Juliana Robles de la Pava – Material Ecopolitics and Contemporary Aesthetics from the South

What does it mean to think of a material politics of art in a situated way? How do materials
also partly construct the meanings of artistic artifacts and turn them into contesting
objects? In this project, Juliana Robles de la Pava develops how the material agencies in
certain practices of contemporary artists from South America -such as Valeria Conte Mac
Donell from Argentina, Aldo Chaparro from Peru and Sheroanawe Hakhiiwe from the
Venezuelan Amazon- configure a material micropolitics capable of rewriting certain
codes of Modern Aesthetics and Western Art History from which poetics have been
developed and from which Patrimonial, Historiographic and Theoretical art policies have
been undertaken. Thus, Juliana argues in this research that the material agencies involved
in these practices are not only elements of individual choice, nor formal qualities of
artistic objects, but that these material agencies also trace an ethics and a politics of
aesthetic artifacts linked to a sensitive mesh in which different types of human and extrahuman
beings are woven and complicated. These practices expose a way of understanding
the relationship with “nature” and other existences that can be read in the key of a Worldecology
in which the materials themselves reveal relations of power, reproduction and
value.

Juliana Robles de la Pava holds a PhD in History and Theory of the Arts from the
Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Her doctoral
thesis was focused on developing a material ontology of photography, taking as a
conceptual framework the interdisciplinary studies on artistic materiality and
contemporary theories of the New Materialisms, the Ontological Turn and Critical
Posthumanism. She also holds a master’s degree in Curatorial Studies in Visual Arts from
the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) and a bachelor’s degree and
professor of Arts from the University of Buenos Aires. She teaches at the same university
in the Department of Arts in the courses: Studies on Photography and Historiography of
the Visual Arts. She has been a fellow of the National Council of Scientific and Technical
Research of Argentina and obtained a doctoral fellowship from the Bunge y Born
Foundation and the Espigas Foundation at the Getty Research Institute. She works as a
researcher at the Centro de Investigación en Arte, Materia y Cultura IIAC-UNTREF.
Juliana was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Centre
for Advanced Study, inherit. Heritage in transformation at the Humboldt – Universität zu
Berlin for 2024. She is author of several articles in academic journals and co-editor of the
book The depth of surfaces. Studies on photographic materiality (2022).