Liquid Ecologies and Memory Work in Latin American Contemporary Art

This talk brings together two recent Latin American art interventions by Clemencia Echeverri and María Magdalena Campos-Pons that reverberate the lived experience of environmental degradation and conflict as des-humanization, loss, and mourning. Both artists use the figure of thought of ‘liquid/liquidity’ to unfold ambivalences, contradictions, and the incommensurable of cultural work and the memory of landscape. By understanding ‘liquids’ as ontological and metaphorical materials to address this historical oblivion, I discuss water and the use of liquids as a media-reflexive dimension in Latin American art.

Liliana Gómez is SNSF-professor at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich where she directs the project Contested Amnesia and Dissonant Narratives in the Global South. Post-Conflict in Literature, Art, and Emergent Archives. She is the author of Lo urbano: Teorías culturales y políticas de la ciudad en América Latina (Pittsburgh 2014), co-editor of the book Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Arts (Routledge 2020) and editor of Performing Human Rights. Contested Amnesia and Aesthetic Practices in the Global South (diaphanes 2020).

Scientific Organization: Universität Zürich, Kunsthistorisches Institut

^{_{Image: RÍO POR ASALTO. Clemenica Echeverri; Duration: 09’44’’. Loop. Video: video multichannel installation, 6 screens, Sound 7.1, XII Shanghai Biennale, 2018-2019. Photo by estudio C. Echeverri}}