The Work of the Imagination: Art and Socio-Ecological Futures in Argentina

In this paper I ask what ideas, memories, arguments, imaginaries, and stories, Argentinian visual artists and collectives who have publicly exhibited artworks that address environmental issues mobilise to articulate their visions of socio-ecological futures. Using a cultural sociology approach and drawing on interview material, I consider the imagination to be an individual capacity to facilitate action and direct the research lens to what artists actually do to produce alternative imaginaries of better socio-ecological futures. We will see that artists pursue the latter not by imagining future possibilities and re-defining the present in light of such future possibilities, but by developing artistic explorations and artistic ways of knowing that entail a critical evaluation of the relation between the human and the more-than-human worlds, a strong consciousness of the past as a frame of reference to make sense of current environmental problems and challenges, and a questioning of modern notions of progress, development, and socio-historical time. I show that these artists do the ‘work of the imagination’ by locating their individual and collective agency and their aesthetic action in concrete places and times and by working towards the production of alternative imaginaries that seek to unsettle and challenge dominant capitalist, neo-colonialist and extractivist imaginaries.