WISER Lunchtime Seminar | Estefanía Bournot on Extractive Zones and the Last Utopia

by Estefanía Bournot (Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Extractive Zones and the Last Utopia:

Art, Literature, and Ecological Resistance from Latin America to Africa

Gustavo Caboco “Kyba Wapichana”, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 165 x 114 cm

This talk examines how contemporary artistic and literary practices from Latin America and Africa confront the enduring legacies of extractivism on landscapes, communities, and epistemologies across the Global South. Grounded in decolonial thought and political ecology, it explores emergent forms of artivism: entangled aesthetic and political interventions that redefine the function and experience of art in a world at the brink of ecological collapse. By linking African and Latin American experiences, the presentation foregrounds the critical potential of South–South perspectives and their innovative cultural production to give form to what Achille Mbembe has called “the last utopia” (La communauté terrestre, 2023): a planetary horizon rooted in care, cohabitation, and ethical entanglement with all forms of life.

Tuesday, 26^th August
1pm
WiSER Seminar Room, 6th Floor Richard Ward Building.

Estefanía Bournot is an APART-GSK Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her work focuses on contemporary cultural production from the Global South, with an emphasis on South Atlantic entangled histories, decolonial epistemologies, and political ecologies. She co-edited the cluster on  GeoSemantics for the online platform ASAP/Review; the special issue “Geological Groundings: Earthly Memories and Inhuman Becomings in Latin American Cultures” (JLACS); and the forthcoming volume World Literatures from Below (Bloombsbury 2026). In addition to her academic research, she has organized a variety of academic and public-facing events, including the online conference series SUR 2024, on Latin American Artivism, the international conference Decolonising the World Republic of Letters (Paris 2024) and South-South Comparativism: Histories, Methods Repertoires (Berlin 2025).

Please RSVP for catering purpose.