Writing

Featured Essays

a genealogical cosmographer
First appeared in archie moore: kith and kin. Golden Lion Award at Venice Biennial essay for Archie Moore pavilion and book, Spectator Books, Leipzig, 2024. 

Un-Earthing Extractive Architectures, e-flux journal

Subversive Embodiment in Authoritarian Times: Paz Errázuriz’s Archive of Sex and Gender, post (MoMA)

Life Otherwise at the Sea’s Edge, Open Rivers Journal

Transmission: Macarena Gómez-Barris, Blackwood Galleries

Into the Fluid Heart of Wallmapu Territory, Serpentine Galleries

The Occupied Forest, Afterall Journal

Fiction

Chuquicamata, (Mousse, 2024). An excerpt from an upcoming novel.

The Impossible Ritual, (Social Text Online, 2020)

Books

Macarena is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers the fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.

The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, (Duke University Press, 2017)
Explores decolonization in relation to five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories.

Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, August 2018) Explores submerged perspectives and art-making, social movements, and creative intellectual labor to imagine worlds anew.

Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009)
Traces fascism, the rise of neoliberalism, and memory’s obliteration as central to the nation-state. Shows how memorials, painting, and documentary film production are central to enlivening potential in the ruins of necro-capital.

Toward a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010)
Co-edited volume with Herman Gray, addresses global sites of deep cultural imprint, and the invisible work of tethering lives of sustenance after catastrophe.

Other Publications

Anarchisms Otherwise: Pedagogies of Anarco-Indigenous Feminist Critique, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 2021.1

Atacama Remains and Post Memory, Media Fields Journal, No. 5, 2012

Bounded Tourism: Immigrant Politics, Consumption, and Traditions at Plaza Mexico, Clara Irázabal and Macarena Gómez-Barris, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2008

Coloniality and Islands, Macarena Gómez-Barris and May Joseph, Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2019

Decolonizing Horizons, Amerasia Journal,Vol. 42, No. 3 2016

Extractivisme énergétique: Entretien avec Macarena Gómez-Barris, Macarena Gómez-Barris et Sarah Claire, Socio-Anthropologie, 42, 2020

I Felt the Sea Sense Me: Ecologies and Dystopias in Cecilia Vucuña’s Kon Kón, Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, Andrea Andersson and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Siglio Press, 2017

Introduction: Las Américas Quarterly, Macarena Gómez-Barris and Licia Fiol-Matta, American Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 3, 2014

Mapuche Hunger Acts: Epistemology of the Decolonial, Transmodernity Journal, 2012

Mestiza Cultural Memory: The Self-Ecologies of Laura Aguilar, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, Edited by Rebecca Epstein, University of Washington Press, 2017

Submerged perspectives: the arts of land and water defense, Globalizations, Vol. 18, No. 6, 2021

The Colonial Anthropocene: Damage, Remapping, and Resurgent Resources, Antipode, March 2019

Torture Sees and Speaks: Guillermo Núñez’s Art in Chile’s Transition, A Contracorriente, Vol. 5, No. 1, Fall 2007

The Plush View: Makeshift Sexualities and Laura Aguilar’s Forbidden Archives, The Plush View