Pour un manifeste post-photographique Joan Fontcuberta. Translated from Spanish by Émilie Fernandez

FORÊTS ISBN. 978-980-1234-567-8.

par Ritual Inhabitual

GÉOMÉTRIQUES Luttes en territoire Mapuche

Luttes en territoire Mapuche GEOMETRIC FORESTS Struggles on Mapuche Land

27.5 × 22.5 cm 204 pages 168 color and black and white illustrations softback june 2022 retail price: 42 €

Ritual Inhabitual (RI), an artistic pluridisciplinary collective founded by Tito González García and Florencia Grisanti. Adriana Paredes Pinda is a Mapuche-Huilliche poet. Flora Pennec is an ethnobotanist working for the cnrs and Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Jacob Rekedal is a doctor in ethnomusicology at the University of California. Marien González Hidalgo is a specialist in environmental sciences at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. Vincent Debaene is a lecturer and researcher at Université de ParisSorbonne. The work is edited by Sergio Valenzuela Escobedo, an artist and independent curator and who holds a PhD in the theory and practice of photography from ensp in Arles.

Photographs by Ritual Inhabitual (Tito González García and Florencia Grisanti) Texts by Adriana Paredes Pinda, Flora Pennec, Jacob Rekedal, Marien González Hidalgo, Vincent Debaene Edited by Sergio Valenzuela Escobedo

In the south of Chile, the forest has been the locus for several struggles for survival. Initially the indigenous Mapuche fought to preserve their territorial and cultural sovereignty in the face of Spanish imperialism. Now other forms of imperialism have taken over, eager to develop industrial forestry and destroy land. As intensive agroforestry exhausts soils and erodes the biodiversity of primary forests, it simultaneously eradicates the ancestral practices they host: native herbal pharmacopeia, traditional medicine and spiritual practices are closely connected with the plant life of these ancient lands. This work contains three photographic investigations into the destructive effects of the economic policies of overexploitation and the struggle of the Lafkenche people, who are part

Exhibition Les Rencontres d’Arles 2022

event

of the Mapuche culture. From this encounter with the Lafkenche emerges a series of vibrant portraits in which healers, shamans, rappers, evangelists and also the plants themselves tell of the resistance and solidarity that holds the community together. To complement the portraits, there is a herbarium of medicinal plant species threatened by monocultures. The book is closed off by a documentary series showing how paper forests of more than one million hectares are produced beneath the icy neon lights of a small biotech laboratory. To fully grasp the context, all three investigations feature extensive analyses combining Mapuche poetry, the economic and political history of the Chilean forest, and photography theory. Ritual Inhabitual transgresses traditional codes of ethnographical photography to capture the struggle on Lafkenche land and its flagrant equalities. Via multiple entrance points, the exploration of the south-Chilean forest demonstrates the importance of adopting a historical, transversal approach when advocating for biodiversity.

46

Pukutriñuke. Groupe de rap Mapuche. Santiago du Chili, 2016

47