Affects and Aesthetics of ‘Body-territory’

Abstract

The works of Chilean artists Rocío López Montaner, Denisse Viera and Fernanda López Quilodrán performatively explore the body/territory relation, focusing on ‘sacrifice zones,’ areas with a massive concentration of polluting industries. These works propose alternative ways of thinking about bodies and, therefore, of their affective dimension. Expanding the limits of what a body can do, they problematize its anthropocentric genesis by visibilizing its entanglements with the more than human. This article focuses on the ways in which these approaches enter into dialogue with the concept of ‘body-territory,’ which emerges from indigenous community feminisms and, according to Verónica Gago, “‘deliberalizes’ the notion of the body as individual property and specifies a political, productive and epistemic continuity of the body as territory” (2019). The continuity between body and territory, in fact, becomes key in these aesthetic productions: bodies, rather than align with the liberal logic of individual property, become collective. And they are capable, in that proliferation, of encompassing the more than human. These corporealities are permeable to contamination, and they thus embody human and non-human stories and memories of toxicity, abandonment and suffering. Suffering, violated and vulnerable bodies and materialities that resonate with emotions linked to sacrifice, surrender, mourning, care and reparation, and also desire and sensuality. These affects are rethought and reconfigured in the process of mediating our relationship with the most than human.