Manifesto: Fertilizing mourning – Global South’s offering to a world in flames

Eliana Otta

doi:10.1386/jgmc_00060_1

ISSN: 2052-3971
E-ISSN: 2052-398X

Manifesto: Fertilizing mourning – Global South’s offering to a world in flames
By Eliana Otta¹
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Affiliations: ¹ ISNI: 0000000115406984 Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
Source: Journal of Greek Media & Culture, Volume 8, Issue Greece and the South: Grammars of Comparison, Protest, and Futurity, edited by Maria Boletsi and Dimitris Papanikolaou, Oct 2022, p. 247 - 257
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00060_1
Language: English
- Received: 12 Aug 2021
- Accepted: 05 Jul 2022
- Published online: 01 Oct 2022

Abstract

This manifesto takes the coincidence of Peru’s and Greece’s bicentennials of independence, and their overlap with the COVID-19 pandemic, as a departure point, in order to propose a different understanding of mourning from the Global South. The article is an open invitation to reinforce mourning’s capacity to be a reproductive life force, responding to contemporary experiences of loss in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accelerated processes of extinction, especially in resource extraction zones, like the Amazon. Taking inspiration from ancient Indigenous techniques for soil regeneration, fertilizing mourning is a call to merge traditional knowledge, collective practices and non-anthropocentric world-views that resist individualism and capitalism both in the Global South and in places that defend communal life in the north of the planet. This manifesto proposes that to transform prevalent colonial, modern structures, it is necessary to develop a different relationship with nature, by reconsidering the entanglements between life, death and regeneration.

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2022-10-01

2024-04-27

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Manifesto: Fertilizing mourning – Global South’s offering to a world in flames

Journal of Greek Media & Culture 8, 247 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00060_1

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Article Type: Article

Keyword(s): Amazon; collectivity; extractivism; Indigenous communities; necropolitics; sacred struggles; Yana Allpa

Manifesto: Fertilizing mourning – Global South’s offering to a world in flames

Abstract

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