Advisor/tutor: Rachel O'Reilly

Arnhem, August 2019

Abstract

This thesis seeks to identify and engage with the root causes and western imaginaries that have contributed to the current environmental planetary crisis that defines this epoch some call the Anthropocene. To do this I draw upon decolonial, feminist and eco-Marxist critiques of its narrativization that connect it to the world-making praxis of early capitalism and colonialism, and the epistemic and aesthetic projects that accompanied it. I look at how the subsequent rifts constructed through the separation and privileging of culture over nature and mind over matter continue to limit the imaginations and narrations that western artistic and academic institutions (re)produce. In response I identify the possibility for an artistic praxis to open up space for dialogue between conceptual and perceptual approaches to making visible our embedded and embodied entanglement within capitalist/colonial systems and the web of life they are situated in.