Engaging with a multiplicity of theoretical debates that thematize the porous boundaries between the literary, the visual, and the political—socially engaged art and the production of the commons, system theory, utopian studies—, each presentation contributes a framework for analyzing impactful experiments that escape traditional definitions of the art object, the artist, and the conventional circuits of artistic exchange.
The practices discussed materialized the creation of networks that supported virtual and physical spaces for commonality–connecting challenges, opportunities, and individuals that would otherwise remain isolated. In our first presentation, Professor Alfonso Fierro will discuss Mexican artistic collectives from the 1970s and 1980s who joined the global Mail Art network to create alternative vehicles for producing and exchanging collective art beyond the logics of the market.
The second presentation, by Professor Sergio Delgado Moya, analyzes the speculative novel Down with Gargamel! (2020), written by Puerto Rican author Othoniel Rosa, to dissect the implicit and explicit links between the fictive spaces of the novel and contemporary social movements in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Americas. This complex dialogue between the novel and recent regional uprisings creates a network for tracing and using micropolitical tools of insurrection that exceed the pages of the book.
The third presentation, by Professor Jerónimo Duarte-Riascos, concentrates on the artist-run space Casa Nuvem, active in Rio de Janeiro from 2012 to 2016. Casa Nuvem featured art studios, a bike workshop, a bar, and a shared kitchen, and it hosted numerous experimental practices. In 2016, it was forced to close due to what its founders have labeled as a “process of moral siege” advanced, mostly, through acts of collective writing. The presentation examines how the development and downfall of this project exposed questions about the power of artistic practices as constructive and destructive forces that may successfully alter networks of support, cohabitation, activism, and creativity.
Lastly, Professor Edward Vazquez examines the exhibition and exhibition catalogues co-authored by Chilean artists Catalina Parra and Eugenio Dittborn during the Fall of 1977. His presentation reads these materials alongside the theoretical underpinnings of Ronald Kay to argue that they created a network that produced a fractured collective that functioned as a a site of critique/resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship.
As evidenced by the brief description of the presentations above, the practices explored in this panel vary in form, location, and intent. Yet, they all successfully created sites of experimentation, dwelling, resistance, and creativity. Frequently materialized as responses to perceived contextual failures, they constitute a privileged window from where to explore various historical tensions proper to the larger political communities of the region.