“We envision a timeless and a historical future. We bury our seen and unseen dead. We mourn all of our losses. We catalogue our human and more-than-human martyrs in the war against you, Earth.”
In an intimate letter to Earth, Madre Tierra, Pachamama, Gómez-Barris mourns the colonial and capitalist-induced harms to the planet, while steeling our resolve for fierce resistance to ecocide. Rooted in the queer, decolonial, and more-than-human perspectives that animate her work, Gómez-Barris calls for earthly and embodied activist practices.
“Artists-in-Presidents” is initiated by Constance Hockaday, curated by Christine Shaw, and commissioned by The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga). Podcast production by Vocal Fry.
Transmissions are released every Friday from August 6–December 17, 2021. To view the portrait gallery, access ASL videos and transcripts, and for additional information about the project, visit www.artistsinpresidents.com and www.blackwoodgallery.ca.
Macarena Gómez-Barris is a scholar and writer who works at the intersections of the built environment, decolonization, visual arts, memory, land, and sea restitution. She is the author of four books: Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017), Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (2018), and Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010, with Herman Gray). She is completing a new book on what she terms the colonial Anthropocene, At the Sea’s Edge: Liquid Ontologies Beyond Colonial Extinction (Forthcoming, Duke University Press). She is a series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts, Duke University Press. Macarena is also the Founding Director of the Global South Center and the Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award, the 2020–2021 Pratt Research Award, and the 2020–2021 Graduate Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Photo: Soraya Zaman
