Irreversible Repetitions: The Armadillo in the Face of the Anthropocene

Abstract

This reflective article focuses on the armadillo, an endemic species of South America, as a symbolic figure and a situated body from which to explore the tensions between body, territory, memory, and heritage in the context of the Anthropocene. Based on the artistic project Anthropocene, Irreversible Repetitions (2019), the text proposes a critical reflection on the repeated violence humanity inflicts on other forms of life, as well as on the contradictions that emerge between the conservation of natural heritage and the transmission of cultural traditions. The methodology is grounded in a critical and relational approach to the project, developed through research-creation methodology, understood as an inseparable process linking thought, artistic practice, and situated experience. This approach combines dialogue among artistic, scientific, and philosophical epistemologies, along with a critical reflection aimed at denaturalizing anthropocentric hierarchies and extractivist logics that have historically shaped relationships between the human and the non-human. Within a theoretical framework connected to art, Latin American environmental history, and relational and decolonial ontologies, the project brings together photography of bodily interventions, video art, experimental printmaking with organic materials, and sculptures of armadillos in metal and textile. These practices activate a visual and poetic narrative that intertwines memory, matter, and affect, addressing notions of fragility, vulnerability, resistance, and care. The armadillo thus emerges as a contradiction between natural and cultural heritage, as a symbolic threshold that enables a critical interrogation of how we inhabit the world, and opens possibilities for imagining more sensitive, just, and regenerative modes of coexistence among species.

Keywords: armadillo, body, heritage, territory, visual arts, critical perspective.