Inquiry

Our viewpoints are deeply ingrained, both implicitly and explicitly. What’s necessary to see outside them? We ask this well-aware that Eurocentrism, colonialism, and anthropocentrism structure the dominant ways of knowing, thinking, and doing in the Global North. How can art and pedagogical practices introduce new ways of thinking? Rather than looking from above, practitioners urge us to look from aslant, or from below: from non-human and more-than-human livelihoods; from outside Eurocentric canons; and from, as scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris writes in relation to the work of Carolina Caycedo, the “submerged perspectives” of knowledge traditions that have been actively suppressed. Visual arts practices often elicit shifts of perspective. Those seen here question subjecthood, sentience, agency, livelihood—asking at a fundamental level: who or what gets to claim the legitimacy of what they know and experience?