Proposal for a post-extractivist aesthetic regime

Abstract

With Phantom Recorder (2018), Adrián Balseca questions the corporality of the world in the age of the Anthropocene. Currently, as the influence of human activity upon Earth has become a major geological force, capable of irreversibly transforming the planetary ecosystem, Balseca gets involved as an artist to create a symbology of these challenges on Ecuadorian territory. His work is the reflection of a non-modern practice in which boundaries between the functional, the utopian, and the poetic are increasingly blurred. In this text, we suggest that, through the visual and acoustic strategies of Phantom Recorder, the artist subverts the colonial regime both for the arts and for the Amazon territory. We will also pay special attention to the artist creative process of Phantom Recorder, which questions energy models of modernity and the inequalities it produced and offers us an alternative aesthetic regime outside the bounds of a neoclassical economic model based on fossil fuel extraction.