PhD | Ecologies of Repair and Reparation: The reparative potential of Heritage and Art Practices in Latin America

PhD | Ecologies of Repair and Reparation: The reparative potential of Heritage and Art Practices in Latin America
PhD candidate: Maria Suarez Caicedo
Institution: University of Amsterdam

This PhD project seeks to expand the orientation towards processes of decolonization in the field of museum and heritage studies beyond actions of restitution and repatriation of objects, aiming towards a redefinition of reparations that involve forms of worldly repair in the face of environmental crises. Moreover, the project aims to recognize the entanglements between social and ecological damage and forms of repair that address both. To achieve this, the research will focus on case studies from Latin America, a region where the complexities of colonial legacies have made explicit precisely these entanglements between social and ecological damage; and where the victims of these damages are engaging in alternative forms of repair for themselves and their territories. The project’s central question is through which processes, ideas and representations do community-based artistic and heritage practices engage in modes of social and ecological reparation in Latin America? To answer this question, the project will focus on the artistic-heritage objects produced by communities and artists, drawing on methods from cultural analysis, and on the artistic-heritage practices in which these communities engage, using ethnographic methods such as emplaced and active participation and observation and interviewing. By emphasizing the ecological dimension of reparations, the project seeks to connect the natural and cultural-social aspects of this process and highlight the link between environmental degradation and processes of social injustice.