Chats in the Stacks: Carolyn Fornoff - Subjunctive Aesthetics

Summary

Dr. Carolyn Fornoff's talk introduces her book, 'Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change,' exploring how art navigates environmental crises, particularly in Mexico and Central America. She discusses the shift from art's evidentiary function to embracing uncertainty and hypothesis, using the subjunctive mood as a metaphor. Fornoff highlights the role of cultural production in challenging extractivist policies and envisioning alternative territorial relations, emphasizing the power of art to generate narratives and values that contest the status quo.

Takeaways

• 🌎 Dr. Carolyn Fornoff's research focuses on cultural responses to environmental crises in Latin America, particularly Mexico and Central America, and how art navigates complex issues like climate change.
• 🎨 Her book, 'Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change', explores how contemporary Mexican filmmakers and writers have shifted from art's evidentiary function to embracing subjunctive registers of hypothesis and uncertainty.
• 🌲 During the 21st century, Mexico has increased extractive concessions while positioning itself as an international leader in combating climate change, leading to a crisis of imagination framed by cultural production.
• 🖌️ Artists grapple with the threat of climate change and extractivist policies to Mexico's present and future, envisioning alternative forms of territoriality and ways of being in relation to the environment through strategies like rewriting and counterfactual speculation.
• 📚 Fornoff's work questions the traditional role of art as a didactic or forensic vehicle for proving environmental damage, instead highlighting the value of doubt, contingency, and imagination in knowledge-making practices.
• 💭 Subjunctive aesthetics, as an aesthetic modality, helps understand how cultural responses to environmental crises mobilize doubt, contingency, and desire to challenge extractive paradigms and imagine alternative ways of living.
• 🌐 The concept of subjunctive aesthetics extends beyond grammatical mood to include the potential and uncertain, inviting listeners or readers to think beyond what is said or written.
• 🌳 The subjunctive mood in art makes the invisible visible, challenging the status quo, and suggesting that the future can be changed through the exploration of 'as if' scenarios.
• 🎭 Performance art, such as Naomi Rincon Gallardo's 'Una Trilogia de Cuevas' (A Cave Trilogy), uses queer aesthetics and counterfactual mourning to highlight Indigenous women's leadership in land defense and imagine new desires and alliances.
• 🌞 The Cave Trilogy by Rincon Gallardo reimagines land defense as outrageous fun and a party, using excess and狂欢 to lift the audience into the imaginative space of potential, reorienting viewers back to the vital life-building work of land defenders.
• 📈 The reception and impact of these artistic expressions vary, with some reaching broader publics and others targeting specific audiences, reflecting the different publics and the varied work these art pieces perform.

Q & A

What is the primary focus of Dr. Carolyn Fornoff's research?

Dr. Carolyn Fornoff's research primarily focuses on exploring cultural responses to environmental crisis in Latin America, with a particular emphasis on Mexico and Central America. She investigates how art can be utilized to navigate or address complex issues such as climate change.

What is the main argument presented in Dr. Fornoff's book, 'Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change'?

In 'Subjunctive Aesthetics', Dr. Fornoff argues that contemporary filmmakers and writers in Mexico have shifted their focus from the evidentiary function of art, which is to prove environmental crisis, towards using subjunctive registers of hypothesis and uncertainty. This shift grapples with imagining the world differently and explores alternative forms of territoriality or ways of being in relation to the environment.

How does Dr. Fornoff define 'subjunctive aesthetics'?

Dr. Fornoff defines 'subjunctive aesthetics' as an aesthetic modality that embraces aesthetic and narrative forms marked by doubt, hypothesis, and speculation. It is an umbrella term for responses that engage with the potential and the uncertain, similar to the grammatical mood of the subjunctive, which does not commit to a singular or fixed truth but encodes the speaker's uncertainty or opinions about the state of things.

What is the contradiction that frames the cultural production in Mexico as a crisis of imagination?

The contradiction that frames the cultural production in Mexico as a crisis of imagination is that while Mexico has escalated extractive concessions, it has also positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. This contradiction leads to a struggle for alternative imaginations of the world and ways of being in relation to the environment.

How does Dr. Fornoff's book contribute to the understanding of the role of art in environmental crisis?

Dr. Fornoff's book contributes to the understanding of the role of art in environmental crisis by challenging the traditional evidentiary role of art and highlighting the potential of subjunctive aesthetics. It suggests that art can go beyond merely making the environmental crisis visible and can instead engage with doubt, contingency, and desire to imagine and propose alternative ways of living and relating to the environment.

What is the significance of the shift from evidentiary aesthetics to subjunctive aesthetics in cultural responses to environmental crisis?

The shift from evidentiary aesthetics to subjunctive aesthetics signifies a move away from didactic representation aimed at proving the urgency of environmental damage, towards an approach that embraces uncertainty and speculation. This shift allows for a more nuanced and imaginative engagement with environmental crisis, enabling the exploration of alternative narratives, values, and ways of being in relation to the environment.

How does Dr. Fornoff's concept of subjunctive aesthetics relate to the grammatical mood of the subjunctive?

Dr. Fornoff's concept of subjunctive aesthetics is directly inspired by the grammatical mood of the subjunctive, which is used to express uncertainty, potential, and desire for change. Just as the subjunctive mood in language allows for exploration of hypothetical scenarios and alternative possibilities, subjunctive aesthetics in art encourages a similar engagement with doubt, contingency, and the imagination in response to environmental crisis.

What is the role of the subjunctive mood in the context of the environmental crisis as discussed by Dr. Fornoff?

In the context of the environmental crisis, the subjunctive mood, as discussed by Dr. Fornoff, serves as a tool for envisioning alternative realities and possibilities. It allows for the expression of uncertainty and the potential for change, which is crucial in challenging the status quo and imagining different ways of relating to the environment that could lead to more sustainable futures.

How does Dr. Fornoff's work contribute to the broader discourse on climate change and cultural production?

Dr. Fornoff's work contributes to the broader discourse on climate change and cultural production by offering a new lens through which to understand and evaluate cultural responses to environmental crisis. By introducing the concept of 'subjunctive aesthetics,' she expands the conversation to include the emotional, imaginative, and speculative aspects of art and its potential to inspire and enact change in the face of climate change.

What are some of the strategies that artists use, according to Dr. Fornoff, to envision alternative forms of territoriality or ways of being in relation to the environment?

According to Dr. Fornoff, artists use strategies such as rewriting, counterfactual speculation, and embracing doubt, hypothesis, and uncertainty to envision alternative forms of territoriality or ways of being in relation to the environment. These strategies allow them to grapple with the threat posed by climate change and extractivist policies, and to challenge the dominant narratives and imagine different possibilities for the future.

How does the concept of 'un mundo donde quepan muchos, mundos' (a world where many worlds might fit) relate to the idea of subjunctive aesthetics?

The concept of 'un mundo donde quepan muchos, mundos' relates to the idea of subjunctive aesthetics by embodying the principle of multiplicity and the potential for diverse, coexisting realities. This idea aligns with the subjunctive aesthetics' focus on the possible, the uncertain, and the hypothetical, as it suggests that there can be many different ways of understanding and interacting with the world, especially in response to environmental challenges.

What is the significance of the counterfactual mourning practices discussed by Dr. Fornoff in the context of land defense?

The significance of the counterfactual mourning practices, such as the slogan 'Samir Vive' (Samir lives), is that they deny the finality of death and assert the continued existence of other possible worlds. This form of mourning contests the foreclosure of political dissent by extractivism and affirms the vitality and futurity of land defense. It also acknowledges the public's responsibility to the political projects that the deceased land defenders died defending.

Outlines

00:00

📘 Introduction to Dr. Carolyn Fornoff and Her Work on Subjunctive Aesthetics

Dr. Carolyn Fornoff, an Assistant Professor at Cornell University, specializes in Latin American cultural responses to environmental crises, with a focus on Mexico and Central America. Her research explores the role of art in addressing complex issues like climate change. Her new book, 'Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change', discusses how contemporary Mexican artists and filmmakers have moved beyond merely documenting environmental issues to engaging with uncertainty and hypothesis. Dr. Fornoff examines how these cultural productions challenge and reimagine ways of relating to the environment amidst Mexico's contradictory roles in both escalating extractive concessions and leading international efforts against climate change.

05:02

🌱 The Role of Subjunctive Aesthetics in Environmental Crisis

Dr. Fornoff elaborates on 'subjunctive aesthetics' in her book, which represents a shift in how environmental crises are artistically represented. Moving away from direct evidence and factual certainty, these aesthetics embrace doubt, emotion, and imagination. This approach aligns with the Zapatista idea of a world where many worlds fit, encouraging a reconsideration of possibilities and alternative realities. Dr. Fornoff highlights how thinking in the subjunctive can challenge the status quo and open up new ways of imagining a future beyond environmental and social constraints.

10:05

🛡️ Counterfactual Mourning and Land Defense

In this section, Dr. Fornoff discusses the concept of counterfactual mourning, as seen in responses to the murder of land defenders in Latin America. She uses the case of Samir Flores Soberanes, a Nahuatl land defender murdered in 2019, to illustrate how activists use counterfactual statements like 'Samir lives, the fight continues' to challenge the finality of death and continue advocacy against extractive projects. Dr. Fornoff explains how these forms of mourning maintain the visibility and ongoing relevance of land defenders' causes, even posthumously.

15:07

🎨 Artistic Representations of Mourning and Defense

Dr. Fornoff discusses the visual and public expressions of mourning for murdered land defenders in Mexico. She analyzes how simple yet powerful representations, like the slogan 'Samir Vive', serve as a form of counterfactual mourning that challenges the erasure of victims and supports ongoing social justice movements. This method of remembrance uses public art and social media to sustain the memory and political projects of the deceased, engaging the public in a dialogue about impunity and resistance.

20:08

🕊️ Performance Art and Feminist Counter-Worlds

Exploring the intersection of performance art and land defense, Dr. Fornoff highlights the work of Naomi Rincon Gallardo, whose multimedia performance trilogy enacts feminist and queer narratives against extractivism. These performances offer a space to reimagine relationships with the land, showcasing how art can facilitate a critical and imaginative engagement with environmental issues. Gallardo's work, focusing on Indigenous leadership and land defense, combines myth and activism to propose alternative futures.

25:10

🌟 The Queering of Environmental Art

Dr. Fornoff critiques the conventional serious tone of environmentalist art, suggesting that more irreverent, playful, and even camp aesthetics can offer new perspectives and approaches. She discusses Naomi Rincon Gallardo's Cave Trilogy, which uses costumes, camp, and playful aesthetics to challenge traditional narratives of environmental activism. This approach helps reframe environmental issues through lenses of joy, desire, and resilience, expanding the possibilities for how environmental art can influence perceptions and actions.

30:11

🌐 Broadening the Scope of Mourning and Activism

The discussion extends to how counterfactual mourning practices in art and activism serve to challenge ongoing violence against land defenders and reject extractivist paradigms as the only viable future. Dr. Fornoff argues that these artistic and public acts of mourning do more than seek justice; they invite participation in imagining and creating alternative realities where community, joy, and sustainable interactions with the land are central.

Keywords

💡Subjunctive Aesthetics

The term 'Subjunctive Aesthetics' refers to an artistic approach that embraces uncertainty, hypothesis, and speculation, particularly in response to environmental crises. It is a way of using art to navigate complex issues such as climate change by imagining alternative realities and possibilities. In the video, Dr. Fornoff discusses how contemporary Mexican filmmakers and writers have shifted towards this aesthetic, moving away from the traditional evidentiary function of art that aims to prove environmental crises, and instead exploring how the world could be imagined differently.

💡Extractivism

Extractivism is the practice of extracting materials or resources from the earth, often leading to environmental degradation and social conflict. In the context of the video, Dr. Fornoff discusses how Mexico has escalated extractive concessions while positioning itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change, creating a contradiction that frames a crisis of imagination. Artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico's present and future, envisioning alternative forms of territoriality and ways of being in relation to the environment.

💡Environmental Crisis

An 'Environmental Crisis' refers to a situation where the natural environment is under severe stress or damage due to human activities, often leading to significant negative impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human societies. In the video, Dr. Fornoff's research focuses on how art can be used to address the environmental crisis, especially in the context of climate change. She explores how cultural responses to this crisis have evolved from evidentiary functions to subjunctive aesthetics, which engage with the crisis through doubt, contingency, and desire.

💡Counterfactual Mourning

Counterfactual Mourning is a concept introduced by Dr. Fornoff in her book, referring to the practice of publicly honoring murdered land defenders by asserting that their deaths did not have the intended impact of silencing dissent. This form of mourning denies the finality of death and insists upon the futurity of the defender's life and political project. It is a way of using public memory and collective action to contest the foreclosure of political dissent by extractivism and to imagine other possible worlds.

💡Land Defenders

Land defenders are individuals or groups who actively protect and fight for the rights of communities to their land, often against extractive industries and other forms of environmental degradation. In the video, the discussion revolves around the violence and threats faced by land defenders, particularly in Latin America, and how their deaths are responded to through cultural production and practices like counterfactual mourning.

💡Cultural Production

Cultural Production refers to the creation and dissemination of cultural artifacts, such as literature, art, film, and other forms of expression. In the context of the video, Dr. Fornoff explores how cultural production in Mexico has evolved to address environmental crises and the challenges posed by extractivism. She examines the shift from evidentiary functions to subjunctive aesthetics in the representation of environmental issues.

💡Imaginative Potential

Imaginative Potential refers to the capacity of art and cultural production to inspire and give form to new ideas, possibilities, and visions of the future. In the video, Dr. Fornoff argues that subjunctive aesthetics tap into this potential by engaging with doubt, contingency, and desire to challenge extractive paradigms and imagine alternative ways of living in relation to the environment.

💡Evidentiary Aesthetics

Evidentiary Aesthetics refers to the use of art as a tool to document and make visible the realities of environmental damage and crisis. This approach often aims to raise public awareness and provide evidence of the urgency of environmental issues. In the video, Dr. Fornoff contrasts evidentiary aesthetics with subjunctive aesthetics, noting a shift in Mexican cultural production from the former to the latter.

💡Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch that emphasizes the impact of human activity on the Earth's ecosystems. In the video, the concept is used to discuss the historical circumstances and modes of production that have led to the current environmental crisis. It highlights the need for a reimagining of our relationship with the planet and the potential for art to contribute to this reimagining through subjunctive aesthetics.

💡Grammatical Mood

Grammatical Mood refers to the modality of a verb that expresses the speaker's attitude or stance towards the action or state it describes. In the video, Dr. Fornoff extends the concept of grammatical mood, particularly the subjunctive mood, to artistic expression. She suggests that art can embody the subjunctive mood by encoding uncertainty, opinionating, and a desire for change, thus allowing for the exploration of alternative realities and the potential for a different world.

Highlights

Dr. Carolyn Fornoff introduces the concept of 'Subjunctive Aesthetics' in relation to Mexican cultural production and the era of climate change.

The shift in contemporary Mexican filmmakers and writers from art's evidentiary function to subjunctive registers of hypothesis and uncertainty.

The 21st century contradiction of Mexico escalating extractive concessions while positioning itself as an international leader in fighting climate change.

Cultural production emerging from the contradiction frames the impasse as a crisis of imagination.

The book 'Subjunctive Aesthetics' studies how artists grapple with the threat of climate change and extractivist policies to Mexico's present and future.

The concept of 'un mundo donde quepan muchos, mundos' or 'a world where many worlds might fit' as a call to imagine alternative forms of territoriality.

The importance of thinking in the subjunctive to challenge the status quo and imagine change.

The role of subjunctive aesthetics as a form of cultural response that embraces doubt, hypothesis, and speculation.

The contrast between forensic or evidentiary aesthetics and subjunctive aesthetics in responding to environmental crisis.

The Zapatista call to imagine a world with many worlds and the subjunctive's ability to make things thinkable.

The linguistic invitation of the subjunctive mood and its extension to aesthetic form as a heuristic device.

The rise of debates and uncertainty about extractivism and climate change as a context for the flourishing of subjunctive aesthetics.

The case study of Nahuatl land defender Samir Flores Soberanes and the use of counterfactual mourning as a form of resistance.

The role of public art and social media in perpetuating the memory and resistance of murdered land defenders.

Naomi Rincon Gallardo's 'A Cave Trilogy' as a performance art series highlighting Indigenous women's leadership in land defense and enacting queer alliances.

The Cave Trilogy's use of mesoamerican myths, Indigenous activism, and queer theory to create transtemporal counter-worlds.

The importance of desire, playfulness, and indulgence in land defense and the reimagining of environmental art.

Transcripts

SPEAKER: Today, I am thrilled to introduce Dr. Carolyn

Fornoff, Assistant Professor of Latin American

Studies in Cornell University's Department of Romance Studies.

Dr. Fornoff's work explores cultural responses

to environmental crisis in Latin America with particular focus

on Mexico and Central America.

Her research questions how art can

be used to navigate or address complex issues such as climate

change.

Her new book, Subjunctive Aesthetics:

Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change,

traces how contemporary filmmakers and writers in Mexico

have shifted away from art's evidentiary function

or its ability to prove environmental crisis

and towards subjunctive registers of hypothesis

and uncertainty that grapple with how the world could

be imagined otherwise.

During the 21st century, Mexico has

escalated extractive concessions at the same time

that it has positioned itself as an international leader

in the fight against climate change.

Cultural production emergent from this contradiction

frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination.

In Subjunctive Aesthetics, Dr. Fornoff

studies how artists grapple with the threat

that climate change and extractivist policies pose

to Mexico's present and future, and how

they rise to the challenge of envisioning

alternative forms of territoriality or ways

of being in relation to the environment

through strategies ranging from rewriting

to counterfactual speculation.

So please join me in welcoming Dr. Carolyn Fornoff.

[APPLAUSE]

CAROLYN FORNOFF: Thank you, Hannah,

for that great introduction, and thanks to all of you

for being here today.

It means a lot to me to see so many colleagues and friends

and students.

I appreciate it.

So it's an honor to present to you my first single authored

book, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production

in the Era of Climate Change.

My goal with this book was to analyze the aesthetic

and narrative strategies that authors, artists, and filmmakers

use to make sense of environmental catastrophe,

and particularly situations that foreclose

the possibility of future life like toxicity, extinction,

and dispossession.

One question that motivated me in this project

was to rethink what art can do beyond the ability

to simply make environmental crisis legible or visible.

We might think about this evidentiary mode

as a dominant mode of the environmental arts,

one that positions art as a didactic or a forensic vehicle

for proving the urgency of environmental damage

and that avoids ambiguity as something

to be minimized in order to achieve political consensus.

This ability of representation to make the invisible visible

or to raise public awareness to the facts

is, for example, illustrated here by this aerial photograph

of the Lacandon Jungle by Mexican photographer, Santiago

Arau, an image that makes deforestation immediately

tangible through the stark contrast of colors

and the demarcation of space.

Such pedagogical or forensic aesthetics

are of course hugely valuable and do important work.

They take up the task of investigating the truth

and amplifying its circulation or of reconstructing past events

and making sense of the senseless.

Yet, as I was surveying recent Mexican cultural production,

I was struck by how many works that deal

with environmental issues actually

shift away from this evidentiary mandate

to prove the certainty of environmental crisis

and instead embrace aesthetic and narrative

forms that are marked by doubt, hypothesis, and speculation.

So in this book, I call this umbrella

of responses subjunctive aesthetics,

and a nod to the grammatical mood

that is the realm of the potential and the uncertain.

Grammatical moods are usually separated into two categories,

realis and irrealis.

Realis, associated with the indicative, or what is,

is the mood of evidence and truth.

Through the indicative, a speaker confidently

affirms the facticity and definitiveness of their claims.

By contrast, irrealis moods including the subjunctive

indicate no such commitment to a singular or a fixed truth.

The subjunctive instead encodes the speaker's uncertainty

or opinionating about the state of things.

It's used to respond to reality in a way that expresses

its potential to change or the speaker's desire for it

to change.

My book contends that by considering the subjunctive

not just as a grammatical mood but as an aesthetic modality,

we can better understand how contemporary cultural responses

to environmental crisis mobilize doubt, contingency, and desire

to dispute extractive paradigms and imagine

ways of living otherwise.

Subjunctive aesthetics, I argue, can

be understood as the mirror image

to forensic or evidentiary aesthetics.

Both respond to situations of material damage

and the violent foreclosure of life,

but whereas forensic aesthetics sustains

an anthropological focus on witnessing

and marshals evidence toward establishing a shared truth,

subjunctive aesthetics tilt away from fact gathering

and narrative certainty and instead

toward knowledge-making practices that

are motored by doubt, emotion, and the imagination.

Such responses might be thought about as modeling the Zapatista

call to imagine "un mundo donde quepan muchos

mundos," or "a world where many worlds might fit."

I think that environmental crisis

compels questions in the subjunctive about how

things might but need not be.

What would it take to curb global emissions,

and how could the world be organized differently

around life rather than around accumulation?

Thinking in the subjunctive explodes the fixity

of the way things are, suggesting even

against all odds, that the status quo can be changed.

As Kierkegaard put it, quote, "When

one begins to study the grammar of the indicative

and the subjunctive, one becomes conscious

that everything depends on how it's thought.

The indicative thinks something is actual,

the subjunctive thinks something is thinkable."

For its ability to make things thinkable,

the subjunctive has long motored the arts

as the realm of imagination where reality brushes up against

and is tested against ideality, hypothesis, and probability.

The linguist, Hans Busch, also explains that quote,

"With the subjunctive, we always invite the listener or reader

to think and to go beyond what is said or what is written."

In the book, I extend Busch's framing

of the subjunctive as a linguistic invitation

to engage with what has been expressed

to theorize subjunctive aesthetics as a form that is not

didactic in aim but heuristic in its welcoming

of emotional or experimental responses to a given reality.

That is, the subjunctive registers

uncertainty in language.

Its invocation of emotion, contingency, and the imagination

is particularly useful around events

that are contested or unsettled, difficult,

by asking us to feel our way or debate our way through them.

So you can see why the subjunctive might flourish

in a moment of rising debates and uncertainty

about extractivism and climate change.

The Indian novelist and theorist, Amitav Ghosh,

in the Great Derangement, has also

commented on the importance of subjunctive modes

in the era of climate change.

He writes that to reproduce the world as it exists

need not be the project of fiction.

Rather, what fiction makes possible is

to approach the world in a subjunctive mode

to conceive of it as if it were other than it is.

I think this ability to think in the as if is key.

Rather than see art as serving an ancillary, illustrative, or

didactic role in proving environmental damage,

subjunctive aesthetics make a bid

for art's experimental capacity to generate

alternate narratives, values, and grammars

of territorial belonging.

It centers the role of desire in producing the future

and mobilizes the "as if" to imagine other ways of relation.

Precisely at a moment when the future seems

to be predetermined, foreclosed by extractive capitalism,

the subjunctive ability of art to make things thinkable

enters to make those outcomes more propositional,

to doubt them, fear them, opine, or emote about them

and to concoct other possibilities.

Yet, I want to stress that this imaginative potential always

emerges from within concrete historical circumstances

and modes of production.

And here I turn back to the fact that

the subjunctive grammatical mood got

its name because of its placement

in subjoined or subordinated clauses.

The subjunctive often bridges two different subjects

appearing in the dependent clause in response

to conditions imposed by the main clause.

It thus models relationality the way

that subjects exist in reliance or subordination to one another.

Extrapolated to the theorization of subjunctive aesthetics

in the era of climate change, the subjunctive mood

mirrors the way in which we're compelled

to respond to pre-existing planetary conditions, phenomena

put in motion by structures, be they economic

or climatic that supersede us.

Our subordination to these determining structures indexes

that regardless of how we might react to, negate,

or wish the world were different,

we cannot reinvent the Earth.

However, we can reinvent the way in which we relate

to it and to one another.

So tethered to the reality of the anthropocene,

subjunctive aesthetics simultaneously

index our dependency on the past and present

but also the possibility that we might

reformulate our relationship with the more than human planet,

and conjure into being other futures.

So to summarize, I used the term subjunctive aesthetics

in the book to describe three intersecting trends

in contemporary Mexican literature

and visual art about ecological crisis.

The first is a thematic concern with the foreclosure

of the future by extractivist practices

and carbon-intensive modernity, and the use of subjunctive

rejoinders to contest the definitiveness

of those foreclosures.

Second, subjunctive aesthetics are less interested in evidence

and more in imaginative potential.

And third, like the subordinated structure

of the subjunctive grammatical mood,

subjunctive aesthetics register a state

of subordination and entanglement

with external factors from the climatic to the economic.

Ultimately, I argue that in a context in which extractivism

is continually asserted across the political spectrum

as the only possible path to economic well-being

and collective well-being, the subjunctive ability

of art to imagine the world otherwise

becomes a key means by which to express alternative formulations

of how the relationship with the planet should or could be.

So in the book, I chart different manifestations

of subjunctive aesthetics, and here's the table of contents.

In the first chapter, I discuss environmental rewriting

as a tactic, a formal tactic of subjunctive aesthetics

that is used by the visual artist,

[INAUDIBLE] who essentially enacts

a sort of dwelling in inherited canonical texts

of Mexican literature.

And within those inherited structures,

she performs small interventions to make

them speak to the present as if they were written

from the vantage of today.

In the second chapter, which is the chapter that I'll

speak to you more about today, I discuss counterfactual

mourning in response to the murder of land defenders

which deny death as a ultimate closure

and insist upon the futurity of the defender's

life and political project.

In the third chapter, I look at poetry about extinction

by poets including [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE],, who

mobilize poetry's ability to bring different things

and beings into imaginative proximity

through spatial contiguity as a way

to reformulate human relationships with endangered

life.

In the fourth chapter, I turn to cinema

and I look at observational documentaries

about drought and flooding in Mexico

to consider how sensorial immersion operates

to critique how rural resilience has been represented on screen.

And finally, in the last chapter of the book,

I turn to consider the conditions of production

of cinema in Mexico in the era of climate change

to think about experience and reimagining carbon neutral film

exhibition and filmmaking through the use of solar panels

and bicycles in rural Mexico.

Today, for the remainder of this talk,

I'm going to narrow in on chapter 2, a case

study from the book, which is titled

"Land Defense and Counterfactual Mourning."

Across Latin America, violence against land defenders

has escalated along with the expansion

of the extractive frontier, which

was prompted since 2008 by a boom in global commodity prices

that has encouraged administrations

in Latin America across the political spectrum

to intensify export-oriented extractive production.

As a result of the expansion of this extractive frontier,

conflicts with affected communities

have surged with these extractive companies usually

supported by the state.

As you can see in this chart by Global Witness, which

is an NGO that tracks the murder of land defenders

throughout the world, several Latin American nations

have the highest rate of victims in the world and nearly a third

of all documented victims are Indigenous.

In the chapter, I open with the case of Nahuatl land defender

and radio broadcaster, Samir Flores Soberanes, who

was murdered in his home in 2019 after months

of leading the opposition to Proyecto Integral Morelos,

a planned megadevelopment project that would construct

a thermoelectric plant and a natural gas

pipeline crisscrossing Indigenous and [INAUDIBLE] lands

in Morelos.

As an organizer for the Frente de Pueblos and Defensa de La

Tierra in Morelos, Flores gave voice to community objections

to this pipeline and particularly the contamination

risk that it posed to the local water supply.

Fellow activists contend that Flores's murder

was an attempt to silence opposition

to this natural gas pipeline, pointing to the fact

that the murder took place just days before a planned

referendum on the mega project.

In the wake of Flores's murder, Indigenous

and environmental activists honored his life

and called attention to his death

through the slogan, "Smair vive, La lucha sigue,"

or "Samir lives, the fight continues,"

spreading this rallying cry on social media

and writing it on walls in cities throughout Mexico.

In my chapter, I point out that this rallying cry

is a counterfactual statement.

Borrowed from the Zapatista formulation,

"Zapata vive, la lucha sigue," the slogan

denies murder its conclusive force.

It suggests that Flores's death did not

have the intended impact.

It did not silence dissent to the pipeline.

It also suggests that his death need not have been so.

Thus, the counterfactual negation of Flores's death

contests the foreclosure of political dissent

to extractivism by affirming the continued

existence of other possible worlds,

a world in which Samir Flores still lives,

a world in which relations with territory

are forged around consensus, relationality, and life

rather than around violent utilitarianism.

So in the summer of 2021, walking around Mexico City,

I began to notice "Samir Vive" graffitied and painted

across the sides of buildings.

And you can see it to the right there on that monument.

These spectral traces of the dead in the realm of the living

reinstate them as public figures.

They interpolate passers by in an invitation to relation.

They usually crystallize around a delimited set

of characteristics which we can see here, right?

The face, the name, and usually a simplified slogan.

These pared down aesthetics of remembrance

echo strategies that were first popularized in the '60s and '70s

in the Southern cone and the response

to the politically motivated forced disappearances

of political dissidents, and have since

been used throughout Latin America to contest impunity.

Applied to land offender victims, the distilled

visual representation simplifies highly complex localized

struggles into an immediately recognizable idiom of impunity,

connecting these cases of murdered land defenders

with other ongoing social justice

movements like Ayotzinapa and the Niunamenos movement

against feminicide in Mexico.

Like the victims of feminicide, murdered land defenders

are great in number and yet their deaths

have a hard time gaining national recognition because

of their atomized occurrence in far flung locations

and because of misinformation campaigns that often criminalize

victims or often misattribute their death to localized

disputes or to the drug war.

In this sense, the economical or even formulaic

presentation of victims aims for familiarity

in a move that brings to mind Susan Sontag's

description of how political posters borrow

from the lesson of simplicity from advertising.

Therefore, even when a passerby doesn't know the victim--

they might not be familiar with Samir--

this sort of phrasing triggers an immediate recognition.

In this case, it counterintuitively

identifies the dead through the counterfactual

assertion of their life.

Through repetition and reiterability,

the slogan places the individual victim

within a network of similar cases, Berta Vive, Samir Vive,

Bety Vive, a discursive assemblage

that figures terror as both intimate and infinitely

repeatable.

Notably, it's notable to me that the purpose

of these slogans graffitied in public space is not pedagogical.

It doesn't teach us anything about the victim

or about their specific cause.

In fact, specifics are usually conspicuously absent.

Instead, the goal is effective, to spark a form of mourning that

negates terrors' intended eradication of space

by taking up public space.

The first name addressed to the victim

fosters a familiarity that is reinforced spatially

through the slogan's quotidian placement, such

that one encounters these names of the dead on your daily route

through the city.

Street art and social media campaigns

that honor murdered land defenders

tend to treat victims with reverence, depicting them

as murderers or heroic figures.

In large part, this is an effort to counteract

negative mediatic representations that

tend to focus on blockades or the destruction

of private property rather than the concrete complaints

behind these actions--

something that happens in the United States as well.

Yet, the drawback to responding to this mediatic

delegitimization through hagiographic tactics,

such as the halo that murdered land defenders are often

endowed with which renders them murderers,

is that it recurs to the model of the legitimate or ideal

victim.

In her study of the legitimate victim,

Sandra Walklate argues that this reductive model,

albeit effective in cultivating empathy,

allows only some people to be seen as deserving victims

while others are viewed as undeserving victims

or may never be labeled as victims at all.

For example, people who negotiate with capital or labor

in the extractive industry but still suffer from its effects.

Despite these caveats, ultimately,

the inscription of the names of the dead powerfully

restore them to public space.

Visual and discursive acts of counterfactual mourning,

like those we see here, refer to death

but deny it as such, rerouting back

to life in a subjunctivist expression of desire

for how the world could have been

or could still be a world in which Samir lives.

Counterfactual mourning embraces the hauntological,

propelling the dead into the future

through the continued affirmation of their life

and the futurity of land defense.

It affords the victim space in the collective imaginary.

It asserts their vitality and it acknowledges

the public's responsibility to them

in the political projects they died defending.

Akin to an imaginative act of undoing, counterfactual mourning

produces an enlarged sense of temporal possibility,

correlating with a newly activist or even interventionist

relationship to the past.

So just as ghosts disturb this separation

of the living from the dead, so too

does counterfactual mourning trouble

the logic of extractivism by positing

other ways of being in relation to the planet,

embodied in the person who fought to make it a reality.

So with what remains of my talk, I'm

going to turn to a different example

of counterfactual mourning in the context of land

defense in performance art.

This is a performance trilogy called Una Trilogia de Cuevas,

A Cave Trilogy, by the Mexican performance artist, Naomi Rincon

Gallardo, a three part multimedia

performance series about extractivism and dispossession.

Collectively, the trilogy highlights Indigenous women's

leadership and land defense in Mexico

and it enacts queer alliances that are unbound

by patriarchy and extractivism.

These feminist counter worlds, as Rincon Gallardo describes,

them are transtemporal, nourished at once

by mesoamerican myth, Indigenous activism

in the present, and queer theory in order

to engender worlds that are quote, "opposite to the future

for a future that is not yet here."

In this sense, Rincon Gallardo's speculative trilogy

complements and extends the counterfactual negation

of death's finality in activist phrases like "Samir Lives,"

by enacting what that parallel world cultivated by the undead

looks and feels like.

In a similar way to how urban art interventions create space

for the dead by interrupting the passerby's visual field

and invites their engagement, performance art

also creates space for the land defender's body territory

through enactments or doings of bodies brought together

around shared space.

Importantly, Rincon Gallardo's trilogy

centers the violence experienced by land defenders

but it departs from the reverent representational modes

that we were just discussing.

Whereas those modes idealize land defenders

in an understandable attempt to foreground their heroism

and innocence, drawing on nostalgia and revolutionary

ideals through the Zapata Viva mantra

to appeal to the widest possible public

in order to drum up support to contest impunity,

but Rincon Gallardo cultivates, I

think, more complex effective engagement

with environmental and Indigenous activists.

In fact, the trilogy dramatizes land defense as outrageous fun,

as a party.

In the performance trilogy, we see queer dance parties that

are soaked in drink and song.

And through this revelry and this raucousness,

Rincon Gallardo demonstrates how land defense is motivated

by desire and it opens up a different sort of space

time, a possible world that exemplifies what

Jill Dolan called utopian performatives that quote,

"persuade us that beyond this now of material oppression

and unequal power relations lives a future

that might be different."

The effect of excess that courses through the trilogy

lifts the audience out of the present

and into the imaginative space of the potential.

In this sense, the trilogy refracts the way

that land defenders are mourned in their communities

as leaders in the fight for another world whose deaths are

not reducible to a narrative of victimhood.

Rincon Gallardo's decision to center land defenders

in her performance art while also shifting away

from typical moralizing representational strategies,

I argue, queers environmentalist art,

offering a necessary corrective to the dominant forensic focus

on violence, impunity, and death, and reorienting viewers

back to the vitalist life-building, world-affirming

work that land defenders perform.

I suggest in my book that Rincon Gallardo theorizes

joy, gathering, desire, and partying as a feminist and queer

means of surviving and flourishing in times

of extractivist violence.

The cave trilogy originated in Rincon Gallardo's desire

to honor and mourn Bety Carino, the guiding

figure of the first episode, who you can see on the right hand

side.

In the artist's statement for this first chapter, which

is called "El Viaje De Formal, The Formaldehyde Trip,"

Rincon Gallardo explains that this is quote,

"A twisted, mythical, critical fabulation

aspiring to materialize and activate the ghost, spirit,

and body of the murdered Mixtec activist, Bety Carino, who

dedicated her life to the opposition

to extraction projects threatening Indigenous

communities."

El Viaje de Formal" follows the character of Bety Carino

as she travels through the underworld after her death

where she is cared for and cares for fellow female warriors.

And you could see sort of the kitsch DIY aesthetic

that Rincon Gallardo embodies or enacts

in this performance piece.

And she trains these fellow female warriors

in techniques of resistance, sort

of continuing to nurture this fight against dispossession

even in death.

In turn, these warriors then piece together

Carino's dismembered body and put it back together

from where it floats into cosmic space in this act

of feminist recomposition.

Performance scholar, Laura Gutierrez,

has pointed out that Rincon Gallardo's trilogy works

in a parallel vein to Saidiya Hartman's Critical Fabulation.

It's storytelling that strains to tell impossible histories.

In her work about the lives of enslaved Black women,

Hartman adopts this method because the historical record

has obscured these stories.

The impossibility of accessing them

pushes Hartman to speculate about how

these women's lives might have been if only

she could fully imagine them.

Just as Hartman indexes the transtemporal possibilities

of this exercise, which brings the past into focus

without reproducing the language of violence,

Rincon Gallardo draws out the reparative possibilities

of encounters among women warriors across time.

And she does this by configuring Bety Carino as another iteration

of Coyolxauhqui, or the Aztec moon

goddess who was murdered by her brother

for trying to claim power.

And she does this through the costuming,

right, this shiny polyester jumpsuit decked out

with red tassels, plastic skull knee guards, a skull-laden belt,

and blinking red nipples.

Rincon Gallardo's reactivation of Coyolxauhqui through Carino

articulates a transtemporal collapse or lineage

of women who have been murdered for pursuing goals that

flew in the face of patriarchy.

And so the whole trilogy is called The Cave Trilogy,

and the cave is this really important transformative space

in the performance series.

Associated with the female body, sexual pleasure,

and reproduction, as well as with the underworld

and with sleep, in each episode, the cave

is a central site of communion, refuge, and pleasure.

In this sequence from "El Viaje de Formal" after Carino's body

has disintegrated, a raucous punk concert

in this vaginal cave of the underworld

transforms into a queer orgy.

The heavy metal lyrics that are shouted by the revelers,

first in Spanish and then again in English,

make Rincon Gallardo's message clear.

Quote, "The tomb doesn't stop us.

We are not tired, disheartened.

We are repeatedly dead, indomitable, illegible

monsters."

The women performers rhythmically move their hands

through the cave's muddy floor, sensually spreading mud

on each others legs.

The orgy in the mud thus illustrates the centrality

of desire in land defense, how the enactment

of other forms of politics is actualized

through embodied desires that bring bodies

into relation and contact.

So the titular cave, of course, is this transformative space

where bodies can come into renewed contact

as they imagine another world.

In mesoamerican codices like the Mayan Popol Vuh,

the seven caves are where life originated,

a space of flux or transit between different times

and worlds.

And the historian, Federico Navarrete,

has explained that ritual allowed

access to this alternative, temporal, and ontological order

in which there is no difference between human, nonhuman,

and deity.

And those that emerge from the cave in mesoamerican myth

did so renewed, manifesting a new way of being

and even a new historical era.

Drawing on this concept of the cave as a portal

to another temporal or ontological space, a portal that

is not just a temporary break from reality

but rather an irreversibly transformative experience,

Rincon Gallardo's Cave Trilogy deploys performance

as a counterfactual feminist realm

in which to imagine new desires, alliances,

and worlds beyond capitalism.

So, Rincon Gallardo's treatment of land defense

through queer aesthetics like camp, irony, and frivolity

makes, I think, a really important and unusual

intervention into environmentalist art.

As the scholar Nicole Seymour has pointed out,

environmental movements have tended

to eschew the flamboyant aesthetics of queer culture

and have gravitated instead toward the opposite sensibility

characterized by austerity, sacrifice, and self-seriousness.

While Seymour writes about the US,

the same I think can be said broadly about Latin American

environmentalist art, which rarely

recurs to the exaggerated register

and effective excess of camp.

In many ways, the purported incompatibility

between irreverence on the one hand

and environmentalism and land defense on the other

is understandable.

I mean, as we have seen from the high rates of land defender

murders, environmentalism is serious business.

And yet, I think that irreverent modes of mourning

can really complicate and complement these mainstream

representational modes by preventing violence

from being sublimated into trauma or spectacle,

and by instead pivoting back out toward desire.

And this is the case, I think, with this is the third

installment of The Cave Trilogy called "Opossum Resilience,

Resiliencia Tlacuache," in which the opossum is used to mirror

Zapotec lawyer and anti-mining activist,

Rosalinda Dionicio's brush with death in 2012 when paramilitary

forces linked to the Minera Cuscatlan--

a Mexican mining affiliate of the Canadian transnational

company, Fortuna Mines--

ambushed her vehicle.

And in the vehicle with her was another anti-mining

activist and Zapotec leader, Bernardo Vazquez Sanchez,

who was killed in the attack.

But the bloodied Rosalinda Dionicio, who was shot twice,

survived the attack by pretending that she was dead.

And so you can see why Rincon Gallardo chose

the opossum who was famous for playing

dead to outwit predators.

And the opossum here embodies this resilience and miraculous

resurrection.

The opossum is also a trickster.

It's the deity of drunkenness and thievery.

In mesoamerican myth, the opossum

appears as a creature who brings humanity corn and fire,

pilfering these life forces from the gods

and bringing them down to Earth to humans.

This unfolding of Dionicio, who does not

appear on screen in this episode,

through the figure of the opossum,

avoids flattening her into the role of idealized hero

or passive victim.

Instead, it positions her as an activist who

risks her life in defense of Zapotec territory

but also as a picota, or sort of a playful picaresque

figure who relentlessly undermines her foes.

The ludic and playful representation

of Dionicio as an intoxicated trickster

reorients viewers' understandings of land defense

not just as serious business, but also

compatible with pleasure, playfulness, and indulgence.

Land defense here is outrageous fun, or as the opossum sings--

there we go-- as the opossum sings

in a scene where it's drinking from the agave plant,

and "En tiempos de despojo, que no haga falta el

tepache, in times of dispossession,

may tepache not be scant.

Tepache is a fermented beverage, alcoholic beverage,

derived from pineapples.

In mobilizing desire and playfulness,

Naomi Rincon Gallardo Cave Trilogy

actualizes Eve Tuck's point that we

must resist reducing disenfranchised communities

to the experience of damage and pain.

Instead, The Cave Trilogy teases out

the complexity of life lived in the extractive zone

in which pain, rage, joy, and desire intermingle.

These affects animate land defense,

revealing it to be a collaborative project that's

sustained by dreams for a better future and memories of a shared

past.

Tuck elaborates on desires qualities.

Quote, "Desire is involved with the not yet,

and at times, the not anymore.

It has a ghostly remnant quality not contained to the body

but still derived of the body.

Desire is about longing.

It's about a present that is enriched by both

the past and the future."

So following Tuck desires both speculative and hauntological,

it's the discovery of possibilities,

the charting of paths for future action,

the embrace of alternatives over certainties,

and the excess that courses alongside and throughout

the experience of the real.

So to conclude, if violence against land defenders

is a strategy through which to forcibly impose extractivism

as the only way of relating to land,

a form of relating that forecloses others

by contaminating water, eradicating habitats

and so on, counterfactual practices of mourning like Samir

Vive and Rincon Gallardo's Cave Trilogy

refuse that foreclosure as definitive

and affirm the futurity of post-extractivist forms

of inhabiting territory.

I think that it's notable that counterfactual aesthetics

of mourning do away with the evidentiary function

that we so often associate with works about impunity.

Perhaps this is because violence against land defenders

is a trauma that is not confined to the past,

but it's ongoing and constitutive

of extractivist modernity.

As a result, counterfactual practices of mourning

are actually not usually oriented

toward the state or the justice system

at all, as is the case in the post-dictatorial context or even

in other contexts of mourning in Mexico, like the [INAUDIBLE]

or Ayotzinapa massacres, which are sort of containable and thus

redressable as events.

The purpose of a counterfactual mourning

exceeds what the state can or is willing to do,

and it exceeds the scope of any singular case

or any individual case that might be brought to trial.

Rather, I suggest that the work performed

by counterfactual mourning is imaginative and future-oriented,

and its invitation to join in the subjunctive act of enacting

other possible worlds that might exist beyond extractivism

and its corollaries of violence and dispossession,

worlds in which people engage with territory on the basis

of life, community, joy, and desire.

The succinct counterfactual assertion

of life in the face of death, and slogans like "Samir de Vive"

identifies that the stakes of public mourning

lie not just in visibility or proof or the pursuit of justice,

but in imagining a world that persists beyond extractivism,

a counterfactual world where Samir Flores and Bety

Carino still live, a world sustained

by those who keep their memory and desires alive.

Similarly, the raucous and sensual parties

enacted in Rincon Gallardo's Cave Trilogy

create this space where those who

are dispossessed and coalesce in a gesture that refuses death.

This subjunctive potential of art

to create spaces and forms of signification that

imagine beyond what is, echoes the work that is performed

by land defenders themselves, who

treat the future as a territory to be defended.

Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: Thank you so much for that wonderful presentation.

We're going to open the room up to questions both here

in the room and on Zoom.

So if you have a question, just raise your hand

and I'll pass the mic on to you.

AUDIENCE: First of all, congratulations

on this amazing book and thank you for a wonderful talk.

I wonder if you could just share with us some

of the reception of the art.

And I'm curious to know if the irreverence and that kind

of punk rock aesthetic that I see here

angers people, or just-- yeah, if you could just speak

to the reception of the work.

CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yeah.

I mean, I think that part of the reason I wanted

to combine these two examples in this chapter

is that they really speak to different publics.

So you know, these performance pieces

are typically only available to see in art museums.

They are performance works that were recorded.

The very first one debuted in SF MoMA.

So if that gives you an idea of the intended

audience or the original intended audience,

and so they're doing sort of different work

for different publics, which I'm interested in, right?

And so I do think that the importance of appealing

to a broad public through sort of here,

we see like revolutionary imagery that

recalls the Mexican Revolution.

It brings the Zapatista revolution to mind.

And it's doing sort of this work of amalgamating political issues

into this the figure of the singular land defender

in a way that will help sort of a general public

be sympathetic to their claims, or potentially

be sympathetic to their claims.

Whereas this sort of work is not appealing to the general public.

And I think it's pretty disinterested

in the general public, which allows

it to perform different work.

And yet, it also restricts it in some ways

from reaching that broader public

or creating those tensions.

But when I've taught this piece in the past,

I think a thing that causes students in trouble

with dealing with it is that DIY, like, low-res aesthetic.

And so it doesn't neatly sit within the high art world

either.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Congratulations on the book.

It's amazing.

I think I'm so glad to be here and to hear you talk about it.

Maybe, can we go back to the image with the graffiti?

Because I'm wondering, when I'm looking at it

and I see a little bit the contrast

between that monument-- which I'm assuming

is the monument-- and the graffiti.

And it kind of made me think about,

I love the idea of counterfactual mourning.

And I'm just wondering about the lastingness of that mourning,

you know?

Because you have that monument that, in a way, I mean,

I don't know what he's saying or what he's doing,

but I am assuming it's commemorating

something in that more official permanent way.

Whereas the graffiti has that ability to appear and disappear.

So I'm just wondering if there is something

about how long does this counterfactual mourning last?

And if there is an end, and if there is something

after that end that gives us another sense of those futures

that you're talking about.

CAROLYN FORNOFF: Thank you.

It's a great question.

I think that, I mean, the temporality

is, it's more ephemeral.

And yet, it is surprisingly lasting,

particularly given the quantity of cases.

Now, there are only certain cases

that really achieve this broader circulation and resonance.

So we might think about in Honduras, the case

of Berta Caceres, right?

Or both Samir Vive, which continues

to be quite prominent even though he was murdered in 2019.

Yeah, so it's not a long lasting monument.

It is more ephemeral.

And I think that then the internet

becomes this space where some of these discourses

become sort of archived.

But it's true.

It is particularly in contrast with the monument that is there

in this permanent official way.

The counterfactual mourning does have a shorter timeline.

AUDIENCE: Carolyn, that was so wonderful and so refreshing

because I find evidentiary pedagogical environmental art so

boring.

And it's just everywhere.

I have a question that actually relates to the question

was asked last, the relationship.

The subjunctive capacity to grasp long time.

So I'm thinking, like, because environmental degradation

and extractive is both, like, long in the making

and also well lasts-- like, you know,

thinking of Rob Nixon's Slow Violence, right?

And the subjunctive capacity to grasp

this kind of almost inhumane temporality

of environmental degradation.

Yeah, because it has itself, also in the grammatical mode,

has a really different interesting relationship

to time and to the future.

But environmental degradation has this both long future

and long past, this due past.

And so I was just curious in relation to that,

and also, congratulations.

CAROLYN FORNOFF: Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, no.

I mean, I'm totally obsessed with the question of time

and environmental aesthetics.

The first volume that I got a chance to co-edit

is called Timescales, Ecological Temporalities Across

Disciplines.

And I think that the subjunctive is doing something different.

It's not so much interested in collapsing timescales,

although you might-- like, I do suggest

that in this in this piece, there

is this interest in this radical collapse of timescales into sort

of this mode of simultaneity.

But the subjunctive as a grammatical mood,

and I think as an artistic mood, is

interested in this departure from the now or this departure

from the historical archive into sort of this other space,

this space of the possible.

And I'm not sure what that--

what's the temporality of the possible?

I don't know.

It's a great question.

Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Congratulations, and that was fabulous.

I'm very interested in how you move from this attention

to the linguistic, the tense, and turn it into a methodology.

That is fascinating and I really appreciate that.

I wanted you to talk a little bit more

about what you were saying here and what she just asked about,

the uses of the past, right?

How these works are citing or reusing the past even

in this [SPANISH],, it is just in that,

recycling and reusing the Zapatista slogan.

And even though that is in Morelos,

which makes sense of course, as the homeland of Zapata.

Here, in this piece, there's a collapse of different Indigenous

references, right?

You talked about Maya, but the Coyolxauhqui Aztec,

and nothing to do with the present of the Zapotec people

who are at work here.

So is there-- what do you think about that use

of a homogeneous indigeneity, of a collapsing of an Indigenous

past with the living people that are defending these territories?

What do you think about those uses of the past?

CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yeah, I mean, it's certainly--

there is something problematic to the collapse

of the particularity and the specificity

of different Indigenous cosmologies

into this sort of idiom of speculative indigeneity,

right, that this artist is interested in.

And it's important to note that she is a Mestiza

artist as well, right?

So she is not herself Indigenous,

which I think is telling.

But I do think-- so in that sense,

I guess that she's in that same lineage as folks equally

problematic perhaps, like Gloria Anzaldua and other Chicana

thinkers who have turned back to,

like, shall we write as sort of this figure of feminist undoing

and repair?

So, yeah, I think that there is something problematic that

is happening there.

And honestly, like with these two,

where there's the absence of the pedagogical.

It's productive in many ways, but it's also

problematic in others because there's a total erasure of what

exactly who this person is.

What are the specificities of their fight?

And it sort of collapses the individual

into this idiom of impunity.

And so it's a risky move.

I feel I find it both generative and problematic.

AUDIENCE: Congratulations again.

I did love your book.

I saw it as a good model not only

to think about Mexico and cultural production

in the connection with climate change,

but also to think about beyond Mexico,

thinking about Latin America.

One of the things that you mentioned at the beginning,

you just quoted Amitav Ghosh.

And in Ghosh, what he says, you know, his indictment

of realist fiction, the way that realist fiction has not really

dealt with climate fiction.

He says there is an exception which is not realistic,

which is speculative fiction.

Speculative fiction has dealt with climate change

with fiction fantastica, sci-fi.

But he says, I'm not going to focus on that.

I'm not going to concentrate on that.

And when you talk about the possible, the subjunctive,

it is also the speculative.

And you say some of these works speculate.

But I'm trying to quote you, but you said something like,

but I am not going to do speculative fiction, which

is different from, for example, la companhia seems to me,

a speculative fiction.

So I just was wondering about your conscious decision

not to focus on a genre that would give you lots of texts

and work on dealing with climate fiction.

CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yeah.

Thank you so much, Edmundo.

I think-- so first of all, Amitav Ghosh

has not read Latin American literature.

That's all I have to say, because there's

a long tradition in Latin American literature

of realist literature that does deal with climate crisis.

In my class, we're reading all of it.

La [SPANISH], right?

All these novels that--

or La Novela de la Tierra, La Novela de la Selva,

realist fiction galore that deals with environmental crisis.

So Amitav Ghosh needs to read, needs to come to my class

and read realist fiction.

But actually, I confess that I began this project as a project

about speculation, and then I decided

it was too narrow, that the objects that I

wanted to talk about were not always speculative fiction.

And so, as a sort of a means of expanding the project

and thinking beyond the limitations of genre,

because I mean, I think you can say that this

is speculative fiction.

But I wasn't sure how exactly to make that case,

so I was thinking you know, instead of putting them

into a genre, why not talk about what

they're doing, which is to me, activating the subjunctive mode?

And I think that forms across multiple forms

of cultural production can activate the subjunctive mode

without necessarily being in that speculative genre.

But yes, it is sort of this thing

that I deal with in the introduction, where I say,

the subjunctive encompasses the speculative

but it also goes beyond the speculative.

AUDIENCE: Carolyn, thank you so much for the talk

and congratulations.

Super excited to read the book and have you sign it.

So, my question kind of gestures more to your use of desire

and how you talk about it as kind of, from what I heard,

like, a fight for another world, a desire

for defense of the land, and a desire

to think of worlds beyond capitalism, right?

And then I was thinking about like the erotic in land art

desire, and thinking of the artist's work,

of Naomi's work and her performance,

and reflecting on previous works of art like in the land art

genre, like Ana Mendieta, and how

she does a lot of, like, nude work

where she's directly kind of interacting or encountering

the land, and also thinking about--

I forget this artist's name, but like a walk

on the land where he, like, walks barefoot.

That's his performance, just walking barefoot on the land.

So I was kind of curious as to how

you would read the costumes in these performances,

if it's sort of a--

because you also talked about queering environmental art

and interrupting the gaze.

So thinking about how this is queering environmental art

in such a way, like, queering the tradition

of environmental art through the use of costumes

and an interruption of the gaze on, like, on the body,

like directly on the body and its interactions with the land.

Yeah, I don't know.

I'm just curious as to how you read the use of costumes

and, like, engagement with the land in this work.

CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yes.

Yeah, I mean, I think that--

I mean, the costumes are a key part of this trilogy

and there are all these DIY sort of recycled materials.

So we see, like, the plastic water

jugs on her head as part of her headdress,

and this insulation tube.

Each episode has this nawale, or animal spirit, right?

It's the axolotl, the hummingbird, and the opossum.

And Rincon Gallardo herself donned these costumes.

And they all have this sort of papier maché,

like, thrown together DIY aesthetic.

And she's talked a lot about how she's

inspired by B-movies from the '80s and '90s

of these really trashy, like, sci-fi films.

And so, in that way, it's very different from sort

of the, like, somber walking barefoot or nude repose

in the land, which is equally valid like forms of thinking

about body territory together, or like the human body is not

separate from but integrated into the landscape.

But yeah, I mean, it's doing something more irreverent

that I find refreshing.

AUDIENCE: Carolyn, congratulations.

When you mentioned the subjunctive mood,

you also say words as possibility,

as alternative realities.

And I was thinking about other term that

came to my mind, utopia, which is a term that I find

a lot in conversations about the climate

crisis, environmental issues nowadays.

So, how do you relate to that term, to utopia?

Do you find it useful, productive?

How does the subjunctive mode relate to utopianism?

CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yeah, that's a great question, Illiana.

I mean, like particularly in this piece,

like, utopia is very much present.

But I don't feel tied to the concept of utopia.

And so, particularly, because often for me, like,

my analysis is driven by works that are intriguing to me.

And often, these works are not performing utopia.

And so I wanted to allow for that multiplicity of feelings,

like La Compania, which articulates more of a dystopia.

But to bring all of these, what I

think of as a representative sampling of some

of the most interesting works that are performing,

this imaginative call.

AUDIENCE: I'm going to let a grad student reply.

CAROLYN FORNOFF: Very kind.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

Congratulations, Carolyn.

So my question goes in the sense that as I understand

that the subjunctive aesthetics do

complicate our notions or preconceptions of time, right,

and possible futures, et cetera.

But since these works are grounded--

pun intended or not--

in the land itself, in the territory, the landscape,

I was wondering if you also see in the works

that you analyze a complication of space itself.

And for example, if there is a idealized vision

of the land or the landscape, or if you

find there to be a complication of the notion of space

as much as there is one of time?

CAROLYN FORNOFF: Yeah.

I mean, I think definitely, there

are copious, abundant environmentalist

artworks that idealize space.

And I'm thinking of my fourth chapter,

the rural resilience film, where I look at films like [SPANISH],,

which is this observational documentary about the desert

where the gaze--

I sort of take that film to task for promoting a gaze that's

romanticized of rural hostility and of rural resilience

in the face of the hostility of drought.

And so it's actually in chapter 4

where I sort of complicate this idea

that subjunctive aesthetics is always

doing something generative.

I think that subjunctive aesthetics can also

be a way to think about how nostalgic or romanticized views

of the engagement with land can sort of perpetuate sort

of reductive ideas about ways to exist in relation to territory,

particularly when they're objects like Rincon Gallardo,

like this observational documentary that

are meant for consumption by people who do not

live in these spaces.

And so I talk in that chapter about the reception of some

of these arthouse observational documentaries

by global north audiences, who then sort of get this idea that,

OK, it's really hostile.

Drought is worsening, but you know,

these people are surviving.

And so in that chapter, I sort of think about some

of the potential problems and pitfalls

of the sensorial immersion in the idealized landscape.

[APPLAUSE]