Latin American Speakers Series 2024: Macarena Gómez-Barris

"Senti-Pensando Art & Praxis"

In this lecture, Gómez-Barris will focus on how to think beyond the colonial Anthropocene in part through senti-pensando or ecological modes of feeling and thinking that exceed the binarized form of Western knowledge production. By thinking with a range of film, media, art and performance practices, and the color, she considers anti-extractive modes of representing and imagining decolonized life.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is an interdisciplinary scholar, speaker, and author of four books and dozens of essays and interviews on environmental media, decolonial theory and praxis, queer femme, and creative and embodied research methods and what she deems as “antidotes to the colonial Anthropocene.” Her work addresses artful living and survivance in spaces of social and ecological suffering and include her book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. In it, she theorizes decolonization in relation to five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, August 2018) that thinks from submerged perspectives and artmaking, social movements, and creative intellectual labor to imagine worlds anew. Her first book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009) traces fascism, the rise of neoliberalism, and memory’s obliteration as central to the nation-state. She shows how memorials, painting, and documentary film production are central to enlivening potential in the ruins of necro-capital. Her co-edited volume with Herman Gray of Toward a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) addresses global sites of deep cultural imprint, and the invisible work of tethering lives of sustenance after catastrophe. Macarena is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers the fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.


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