CULTURAL TECHNIQUES AND AESTHETIC TACTICS FOR A NEW NATURAL CONTRACT. TOWARDS A THIRD SPACE FROM SOUTHERN SENSIBILITIES

Abstract

In the current political-environmental crisis context, the disconnection between the scientific representation of the crisis and its situated understanding becomes a central problem, which has raised reflections on the socio-epistemic conditions of the representation. Faced with this disconnection, sociology and philosophy of science have proposed a new type of agreement or “natural contract” between the environment and human practices for the coexistence in a common world. What could such a new natural contract involve? What forms can it take in our local scenario? This article describes the problem of the representational crisis and analyses two cases located in Magallanes and the Chilean Antarctica Region, which undertake this problem from non-academic knowledge spaces that operate from the crossroads between art and science: Natural History Museum Río Seco and the Liquenlab Art Laboratory. Section 1 introduces the problem of the representational crisis from a medial and socio-technical approach. Section 2 describes the context of the Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica region as a geopolitically figured territory based on scientific representations. Section 3 describes the case studies as "cultural techniques". To do so, we analyze the institutional identity, the curatorial interests, the socio-technical conditions and the aesthetic production techniques of these new spaces of knowledge. In particular, we propose the concept of "aesthetic tactics" to interpret the socioepistemic effects of both cases, distinguishing four structural components: composition, operation, scale, materiality. Section 4 concludes that the situated understandings of the representations and scientific knowledge of both cases contribute to generating a new contract between nature and society, from the calculated imbrication of artistic and scientific cultural techniques, with which they manage to establish aesthetic tactics to return on the political and socio-technical conditions of the representation.