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?
14
2019
Adriana Ciudad, "Allá nos veremos , sin sombra y sin faz", 2018. Oil on canvas, 150 x 200 cm. Image courtesy of the artist
14 2019
04.03.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Peru
Natalia Majluf, Beverly Adams, Florencia Portocarrero
Florencia Portocarrero, co-editor of this issue, talks with curators Beverly Adams and Natalia Majluf about «Amauta» magazine, which, during the 1920s, inaugurated a circulation of ideas and discussions about what Latin America could have meant in relation to Marxism and the avant-gardes of Western modernity.
14 2019
11.03.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Bolivia, La Paz
Valeria Paz Moscoso
Through the work of the artists Andrés Pereira and Roberto Valcárcel, the Professor Valeria Paz unfolds the constructs around the indigenous legacy which has founded cultural policies in Bolivia, and which has perpetuated a hegemonic understanding within art history that reflects not only in the public space but also in the cultural institutions of the country.
14 2019
18.03.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Ecuador, La Pila
Pamela Cevallos, María Elena Bedoya
María Elena Bedoya and Pamela Cevallos write about the tension between replicas and originals within indigenous material culture as a consequence of their use in the creation of national patrimonies and collections that found dominant discourses and neocolonial dynamics of circulation and exhibition.
14 2019
25.03.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Abya Yala
Daniela Ortiz
The artist Daniela Ortiz outlines a critique of the logics of colonial order that regulate the ways of collecting and exhibiting art in Europe, while seeking to unveil the games of power founded in the management of plunder that have done nothing but to historically oppress Abya Yala peoples and territories.
14 2019
01.04.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Dja Guata Porã, Río de Janeiro
Pablo Lafuente, Sandra Benites
Through the exhibition «Dja Guata Porã: Rio de Janeiro Indigena», the curators Sandra Benites and Pablo Lafuente reflect on the discursive powers and agencies that the indigenous communities of Brazil can achieve from exhibition and institutional devices, and question the concept of the art object in the production of these communities.
14 2019
08.04.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua
Patricia Belli, Miguel A. López
Curator Miguel A. López and the artist Patricia Belli make a critical and historical review of Belli’s artistic productions in order to recognize and reflect on the powers of art as the axis of mediation and discussion among agents within the dizzying contexts that Latin America goes through, as well as elucidate what effective resistance can mean today.
14 2019
22.04.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Venezuela
Erik del Búfalo, Ana Alenso
Erik Del Búfalo speaks with artist Ana Alenso about the questions her work activates around the imaginaries of uncertainty within the Venezuelan present, perpetuated by a voracious petro-state.
14 2019
29.04.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Chile
Paz Guevara
Curator Paz Guevara makes a constellation of the different editorial interventions that have been made into Hubert Fichte’s works written in Latin America, to propose, out of the re-reading of those texts, the trace of a counter-cartography of the affects that question the ways in which the region has been narrated.
14 2019
06.05.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Brazil
Jota Mombaça
Artist Jota Mombaça questions the concept of decolonization posed by Frantz Fanon and deepens in the potencies that emerge out of the idea of destroying the world as a medullary axis in order to repose the coloniality and, along that, imagine other spaces which diverge from discourses of this nature.
14 2019
13.05.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Ecuador
Eduardo Carrera
Through the analysis of the work of Jenny Jaramillo, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, and Saskia Calderón, the curator Eduardo Carrera inquires into the body explorations around dissident subjectivities in the Ecuadorian artistic field, artistic productions which dislocate the concepts of race, identity, and gender.
14 2019
20.05.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Colombia
Claudia Segura, Adriana Ciudad
Questioning mechanisms of epistemic extractivism and depoliticization of Afro-Colombian ancestral knowledge, Claudia Segura talks with Adriana Ciudad about the collaborative artistic process carried out with the Cantoras of Timbiquí, a funeral accompaniment that resignifies the personal battle through the collective.
14 2019
27.05.2019
Issue 14: Look Who's Talking Estados Unidos
Demian DinéYazhi’, Alan Peláez López, Diego del Valle Ríos
Diego del Valle Ríos, editor of Terremoto, talks with Alan Pelaez and Demian DinéYazhi’ about the personal and collective implications of confronting the colonial state, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy in the US.