Unlearning Humanity
Video performance.
Concept
elena victoria pastor
camera David Cuesta
editing Elisa Juri
voice off Herman Vladimir Ruiz (Spanish with English subtitles)
Iquitos, 2025
The concept of "humanity" has never been a neutral or
unifying category. It is, rather, a terrain of conflict—a construct
historically shaped by political, cultural, and historical divisions
that have determined who qualifies as human and who does not. This
fractured idea has served a dual function: externally, it has
justified a false sense of supremacy over other species, positioning
the human as master of a world to be dominated; internally, it has
enabled extractivist logics between the Global North and Global
South, where certain human lives are rendered expendable in the name
of progress.
The work engages with the material consequences of such thinking. Unlearning Humanity is a video performance that stages the dissolution of "the human" as a master category. Its central encounter takes place in the Allpahuayo Mishana National Reserve, near Iquitos, where a Lupuna tree is approached not as resource but as otherness—an interlocutor to be touched, listened to, regarded with care. The work incorporates a voice-over interview with Herman Vladimir Ruiz, biologist and director of the reserve, whose words situate the tree within a living territory rather than a specimen to be catalogued. The Lupuna, sacred in Amazonian cosmology, appears as presence: tall, unsettling, alive . The performance proposes that environmental ethics begins not in mastery but in relation, and that unlearning supremacy is an embodied practice. From the ruins of anthropocentric arrogance, new empathies emerge: partial, precarious, grounded in shared vulnerability rather than control.
This work was presented at Fluctoplasma Festival 2026 as part of the collective exhibition Aesthetics in (dis)solution.
images: courtesi of the artist
The work engages with the material consequences of such thinking. Unlearning Humanity is a video performance that stages the dissolution of "the human" as a master category. Its central encounter takes place in the Allpahuayo Mishana National Reserve, near Iquitos, where a Lupuna tree is approached not as resource but as otherness—an interlocutor to be touched, listened to, regarded with care. The work incorporates a voice-over interview with Herman Vladimir Ruiz, biologist and director of the reserve, whose words situate the tree within a living territory rather than a specimen to be catalogued. The Lupuna, sacred in Amazonian cosmology, appears as presence: tall, unsettling, alive . The performance proposes that environmental ethics begins not in mastery but in relation, and that unlearning supremacy is an embodied practice. From the ruins of anthropocentric arrogance, new empathies emerge: partial, precarious, grounded in shared vulnerability rather than control.
This work was presented at Fluctoplasma Festival 2026 as part of the collective exhibition Aesthetics in (dis)solution.
images: courtesi of the artist