In recent years, the emergence and evolution of feminist discourses and practices, decolonial studies, queer and crip theories, etc., have become the main axes generating re-readings in the dominant historiography of art and in the agency and rewriting of identities and subaltern subjects that were historically invisible, violated, expelled and / or categorized as one more element in works and art exhibitions. This rescue and politicization within art has meant a paradigm shift at the historiographical and political level in the search for dialogues between critical theory, political practice and symbolic intervention in hegemonic visualities and in contemporary art.
That said, at present, drawing a cartography on the evolution of antispeciesist discourses in contemporary art is more complicated. Many of us are stupefied by the lack of antispeciesist discourse in cultural and artistic spaces, and at the same time we perfectly understand the interests of the institutions to which these spaces belong. In the midst of this silence, it is impossible not to ask some questions, how are antispeciesist narratives created and displayed in the historiographic project of current art? How to break the systems of these narratives? What are the relations between visuality, representation, identity, power and subjectivity that prevent the access of antispeciesist discourse in the writing of art history?
Antispeciesism as discourse and political practice against animal exploitation is almost non-existent within contemporary artistic practices; this silence implies that the body and life of nonhuman animals is not seen as part of the struggle against the oppression and exploitation of those “other” bodies; visualizing and pointing out these oppressions and privileges generates too much controversy in cultural spaces that are considered vanguardists, critical and transgressors.