User account

Genaro Amaro Altamirano: Dissipating Darkness
Dissipating Darkness
(p. 61 – 72)

Genaro Amaro Altamirano

Dissipating Darkness

PDF, 12 pages

  • cultural critic
  • architecture
  • aesthetics
  • art theory
  • ecology

My language
English

Selected content
English

Genaro Amaro Altamirano

is a founder of the Museo Comunitario del Valle de Xico and a chronicler who has published dozens of ethnographic texts on the history of the Xico Valley. An activist who works to protect the rights and heritage of indigenous culture, since the 1990s he has been deeply involved in founding and supporting community organizations. In 2009 the Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura awarded Amaro the Chimalpahin Prize for cultural merit. In 2012, he collaborated with Maria Thereza Alves on the project The Return of a Lake and gave a public conference on the lake’s desiccation at dOCUMENTA (13). He has also been a guest speaker at conferences in Mexico and the United States.
Jens Andermann (ed.), Lisa Blackmore (ed.), ...: Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape

Entangled with the interconnected logics of coloniality and modernity, the landscape idea has long been a vehicle for ordering human-nature relations. Yet at the same time, it has also constituted a utopian surface onto which to project a space-time ‘beyond’ modernity and capitalism. Amid the advancing techno-capitalization of the living and its spatial supports in transgenic seed monopolies, fracking and deep sea drilling, biopiracy, geo-engineering, aesthetic-activist practices have offered particular kinds of insight into the epistemological, representational, and juridical framings of the natural environment. This book asks in what ways have recent bio and eco-artistic turns moved on from the subject/object ontologies of the landscape-form? Moving from botanical explorations of early modernity, through the legacies of mid-twentieth century landscape design, up to artistic experimental recodings of New World nature in the 1960s and 1970s and to present struggles for environmental rights and against the precarization of the living, the critical essays and visual contributions included in Natura attempt to push thinking past fixed landscape forms through interdisciplinary encounters that encompass analyses of architectural sites and artworks; ecocritical perspectives on literary texts; experimental place-making practices; and the creation of material and visual ecologies that recognise the agency of non-human worlds.