Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores the work of Chilean artist Alejandra Prieto. I see her works as facilitations of thought-actions of matter that enable the latter to assert its presence, enacting a material decolonial voice that thinks the contemporary economic structure of plunder and exploitation.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout the Twentieth Century Latin American working class movements fought for the socialization of national natural resources, trying to expropriate them from Northern corporations and national elites. In the sixties this movement was supplemented by the impulse to industrialize in order to achieve independence from the neo-colonial interests of the north. As the Century came to its end and as the neoliberal global division of labor became common sense among the newly empowered elites, Import Substitution Industrialization policies became a thing of the past, while national natural resources were re appropriated by elites and Northern corporations who ever since have deepened and accelerated the exploitation of these territories. These struggles were always framed by an economics that saw matter in very straightforward, simple, terms: materials were first and foremost resources, commodities—abstract objects of exchange, both a sign of dependency and a source of wealth. While their condition of commodities cannot be denied, this conceptualization is certainly partial and conducive to extractivism. In this context, many indigenous communities and other actors have come to supplement this economics and to counter its effects introducing posthumanist ways of conceptualizing and relating to matter. In this presentation I want to explore the work of Chilean visual artist Alejandra Prieto with coal and lithium as one such articulation. I see her works as facilitations of thought-actions of matter that enable the latter to assert its presence, its material sense-meaning, enacting a material decolonial voice that thinks the contemporary economic structure of plunder and exploitation.