Figueira
One Thousand Suns:
Solar Entanglements in Extractive, Indigenous, and Aesthetic Imaginaries
In a time of social and environmental crises, this dissertation proposes looking at the sun as a way of paying attention to the entangled human and more-than-human relationships at play in processes of planetary change. Through an interdisciplinary approach, it investigates the ways in which the sun and solar energy participate in making and unmaking worlds in the Atacama Desert – the sunniest place on Earth – where histories of coloniality, environmental degradation and ancestral resilience converge. This project travels through differing solar imaginaries – from the sun that takes part in lithium extraction, to the underground sun of the Indigenous Lickanantay people, and then to the eclipse of the sun in aesthetic practices – to find out how a focus on solar relations might help us re-imagine some of the ecological problems we face today.
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Breathing Otherwise:
The Coloniality of Air
and
Indigenous Air Conditioning
This essay explores how enduring forms of coloniality shape the air we breathe, linking practices like air conditioning and urban pollution to contemporary social and environmental inequalities. Drawing on postcolonial thinkers, it examines how the slow violence of colonial traditions in medicine and architecture shape unequal atmospheres, with examples such as India’s air pollution crisis. Indigenous sensory practices are discussed by centering Indigenous scholars and their accounts of how they might provide strategies against air’s coloniality. They give us a glimpse at airs that resist, calling for a rethinking of air as a site of (in)justice and decolonial potential.
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Anthropocene Aesthetics:
A Revaluation of Values
Could our environmental efforts be shaped by the very values that led to ecological devastation? This essay challenges the myth of progress, questioning whether our conceptions of “nature” can sustain us in a collapsing world. Drawing from Nietzsche and Alfred North Whitehead, it calls for a revaluation of values and a reclamation of aesthetics – not as a domain of judgment, but as a practice of creating new ways of living and sensing in turbulent times. Through a focus on the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a radical experiment in resistance against capitalist infrastructure, the essay explores how an expanded, pluralist aesthetics might open paths to alternative value-ecologies and affirm new possibilities for inhabiting a damaged planet.
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Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Contemporary Directions
After Susan Buck-Morss
Building on Walter Benjamin’s critique of the aestheticization of fascism, Susan Buck-Morss’ essay ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics’ (1992) shows how technological advances in surgery paralleled cultural shifts with dangerous political consequences. This essay revisits her key arguments to demonstrate their relevance today through an exploratory constellation of contemporary thinkers such as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Cressida J. Heyes and others. By tracing multiple paths through the entanglements of sensory experience and politics, the essay explores how a reconsideration of aesthetics as a bodily, sensory realm might generate possible responses to the alienation of modern life.
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