Performance, Ritual and Socio-environmental struggles

My Ph.D. project delves into the fruitful and intricate relationships between performance art, ritual, and socio-environmental struggles in Latin America while creating a new visual constellation addressing structural issues of the Capitalocene (Malm, 2016; Moore, 2016). In my research, I propose to develop a new analytical category: eco-ritual performance characterized by the incorporation of ritual elements and the ritualization of aesthetic practices, a powerful artistic strategy to mediate socio-environmental conflicts. This echoes the particular reality of Latin America, where profound ecological crises, exacerbated by extractivism and (neo)colonialism, disproportionately affect Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, their territories, and cultures. One of the key findings of my research is that eco-ritual performances involve not only the artist's body but also the collective body. Therefore, it is a collaborative activity where artists employ indigenous repertoires, a process in art history I refer to as the "indigenization" of the arts, a terminological loan from Lucy Lippard (Lippard, 2017). Moreover, art historian Olivier Lussac's insights on performance inform my research, emphasizing the need to expand our understanding of performance within historical and sociocultural contexts (Lussac, 2020: 5). Therefore, my research project redefines performance art boundaries through the artistic practices of Latin-American women artists such as Cecilia Vicuña, María Evelia Marmolejo, Regina José Galindo, Laura Anderson Barbata, Gabriela Carneiro da Cuhna, and Lucia Monge. In this sense, with my hypothesis, I argue that eco- ritual performance aims to dismantle values and beliefs rooted in modernity; it also questions the Latourian modern constitution precepts and operates as the place to dislocate the hierarchy between the human and the non-human. Therefore, eco-ritual performance is a tool to rekindle and make kin (Haraway, 2016) as well as space to rehearse a more ethical behavior through Nature, and the environment.