Florencia San Martín (she, her, ella) is Assistant Professor of Art History and Global Cultures at California State University, San Bernardino, where she teaches and writes about contemporary art and culture from the Americas, decolonial methodologies, and theories on memory, race, and gender. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in academic journals including ASAP/J, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, ILLAPA Mana Tukukuq, The Poiésis, and Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics. Her research has been supported by institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Rutgers University, and CONICYT. She is currently working on two book projects: a monograph based on her dissertation titled The Decolonial Project of Alfredo Jaar; and the volume Decolonizing Art History, which she is co-editing with Tatiana E. Flores and Charlene Villaseñor Black for Routledge, and which will be published in 2022. As editor, Florencia served as New York Coordinator for the Latin American art magazine Art Nexus from 2017 to 2020 and is currently serving in the Editorial Board of Visual Studies and as Topic Editor of Arts. Originally from Santiago, Chile, before moving to Southern California in the fall 2020, Florencia has taught courses on art history and visual culture at The School of Visual Arts, CSI/CUNY, and several universities in Chile.
Through a close reading of Kowkülen (Liquid Being) (2020), a video piece by artist Sebastián Calfuqueo, the author delves into the work’s intricate engagement of Mapuche cosmopolitics, proposing a critical approach to the neoliberal violence of water commodification in Chile vis-à-vis nonbinary modes of inhabiting the world.
