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.
D.5.1 Overflowing Tlatelolco: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Teatro Ojo, and the Memory of 1968
Mya Dosch, California State University Sacramento
October 2, 2008 marked the 40-year anniversary of Mexico City’s 1968 student movement and its violent repression by the state. As part of the commemoration, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s participatory installation Voz Alta shone over the city. Lozano-Hemmer and his production team installed a modified megaphone on a stand in Tlatelolco Square. The artist invited the public to say what they would, and a computer system “translated” the rhythm and volume of each speaker’s voice into flashes from four massive searchlights. Voz Alta projected beams of light across the city in honor of 1968.
While Voz Alta has been flatly celebrated as a participatory platform for “free speech,” I pay close attention to the aesthetics of this platform, showing that it forecloses speech in a number of key ways. It also anchored the memory of 1968 comfortably in Tlatelolco Square, allowing the gentrification of Mexico City’s Centro Histórico to go on, unbothered by this history. In contrast, I argue that itinerant artworks by the artist collective Teatro Ojo refused such a nostalgic homecoming. Instead, they wandered Mexico City’s streets, rode its busses, and visited its historic sites. In so doing, they escaped from the canonical timelines and territories of the student movement, making 1968 appear in unsuspecting times and places. Their playful, looping approach to history offers a model for activist engagement in the past.
Mya Dosch is Assistant Professor of Art of the Americas at California State University, Sacramento, where she teaches courses on Latin American art, race and representation, and public art in the Americas. Her dissertation, Creating 1968: Art, Architecture, and the Afterlives of the Mexican Student Movement, received the 2019 Association for Latin American Art Biennial Dissertation Award. She is also the recipient of a 2009 Beinecke Endowment Scholarship for Graduate Study. Her work appears in Future Anterior, Sculpture, and the forthcoming exhibition catalog No calles, manifiéstate about the artist collective Grupo Suma.
D.5.2 Alejandra Prieto’s Creations Out of Coal
Elixabete Ansa-Goicoechea, Pontificia Universidad católica de Chile
Coal extracted from Curanilahue, a commune in the south of Chile (Bío Bío Region), serves as the main sculpting material for Alejandra Prieto (Santiago de Chile, 1980-). Her work turns extractivism and class struggle two of the main sovereign issues when describing the present political moment in Chile. A wall-wide framed mirror, a chandelier lamp, a pair of Nike sports-shoes, or a Le Corbusier Chase Longue are just some of the objects Prieto has made out of coal and exhibited in solo and collective exhibitions since 2005. Traditional notions of taste, design, class, work, and race are problematized in her work. This contribution aims at presenting Prieto´s proposal trying to establish relationships between art, production, and politics in Chile.
Elixabete Ansa Goicoechea is Associate Professor and Director of Academic Development in the Institute of Aesthetics at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She studies the relationships between art and politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. Author of Mayo del 68 vasco: Oteiza y la cultura política de los sesenta (Pamiela, 2019), Ansa-Goicoechea has developed transatlantic studies establishing critical relationships between the Basque Country and Latin America.
D.5.3 Fighting Neoliberalism: The New York Solidarity Network with Chile
Florencia San Martín, California State University, San Bernadino
On October 18, 2019, massive protests erupted in Chile, inaugurating the biggest social uprising since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–90). Coined as Chile’s "estallido social" (social outbreak), an unprecedented number of art workers and activists took to the streets, to demand the end of the neoliberal model-imported for the first time transnationally into Chile during Pinochet’s regime under the advice of US economist Milton Friedman. But to be sure, demands regarding the end the neoliberal project in Chile developed from the realm of art and culture are nothing new; nor are solidarity groups supporting these demands in the global context. In the U.S. for instance, an important artistic solidarity network developed immediately after the coup, critiquing the catastrophic relationship between the newly installed dictatorship and the neoliberal model. This presentation is about this solidarity network and focused more specifically in artistic practices developed from New York through the work of cultural practitioners including, among others, U.S. art writer Dore Ashton, Newyorican photographer Maximo Colon, and Chilean former ambassador to the U.S., Orlando Letelier. In unearthing these artistic practices that included, among other forms, public interventions, mural making, performative protests, and memorials, this presentation’s aims is twofold. First, it seeks to connect historically, culturally, and politically the current "estallido social" in Chile with a longer and larger history of anti-neoliberal demands made from the front of the visual arts not only in Chile but within a hemispheric context. And secondly, from the starting point of the visual arts as a form of activism, it advances in recent scholarly efforts in the field of memory studies regarding the understanding of memory within transnational and anti-capitalist scopes.
Florencia San Martín writes about contemporary art, decolonial methodologies, and memory politics with particular focus on the Americas. Her work has appeared in ASAP/Journal, ILLAPA Mana Tukukuq, Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics, The Poiésis, and Iberoamericana Vervuert, and her research has been supported by Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Chilean Commission for Scientific and Technological Research, and Rutgers University, where she completed her PhD in Art History in 2019. She is New York Editor of Art Nexus, editorial board of Visual Studies and Arts, and recently co-edited a special issue on Latin American contemporary art and decolonial thinking for Arts/MDPI. She is currently working on her first book project in which, from a decolonial lens, she examines Alfredo Jaar’s critique of the humanitarian and epistemological consequences of neoliberalism and the ideological outlooks that define our globalized present. She is also currently co-editing a Companion to Decolonizing Art History with Tatiana E. Flores and Charlene Villaseñor Black for Routledge.
D.5.4 Depicting Exodus in Contemporary Latin America: Beatriz González’s Zulia, Zulia, Zulia
Martín Ruiz Mendoza, University of Michigan
According to the United Nations, 2.6 million Venezuelans have migrated since 2014 to other countries in South America, mainly due to violence, hyperinflation and food and medicine shortage in their home country. Only Colombia is sheltering 1 million Venezuelans, and projections indicate that 4 million could be living there by 2021. This state of affairs brings to mind a question posed by Homi Bhaba in his introduction to The Location of Culture, namely,
"How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings, and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable?” (2).
The way in which the Venezuelan migration crisis has been politically exploited by the political elite in Colombia fully evinces the antagonism posited by Bhaba. This calls for alternative representations that transcend ideological binaries to focus instead in the human ordeal that the Venezuelan exodus entails. Those alternative representations would necessarily oppose the mass-mediatic approach that has so far informed the general view about this ongoing crisis. The resistance to the ideologically-driven regimes of representation that dominate the current debate about the Venezuelan exodus can be attested in artworks like Beatriz González’s Zulia, Zulia, Zulia (2015), an oil on canvas that depicts the plight of hundreds of thousands of anonymous immigrants who cross into the Northeastern region of Zulia on the Venezuela-Colombia border. This paper analyses the aesthetic mechanisms through which González depicts the experience of migrants crossing the border, and argues that the pictorial representation of migration proposed by Zulia, Zulia, Zulia brings to the forefront the notion of crossing as a symbolic constellation that transcends the mere physical act of moving from one territory to another. Ultimately, my paper shows how this artistic approach to exile elicits crucial reflections about the aporias of nationality, assimilation, belonging, and mobility in contemporary Latin America.
Martín Ruiz Mendoza holds a B.A. in Languages and Sociocultural Studies and an M.A. in Philosophy from Los Andes University, in Bogotá, Colombia. He is now a PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, where he has taught various courses on Hispanic literature and cinema. He has been awarded a University of Michigan International Institute Fellowship and a Rackham Humanities Fellowship in support of his current research project about Colombian contemporary cultural production.
