Agenda

In the Dissolution: Fragility at the Tide’s Edge

12 November 2025, 3 PM 

Ca’ Bottacin, Main Hall Dorsoduro 3911, Calle Crosera, Venice

Abstract:
In this talk, I contend with the fragile subject of water and the dissolution of the sea’s edge as a metaphor and material geography that allows for a different kind of theorizing and writing practice about the blurred line between life and death. Through a focus on embodiment, and narrative story telling amidst the colonial Anthropocene, I attend to the qualities of scale, damage, and destruction as representations of living in a dramatically altered but still inhabitable planet.  

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities, authoritarianism and extractivism, queer Latine epistemes, media environments, cultural theory and artistic practice. She is author of four books including, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) that examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarity in troubled times. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press. She is working on two new books. Macarena is Chair of Modern Culture and Media and Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor at Brown University.

Participation:

Places are limited, please fill in this form to register.