Art can promote critical thinking and awareness for social issues. It can be an instrument of power, or on the contrary, art of denunciation, an activist art. In the 1960s and 1970s, art made by women was associated with feminist causes, such as the well-known artist Yoko Ono, and with environmental causes, such as Jo Hansen, Mary Beth Edelson, Patricia Johanson, among others. Eco-feminist art emerged in the late 1960s amid the development of conceptual art, a type of ecological and spiritual feminism that reflected on the exclusion of women from the art market aswell as the symbol of women in connection with nature.
Today, thought the legacies of international feminist are manifested in a vast field of artistic productions, knowledge and research practices that continue to be widely discussed, sometimes with difficulties, doubts and prejudices.
Feminist and eco-feminist art thus plays an important role, not only because it tells what history has silenced, but also because it proposes a critical dialog with the capitalist model and seeks alternatives: Countering the exploitative vision of patriarchy with artistic representations that are more organic, systemic, just, resilient and fertile, like the very alliance that links women to nature.
For this Webinar, which aims to take an international perspective, integrated researcher Teresa Lousa is inviting artists and researchers working on contemporary art issues, particularly in the feminist and ecofeminist field:
Mari Fraga, whose artistic work is based above all on body-earth and women-nature approaches in the context of the Anthropocene and Climate Change, is inspired by ecofeminism, Amerindian worldviews, decolonial and Latin American epistemologies. She is a visual artist, researcher and professor at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Rio de Janeiro, PhD in Arts from UERJ (2016); creator of Carbono Magazine (www.revistacarbono.com); leader of the research group GAE Arte:Ecologias. Experimenta.
Isadora Mattiolli is an artist, professor and independent curator. She has a Master's degree in Visual Arts (UFRGS) and a degree in Visual Arts (UFPR). Researches contemporary art from a feminist perspective, with an emphasis on artistic processes in photography, video and performance. She has been a lecturer in Cultural Production at EMBAP (UNESPAR) since 2019 and a guest lecturer at the Postgraduate Program in Art History and Curatorship at PUC - PR since 2018. She has been curating institutional and independent exhibitions since 2016, with a focus on emerging artists.
Taís Cardoso is completing her PhD and has a master's degree in Art History, Theory and Criticism and a bachelor's degree in Social Sciences/Anthropology from UFRGS. She works in research, writing and organizing contemporary art exhibitions. Taís is interested in thinking about artistic processes with feminist and queer approaches that touch on issues related to ecology and technology. Among various themes, she has worked on Donna Haraway's feminist epistemology. Her texts have been published in periodicals such as Revista Parêntese, Folha de São Paulo and the IMS Blog.
Moderation
Teresa Lousa (CHAM)
Coordination
Isabel Soares de Albergaria (CHAM)
Organization
CHAM Açores
Research Group «Art, History, and Heritage»
