Fellow 2024-2025
This project analyzes a series of contemporary Latin American techno-aesthetic practices (photography, film, and experimental video), elaborated between 2000 and 2020. Given the environmental and civilizational crisis of planetary scale, these practices investigate new potencies of acting, imagining and thinking the current scenario and the future from a situated epistemological perspective and through a material and medial exploration, understood as an inseparable exercise of the artistic processes deployed. My hypothesis is that the techno-aesthetic materials that compose these practices, their genealogy and medial nature, trace a political ecology capable of diagramming a non-anthropic sensibility in contemporary Latin American art. Thus, the project privileges those practices that account for the initiatives of artists and collectives that develop their work in the search for an ethical-ontological inquiry of aesthertic materials. These practices record the narratives of the inhabitants of different territories or worldviews, integrating alternative relationships with spaces, communities, and nature.
Abstract
Technological Eco-Politics in Contemporary Latin American Art: Material Memories and Aesthetic Epistemologies situated in the Face of the Planetary Crisis
This project proposes to analyze a series of contemporary Latin American techno-aesthetic practices (photography, film, and experimental video), elaborated between 2000 and 2020. Given the environmental and civilizational crisis of planetary scale, these practices investigate new potencies of acting, imagining and thinking the current scenario and the future from a situated epistemological perspective and through a material and medial exploration, understood as an inseparable exercise of the artistic processes deployed. It is proposed that the techno-aesthetic materials that compose these practices, their genealogy and medial nature, trace a political ecology capable of diagramming a non-anthropic sensibility in contemporary Latin American art. The tentative framework from which she will work seeks to privilege those practices that account for the initiatives of artists and collectives that develop their work in the search for an ethical-ontological inquiry of materials and actions that record the narratives of the inhabitants of different territories or cosmovisions that integrate alternative relationships with spaces, communities, and nature.
Education
2013 PhD School of Philosophy and Letters, Universidad de Buenos Aires
2010 MA History of Argentine and Latin American Art, Universidad Nacional de General San Martín
2006 BA Literary Theory, School of Philosophy and Letters, Universidad de Buenos Aires
Most Recent Academic Position
Associate Professor, Chair of Literary Theory and Analysis, Department of Letters, School of Philosophy and Letters, Universidad de Buenos Aires
Most Recent Publications
Paula Bertúa. "Herbaria: Essays for a Material and Post Naturalist Memory of Botany and Film." La Furia Umana, no. 46 (2025): 27–36.
Paula Bertúa and Lucía De Leone, eds. Estéticas contemporáneas en la cultura latinoamericana. Buenos Aires: Institute of Hispanic American Literature, School of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires, 2025.
Paula Bertúa and Irene Depetris-Chauvin, eds. Extinction Affects in Latin American Literature and Culture. Special issue, Latin American Literary Review 51, no. 193 (2024): 1–187.