Fellow 2024-2025
In her research on art and visual culture in Latin America, Paula Bertúa combines questions of gender, politics and technology. Her research integrates a materialist approach with critical posthumanism, media geology, and ecopolitics to contour a new perspective on Latin American artistic and collective practices, which she understands as cosmo-aesthetics.
At the intersection of aesthetic practice and theoretical discourses, Bertúa explores the interventions of contemporary Latin American techno-aesthetics in relation to global political and environmental discourses against the background of regional conditions and their interplay with transnational imaginaries. She is also working as a curator and is a member of MATERIA: Centro de Investigación en Arte, Materia y Cultura - (IIAC-UNTREF), an interdisciplinary institute that promotes artistic and scientific research on diverse representations of Latin American visual culture.
Abstracht
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
El trabajo de mirar. Saberes, prácticas y abordajes críticos de las imágenes”. With a Foreword by Adrián Cangi. (The Work of Gazing. Knowledge, Practices, and Critical Approaches to Images) Bernal: Publishing house of the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2023.
Múltiple, singular, plural. Derivas de género en la fotografía contemporánea.(Multiple, singular, plural. Gender-related Issues in Contemporary Photography). Montevideo: Photography Centre of Montevideo, 2022.
with Alejandra Marín CINCO – (FIVE), Montevideo, Photography Centre of Montevideo, 2017.