In this presentation Professor Macarena Gómez-Barris considers the modes of thinking and being with the sea’s edge, a place long theorised by Rachel Carson. In her attention to the Pacific Ocean, through the affects of ecological mourning and pleasure, she offers a situated narrative of exhaustion as part of the tidal movement of the Earth. In this wet space, Gómez-Barris attends to filmic representations of what it means to carry the weight of capitalist exhaustion, particularly in spaces of colonial occupation and its afterlife. Throughout this presentation she asks, what forms of representation can address the longing, pleasure, and memoryscape of capitalist exhaustion?
Macarena Gómez-Barris is Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Chair of Modern Culture and Media, and Director of the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Brown University. She is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities, authoritarianism and extractivism, queer Latinx epistemes, media environments, racial ecologies, cultural theory and artistic practice. She is the author of four books including, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) that examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarities in troubled times. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press.
Her forthcoming book At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) considers colonial oceanic transits and the generative space between land and sea. Gómez-Barris is on the Social Text Collective, co-of the Queer Aqui Project at Columbia University, and on the Executive Editor Board of GLQ. She received the Pratt Institute Research Recognition Award (2021-2022) and the University of California, Santa Cruz Distinguished Alumni Award (2021-2022). She is the author of dozens of esssays and curatorial events. She was founder and director of Global South Center, NYC. She organises a new series called Writing Media Now hosted by the Department of Modern Culture and Media.
Organised by Dr Lucy Bradnock, Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art and Dean for Research, The Courtauld, as part of The Courtauld Centre for the Art of the Americas, supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
