Issue 14

Look Who's Talking

04.03.2019 - 27.05.2019

Co-edited with Florencia Portocarrero

Imagine the painter who accompanied the colonizing missions that were heading towards the Andes Mountains, who, along with the chronicler, would be responsible for creating the images that would define America in the collective imagination. For him, the physical and symbolic violence of the colonial project made perfect sense, so he focused his gaze on the landscape that his narrow knowledge of the world translated into exoticism. Overwhelmed by the vast biodiversity, he reduced the great mountain chain into a small series of paintings that would reinforce the formation of America—as of all the South—based on its condition of not being the West.

In this case, the painter’s gaze became reductionist to collaborate in the creation of the stereotypes that would be part of the epistle of the coloniality of seeing. Following the reflections of the Peruvian theorist Anibal Quijano, Joaquín Barriendos proposes to analyze “the visual machineries of racialization that accompany the development of modern/colonial capitalism.” The gaze that drives these machines hierarchizes the diversity of cultures and identities to define them marginal to the western human, and thus, achieve their exploitation, control, and extermination. Sodomites, savages, demoniacs, subalterns: labels that from this geography we appropriate to (re)build ourselves as a counterweight. However, from practices that embody heterogeneity and inhabit the paradox of otherness, many have resisted this mandate, dislocating this alienating and (self)imposed gaze from the awareness of the existence of an open colonial wound that crosses the continent and demands to be examined.

In a context as polarized as today, in which the strengthening of neo-nationalisms of a fascist nature and the intensification of the extractive brutality of the neoliberal regime in the region, coincide with a growing socialization of decolonial and anti-racist theories, it is vital to rethink and question the representation of “Latin America” in the eld of art history. Look Who’s Talking gathers the re ections of artists, curators and researchers who, recognizing that we are all traversed and affected by these forces, are betting to ask: to what extent have we subverted the colonial gaze? What does a decolonization located in Latin America mean for our global, continental and regional collective imaginaries? And no less important, from where do we speak as Latin American curators, artists, and cultural agents?

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Adriana Ciudad, "Allá nos veremos , sin sombra y sin faz", 2018. Oil on canvas, 150 x 200 cm. Image courtesy of the artist

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