A.5.1 Situated and Diasporic Flows in Galo Preto Coletivo

Sarah Shamash, Emily Carr University of Art + Design; University of British Columbia

In many Latin American syncretic religions, the rooster is viewed as a symbol of transformation. Also, the rooster is used as a sacrificial animal to satisfy deities. Galo Preto, the Portuguese words for Black Rooster, is the name of a two-person art collective formed in Olinda, Pernambuco, Brazil in 2016. This paper will examine the artistic flows and exchanges between the two artists: Carlos Colín and Bozó Bacamarte - one Mexican born, living in Vancouver, and the other, a Brazilian artist living in Recife, Brazil. This paper will draw from a documentary film made by the author on Galo Preto that further examines the role of visual languages rooted in Latin American philosophies and aesthetics as these languages cross geopolitical borders through interdisciplinary practices of art making. In particular, I will investigate how situated knowledge is produced in contexts of diaspora and within each artist’s respective location and conditions of production. Further, I will examine how these knowledges are embodied and exchanged through artmaking. While the circuits of spatio-temporal locations of the artists’ transit from North to South, from Mexico to Canada to Brazil, Galo Preto’s aesthetics and ethos are deeply rooted in Latin American social movements, concepts, and histories. Specifically, Bozó has an ever-growing significance in the Brazilian (street) art scene, with an aesthetic signature grounded in the Movimento Armorial, an artistic initiative arising from Brazil’s northeast popular culture. Carlos’ more conceptually based and object oriented practice is heavily influenced by Latin American philosophies and his Mexica heritage. This intellectual, cultural combination all fused together when the two artists met in Olinda, Brazil in 2016, generating original artworks. I will investigate the collective’s creative process and a representative artwork titled El Xolo e a La Ursa, to shed light on translocal Latin American flows of thought, translation, and artmaking.

Invitation for the Zoom meeting of Confined Bodies Virtual Exhibition. Curators: Machado, Molero, Zavarce. MACZUL. Graphic design: Stefania Hernandez.

A.5.2 Diaspora, Displacement and Confinement: Confident Bodies a Virtual Exhibition

Elsy Zavarce, Concordia University

How a community of practice can help build a sense of belonging, resilience, and resistance? How decolonial curatorial approaches can help us build communities in the time of Covid19? In March 2018, the exhibition CUERPO EN CUESTIÓN opened at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia (MACZUL) Venezuela. On that occasion, 18 multidisciplinary works by 15 artists were shown to the public. This exhibition was the beginning of a conversation motivated by the call of the artists and curators Molero, Machado and Zavarce, taking as a starting point Neydalid Molero's book (2006): Identidades corporales alternativas: perspectivas de la autorepresentación en el arte contemporáneo.

Two years later they meet again in the virtual space, from three different geo-coordinated locations: Argentina, Colombia, Canada, to resume the conversation this time within the conditions of the global pandemic and their condition as migrants. During the lockdown, in collaboration with the Zulia Contemporary Museum (MACZUL), we developed a digital platform entitled Confined bodies in which we explored the experiences of our confined bodies during Covid-19. Artists were invited to reflect on the state of our sudden hyperconnected world, and the simultaneous expansion and containment of our daily dynamics, all of them inscribed in a digital enclosure.

This paper will present a discussion of the artwork presented in the exhibition Confined Bodies from a social pedagogical and decolonial curatorial frameworks. But also, will present further questions inspired by our own personal journeys. We now find our confined bodies inquiring deeply about how our own displacement is transforming in the times of Covid-19. How does confinement manifest in a body that is already displaced? How many territories define and delineate our identities? How many territories can a body live in at once? Are we physical bodies from geographic territories? Or are we now virtual bodies from digital territories?

A.5.3 Photographie Ex-appropriation. Thresholds about the Idea of Latin American Photography.

Juliana Robles de la Pava, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero; Universidad de Buenos Aires

Latin American photography idea has become a wandering that makes it impossible to delimit its original emanation center. Paradoxically, its delimitation has been drawn throughout the 20th century outside the limits of what we know as Latin America. In this sense, the idea of Latin American photography does not seem to point to a property that configures the exceptional nature of Latin American photographic production, but rather, to an instance of contamination, disidentity, interaction and flow from which it becomes possible to interrogate what we enunciate as Latin American art and photography. This paper will address some historical and contemporary approaches to the idea of Latin American photography to indicate how its constitution, as a strategic concept of dissemination of the visual culture of the region, has been woven on a threshold that exceeds geopolitical or national limits. In this sense, it will be effective to understand the concept of Latin American photography as a diasporic concept, that is, as a threshold, a gap, or an instance of non-belonging in which it is possible to think from the materiality of the images themselves. To address this approach, we will review the ideas formulated around this concept in the Pan-American context, the disquisitions in the Coloquios Latinoamericanos de Fotografía in the late 1970s, and then question the essentialization formulated in contemporary exhibitions of Latin American photography. This review will allow us to understand to what extent decentralization is a helpful path to approach the constitutive difference that nests in the idea of Latin America.