From Sacrifice Zones to Cultivation Grounds
Multispecies Ontology and the Curatorial Practice of Mutual Nurturance
Guely Morató Loredo
JUST PRACTICES: Artistic Research, Curating, and Climate Justice
From Sacrifice Zones to Cultivation Grounds
Listen to a conversation around the ideas developed in this essay
Statement
My practice operates at the intersection of artistic research, curatorial methodology, and territorial fieldwork. I develop situated forms of knowledge through listening, relational epistemologies, and collective processes.
Working across the Andean-Amazonian region and international institutional frameworks, I examine how extractivism is sustained not only through material infrastructures but through ontological systems that define value, perception, and relations between human and more-than-human worlds.
Through Sonandes, I have established a research infrastructure where curating functions as a practice of mutual nurturance (yanak uywaña), shifting from presentation toward cultivation.
My projects function as epistemic devices, producing knowledge through material transformation, duration, and participation. My current research focuses on technodiversity as a critical and practical horizon.
Sonandes: Germinal Ground
I founded Sonandes as a space for collective learning and thought: an artistic research infrastructure developing long-term, situated methodologies at the intersection of listening, territory, and artistic practice. Its foundation is international and interspecies cooperation, operating across Latin America and global institutional frameworks as a space for epistemic exchange.
The work is grounded in field research developed with communities, ecosystems, and more-than-human entities. From that foundation, Sonandes hosts the only Sound Art Biennial in Latin America, the Puertos creative residency programme, long-term research projects, exhibitions specialised in sound and listening, laboratories, and publications.
Its structure responds to a logic of nurturance rather than event production: each programme feeds the others, generating an ecosystem of knowledge that grows alongside the communities and territories that inhabit it.
From Sacrifice Zones to Cultivation Grounds: Multispecies Ontology and the Curatorial Practice of Mutual Nurturance.
Abstract
This research proposes Yanak Uywaña (Andean mutual nurturance) as a curatorial methodology to transform cultural institutions, shifting their extractive logic toward multispecies practices of care. Starting from the paradox of the energy transition, the study critically addresses the accelerated temporality of contemporary capitalism.
Through multinaturalism and cosmotechnics, it articulates a relational epistemology in which materiality, territories, and non-human temporalities co-produce knowledge. The proposal is grounded in a trilogy of artistic projects (Wak’a, Triangle of Sacrifice, Rare Earths) that map sacrifice zones in the Global South and their entanglements with European centers of consumption.
The Dutch context, a key node within extractive networks yet endowed with institutional capacity to demand transparency, offers fertile ground for these inquiries. By articulating ancestral knowledge and critical heritage, the research develops long-term interventions that operate as living epistemic devices.
Beyond representation, the project functions as a situated praxis, translating cultural memory into curatorial protocols that prioritize gestation and reciprocity. By interrogating how museums can shift from exhibition to nurturance, it explores new social choreographies and circular temporalities, positioning institutions as sites of climate justice and coexistence.
In the Andes,
the future, like a child,
is carried on the back
Trilogy Framework
From Ontological Paradigms to Everyday Complicity
This trilogy articulates a research trajectory that moves from the analysis of extractive paradigms to their embodied, material, and everyday manifestations.
Together, the three researchs constitute a methodological progression: from ontology to materiality, from witnessing to complicity. The trilogy constructs conditions in which extractivism can be perceived, inhabited, and critically reconfigured. In this sense, the projects function as epistemic devices through which alternative modes of relation, grounded in listening, reciprocity, and technodiversity, begin to emerge.
Wak’a
Neo-extractivism, Sacredness & Deep Listening
Establishes the epistemic ground by examining how regimes of belief organize the conditions of extraction. It identifies sacrality as a governing infrastructure that determines what can be taken, from whom, and under which terms. This first movement situates extractivism within a broader cosmological and political economy.
Triangle of Sacrifice
Infrastructures of Technocolonialism
Displaces this inquiry into the realm of material experience. Extraction is no longer analyzed as a paradigm but enacted as a process that unfolds through time, matter, and perception. The work produces knowledge through corrosion, duration, and the ethical condition of witnessing, where the subject becomes implicated in what is observed.
Rare Earths
Open Score for a Broken Chain
Extends this trajectory into the scale of everyday life. Here, extractivism is traced within the micro-gestures that sustain global supply chains, revealing complicity as a distributed and embodied condition. Participation becomes performative, collapsing distance between system and subject.
WAK’A: Neo-extractivism, Sacredness & Deep Listening
Ontological Paradigms and the Political Economy of the Sacred
Wak’a traces three coexisting belief structures that organize power and economic value across time. Andean animism regulates territory through reciprocal obligations between communities and ecosystems, where extraction remains bound to relational accountability. Evangelization fractures this condition, displacing the sacred and redefining land as inert, ownable matter. In doing so, it establishes the ontological ground upon which extractivism operates.
Contemporary technology extends this transformation as a new liturgical regime. It mobilizes faith in progress, consolidates authority through opacity, and normalizes sacrifice zones as conditions of development. Its force is not only infrastructural but symbolic, sustained through belief systems that remain largely unquestioned.
Within this continuum, sacrality emerges as a governing infrastructure rather than a residual spiritual category. What a society holds as sacred delineates the limits of extraction, assigning value, legitimacy, and disposability. Wak’a reveals that extractivism does not begin with the act of extraction itself, but with the prior reconfiguration of what is allowed to be taken, and what must remain untouchable.
Technology promises
immortality,
no longer in heaven
but on Mars.
TRIANGLE OF SACRIFICE: Infrastructures of Technocolonialism
Epistemic Materiality and the Implicated Witness
Triangle of Sacrifice unfolds extraction as a material and epistemic process. Through calibrated saline dripping, the sculptures corrode in real time, registering the environmental cost of lithium mining as a gradual transformation of matter. Knowledge takes form through duration, exposure, and the visible erosion of structure.
The temporality of the work is irreversible. Its outcome is known, yet its unfolding demands sustained attention. This condition displaces the viewer toward a position of witnessing that carries ethical consequence. To witness is to become inscribed within the event, as in juridical testimony, where presence implies responsibility.
As the process advances, the installation recalibrates perception. Matter diminishes, sound thins, and space loses stability. The dense vibrational field of the Lithium Triangle slowly dissipates into wind, while light withdraws until the room is left in darkness. Visibility itself collapses alongside the object.
At its limit, the work becomes inaccessible. Entry is no longer possible; only the trace of the process remains. Corrosion, disappearance, and the persistence of wind mark the exhaustion of a sacrifice zone. What remains is not representation, but aftermath. Matter, having reached its threshold, produces silence as its final form of knowledge.
RARE EARTHS: Open Score for a Broken Chain
Supply Chains and Everyday Complicity
Rare Earths maps global supply chains through situated, repeatable actions that shift across territories and contexts. The chain does not break; it disperses. Its continuity depends on its fragmentation across scales, embedded within the ordinary rhythms of contemporary life.
The work attends to the micro-gestures that sustain extractivism. Eating, or refusing to eat, condenses planetary infrastructures into intimate bodily experience, where decision and consequence become inseparable. These minimal actions echo the distributed nature of global systems, where responsibility rarely appears as a singular act.
Participation unfolds as performance. The audience activates the same logic it is invited to examine, inhabiting the tension between awareness and implication. Meaning accumulates through repetition, variation, and the gradual recognition of one’s position within the chain.
As an open score, the work resists closure. It remains contingent, shaped by each iteration and its specific conditions. Listening operates here as an ethical practice, not only amplifying voices from territories under extraction, but reconfiguring the conditions under which those voices can be perceived. Within this framework, complicity is not an abstract condition but a lived, everyday relation.
Copper, gold, tin, lithium
An audio fragment from Rare Earths, an open score that mutates each time it inhabits a Sacrifice Zone.