if I devoted my life to one of its feathers? : aesthetic responses to extraction. accumulation, and dispossession

“And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?” wrote the Chilean poet, artist, and feminist activist Cecilia Vicuña in the early 1970s. Vicuña countered anthropocentric and hetero-patriarchal urges with healing and appreciation, reviving the aesthetic and spiritual bonds between human and more-than-human entities and worlds. Revolving around this vision of interconnectivity, this book, which accompanies a joint exhibition of the same name of Kunsthalle Wien and Wiener Festwochen, seeks to create a collective dialogue around unequal distribution of power, sovereignty, and social and ecological justice.
The exhibited works and written contributions reflect on the rationale of exploitation, the fast-paced mining of raw materials, and environmental destruction as a colonial legacy. They deconstruct Western anthropocentric models and enduring colonial and racist discourses, trace the stories of indigenous struggles for collective survival, and celebrate encounters defined by solidarity in their resistance to capitalist extraction, misogyny, imperialist violence, and dispossession.