Cuerpos y territorios

haceres locales como dispositivos de tensión.

Abstract

The editorial project Bodies and Territories (2024) explores the relationship between body, materiality, and territory in contemporary Chilean creative production, bringing together artisanal practices, critical thought, and ecological awareness. The selected works demonstrate how the body is constituted as a situated entity, traversed by affects, memories, and relationships with other human and non-human bodies, questioning the dualistic fragmentation inherited from Western modernity and proposing an ethic of attention and care. Through textiles, biomimicry, and diverse materials, the artists articulate formal strategies that create tension between the organic and the artificial, the rigid and the porous, the real and the imaginary, generating spaces where life manifests in constant transformation. Interventions on these materials communicate, signal, and restore meanings, activating a politics of care, interdependence, and the re-signification of local knowledge in response to global extractivist logics. Critical analyses, inspired by the reflections of Aimé Tapia González and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (among other authors), allow these pieces to be understood as surfaces where irresolvable tensions coexist, differences intersect, and ecological memory endures. An ethical and epistemological situated positioning becomes evident, where body and territory are living fabrics traversed by vulnerabilities and resistances, and where creativity is conceived as an extension of the environment. The project reveals how artistic creation can activate sensitive and critical experiences regarding the relationship between the human and non-human, between memory and materiality, and proposes an expanded mode of thought that integrates aesthetics, ethics, and ecology in reflections on contemporary territories.