chair / Tatiane de Oliveira Elias, Federal University of Santa Maria
The theme of this session is art and activism in Latin America. Art and activism are two distinct academic disciplines, but ones which can dialogue and merge into action, which ranges from cultural production to a mutual understanding of contemporary political and social changes. We will therefore look at Latin America contemporary artists whose work blends art and activism. Artists in different contexts and Latin America countries have increasingly positioned themselves in situations of political and social change, from climate change to human rights. The current political crises, the coronavirus crises and the consequences to the global economy, as well as the social struggles that lead to large influxes of Latin America migrants into the United States, have already inspired many. Further examples to be deepened in this research are the works that focus on refugees fleeing political persecution, Latin America protest art, social injustices, resistance, art and politics.
Tatiane de Oliveira Elias is a professor assistant at Federal University of Santa Maria. She taught introductory and upper-level courses in Art History and Museum Studies. She is currently teaching Brazilian Art, Art Theory and Global/Local and Transcultural Art. Her research interests are contemporary Brazilian Art, Global Art, Latin American Art, Art and Politics, Art and Diversity, Art and Dictatorship. From 2004 to 2008, she studied Art History at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 2008, she studied abroad at the Venice International University (VIU). In 2003, she received her MA in Art History from the University of Campinas, Brazil. She earned her PhD (2014) in Art History at the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart, Germany.
C.5.1 Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape: Constructing Activism through the Body
Julia Kershaw, Florida State University
Under Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–85), many artists sought to counteract the control, censorship, and torture of the government that permeated the daily lives of Brazilians. Under such conditions, Lygia Pape produced Divisor (Divider) (1968) in Rio de Janeiro and her colleague Lygia Clark constructed Estruturas vivas (Live Structures) (1969) in Paris. I argue that Clark’s Estruturas vivas and Pape’s Divisor use the human body as a means of expression to counteract the repressive military regime in Brazil and thus encourage a sense of activism through ideas of choice and inclusion. As such, they create a new formation of nation that gives agency back to the body by allowing participants to experiment and communicate.
In Estruturas vivas, people became a living structure of cellular architecture by tying knotted rubber bands to parts of the body. Alone the rubber bands functioned as objects, but when tied to bodies they attained structure and life. Divisor also used the body as a protagonist. Divisor was a 30m x 30m white sheet with slits for each person’s head and reflected how spaces can be isolating and dividing, but with communication and movement the body can adjust and find ways to express freedom. Estruturas vivas and Divisor have not been discussed in relation to each other, particularly in connection to how changing geographies impact nationhood. Unlike Pape who remained in Brazil in spite of being tortured and imprisoned under the dictatorship, Clark lived in Paris for two periods from 1950 to 1952 and 1968 to 1977. I find that these migrations accentuate that experience and associations of absolutist space are not fixed and can transcend boundaries through activism. I also contextualize their works within larger frameworks including Pape and Clark’s other acts of resistance and the May 1968 students protests in Paris.
Julia Kershaw is a doctoral student in the department of Art History at Florida State University. She studies Global Contemporary Art with a focus in contemporary art and architecture of Brazil and its cross-cultural exchanges with the United States and Europe. Her research interests include participatory art practices, the intersection of art and critical theory, body politics, and European modernisms. She presented about Oscar Niemeyer’s 1939 Brazilian Pavilion at SECAC in 2019 and co-organized a lecture series entitled, Brazil in Perspective, where she presented her research about Hélio Oiticica and Gordon Parks. She also wrote an article with Dr. Marcos Colón about Indigenous agency of the Paiter Surui in Luiz Bolognesi’s film, Ex-Shaman. In April of 2019, Julia served as a film panelist for a global Indigenous film showcase at Florida State University that highlighted films directed by Indigenous women like Birds in the Earth, Blackbird, and Fast Horse.
C.5.2 Humanity: Reflecting upon Belonging Beyond Boundaries
Jane T. Griffo, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA)
In this paper I address the work of the Brazilian visual artist Ernesto Neto, through the installation Gaia Mother Tree, which was inspired by the notion of the sacred in communal practices of the Huni Kuin people, Amerindians of the Northwest of the Amazon Forest in Brazil. I explore the ontic notion beyond the traditional Western thinking of humanity. My analysis is from the critical perspective of the "nomadic subject" of the Italian philosopher Rosi Braidotti on "humanism" and "posthumanism", and the concept of "perspectivism" and "ontological turn" of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. I further address issue of ethical values of coexistence between humans and nonhumans in Western Capital expansion, that has devastated the surface of the planet for centuries destroying forests, polluting rivers and oceans, affecting global warning due to prioritizing capital before thinking "Being". Both Braidotti and Viveiros de Castro have been influenced by Deuleze & Guatarri's philosophy of “deterritorialization and reterritorialization” of thought as the plane of immanence. These philosophers see the need to decolonize Western thinking, recognizing the importance of other epistemologies that could favor the coexistence between humans and nonhumans in an ecological balance with nature such as the concept of belonging beyond the boundaries of ethnicity and nationality.
Jane Griffo is a Brazilian visual artist, art educator and scholar, pursuing a PhD in the Visual Arts at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA), Portland, ME. International traveler, explorer and nomadic, Jane left Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, her birthplace, at the age of 20 and since then has lived in many countries in the Americas and Europe meeting a diverse number of people with distinct views of the world. Being in the world, makes Jane reflect on the concept of home that goes beyond one's birthplace and the concept of family that bonds individuals who are not blood related. Her doctoral dissertation is on a nomadic philosophy with an ontological turn, that questions the social constructions of the Continental philosophy that has diffused in the Americas, subjugating Amerindian epistemologies.
C.5.3 Precarious Assemble in Post-Dictatorial Argentina and Uruguay
Anna Corrigan, University of Cambridge
This paper will address two works of photographic assemblage carried out over 30 years apart. In both works, photographic portraits of those disappeared under the last Argentine and Uruguayan military dictatorships appeared on the walls of Montevideo and Buenos Aires. In 1984 Buenos Aires, the collective C.A.Pa.Ta.Co. coordinated the production and circulation of afiches participativos. Portrait photographs of the disappeared, sourced from the archives of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, were pasted on the walls and monuments surrounding the Plaza. The public was then invited to color in the black-and-white photocopied posters with crayons. In 2008, artist Juan Angel Urruzola installed gigantografías, or enormous photographs of the disappeared, throughout the streets of Montevideo. This project coincided with a referendum on the notorious Law of Expiry in Uruguay and mobilized a multitude of gazes that silently addressed the city’s inhabitants, demanding justice for those disappeared during the 1973-1985 Uruguayan military dictatorship. In both projects, photography intervened in public space, directly addressing and soliciting responses of passersby. In this paper, I will locate the images’ political, formal and symbolic impact in their assembled status. The works hinge on a simultaneous endurance and fragility that result from their attachment to city walls, public intervention and natural deterioration. Bringing together Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of assemblage, Judith Butler’s reflections on political assembly, and Claire Bishop’s discussion of antagonism, I argue that the precariousness of assembly enables collective creation, dissent and exchange within the portrait photograph’s symbolic circulation in human rights movements of the Southern Cone.
Anna Corrigan is a PhD student at the Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and an M.A. from St. Andrews University, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and Universidade Santiago de Compostela through the Erasmus Mundus Crossways in Cultural Narratives program. Beyond her studies of Latin American politics and visual culture, she works as an editor and translator for academic texts.
C.5.4 Fake Political Campaigns and Ad-Jamming: Vómito Attack in the Neoliberal City of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Silvina Yi, Union College
Formed in 2001 as a response to both the economic crisis in Argentina and the aftermath following the September 11 attacks in the United States, Vómito Attack is a collective of five artists and social activists that use urban art as a platform for making scathing remarks on political corruption and rampant consumerism. They claim to engage in a “vomit project” that reconfigures information and are notorious for running a fake political campaign in 2007 under the slogan of “Poder, Corrupción y Mentiras” (PCM) | “Power, Corruption and Lies.” The artists used the same tactics employed by traditional political party activists and promoted the fictitious PCM party by painting huge block letters alongside the highway and covering the city walls of Buenos Aires with posters. Additionally, Vómito Attack’s practice ad-jamming by manipulating and defacing advertisements in order to distort and subvert their meanings in Buenos Aires.
This paper analyzes the way in which Vómito Attack’s 2007 fake political campaign and practice of ad-jamming in Argentina experiment with practices of modifying life in the neoliberal city. Their work not only responds to the massive privatizations, economic and political crisis, but also seek to alter space and time in the city by disrupting the everyday. These disruptions then lead – albeit briefly – to the modification of everyday life. The artists are inspired by the same everydayness they seek to disrupt, and their work aims to make the familiar unfamiliar through the creative transformation of the everyday. This creative transformation, in turn, reveals two things about the everyday: one, that it can function as both exploitation and resistance, and two, it highlights the emancipatory potential of everyday life.
Silvina Yi is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies & Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Union College. She received her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan in 2019 with a dissertation entitled City-in-Flux: Neoliberalism and Urban Space in Recent Argentine and Brazilian Cultural Production. Her work examines the confluence of space and power, particularly the reorganization of space and time in Argentine and Brazilian cities due to the transition to neoliberalism and its destructive effects. She analyzes narrative fiction, film, photography, theater, and artistic urban interventions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries from which to expose and contest neoliberal discourse affecting everyday life in the city.
