This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in-person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundt’s building.
Abstract
Over the last decade, the expansion of the cattle and soy frontier in central South America has increasingly accelerated, leading to deforestation and biodiversity loss. Once symbols of colonization and invasion, feral cattle - who gradually adapted, in hundreds of years, to local ecologies - are now becoming an endangered species, supplanted by more economically efficient, genetically improved races. In my presentation I propose to consider what thinking with feral cattle does to ideas of endangered ecologies and regenerative cattle raising practices, power relations, and multi-species entanglements. In particular, I will develop my argument by focusing on the Paraguayan Chaco and the Argentinean region of Patagonia.
Biography
Professor Valentina Bonifacio is a researcher and lecturer in visual and applied anthropology. Bonifacio’s research topics include environmental history and its frictions, indigenous people and the State in Paraguay, inter-species ethnography, the use of audio-visual mediums as research tools and collaborative processes between anthropology, contemporary art, and urban design.
Committed to a multi-disciplinary approach, besides writing articles Dr Bonifacio is shooting documentaries. The documentary film Casado’s Legacy toured in the most important ethnographic film festivals. Since a few years Bonifacio is collaborating with both urban designers and artists with whom she carried on a variety of projects. She curated the exhibition “Destiempo: dynamogram of Puerto Casado”; the works displayed in the exhibition tell the history of the one hundred years of a tannin factory in Puerto Casado through an interdisciplinary lens, bringing to light the contradictions and connections with global history. Notes on the making of the exhibition
Read more: BONIFACIO Valentina - Unive