Performative Strategies in the Extractive Periphery: Resisting Colonial-Capitalist Logics of Dissolution in the Anthropocene

• Main Author: Frappier, Valérie
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: extractivism; land-based performance; performance strategies; Indigenous knowledges; colonial-capitalist critique; Levin; Tahltan; anishina*
• Online Access: http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/3050/; http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/3050/1/Frappier_Vale%CC%81rie_2020_MFA_CCP_thesis.pdf

Situated at the intersections of performance, decolonial and ecological theory, this thesis posits embodied performance strategies as a catalyst for subverting the colonial-capitalist logics of extractivism. Through close readings of the work of contemporary artists Tsēmā Igharas (Tahltan), Otobong Nkanga (Nigerian-born, Antwerp-based), Warren Cariou (Métis and European ancestry), Carolina Caycedo (Colombian mestizx, Los Angeles-based) and Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), this thesis argues that the performing body translates extractive politics into the immediacy of the senses through the micro and intimate aesthetics of the corporeal to engage in a form of critical public pedagogy. Drawing on the work of scholars Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Laura Levin and Wanda Nanibush, this study queries what submerged perspectives are voiced and made visible in the extractive zone, and frames these perspectives within the current discourse of the Anthropocene. The artists’ land-based praxes, foregrounding Indigenous knowledges, are examined as a type of field research of specific regions’ geopolitics and temporalities—praxes which conceptualize alternative ways of representing and thinking about land through the performance of place-based relationality.