today I'm thrilled to introduce Dr Carolyn fornoff assistant professor of Latin American studies in Cornell University's Department of romance studies Dr Forno's work explores cultural responses to environmental crisis in Latin America with particular focus on Mexico and Central America her research questions how art can be used to navigate or address complex issues such as climate change her new book subjunctive Aesthetics Mexican cultural production in the era of climate change traces how cont
emporary filmmakers and writers in Mexico have shifted away from Arts evidentiary function or it's ability to prove environmental crisis and toward subjunctive registers of hypothesis and uncertainty that grapple with how the world Could Be Imagined otherwise during the 21st century Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the time at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change cultural production emergent from this contradicti
on frames this impass as a crisis of imagination in subjunctive Aesthetics Dr fornoff studies how artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico's present and future and how they rise to the challenge of envisioning Alternative forms of territoriality or ways of being in relation to the environment through strategies ranging from rewriting to counterfactual speculation so please join me in welcoming Dr Kalen fornoff thank you Hannah for that great in
introduction and thanks to all of you for being here today it means a lot to me to see so many colleagues and Friends and students um I appreciate it um so it's an honor to present to you uh my first um single authored book subjunctive Aesthetics Mexican cultural production in the era of climate change my goal with this book was to analyze the aesthetic and narrative strategies that authors artists and filmmakers use to make sense of environmental catastrophe and particularly situations that fo
reclose the possibility of future life like toxicity Extinction and dispossession one question that motivated me in this project was to rethink what art can do beyond the ability to Simply make environmental crisis legible or visible we might think about this evidentiary mode as a dominant mode of the environmental Arts one that positions art as a dactic or a forensic vehicle for proving the urgency of environmental damage and that avoids ambiguity as something to be minimized in order to achiev
e political consensus this ability of representation to make the invisible visible or to raise public awareness to the facts is for example Illustrated here by this aerial photograph of The lacondon Jungle by Mexican photographer Santiago ARA an image that makes deforestation immediately tangible through the stark contrast of colors and the demarcation of space such pedagogical or forensic Aesthetics are of course huge valuable and do important work they take up the task of investigating the tru
th and amplifying its cir circulation or of reconstructing past events and making sense of the senseless yet as I was surveying recent Mexican cultural production I was struck by how many works that deal with environmental issues actually shift away from this evidentiary mandate to prove the certainty of environmental crisis and instead Embrace aesthetic and narrative forms that are marked by doubt hypothesis and speculation so in this book I call this umbrella of responses subjunctive Aesthetic
s and a nod to the grammatical mood that is the realm of the potential and the uncertain grammatical moods are usually separated into two categories realis and irrealis realis associated with the indicative or what is is the mood of evidence and Truth through the indicative a speaker confidently affirms the facticity and definitiveness of their claim names by contrast irrealis moods including the subjunctive indicate no such commitment to a singular or a fixed truth the subjunctive instead encod
es the speaker's uncertainty or opinionating about the state of things it's used to respond to reality in a way that expresses its potential to change or the speaker's desire for it to change my book contends that by considering the subjunctive not just as a grammatical mood but as an aesthetic modality we can better understand how contemporary cultural responses to environmental crisis mobilize doubt contingency and desire to dispute extractive paradigms and imagine ways of living otherwise sub
junctive Aesthetics I argue can be understood as the mere image to forensic or evidentiary Aesthetics both respond to situations of material damage and the violent foreclosure of life but whereas forensic Aesthetics sustains an anthropological focus on witnessing and Marshall's evidence toward establishing a shared truth subjunctive Aesthetics tilt away from fact Gathering and narrative certainty and instead toward knowledg makak practices that are motored by doubt emotion and the imagination su
ch responses might be thought about as modeling the Satia call to to imagine un Mund or a world where many worlds might fit I think that environmental crisis compels questions in the subjunctive about how things might but need not be what would it take to curb Global emissions and how could the world be organized differently around life rather than around accumulation thinking in the subjunctive explodes the fixity of the way things are suggesting even Against All Odds that the status quo can be
changed as kirkgard put it quote when one begins to study the grammar of the indicative and the subjunctive one becomes conscious that everything depends on how it's thought the indicative thinks something as actual the subjunctive thinks something as thinkable for its ability to make things thinkable the subjunctive has long motored the Arts as the realm of imagination where reality brushes up against and is tested against ideality hypothesis and probability the linguist Hans Bush also explain
s that quote with the subjunctive we always invite The Listener or reader to think and to go beyond what is said or what is written in the book I extend Bush's framing of the subjunctive as a linguistic invitation to engage with what has been expressed to theorize subjunctive Aesthetics as a form that is not didactic in AIM but heuristic and its welcoming of emotional or experimental responses to a given reality that is the subjunctive register is uncertainty in language its invocation of emotio
n contingency and the imagination is particularly useful around events that are contested or unsettled Difficult by asking us to feel our way or debate our way through them so you can see why the subun might flourish in a moment of rising debates and uncertainty about extractivism and climate change the Indian novelist and theorist amitav goch in the great derangement has also commented on the importance of subjunctive modes in the era of climate change he writes that to reproduce the world as i
t exists need not be the project of fiction rather um what fiction makes possible is to approach the world in a subjunctive mode to conceive of it as if it were other than a it is I think this ability to think in the as if is key rather than see art as serving an ancillary illustrative or didactic role in proving environmental damage subjunctive Aesthetics make a bid for Arts experimental capacity to generate alternate narratives values and grammars of territorial belonging It Centers the role o
f desire in producing the future and mobilizes the as if to imagine other ways of relation precisely at a moment when the future seems to be predetermined foreclosed by extractive capitalism the subjunctive ability of art to make things thinkable enters to make those outcomes more propositional to doubt them fear them opine or emote about them and to concoct other possibilities yet I want to stress that this imaginative potential always emerges from within concrete historical circumstances and m
odes of production and here I turned back to the fact that the subjunctive grammatical mood got its name because of its placement in subjoined or subordinated Clauses the subjunctive often Bridges two different subjects appearing in the dependent clause in response to conditions imposed by the main Clause it thus models relationality the way that subjects exist in Reliance or subordination to one another extrapolated to the theorization of subjunctive Aesthetics in the era of climate change the
subjunctive mood mirrors the way in which we're compelled to respond to pre-existing planetary conditions phenomena put closures second subjunctive Aesthetics are less interested in evidence and More in imaginative potential and third like the subordinated structure of the subjunctive grammatical mood subjunctive Aesthetics register a state of subordination and in tanglement with external factors from the climatic to the economic ultimately I argue that in a context in which extractivism is cont
inually asserted across the political Spectrum as the only possible path to economic well-being and Collective wellbeing the subjunctive ability of art to imagine the world otherwise becomes a key means by which to express alternative formulations of how the relationship with the planet should or could be so in the book I chart different manifestations of subjunctive Aesthetics and here's the table of contents in the first chapter I discuss environmental rewriting as a tactic a formal tactic of
subjunctive Aesthetics that is used by the visual artist Veronica GTI who essentially act enacts a sort of dwelling in inherited canonical texts of Mexican literature and within those inherited structures she performs small interventions to make them speak to the present as if they were written from the Vantage of today in the second chapter which is the chapter that I'll speak to you more about today I discuss counterfactual mourning in response to the murder of land offenders which deny death
as a the ultimate closure and insist upon the Futurity of the defender's life and political project in the third chapter I look at poetry about extinction by Poets uh including cardan via and CCE Rodriguez who mobilized poetry's ability to bring different things and beings into imaginative proximity through spatial contiguity as a way to reformulate human relationships with endangered life in the fourth chapter I turn to cinema and I look at observational documentaries about drought and flooding
in Mexico to consider how sensorial immersion um operates to critique how rural resilience has been represented on screen and finally in the last chapter of the book I turned to consider the conditions of production of Cinema in Mexico in the era of climate change to think about experiments in reimagining carbon neutral film exhibition and film making through the use of so solar panels and bicycles in rural Mexico today for the remainder of this talk I'm going to narrow in on chapter two a case
study from the book um which is titled land defense and counterfactual mourning across Latin America violence against land Defenders has escalated along with the expansion of the extractive frontier which was prompted since 2008 by a boom in global commodity prices at the turn of uh that has encouraged administrations in Latin America across the political Spectrum to intensify export oriented extractive production as a result of the expansion of this extractive Frontier conflicts with affected
communities have surged with the um with these extractive companies usually uh supported by state the state as you can see in these this chart by global witness which is an NGO that tracks the murder of land offenders throughout the world say several Latin American nations have the highest rate of victims in the world and nearly a third of all documented victims are indigenous in the chapter I open with the case of Nawa land Defender and radio broadcaster Samir Flores sanes who was murdered in h
is home in 2019 after months of leading the opposition to proo integral Morelos a planned Mega development project that would construct a thermoelectric plant and a natural gas pipeline crisscrossing in indigenous and ailo lands in Morelos as an organizer for the and Morelos Flores gave voice to community objections to this Pipeline and particular the contamination risk that it posed to the local water supply fellow activists contend that floris's murder was an attempt to silence opposition to t
his natural gas pipeline pointing to the fact that the murder took place just days before a planned referendum on the mega project in the wake of 's murder indigenous environmental activists honored his life and called attention to his death through the slogan Sam lauch or Samir lives the the Fight Continues spreading this rallying cry on social media and writing it on walls in cities throughout Mexico in my chapter I point out that this rallying cry is a counterfactual statement borrowed from t
he sapaa formulation sapata lauch the slogan denies murder its conclusive Force it suggests that flores's death did not have the intended impact it did not silence descent to the pipeline it also suggests that his death need not have been so thus the counterfactual negation of floris's death contests the Foreclosure of political descent to extractivism by affirming the continued existence of other possible worlds a world in which Sam Floris still lives a world in which relations with territory a
re forged around consensus relation ity and life rather than around violent utilitarianism so in the summer of 2021 walking around Mexico City I began to notice samier VI graffitied and painted across the sides of buildings and you can see it to the right there on that Monument these spectral traces of the Dead in the realm of the living reinstate them as public figures they interpolate passers by in an invitation to relation they usually crystallize around a delimited set of characteristics rig
ht which we can see here right the face the name and usually a simplified slogan these paired down Aesthetics of remembrance Echo strategies that were first popularized in the 60s and 70s in the southern cone in the response to the politically motivated Force disappearances of political dissidents and have since been used throughout Latin America to contest impunity applied to land offender victims the distilled visual representation simplifies highly complex localized struggles into an immediat
ely recognizable idiom of impunity connecting these cases of murdered land offenders with other ongoing social justice movements like Iota and the neam Minos uh movement against feminicide in Mexico like the victims of feminicide murdered land Defenders are great in number and yet their deaths have a hard time gaining National recognition because of their atomized occurrence in far-flung locations and because of it misinformation campaigns that often criminalize victims or often misattribute the
ir death to localized disputes or to sort of the drug war in this sense the economical or even formulaic presentation of victims aims for familiarity and a move that brings to mind Susan sag's description of how political posters borrow from the language uh the lesson of Simplicity from advertising therefore even when a a passer by doesn't know the victim they might not be familiar with some uh this sort of phrasing triggers an immediate recognition in this case it counterintuitively identifies
the dead through the counterfactual assertion of their life through repetition and and reiter ability the slogan places the individual victim within a network of similar cases Sam a discursive assemblage that figures Terror as both infinite uh intimate and infinitely repeatable notably it's it's notable to me that the purpose of these slogans graffi in public space is not pedagogical it doesn't teach us anything about the victim or about their specific cause in fact specifics are usually conspic
uously absent instead the goal is effective to spark a form of mourning that negates terror's intended eradication of space by taking up public space the first name address of the victim Fosters of familiarity that is reinforced spatially through the slogan quotidian placement such that one encounters these names of the Dead on your daily route through the city street art and social media campaigns that honor murdered land Defenders tend to treat victims with reverence depicting them as murders
or heroic figures in large part this is an effort to counteract negative mediatic representations that tend to focus on blockades or the destruction of private property rather than the concrete complaints Behind these actions something that happens in the United States as well yet the drawback to responding to this mediatic delegitimization through hagiographic tactics such as the Halo that murdered land Defenders are often endowed with which renders them Martyrs is that it recurs to the model o
f the legitimate or ideal victim in her study of the legitimate victim Sandra walat argues that this reductive model albe it effect Ive in cultivating empathy allows only some people to be seen as deserving victims While others are viewed as undeserving victims or may never be labeled as victims at all for example people who negotiate with capital or extractive uh labor extract or labor in the extractive industry but still suffer from its effects despite these caveats ultimately the inscription
of the names of the Dead powerfully restore them to public space Visual and discurs acts of counterfactual mourning like those we see here refer to death but deny it as such rerouting back to life in a subjunctive expression of desire for how the world could have been or could still be a world in which Samir lives counterfactual morning Embraces the hauntological propelling the dead into the future through the continued affirmation of their life and the Futurity of land defense it affords the vi
ctim space in the collective imaginary it asserts their vitality and an acknowledges The public's responsibility to them in the political projects they died defending akin to an imaginative Act of undoing counterfactual morning produces an enlarged sense of temporal possibility correlating with a newly activist or even interventionist relationship to the past so just as ghosts disturb this separation of the living from the dead so too does counterfactual mourning trouble the logic of extractivis
m by positing other ways of being in relation to the planet embodied in the person who fought to make it a reality so with what remains of my talk I'm going to turn to a different example of counterfactual mourning in the context of land defense um in performance art um this is a performance Trilogy called quas a cave Trilogy by the Mexican performance artist Naomi Rong Gallardo a three-part multimedia performance series about extractivism and dispossession Collective the trilogy highlights indi
genous women's leadership and land defense in Mexico and it enacts queer alliances that are Unbound by patriarchy and extractivism these feminist counter worlds as Rong describes them are trans temporal nourished At Once by Mesoamerican myth indigenous activism in the present and queer theory in order to engender worlds that are quote opposite to the Future for a future that is not yet here in this sense Rong gardo specul ative Trilogy complements and extends the counterfactual negation of death
's finality in activist phrases like Samir lives by enacting what that parallel world cultivated by the undead looks and feels like in a similar way to how Urban art interventions creat space for the dead by interrupting the passer by's visual field and invites their engagement performance art also creates space for the land Defender body territory through enactments or doings of bodies brought together around shared space importantly Rong gard's Trilogy centers the violence experienced by land
Defenders but it departs from the reverent representational modes that we were just discussing whereas those modes idealize land defenders in an understandable attempt to foreground their heroism and innocence drawing on Nostalgia and revolutionary ideals through the sapata vi Mantra um to appeal to the widest possible public in order to drum up support to contest impunity Rong gardo cultivates I think more complex effective engagement with environmental and Indigenous activists in fact the tril
ogy dramatizes land defense as outrageous fun as a party in the performance Trilogy we see queer dance parties that are soaked in drink and song and through this rry and this rockish um Rong Gallardo demonstrates how land defense is is motivated by desire and it opens up right um sort of space a different sort of space time a possible world that exemplifies what Jill Dolan has called utopian performatives that quote persuade us that Beyond this now of material oppression and unequal power relati
ons lives a future that might be different the effective excess that courses through the trilogy lifts the audience out of the present and into the imaginative space of the potential in this sense the trilogy refracts the way that land offenders are mourned in their communities as leaders in the fight for another world whose deaths are not reducible to her Narrative of victimhood Rong gallardo's decision to Center land offenders and her performance art while also shifting away from typical moral
izing representational strategies I argue queer environmentalist art offering a necessary corrective to the dominant forensic focus on violence impunity and death and reorienting viewers back to the vitalist life-building world affirming work that land Defenders perform I suggest in my book that Rong Gallardo theorizes Joy Gathering desire and partying as a feminist and queer means of surviving and flourishing in times of extractivist violence the cave Trilogy originated in Rong gallardo's desir
e to honor and mourn Betty kinho The Guiding figure of the first episode who you can see on the right hand side in the artist statement for this first uh chapter which is called the forhide trip um Rong gardo explains that this is quote a twisted mythical critical fabulation aspiring to materialize and activate the Ghost spirit and body of the murdered mixtech activist Betty cardino who dedicated her life to the opposition to extraction projects threatening indigenous communities elak for follow
s the character of Betty cardino as she travels through the underworld after her death where she has cared for and cares for fellow female warriors right you can see sort of the kit DIY aesthetic that rinong gardo embodies or enacts in this performance pieace um and she trains these fellow female warriors in techniques of resistance uh sort of continuing to nurture this fight against dispossession even in death in turn these Warriors then piece together cino's dismembered body um and put it back
together from where it floats into cosmic space in this act of feminist recomposition performance scholar laa Gutierrez has pointed out that Rong gallardo's Trilogy Works in a parallel way vein to CIA Hartman's critical fabulation it's storytelling that strains to tell impossible histories in her work about the lives of enslaved black women Hartman adopts this method because the historical record has obscured these stories the impossibility of accessing them pushes Hartman to speculate about ho
w these women's lives might have been if only she could fully imagine them just as Hartman indexes the trans-temporal possibilities of this exercise which brings the past into focus without reproducing the language of violence Rong Gallardo draws out the reparative possibilities of encounters among women warriors across time and she does this by configuring Betty cardino as another iteration of coyo shaki or the Aztec moon goddess who was murdered by her brother for trying to claim power um and
she does this through the costuming right this shiny polyester jumpsuit decked out with red tassels plastic skull KNE guards a skull Laden bent belt and blinking red nipples gard's reactivation of koyok shaki um Artic through cardino articulated a trans temporal collapse or lineage of women who have been murdered for pursuing goals that flew in the face of patriarchy and so you know the the whole trilogy is called the the cave Trilogy and the cave is this really important transformative space in
the performance series associated with a female body sexual pleasure and reproduction as well as with the underworld and with sleep in each episode The Cave is a central site of communion refuge and pleasure um in this sequence from for after cino's body has disintegrated a rockus Punk concert in this vaginal Cave of the underworld transforms into a queer orgy the heavy metal lyrics that are shouted by the revelers First in Spanish and then again in English make Rong gard's message clear quote
the tomb doesn't stop us we are not tired disheartened we are repeatedly dead indomitable illegible Monsters the women formers rhythmically move their hands through the Cave's muddy floor sensually spreading mud on each other's legs the orgy and the mud thus illustrates the centrality of desire in land defense how the enactment of other forms of politics is actualized through embodied desires that bring bodies into relation and contact so the tit Cave of course is this transformative space where
bodies can come into renewed contact as they imagine another world in Mesoamerican cuses like the Mayan po vu who the seven caves are where life originated a space of flux or Transit between different times and worlds and the historian fero Navar has explained that ritual allowed access to this alternative temporal and ontological order in which there is no difference between human non-human and deity and those that emerged from the cave um in Mesoamerican myth did so renewed manifesting a new
way of being and even a new historical era drawing on this concept of the cave as a portal to another temporal or ontological space a portal that is not just a temporary break from reality but rather an irreversibly transformative experience but in Kong gardo tra kogy tra cave Trilogy deploys performance as a counterfactual feminist realm in which to imagine new desires alliances and worlds Beyond capitalism so uh rong's treatment of land defense through queer Aesthetics like Camp irony and friv
olity makes I think a really important and unusual intervention into environmentalist art as the scholar Nicole Seymour has pointed out environmental movements have tended to isue the flamboyant Aesthetics of queer culture and have gravitated instead toward the opposite sensibility characterized by austerity sacrifice and self-seriousness while Seymour writes about the US the same I think can be said broadly about Latin American environmentalist art which rarely recurs to the exaggerated registe
r and effective excess of camp in many ways the purported incompatibility between irreverence on the one hand and environmentalism and land defense on the other is understandable I mean as we have seen from the high rates of land uh land Defender murders environmentalism is serious business and yet I think that irreverent modes of mourning can really complicate and complement these mainstream representational modes by preventing violence from being sublimated into trauma or spectacle and by inst
ead pivoting back out toward desire and this is the case I think with this is the third installment of the cave Trilogy called a possum resilient in which the apum is used to mirror zapc lawyer and anti-mining activist Rosalinda dionio brush with death in 2012 when paramilitary forces linked to the Mina cusat a Mexican mining affiliate of the Canadian transnational company Fortuna mines ambushed um her vehicle and in the vehicle with her was another anti- mining activist and zapc leader Bernardo
Vasquez Sanchez who was killed in the attack but the blooded Rosalinda dionio who was shot twice survived the attack by pretending that she was dead and so you can see why uh Rong Gallardo chose the aasum right who was famous for playing dead uh toout with its predators and the aosom here embodies this resilience and miraculous Resurrection the aosom is also a trickster it's the deity of drunkenness and thievery in Mesoamerican myth the apost appears as a creature who brings Humanity corn and f
ire pilfering these life forces from the gods and bringing them down to to humans this unfolding of dionio who does not appear on screen in this in this uh episode through the figure of the osum avoids flattening her into the role of idealized hero or passive victim instead it positions her as an activist who R risks her life in defense of zapc territory but also as a pika or sort of a playful um picaresque figure who relentlessly undermines her foes the ludic and playful representation of dioni
o as an intoxicated Trickster reorients viewers understandings of land defense not just a serious business but also compatible with pleasure playfulness and Indulgence land defense here is outrageous fun or as the aosom sings Oops here we go as the aosom sings in a scene where it's drinking from the agave plant um and Times of dispossession Maye not be scan Tache is um a fermented beverage alcoholic beverage uh derived from pineapples in mobilizing desire and playfulness Naomi Rong Yo's cave Tri
logy actualizes Eve Tuck's point that we must resist reducing disenfranchised communities to the experience of damage and pain instead the cave Trilogy teases out the complexity of Life lived in the extractive zone in which pain rage joy and desire intermingle these aects animate land defense revealing it to be a CL collaborative project that's sustained by dreams for a better future and memories of a shared past tuck collaborates on desires qualities quote desire is involved with the not yet an
d at times the not anymore it has a ghostly Remnant quality not contained to the body but still derived of the body desire is about longing it's about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future so following tuck desire is both speculative and hauntological it's the the discovery of possibilities the charting of paths for future action the Embrace of Alternatives over certainties and the excess that courses alongside and throughout the experience of the real so to conclude if viol
ence against land Defenders is a strategy through which to forcibly impose extractivism as the only way of relating to land a form of relating that forecloses others by contaminating water eradicating habitats and so on counterfactual practi IES of M like Samir VI and rong's Cave Trilogy refuse that foreclosure as definitive and affirm the Futurity of post extractivist forms of inhabiting territory I think that it's notable that counterfactual Aesthetics of mourning do away with the evidentiary
function that we so often associate with Works about impunity perhaps this is because violence against land offenders is a trauma that is not confined to the past but it's ongoing and constitutive of extractivist modernity um as a result counterfactual practices of mourning are actually not usually oriented toward the state or the justice system at all as is the case in the post dictatorial context or even in other contexts of mourning in Mexico like the lco or iapa massacres which are sort of c
ontainable and thus redressable as events the purpose of counterfactual mourning exceeds what the state can or is willing to do and it exceeds the scope of any single case um or any individual case that might be brought to trial rather I suggest that the work performed by counterfactual morning is imaginative and future oriented and its invitation to join in this subjunctive Act of enacting other possible worlds that might exist Beyond extractivism and its Coral Aries of violence and dispossessi
on worlds in which people engage with territory on the basis of Life Community joy and desire the succinct counterfactual assertion of life and the fa face of death in slogans like Samir VI identifies that the stakes of public mourning lie not just in visibility or proof or the pursuit of justice but in imagining a world that persists Beyond extractivism a counterfactual world where Sam to florus and Betty kinho still live a world sustained by those who keep memory their memory and desires alive
similarly the rockus and sensual parties enacted in Rong gardo cave Trilogy created create this space where those who are dispossessed can coales in a gesture that refuses death this subjunctive potential of art to create spaces and forms of signification that imagine beyond what is Echoes the work that is performed by land Defenders themselves who treat the future as a territory to be defended thank you so much all right thank you so much for that wonderful presentation we're going to open the
room up to questions both here in the room and on Zoom so if you have a question just raise your hand and I'll pass the mic on to you um first of all congratulations on this amazing book and thank you for a wonderful talk I wonder if you could just share with us some of the reception of the art and I'm curious to know if the irreverence and that kind of like punk rock aesthetic that I see here angers people or just yeah if you could just speak to the reception of the work yeah I mean I think th
at that part of the reason I wanted to combine these two examples in this chapter is that they really speak to different publics so um you know these performance pieces are typically only available to see in art museums right um there are performance works that were recorded uh the very first one debuted in SF Moma so if that gives you sort of an an idea of the intended audience um or the original intended audience um and so they they're they're doing sort of different work for different publics
right which I'm I'm interested in right and so I do think that um that the the the sort of the importance of appealing to a broad public through sort of here we see like revolutionary imagery that recalls the Mexican Revolution it brings the sabatista uh Revolution to mind and it and it's doing sort of this this work of amalgamating political issues into this the figure of the singular land defender in a way that will help sort of a general public um be sympathetic to to their claims or potenti
ally be sympathetic to their claims whereas this sort of work is is um is not appealing to the general public and I think it's pretty disinterested in the general public which allows it to perform different work um and yet it also restricts it in some ways from from reaching that broader public or creating those tensions but when I've taught this piece in the past I think um a thing that that causes um students some trouble with dealing with it is that DIY like low res aesthetic and so that it d
oesn't neatly sit within um the the high art World either um so thank you um Tama congratulations on the book it's amazing I think I'm I'm so glad to be here and to hear you talk about it um maybe can we go back to the image with the graffiti and the um because I'm I'm wondering when I'm looking at it and I see a a little bit the contrast between that Monument which I'm assuming is a monument and the graffiti and it kind of made me think about I love the idea of counterfactual morning and I'm ju
st wondering about the lastingness of that morning you know because you have that Monument that in a way I mean I don't know what he's saying or what he's doing but I assuming he's commemorating something in that more official permanent way whereas the graffiti has that ability to appear and disappear so I'm just wondering if there is something about how long does this counter factual morning last and if there is an end and if there is something after that end that gives us another sense of thos
e Futures that you're talking about thank you it's a great question I think that um I mean the temporality is is it's more ephemeral um and yet it is surprisingly lasting uh particularly given the quantity of cases now there are only certain cases that really achieve this broader circulation um and resonance so we might think about in huras the case of Berta caseres right um or uh both Sam which continues to be quite prominent even though he was murdered in 2019 um yeah so so it's not a longlast
ing monument it is more ephemeral um and I I think that then the internet becomes this space where some of these discourses become sort of archived uh but it's true it it is particularly in contrast with the monument that is there in in this permanent official way uh the counterfactual morning does have a a shorter shorter timeline Al Caroline that was so wonderful and so refreshing because I find evidentiary pedagogical environmental art so boring and it's just everywhere um Mike I have a quest
ion which actually relates the question was as last the relationship the subjunctives capacity to grasp long time so I'm thinking like because environmental degradation and extractive is both like long in the making and also well last like you know thinking of Rob Nixon's slow violence right um and the subjunctive capacity to to grasp this this kind of um almost inhumane temporality of environmental degradation and um yeah I'm so if because it has it's itself also in the grammatical mode has a r
eally different interesting relationship to time and to the future but but environmental degradation has this like both long future and long past this deep past and so I was just curious of in relation to that and and also congratulations thank you thank you yeah no I mean I'm totally obsessed with the question of time in environmental Aesthetics um the the first um volume that I got a chance to co-edit is called time scales ecological temporalities in the um across disciplines and I think that
the subjunctive is doing something different it's not so much interested in sort of um collapse collapsing time scales although you might like I do suggest that in this in this piece there is this interest in sort of this radical collapse of time skills um into sort of this mode of simultaneity um but the subjunctive as a grammatical mood and I think as an artistic mode is interested in sort of this departure from the now or this departure from the historical archive into sort of this this other
space the space of the possible and I'm not I'm not sure what that what what's the temporality of the possible I don't know it's a great question thank you oh congratulations and that was fabulous um I'm very interested in how you move from this attention to the linguistic the tense into and turn it into a methodology um that is fascinating and I really appreciate that I wanted you to talk a little bit more about what you were saying here and what she just asked about the uses of the past right
how these works are are citing or reusing the past even in the Sam you know it's the it it is just in that Recycling and reusing um the sapaa slogan uh and even though that is in Morelos which makes sense of course as the homeland of sabatan um here in this piece there's a collapse of different indigenous references right you talked about Maya but you know the kosi Aztec and nothing to do with the present of the sapot people right who are at work here so is there what do you think about that th
at use of of a homogeneous indigeny of a collapsing of a of an indigenous past with the living people that are defending these territories what do you think about those uses of the past yeah I mean it's certainly it is there there is something problematic right to the the collapse of the particularity and the specificity of different indigenous cosmologies into this sort of idiom of speculative indigeny right that that this artist is interested in and it's important to note that she is a MSA Art
ist as well right so she is not herself indigenous um which I think is telling um but I do think so in that sense I guess that she's in sort of that same lineage as folks equally problematic perhaps like glor analua or um and other Chana thinkers who have turned back to K shawi right as sort of this figure of feminist undoing and repair um so yeah I think that there is something problematic that is happening there and and honestly like with with these two where um you know there's the absence of
the pedagogical it's it's productive in many ways but it's also problematic in others because there there's a total eraser of what what exactly um who this person is what are the the specificities of their fight and it sort of collapses right collapses the IND individual into this idiom of impunity and so it's a it's it's a risky move I feel I find it both generative and problematic congratulations I did love your your book I I saw it as a a good model not not only to think about Mexico and cul
tural production and in the connection with climate change but also to think about that got Beyond Mexico I think about Latin America uh one of the things that you know that you mentioned at the beginning you you you just quoted Amita gosh and in gosh what he says you know his indictment of realist fiction the way that realist fiction has not really dealt with climate fiction he says there is an exception which is not realistic which is speculative fiction speculative fiction has dealt with clim
ate change with fiction fantastic high five but he says I'm not going to focus on that I'm not going to concentrate on that so and you when you talk about the possible the subjunctive it is also the speculative and and you say you know some some of these Works speculate but I'm trying to quote you but you say something like but I am not going to do speculative F which is different from for example a comp seems to me a speculative fiction yeah so I just was wondering about your conscious decision
not to focus on genre that would give you lots of texts and work on dealing with climate fiction in yeah thank you so much edmundo I think okay so first of all amav go has not read Latin American literature is that's all I have to say because there's a long tradition in Latin American literature of realist literature that does deal with climate crisis right in my class we're reading all of it la right all these novels that that um you know are no no okay realist fiction Galore that deals with e
nvironmental crisis so I am Goos needs to read needs to come to my class and read realist fiction um but I I actually I confess that I began this project as a project about speculation and then I decided it was too narrow that I wanted that the objects that I wanted to talk talk about were not always speculative fiction and so as a sort of a means of expanding the project and Thinking Beyond the limitations of genre um because I mean I think I I think you can say that this is speculative fiction
but I was on I wasn't sure how exactly to make that case so I I was thinking you know instead of putting them into a genre why not talk about what they're doing which is to me activating the subjunctive mode and I think that forms across multiple forms of cultural production can activate the subjunctive mode without necessarily being in that speculative genre but yes that is that is it is the sort of this like this thing that I deal with in the introduction where I say the subjunctive encompass
es the speculative but it also goes beyond the speculative [Music] um Carolyn thank you so much for the talk and congratulations um super excited uh to read the book and have you sign it um so um my question kind of gestures more to your use of Desire um and how you talk about it as kind of or from what I heard like the a fight for another world um a desire for defense of the land and a desire to think of Worlds Beyond capitalism right and then I was thinking about yeah like the erotic in Land A
rt desire um and thinking of the artist's work of Naomi's work and um her performance and how and kind of and kind of reflecting on previous works of art like in the Land art genre like Ana and how she does a lot of work um like nude work where she's directly kind of interacting or encountering the land and also thinking about I can't I forget this artist's name but like a walk on the land where he like walks barefoot um that's his performance just walking barefoot on the land um so I was kind o
f curious as to how you would read the costumes in these performances if it's sort of like a you also talked about quering environmental art and kind of interrupting the Gaze so thinking about how this is quering environmental art in such a way like quering the tradition of environmental art through the use of costumes and kind of an interruption of the Gaze on like a on the body like directly like on the body and its interactions with the land um yeah I don't know I'm just curious as to how you
read yeah the use of costumes and like engagement with the land um in this work yes yeah I mean I think that um I mean a CO the costumes are a key part of this Trilogy and there are all these DIY sort of recycled materials so we see like the uh plastic water jugs on her on her head as part of her headdress and this uh like uh insulation tube um the each episode has this uh naal or animal spirit right it's the axelo the hummingbird and the aasum and they're uh Rong herself Dawns these costumes a
nd they all have this sort of like paper mâché like thrown together um DIY aesthetic and she's talked a lot about how she's inspired by bee movies from the ' 80s and '90s of like these really trashy like sci-fi um films and so in that way right it's like very different from sort of the like somber walking barefoot or nude Repose in the land which is I mean equally valid like forms of thinking about body territory together or like the the human body is not separate from but integrated into the la
ndscape but yeah I mean is doing something more irreverent that I find refreshing carlyn congratulations CH when you mentioned the subjunctive mode you also say words as possibility as alternative realities and I was thinking about other term that came to my mind Utopia you know which is a term that I find a lot in conversations about the climate crisis environmental issues nowadays so H how do you relate to that term to Utopia do you find it useful productive how does a subjunctive mode relate
to utopianism yeah that's a great question Liliana I mean like particularly in this piece right like Utopia is very much present but I don't feel tied to the concept of utopia and so particularly because the often for me like the the my analysis is driven by works that are intriguing to me and if often these works are not performing Utopia um and so I wanted to to sort of allow for that multiplicity of feelings like la which articulates more of a dystopia um but to to sort of bring all of these
what I think of like a as a representative sampling of some of the most interesting works that are performing this imaginative um imaginative call let a god St very kind thank you congratulations Caroline uh so my question goes in the sense that uh as I understand that the subjunctive uh Aesthetics do complicate our Notions or preconceptions of time right and possible Futures Etc but since these works are grounded pun intended or not in the land itself in the territory the landscape I was wonder
ing if you also see in the works that you analyze a comp application of space itself and for example um if there is a idealized vision of the land or the landscape or if you find there to be a complication of the notion of space as much as there is one of time yeah I mean I think definitely there is there are copious abundant environment IST artworks that idealize space and I'm thinking of my fourth chapter the rural resilience film uh where I look at uh films like quat Australia which is this o
bservational documentary about um the desert where the Gaze I I sort of take that film to task for promoting a gaze that's Ro romanticized of sort of rural hostility and of rural resilience in the face of rural h hostil the hostility of drought um and so it's actually in chapter 4 where I sort of complicate this idea that subjunctive Aesthetics is always doing something generative I think that subjunctive Aesthetics can also be a way to think about how uh nostalgic or romanticized views of the e
ngagement with land can sort of perpetuate sort of reductive ideas about ways to exist in relation to territory particularly when their objects like drong G like this observational documentary that are meant for consumption by people who do not live in these spaces um and so I talk in that chapter about the reception of some of these art housee observational documentaries by global North audiences who then sort of get this idea that oh you know okay it's really hostile drought is worsening um bu
t you know these people are surviving like you know and so in that chapter I sort of think about um some of the pro the potential problems and pitfalls of the sensorial immersion um in in the idealized [Applause] [Applause] landscape this is such a great talk
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