climate crisis are limited by adopting a universalist approach. But as Braidotti argues, ‘[i]nstead of new generalizations about an engendered pan-humanity, we need sharper focus on the complex singularities that constitute our respective locations’ (Braidotti, 2018: 53). It follows that to understand the motivations and workings of art in connection to anti and post-extractivist struggles in Latin America, it is necessary to move away from a universalist position and to think about aesthetics within the multiscale operating of extractivism in particular contexts. 6 For instance, Gómez-Barris (2017) offers a way of understanding such artistic and activist practices in Latin America by focusing on their positioning with respect to the extractivist hegemony: she speaks of ‘submerged perspectives’, those practices that put forward decolonial understandings of territory and life.
Following and attempting to expand such approaches, I find it necessary in further developing a (post)extractivist aesthetics to look at the ways that counter-hegemonic artistic practices directly respond to the characteristics of extractive societies and the moment of ontological crisis we are currently facing. In previous work I have argued that artists and activists respond by developing specific and localized processes and mechanisms, and that their art fulfills context-specific sociopolitical functions in the face of extractivism (Serafini, 2022). In this article, I develop specifically the concept of design as a function of artistic resistance to extractivism and as a defining element of (post)extractivist aesthetics, with the aim of demonstrating how artistic practice engages with the ontological matters outlined earlier. I do this by drawing on empirical data and building on recent work on design, mainly Escobar’s (2018) proposal of designs for the pluriverse, and on political ontology. In this way, I demonstrate how the arts and culture can act as sites and vehicles for resistance and creation under extractive societies (in addition to being a contested realm in which the logic of extraction is often reproduced), and I specifically argue that artistic practices can enact instances of prefigurative, ontological design at a time of ontological shifts.
Art and Collective Cultures at the Frontlines of Extraction
In November and December 2017, I visited the city of Córdoba, Argentina, and I was hosted by the collective at Revolución CC, one of the most active cultural houses in the city. Cultural houses, also known as collaborative houses, are spaces where artist collectives of working and middle-class mostly under-30s come together to create experimental spaces of co-working and/or co-habitation. They function as sites of collective production and social and political activity, and they are self-organized in the form of networks. Situated in central Argentina, the wider province of Córdoba is one of the regions where monoculture agriculture has expanded at full speed, causing alarming rates of deforestation in addition to the environmental and health consequences that arise from the intensive use of agrochemicals for monocrop GMO agriculture (Barri, 2010). Native forests are cut down to make room for soy monocrops and cattle, and near the city of Córdoba, forests are also cut with no planning to give way to new real estate developments, causing severe disruption to local ecosystems and significantly increasing the risk of landslides and floods (Gianre, 2015). At the same time, the city of Córdoba is known for a longstanding tension between a sizeable young and politically active population (it is one of the country’s largest university towns) and a repressive police apparatus that resorts to excessive force and persecution on a regular basis (Roldán, 2020). In this context, young artists and activists came together to cohabit and co-create, in a move that addresses urgent material concerns (such as growing inflation and stagnant salaries characteristic of the Argentine economy of the last decade) and a desire to build other ways of life in common that are different to what the extractivist logic dictates. These cultural, autonomous spaces ‘are changing the way that we understand and make culture from perspectives and practices that include alternative media, solidary economies [and] the construction of networks and shared knowledges’ (Orosz, 2016, my translation from Spanish).
The cultural houses I got to know were all different, as were the contexts in which I got to know them. In addition to my stay at Revolución CC, I visited another nearby house for a party: cultural houses often organize social events that involve live music, performances and/or exhibitions, which collectives take as opportunities to raise funds for their rent and cultural activities. People from other houses in the circuit make a point of attending those parties as a form of support, knowing that when they organize their own, others in the network will reciprocate.
Another house I visited, Casa 1234, was home to a silk-screen printing studio. At the time of my visit, members of this house were shaken up by a police search they had recently experienced. A series of homes and organizations, including cultural centres, branches of leftist political parties and even community organizations providing food to children, had been searched under the pretense of finding evidence linked to a case of destruction of property during a march against police violence in August that year. Those searched accused the prosecutor of political persecution (El Piquetero, 2017; Razón y Revolución, 2017). In this context of police persecution and violence, the artists and activists I spoke to opened up their practice to those affected by such violence to generate a collective and, as Kester (2004) would term it, dialogical form of aesthetic-political practice that is based on the creation of a bond of care. Visual artists and designers collaborated with the families of victims of police violence to create prints, often featuring the faces of victims, which were then plastered all over town (Serafini, 2022). In this way, their collaboration was not just a form of solidarity and kin making through art, but it also aimed to make an intervention in the visual landscape of the city, one that engages with passersby, whatever their background, to make them confront and reflect on the reality of institutional violence.
Similarly, the artists I spoke to also made prints to accompany the camps against Monsanto that had taken place in the nearby locality of Malvinas Argentinas a few years earlier. In 2012, Monsanto announced that this rural town would be the location of the biggest transgenic seed factory in Latin America. The announcement was immediately met with fierce resistance by local communities and activists that came from across the country to support the fight and express their solidarity, and eventually the local assembly of Malvinas Argentinas won the fight against the agribusiness giant (Smink, 2014). Artists from Casa 1234 had joined those camps and brought their printing tools with them to stand against the extractivism of agribusiness. From our conversations, it became evident that all of their artistic work was heavily centred on relationality, be that with their non-human environments or with the communities they worked with. When speaking of their work with families of victims of police violence, Manuel from Casa 1234 explained:
We become kin with that family, we are already part of it and that limit is already broken [between them and] the solidary artist or the communicator or the militant. Instead, what emerges is kinship, and we build it with that language, which is not the language of the vertical, traditional political practice of political parties where there is one referent [. . .] but we build instead a horizontal and mutually-affective organization.
7
Another notable example of art and culture at the frontlines of extractivism is the collective mapping of Iconoclasistas, a duo made up of communications specialist Julia Risler and graphic designer Pablo Ares. The duo has been facilitating
Prefigurative Ontological Design for Post-Extractivist Worlds
Arturo Escobar draws on both political ontology and design theory to develop his manifesto on ‘designs for the pluriverse’ (Escobar, 2018). Building on his perspective on the ontological design potential of different practices, I consider here the potential that artistic practice has for designing meaning, visions, organizational forms, economies, socialities and structures, and the way that both the discursive and material aspects of such practices facilitate instances of ontological design in a context of violence, environmental destruction and emerging ontological shifts. I understand ontological design to be enacted through everyday practice, in addition to specific moments of planning and envisioning. This understanding of design reclaims it as an everyday, non-specialist and democratic practice, as opposed to top-down, exclusionary and oppressive forms of design. In this sense, I adopt the perspective of practical ontology in addition to that of political ontology, understanding practical ontology as a ‘
Ontological design is, in this view, a political practice that challenges the ontological basis of the hegemony of extractivism by operating at different levels with a view towards ontological, symbolic and material transformation. The ontological design of anti- and post-extractivist movements is linked to an autonomous ethos – in the sense of the Latin American tradition of autonomous politics (Escobar, 2018) – and is also decolonial, as it challenges exclusionary and oppressive universalist principles of mainstream design in order to rethink
Practices of ontological design take place in a wealth of realms, including alternative economies, communication, community organizing and radical pedagogies. However, contemporary, dialogical artistic practices – such as those described earlier – play a distinct role in ontological design, given that, as Kester (2004) would argue, their multidisciplinary and open nature allows them to engage with different realms of the social at once and from a creative, constructive lens. In the collective mappings of Iconoclasistas, for instance, we see how a collaborative creative practice generates a space for creating new socialities, rethinking notions of territory and distribution of economic and social activity, reinventing the practice of mapping and capturing redefined understandings of what is at stake in a social or environmental conflict.
Ontological design is also activated in projects that construct social and economic relations that resist the encroachment of a logic of extraction on everyday life, as I have observed during my fieldwork in Córdoba. Such material concerns emerge as ontological in projects that design and enact new ways of positioning ourselves in society and within the rest of nature. In Córdoba, the advance of extractivism and institutional violence are understood as two sides of one same coin, and in response, activists and artists come up with their own ways of resisting and overcoming such logics and everyday forms of violence, creating bonds that are based on an understanding and fostering of interdependence, designing and enacting anti-extractivist relational ontologies through their artmaking, communal living and community support.
A common characteristic among most of the practices I encountered during fieldwork was the prefigurative ethos underpinning practices that aimed to design other ways of being, understanding prefiguration as the small-scale enactment in the now of the forms of living and worlds we aspire to. I thus refer to this kind of design as
The category of prefigurative ontological design therefore acts as an analytical category fitted for this moment and place: by engaging with the ontological dimension of artistic practices, we can more fully understand the different levels at which they operate, and how they connect to wider theories and movements such as decolonization, which seek to challenge and denaturalize the bases of our knowledge creation practices and give place to other forms of knowing and doing outside the hegemonic modern paradigm (Gómez and Mignolo, 2012). Engaging with the potential for prefigurative ontological design of these practices is more important than ever at a time when ontological shifts are being felt, and when it becomes more pressing to rethink and reconstruct the kinds of relationships we hold within communities and with the ecosystems we are part of. The concept of prefigurative ontological design thus contributes to theorizing a (post)extractivist aesthetics for a situated understanding of the motivations, processes and effects of art that positions itself in resistance to extractivism and for the creation of post-extractivist worlds.
Conclusion: Toward a (Post)Extractivist Aesthetics
This paper aimed to advance our understanding of extractivism and aesthetics in two ways. In the first place, it argued for the productiveness of contextualized uses of the extractivism framework at a time of ontological shifts. I argued that the extractivism framework puts forward an inherently decolonial and political ontological perspective on socio-environmental conflicts and the wider ecological crisis, thus facilitating engagement with the pressing issues of shifting ontologies and the ‘crisis of civilization’.
The second contribution concerns the study of cultural and artistic practices of resistance in extractive societies and the proposal of concepts that can contribute to a (post)extractivist aesthetics. A (post)extractivist aesthetics is one that intends to understand the aesthetics of extractivism and the processes and functions of art that engage in building worlds otherwise, and it does this in reference to historical, geographical, political and cultural contexts. This contextualized understanding of the role of art and cultural practices is paramount to an in-depth analysis of extractivism as a moment and as a condition, and to fully comprehend the ways that (post)extractivist worlds are envisioned and enacted on a daily basis.
A (post)extractivist aesthetics needs to centre ontological struggles, but it must also engage with material issues in its analysis of the sociopolitical function of art and cultural practices, given the urgency of extractivist violence. With this in mind, in this article I developed the concept of prefigurative ontological design. Looking at art as a practice of prefigurative ontological design, I argued, allows us to better grasp the ways that artistic practice can be transformational on different levels. In a context of encroaching extraction and heightened violence that has laid bare the underpinning ontological assumptions of an extractivist model, art allows the enactment of different ontologies, and it can challenge the coloniality of knowledge at the root of extractivist violence.
In this way, the article aimed to make an intervention in how we approach the study of extractive societies and movements for worlds otherwise, highlighting the transformative potential of art at a time of overlapping crises and offering conceptual tools for a situated understanding of the ways that it develops within extractive societies. This is particularly pressing at a time when the most widespread narratives about ecological breakdown centre on climate change but continue to neglect the longstanding forms of violence surrounding extractivism, and when mainstream solutions to the crisis involve further extraction of nature in the Global South (e.g. lithium) to sustain transition programmes based on the assumption of continuing growth. To challenge such narratives, it is paramount to step back from universalist understandings of environmental struggles and bring forward those cultural practices that highlight the differentiated effects of a global extractive economy, and at the same time put forward other ways of being that disrupt the idea of only one possible solution to the ecological crisis.
Footnotes
Funding
This research was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant.
