CONTESTING THE PRESENT STORM: SURVIVING IS MORE THAN NOT DYING - Aesthetic praxis and the defense of life

David Muñoz-Alcántara in dialog with Alistair Hudson

Wednesday 19 June
HfG Lichtbrücke, ab 19:00 Uhr Lorenzstr. 15, Karlsruhe
Eintritt frei

To address today’s political conjunctures, it becomes crucial to study the link between extractivism and warfare as pillars of capitalist democracy and global colonialism. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) has been warning us about the present storm, underlining how the global territorial reordering between imperialist powers has turned into a total war threatening all forms of life: the living, the dead, and the non-dead. The present storm carries a monster of multiple heads, the capitalist hydra – as they name multilayered systematic oppression and exploitation with a voracious ecocidal drive. The Zapatistas have also warned us that in the face of this growing threat, “there will be no landscape left to account for.”

This talk will debate some characteristics of the present storm by analyzing contemporary mechanisms that are renewing the systematic forms of global oppression and exploitation in the context of Mexico. To set the context, it will focus on the 2019 infrastructural National Development Plan, the interrelated impacts, and characteristics of involved actors: military, paramilitary, organized crime, national and transnational corporations. The implementation of these projects carries a documented violent dispossession of communal and agrarian territories, targeted incarceration of land defenders, disappearances and murders, displacement and dissolution of communities, destruction of cultural artifacts and archeological sites, erosion of vital ecosystems, scorched atmospheres, and the risk of irreversible ecological consequences.

It will zoom into the present multilayered critical scenario of the south and southeast Mexican regions, setting grounds for introducing a few keys to the historical indigenous and non-indigenous resistance in the struggle for self-determination and autonomy at the heart of an aesthetic praxis. **/

David Muñoz-Alcántara is a guest professor in Media Art at the HfG. Alistair Hudson is the Scientific-Artistic Chairman of the ZKM.

Images:

Promedios, 5th Anniversary Celebration of the Zapatista Uprising, 1999. Documentary video.

Melecio Galván, Zapata, 1977. Ink on cardboard illustration.