Portfolio // Portafolio
Ways of being under the dominance of neoliberal extractive capitalism desensitize subjects to the human, non-human and environmental relationships that sustain life. As social and environmental crises arise, reduced sensitivity to being-in-relation-with limit our ability to imagine other possible presents, pasts and futures. Formed from personal involvement in socio-environmental justice struggles and inquiry into craft as language, my work situates the artist as a central contributor to emerging transitional social models.
By modelling a thinking-through-making process in my interactive installation Relational Material, viewers become participants who practice correspondence of self with community and place. At a macro level, participants draw shapes and forms from large scale satellite images. At a micro level participants bring hands to local mud to sense land through clay. Engaging with this work, the viewer actively contributes to a paradigm shift from a world of individuals to emergent worlds of interdependent subjects interrelated through making.
Placed in the global convergence of the 4th Industrial revolution and the 6th mass extinction event, my work interconnects participants with local community through self-making, community-making and pedagogy. According to theoretician Rosi Braidotti, what it means to be human, our interconnection to the land we occupy and systems of life that sustain us are coming into question. Here interconnection offers an opportunity to generate practices for affirmative futures.
