Introduction: Convection Currents in Latin American and Caribbean Geo‐Aesthetics

Abstract

Just as tectonic plates move, coalesce and redefine landscape, cultural and aesthetic currents are both shaping and shaped by the material affordances of the planet. Such motions reverberate in the epistemic shift from the 'post-' (postmodernism, postcolonialism) to the 'geo-' which Mary Louise Pratt has so eloquently identified in her foreword to this Special Issue as the defining framework for knowledge-making in the twenty-first century. Over the last decade, cultural analysis has redirected attention towards geological concerns, reconsidering the planet not as a passive backdrop but as an active participant shaping cultural practices. Earthly materials -fossil fuels, minerals, metals -underpin modern societies through their extraction, transformation and destruction, thereby shaping social infrastructures (Parikka, 2015;Yusoff, 2018). Recent critical studies have also increasingly engaged with geological and ecological timescales, directing attention to questions of deep time and damaged futures.In Latin America, where colonial violence collides with ancestral cosmovisions, thinking through the 'geo-' acquires a particular urgency. As scholar Jamille Pinheiro Dias reminds us, however, the academic language of 'turns' -geological, planetary, environmental or otherwise -can obscure the longstanding and ongoing engagement with the natural world in Indigenous thought (Pinheiro Dias, 2022: 144). At the same time, geological matters have long served as sites of power, affect, belonging, and memory in Latin American art, cinema and literature (Luciano, 2023). In Martín Fierro, José Hernández chronicles the life of a gaucho weathered by the expansive Pampas, a defining -yet highly contested -figure in Argentine national identity. Ana Mendieta's Silueta series of 200 performances sculpted with mud, water and fire left lasting impressions on regional debates about gender and nature, foreshadowing contemporary eco-feminist thinking. Alejandro Obregón's Violencia marked a turning point in Colombian art by reflecting decades of political turmoil through a mutilated human body that stood as a metonym for the Andes.Planetary thinking is also connected to how futures are imagined in the region. Contemporary narratives of modernisation, prosperity and progress continue to depend on resource extraction, manipulation and commodification -from gold mining in the Andes for semiconductor production, via lithium extraction in Argentina's salt flats for renewable energy technologies, through to seed patenting as commercial appropriation of biodiversity (Svampa, 2019). Indigenous cinemas in Abya Yala/Latin America offer alternatives to these extractivist visions, proposing ecosocially resilient futures through alternative understandings of planetary matter (Felipe, 2020;Gleghorn, 2017). The Vídeo nas Aldeias project, launched in the mid-1980s as one of the first audiovisual production centres within Indigenous communities, marked an inflexion in Indigenous cinemas in Brazil. By creating spaces for Indigenous