And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?: Aesthetic Responses to Extraction, Accumulation, and Dispossession

Miguel A. Lopez (Editor) and Christophe Slagmuylder (Foreword)

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An exploration of the realities of environmental and social catastrophe through art practices.

“And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?” wrote the Chilean poet, artist, and feminist activist Cecilia Vicuña in the early 1970s. Vicuña countered anthropocentric and hetero-patriarchal urges with healing and appreciation, reviving the aesthetic and spiritual bonds between human and more-than-human entities and worlds. Revolving around this vision of interconnectivity, this book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Kunsthalle Wien, seeks to create a collective dialogue around unequal distribution of power, sovereignty, and social and ecological justice. 

The exhibited works and written contributions reflect on the rationale of exploitation, the fast-paced mining of raw materials, and environmental destruction as a colonial legacy. They deconstruct Western anthropocentric models and enduring colonial and racist discourses, trace the stories of indigenous struggles for collective survival, and celebrate encounters defined by solidarity in their resistance to capitalist extraction, misogyny, imperialist violence, and dispossession.

This publication includes a folded A2 poster: SPIT! (Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together! / Carlos Maria Romero, Carlos Motta & John Arthur Peetz), We The Enemy (poster), 2017. Courtesy the artists.
  • ISBN10 3956796373
  • ISBN13 9783956796371
  • Publish Date 16 January 2023
  • Publish Status Active
  • Out of Print 7 March 2024
  • Publish Country DE
  • Imprint Sternberg Press