An (in)different Nature: Common life in Sebastián Wiedemann´s artistic practice

Abstract

This essay enquires on the notion of “common life”, based on the contributions of some continental and Latin American authors who have problematized the idea of nature from approaches that stress the limits imposed by scientific thought. Thus, for example, the notion of “matters of concern” proposed by Latour, or the relational ontology of nature developed by Whitehead allow us to critically question our traditions of conceiving ways of relating to nature from mechanics of excessive production and extractivism linked to the logics of global capitalism, which have established a disjunction between thought and the perception regarding earth, politics, objectivity, art, media, imagination, or images. In this context, this writing addresses the ways in which contemporary artistic practices allow us to retrace forms of perception that no longer serve to inhabit our present, starting from an immersion into the ‘deep blue’, present in two works by the Colombian experimental filmmaker Sebastián Wiedemann: the short film Deep blue [Springs and freediving between worlds] (2020) and the book Deep blue object. Memories of the future of a cinematographic in between living (2019).