Feminism, Animality and Mourning: Non-human Communities in Bestiario by Gabriela Rivera

Abstract

This article suggests the centrality of emerging Latin American aesthetic manifestations that address the connection between human and non-human life forms to account for contemporary practices and notions of community. Through a reading of the photographic series Bestiario (2015) by Gabriela Rivera, I investigate the ways in which the female body is being re-imagined in relation to paradigms that exceed the human to become enmeshed with other politics. I propose that, dismantling the human-animal hierarchy, Bestiario visibilizes the discursive and material filiation between animal and women’s lives, too often read as expendable and disposable in today’s urgent Latin American social context. This article argues that Rivera’s work offers both the animal (cadaver) and the female body that which they lack: a communal space for mourning in the face of the physical and discursive violence to which they are constantly subjected. Articulating those bodies and abject materialities from the specificity of the visual arts field, Bestiario offers them to a public/community which the piece interpellates both on the basis of the particular language deployed and the intense sensory and emotional response it elicits.