Invitation to the Defense of Luis Ortiz

The Examination Panel is made up of: Janine Jembere (chair), Anette Baldauf and  Renate Lorenz (supervisors), and Fredy Mora Gámez (external appraiser, University of Vienna).

Abstract

Mountains have been often places of colonial fracture and capitalist extractivism as well as of refuge and resistance. In times of necropolitics (Mbembe), the relations with them are frequently marked by death and destruction. This research looks for ways to ethically rerelating with the mountains and acknowledging their interactions with us, particularly as migrant bodies-territories. The project considers indigenous epistemologies of territory as a shared place in ontological relation with all related beings and a feeling-thinking understanding of the world. These concepts are expanded through the Aymara ch’ixi positionality, the ambivalent concurrence of fractured cultures, according to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, that presents how beings are and are not simultaneously. These ideas and the resistance of the mountains’ inhabitants bring possibilities of existence in the apparently empty spaces between the mountains. The methodology develops a weaving in the wind of diverse mountain-beings precisely in those spaces. Through exercises of listening to our silences and strategies of poetical resistance, a chain of relational artworks is created that helps to relate to the mountains. These artworks were created in collaboration with several partners in four different phases (stations) in Germany, Mexico, and Colombia, aimed at understanding mountains as traveling the spirals of space-time. This understanding is based upon indigenous conceptualizations of time and belonging with the whole world as territory.

Short biography

Originally from a town on Colombia's Pacific coast, Luis Ortiz has a history of migration during infancy to Bogotá, as a teenager alone to Germany, and later back to Colombia. He studied Film Studies and Fine Arts at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and University of the Arts Berlin. He is now a candidate for a Ph.D. in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His artistic and socially engaged work has been based on extensive collaborations with social organizations and communitarian art collectives in different countries. He approaches these collaborations from a decolonial positionality of feelingthinking with human and nonhuman beings. His artistic and pedagogical practice deals with migration, racism, extractivism, ecological planetary crisis, and social inequality, all in a global context. In this way, he investigates the possibilities of methodologies/aesthetics of care and poetical resistance. Recipient of a DOC Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Institute of Cultural Studies of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna for his doctoral project.

The thesis defense will be in English and will take place at the Academy at Schillerplatz, room 201i.

We are looking forward to welcoming you.