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Maria Thereza Alves: The Return of a Lake
The Return of a Lake
(p. 51 – 60)

Maria Thereza Alves

The Return of a Lake

PDF, 10 pages

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

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Maria Thereza Alves

is a Berlin-based Brazilian artist. Her re­­search-driven practice problematizes Western binaries between nature and culture, art and politics, or art and daily life. In 1978 she made an official presentation on the human rights abuses of the indigenous population of Brazil at the U.N. Human Rights Conference in Geneva, and in 1988 she co-founded the Green Party of São Paulo, Brazil. Recently Alves participated in dOCUMENTA (13) with The Return of a Lake, the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, and the Sharjah Biennale. She has had a solo exhibition at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City and a survey exhibition at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville. Alves is the recipient of the Vera List Prize for Art and Politics 2016–2018. www.mariatherezaalves.org
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.