Marisol de la Cadena

Marisol de la Cadena was trained as an anthropologist in Peru, England, France and the United States. Her interests are located at the interface between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and non-STS, and they include the study politics, multispecies (or multi-entities) relations, indigeneity, history and the a-historical, world anthropologies and the anthropologies of worlds. In all these areas, her concern is the relationship between concepts and methods, and interfaces as analytical sites. More prosaically, de la Cadena is interested in ethnographic concepts – those that blur the distinction between what we call theory and the empirical — that can also indicate the limits of both and thus open them up to what exceeds them.

Her recent book, Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015), is based on conversations with two Quechua speaking men that lived in Cuzco (Peru). These conversations are a “thinking-together” about life at the intriguing crossroads where modern politics (and history) and earth-beings (and the ahistorical) meet and diverge, thus exceeding each other. The book is an ethnography concerned with the concreteness of incommensurability and the eventfulness of the ahistorical. Currently de la Cadena’s field sites are cattle ranches and veterinary schools in Colombia. There she engages practices and relations between people, cows, and “things” in general. Thinking at divergent bio/geo interfaces, de la Cadena is interested in capturing “the stuff” that makes life and death in conditions of dramatic ecological and political change as the country endures extreme droughts and floods and wants to transition between the violence of war to a condition of peace that might not be without violence. 

T.J. Demos

T.J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology and is the author of numerous books, including Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016), Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, (Sternberg Press, 2017), and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013)—winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award.