NICA recommends | Glacial Conversations

NICA recommends | Glacial Conversations
Date: 19 May 2025
Time: 15:00-19:00
Location: Utrecht, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons (Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA)
Contact & registration: info@casco.art
Read more here.

Part of the Public Program of the exhibition Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song

Glacial Conversations is a gathering initiated by Teresa Borasino as part of her artistic proposal for Sensing the Ways, exploring the entanglement of epistemicide—the erasure of ways of knowing—and colonial extractivism. The program invites reflection through embodied practice and ritual performance and unfolds through dialogue with Yolanda Quispe and Vito Calderón, Teresa’s co-weavers and interlocutors from Andean territories of extraction; interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and academic, Macarena Gómez-Barris; and Peruvian artist and filmmaker Mirella Moschella. Together, these contributions bring forward relational epistemologies long obscured by dominant paradigms, centering decolonial approaches to knowledge, arts, and resistance.

This event builds upon Teresa’s long-term research, Glacial Resurgence, which focuses on the rapidly shrinking Quelccaya—the world’s largest tropical glacier, now redefined as a sacrifice zone for lithium mining. The term “sacrifice zone” refers to territories devastated by colonial violence for capital accumulation. Yet, rooted in the Latin “sacrare”—to make sacred—it also holds the potential for reverence. Glacial Resurgence is grounded in this paradox: a call to reclaim desecrated lands as sacred sites and to cultivate pluriversal alternatives that center the care of all living beings, countering extractive worldviews.

Program Outline

14:00–15:00 Walk-in and exhibition visit
15:00–15:20 Welcome words and introduction to Glacial Conversations
15:20–15:40 Embodied Grounding, a collective exercise

Glacial Conversations
15:40–16:10 A Ritual Performance: Teresa Borasino in conversation with Quelccaya
16:10–16:15 Break
16:15–17:00 Voices with Quelccaya: Yolanda Quispe and Vito Calderón in conversation with Teresa Borasino
17:00–17:20 Q&A
17:20–17:30 Break
17:30–18:20 Macarena Gómez-Barris on the arts of decolonial resistance
18:20–19:00 Q&A and closing reflections
19:00–20:30 A shared meal of Peruvian food by Mirella Moschella

The program begins with an invitation to tune into our bodies through a simple gesture: a practical exercise of holding an ice cube. This act draws attention to the sensations and feelings that arise, gradually expanding awareness to the space around us and the ground that supports us. The exercise enables the possibility of sensing other presences—both within our bodies (such as the microbiome, bacteria, viruses, gut archaea, fungi, etc.) and outside our bodies (including air, people, ancestors, glaciers, and more).

This exercise is followed by a ritual performance by Teresa with Quelccaya, a living being and her conversation partner. The performance intertwines video, spoken word, and a soundscape by Ibelisse Guardia Ferraguti, channeling reverence and reciprocity as antidotes to extractivism.

Having grounded ourselves in a deeper and wider relational presence, Teresa invites us into a conversation with Yolanda and Vito (joining remotely), who generously share their lived experiences of coexisting with a dying glacier and resisting the escalation of colonial extractivism in the search for lithium—the new “white gold” fueling distant economies at the cost of ecological destruction.

Expanding the conversation, we are honored to welcome Macarena for an in-person lecture on the art of decolonial resistance to extractive capitalism, drawing connections with the issues that have long occupied Teresa’s work. Macarena’s research explores the ongoing frontiers of colonial occupation, where bodies, lands, and waters are rendered disposable under global capitalism. She invites us to engage with submerged perspectives—relational, ancestral, decolonial, and queer ways of knowing—that help us dismantle coloniality and reimagine systems of knowledge and life.

The evening concludes with a shared meal of Peruvian food prepared by artist and filmmaker Mirella, whose research explores the relational, embodied knowledge that emerges through growing food—asking how ancestral plants can activate questions of memory, care, and community within diasporic and ecological  contexts. Centering maíz morado, her cultivation of the plant in Dutch soil becomes a relational gesture through which resilience, resistance, and adaptation are observed. As the plant negotiates unfamiliar light, water, and climate, its journey mirrors the lived experience of migration: a body learning how, or whether, to take root in a foreign landscape. Extending this research into the realm of food, Chicha Morada—a traditional purple corn drink—is served as a gesture of gratitude to the Dutch land for hosting the Peruvian seeds, accompanied by vegan adaptations of Papa a la Huancaína and Arroz con Pollo.

Along with the food, we celebrate the launch of the Quelccaya Foundation—a platform committed to defending the glacier, fostering relational ways of knowing, and creating spaces for learning and unlearning through decolonial ecologies.

Please reserve your spot via info@casco.art.

Biographies of the contributors

Macarena Gómez-Barris is an interdisciplinary writer and scholar focused on decolonial ecologies, extractivism, media environments, queer Latinx struggles, marginalized epistemologies, and artistic practice. She is the author of several books, including The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017), which examines the impacts of extractive capitalism; Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, 2018), which explores submerged art and solidarities in times of crisis; and Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009). Macarena is series editor, with Diana Taylor, of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press and is currently working on her forthcoming book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press), which examines colonial oceanic transits. A member of the Social Text Collective, she has authored numerous essays and curatorial projects and founded the Elemental Media Lab at the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

Vito Yuganson Calderón Villanueva is an Aymara social communicator and advocate for the rights of Quechua and Aymara Indigenous peoples in the Puno region of Peru. He serves as the communications coordinator at Derechos Humanos y Medio Ambiente (DHUMA), a non-governmental organization that supports Aymara and Quechua communities in Puno affected by extractive mining activities. Vito has played an essential role in documenting and raising awareness about the environmental and health impacts of mining in his community, including the presence of heavy metals in local children. He is also a key participant in the III Caravana por la Ecología Integral, a Latin American initiative that denounces the harmful effects of extractive industries on Indigenous territories

Yolanda Quispe is a Quechua alpaca herder, park ranger, and rondera—a member of self-organised land defense patrols in the Andes—living at the foothills of the Quelccaya glacier in the community of Phinaya, Cusco. As a park ranger in the Ausangate Regional Conservation Area, she monitors the retreating glacier and its surrounding ecosystems, witnessing the devastating effects of climate change on local water sources and pasturelands. For Yolanda, protecting Quelccaya is not only about survival but also a sacred responsibility: “The glacier is like my father, my mother. To protect it is an honour.”

Mirella Moschella is a Peruvian artist and filmmaker currently completing a Master in Fine Arts at HKU. Her practice intertwines themes of migration, feminism, and the enduring struggles over land and colonialism. Through seeds as carriers of memory and resistance, she explores how ancestral knowledge and radical care can be cultivated and sustained. Rooted in the kitchens, soils, and public spaces of Abya Yala, her work engages with food, textiles, documentary filmmaking, and activism to create spaces for storytelling and political imagination. By honoring embodied knowledge and everyday rituals, Mirella’s work traces the interconnectedness between human and non-human beings, territories, and histories that persist in the face of displacement.