On Aesth-ethic Activism as Epistemic Resistance in
Conversation with José Medina
María Del Rosario Acosta López
ABSTRACT
This paper engages in a dialogue with José Medina’s work on epistemic
activism, adding the notion of ‘aesth-ethic activism’ to highlight the role
aesthetics play in epistemic forms of resistance. Drawing from María
Lugones’s concept of ‘transgressive hearing’ and my work on ‘grammars
of listening’, the paper proposes that ‘radical listening’, in dialogue with
Medina’s ‘radical testimony’, requires not only rendering voices audible but
subverting the very criteria that govern audibility. Aesthetic resistance is
seen as essential for this task. Through an analysis of the artwork Fósil
Acústico by Colombian artists Santiago Reyes Villaveces and Daniel
Villegas Vélez as ‘aesth-ethic activism’, the paper shows how art can create
‘epistemic frictions’ that challenge our sensibilities and open up liminal sites
for complex communication across different epistemic systems. The installation,
I show, calls for lingering in the ‘friction’ that makes meaning
possible, while allowing sense to circulate in ways that resist signification.
Ultimately, in dialogue with Medina and Lugones’s work, and inspired by
Sylvia Wynter’s conception of aesthetics, the paper proposes rethinking the
epistemic as grounded in the aesthetic and aesthetics as a deciphering
practice of epistemic resistance that can make dominant codes of perception
‘consciously alterable’.
