Dystopian imaginaries and ecosocial imaginaries: artistic practices at the beginning of the pandemic in Chile and Spain.

Abstract

This article reviews artistic practice and certain visual narratives developed during the beginning of the pandemic of Covid-19(March to May 2020), focusing on projects carried out in Chile and Spain. Through a selection of works produced during confinement and quarantine, a study is proposed that aims to approach simultaneities, affinities and differences in the artistic themes of both countries, observing how from each particular geographical and sociopolitical context, emerge documentary and metaphoricalrepresentations.Wewill focus on two perspectives: on the one hand, works that appeal to a dystopian imaginary that suggestshow societies, due to global paralysis, experience an anomalous and threatening reality that seemed unreal; on the other, works that develop an ecosocialimaginary that outlines a sensitivity to the current imbalance between nature/human and environmental exploitation. From both perspectives, it is described and examined how the artists, in confinement, articulated reflective devices that portrayed the concern about an unknown future and the activation of the notion of fragility, managing to make visible disastrous social and ecological processes that were alreadydeveloping and that seemed worsen with the arrival of the pandemic.