Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

The book draws on the experience of the Pentagon Project: Research on contemporary art in Colombia (1999-2001), which sought a qualitative leap in the production of art exhibitions in the country. Pentagon refers to five exhibitions resulting from a research program that was intended as a transition between a cultural policy based on representation (Art Salons) to a participatory type where the visual arts sector in the country would be better serve as a community. The project was based on four levels: research, consolidation, production and circulation

Este documento retoma la experiencia del proyecto Pentágono: Investigaciones en arte contemporáneo en Colombia (1999-2001) el cual pretendió dar un salto qualitativo en la producción de exposiciones en el país. Pentágono se refiere a cinco exposiciones itinerantes resultado de un proceso de investigación que pretendía ser una transición entre una politica cultural representativa (salones de arte) a una de tipo participativo en el sector de las artes visuales del país (investigación/circulación). El proyecto se basó en cuatro instancias: Investigación, consolidación, producción y circulación

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Since 1984 the Havana Biennale has been known as “the Tri-continental art event,” presenting artists from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It also has intensely debated the nature of recent and contemporary art from a Third World or Global South perspective. The Biennale is a product of Cuba’s fruition since the Revolution of 1959. The Wifredo Lam Center, created in 1983, has organized the Biennial since its inception.
This dissertation proposes that at the heart of the Biennale has been an alternative cosmopolitanism (that became an existential internationalism during the “contemporary” moment) embraced by a group of local cultural agents, critics, philosophers, art historians, and also supported by a network of peers around the world. It examines the role Armando Hart Dávalos, Minister of Culture of Cuba (1976-1997), who played a key figure in the development of a solid cultural policy, one which produced the Havana Biennale as a cultural project based on an explicit “Third World” consciousness. It explores the role of critics and curators Gerardo Mosquera and Nelson Herrera Ysla, key members of the founding group of the Biennale. Subsequently, it examines how the work of Llilian Llanes, director of the Lam Center and of the Biennale (1983-1999), shaped the event in structural and conceptual terms. Finally, it examines the most recent developments and projections for the future.
Using primary material, interviews, and field work research, the study focuses on the conceptual, contextual, and historical structure that supports the Biennale. It presents from several optics the views and world-view of the agents involved from the inside (curators and collaborators), as well as, from an art-world perspective through an account of the nine editions. Using the Havana Biennale as case study this work goes to disentangle and reveal the socio- political and intellectual debates taking place in the conformation of what is call today global art. In addition, recognizes the potentiality of alternative thinking and cultural subjectivity in the Global South.

En este ensayo, 1989 es el año del nacimiento de lo “contemporáneo", es en ese entonces cuando comenzó un nuevo imaginario global. Además, en 1989 empezó el capitalismo global en Colombia debido al auge del llamado narco-trafico. El 6 de diciembre de 1989 un bus-bomba conducido a control remoto se estrelló contra el edificio del DAS en el centro de Bogotá. La guerra entre el estado y los nuevos capitalistas globales (nuestros primeros contemporáneos) revela la violencia del proyecto moderno. Artistas e intelectuales desencantados con el status quo iniciaban un viaje hacia el “afuera” de las instituciones, la ciudad descentrada / explotada.

(English) The decolonial force, working from within the colonial/modern project, generates tensions of acceptance and resistance inside the model, which in turn bring about fights, rebellions and insurgencies, or create bizarre worlds and forms of resistance. This essay advances how a special kind of cultural activity in Colombia, namely the work of visual artist Fernando Pertuz, is becoming the corpus of these bizarre worlds and the locus of terror within culture. The text doesn’t wish to place the work of this artist in a hegemonic place, for the range of artistic and cultural tasks is wide and diverse, but rather to make a contribution to the emergence of new esthetics and forms of writing, connected to contemporary phenomena in the field of culture and the arts. The end objective is to incorporate to the critical process particular contexts and demands, which may contribute to the development of complex historical narratives and forms of re-existence that are a product of postcolonial/modern history. Key words Colombia, contemporary art, culture and art, decolonial esthetics

La fuerza decolonial trabaja desde el interior del proyecto colonial/moderno, lo cual genera tensiones de aceptación o resistencia dentro del modelo, que producen luchas, rebeliones e insurgencias, o crean mundos bizarros y formas de re-existencia. Este ensayo subraya cómo cierta producción cultural en Colombia, en especial el trabajo del artista visual Fernando Pertuz, viene estableciéndose como el corpus de esos mundos bizarros, y el locus del terror en la cultura.
El texto no busca establecer esta producción como hegemónica, pues el rango del quehacer artístico y cultural es amplio y diverso, sino hacer aportes a la emergencia de nuevas estéticas y formas de escritura, vinculadas a fenómenos culturales y artísticos contemporáneos. Se pretende incorporar al proceso crítico un contexto y unas demandas particulares, que aportan a la construcción de narrativas históricas complejas, y formas de re-existencia que son producto de la historia postcolonial/moderna.

Since 1984 the Havana Biennale has been known as “the Tri-continental art event,” presenting artists from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as artist living in the Northern Diasporas. It has also intensely debated the nature of contemporary art from a Third World/Global South perspective. The Biennale is a product of Cuba’s cultural policy since the Revolution of 1959. The Wifredo Lam Center, created in 1983, has organized the Biennial since its inception. This article proposes that at the heart of the Biennale has been an alternative cosmopolitanism as a sort of decolonial move (that became an existential internationalism), embraced by a group of local cultural agents, critics, philosophers, and art historians, and supported by a network of peers around the world. It examines the role Armando Hart Dávalos, Minister of Culture of Cuba (1976–1997), a key figure in the development of a solid cultural policy that put the Havana Biennale as a cultural project based on an explicit “Third World” consciousness. It explores the role of critics and curators Gerardo Mosquera, Nelson Herrera Ysla, and Llilian Llanes, director of the Lam Center and of the Biennale (1983–1999), who shaped the event in structural and conceptual terms. Finally, it examines how Third World Art has become Global. Using primary material, interviews, and field work research, the article focuses on the conceptual, contextual, and historical structure that supports the Biennale. Using the Havana Biennale as a case study, it is possible to reveal one side of the sociopolitical and intellectual debates taking place in the conformation of what is today called global art. In addition, the article recognizes the potentiality of alternative thinking and cultural subjectivity in the Global South.

Living and interacting with cultural and educational spaces in the U.S, I had experienced the lack of representation and for instance of basic knowledge of a universe of artistic and critical production coming from the South. Why is that Latin American Artists, collectives, critics, thinkers, etc., rarely appear in surveys of Modern Art published in the West? And, is that happening with the contemporary production as well?

The text explores the uses of performance, bodily actions, and visual documentation as part of  Colombian contemporary art, in particular performance art, and the re-foundation of the nation. The social, historical, critical, and symbolic responsibility of the arts in a country ripped out after 50 years of internal conflict.

By presenting a series of examples on contemporary artistic practices that function along side the art market. The text underline the fact that by existing as nomads, (some) artists are able to re-appropriate the means of artistic production and locate themselves, temporally, at the center of the production of sense. How artist as political subjects are able to change conceptions concerning production, circulation, and consumption of the art object?  What is paradoxical here is the fact that, in many cases, we are facing an absence of the art object or at least, a re-elaboration of its means and ends. We are witnessing how the everyday has been taken over the art world and vice versa.

"Decolonial aesthetics refers to ongoing artistic projects responding to the darker side of imperial globalization. This is the terrain where artists are contesting the legacies of modernity and its re-incarnations in postmodern and altermodern aesthetics.
Aesthesis or Aiesthesis, generally defined as “an unelaborated elementary awareness of stimulation, a ‘sensation of touch,’” is related to awareness, sense datum, sense experience and sense expression, and is closely connected to the processes of perception.  Aesthetics, instead, is defined as a philosophical branch that is focus on the study of beauty as a rational investigation about existence, knowledge, and ethics. The Western concept of aesthetics colonized aiethesis (senses, affects) by appropriating the meaning of artistic practice. Today there is an urgent need to decolonize aesthetics to liberate aiesthesis. 
Artists around the world today, including migrant artists living in the West and North (and the multiple diasporas across the globe), are working somehow on the legacies of the Bandung Conference (1955) and the Non-Aligned Movement (1961). Their legacy was the possibility of imagining other worlds beyond capitalism and/or communism. To contribute to the building of that world is the task of decoloniality and of decolonial aesthetics."
IN RUMANIAN AND ENGLISH

BOLIVAR BLVD. Simón Bolívar Footprint in the United States
Fredric Jameson Gallery. Duke University.
July - October. 2011.

The exhibit connects the figure of legendary South American freedom fighter Simon Bolivar (1783-1830) to American Popular Culture and to the North American landscape. By displaying closed to 500 memorabilia objects with the Bolivar brand name, such as motor oil, soda cans, posters, street signs, Havana cigars, cigarettes, etc. the exhibition presents the impact of Bolivar in the cultural imaginary of the United States in the second part of the 19th century and beyond. Counties, cities and towns in the United States were also named Bolivar, as well as streets, avenues, bridges, lakes, creeks, mines, and mountains. It is interesting to find in the Southern US even license plates in Bolivar County, Mississippi with his name. We also find banks, restaurants named after Bolivar. Law enforcement agencies, such as sheriff, police and fire departments encompassed the Bolivar name, with striking designs in their respective emblems. Bolivar has also been an inspiration for the film world, appearing in posters, movies, documentaries and short films.
…
La exposición conecta la figura del legendario luchador por la libertad sudamericana Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) con la cultura popular estadounidense y con el paisaje de América del Norte. Al exhibir cerca de 500 objetos con el nombre Bolívar, tales como aceite de motor, refrescos, carteles, letreros, cigarros habaneros, cigarrillos, etc., la exposición presenta el impacto de Bolívar en el imaginario cultural de los Estados Unidos durante la segunda parte del siglo XIX y más allá. Condados, ciudades y pueblos en los Estados Unidos también usaron Bolívar, así como calles, avenidas, puentes, lagos, arroyos, minas y montañas. Es interesante encontrar en el sur de los EE. UU. incluso placas de matrícula en el condado de Bolívar, Mississippi, con su nombre. También encontramos bancos, restaurantes que llevan el nombre de Bolívar. Las agencias de aplicación de la ley, como oficinas de sheriff, policía y los departamentos de bomberos usan el nombre de Bolívar, con diseños llamativos en sus respectivos emblemas. Bolívar también ha sido una inspiración para el mundo del cine, apareciendo en carteles, películas, documentales y cortometrajes.

a decolonizing reading of their work a definition of "narcoculture" emerges that, along with other cultural forms, complements an understanding of the ways in which the narco phenomenon is reshaping the region after the consolidation of the late phase of modernity.

This year the festival features a series focused on the life of diasporic communities,using films, documentaries, panel discussions, lectures, class visits and open forums, with a special attention to hemispheric Native and Indigenous audiovisual production.

27 films, from eleven countries, with the presence of fifteen filmmakers. The festival includes feature length films, short films, and documentary films, grouped in three series:

1. Spanish and Latin/o American Film Series
2. Native & Indigenous Film Series | October 4, 5,6,7 & 9
3.  Jews and Muslims in Latin/o America and the Caribbean Series

As part of the "Hemispheric Indigeneity in the Global Age" project, the Native & Indigenous Film Series explores in comparative/contextual fashion Native and Indigenous worldviews, in particular the ones related to self-representation and governability, health and environment, and the ontology of being Native/Indigenous in today’s global age. The series intends to bring together cultural producers, shoolars, Native and Indigenous filmmakers, artists, and general public to explore, share, and act upon some of the most pressing issues first nations and pueblos originarios faced today.

The 11th Havana Biennale (May-June 2012) was summoned on the assumption of artistic practices and social imaginaries in search of a place in the circuit of “socially engaged art”, very in vogue after the debates about altermodern and relational art. There is nothing new in this approach regarding our cultural territory, and it is not alien either to the Biennale: we have seen it in previous editions, El arte con la vida 2003 (Art with Life), and Dinámicas de la cultura urbana 2006 (Dynamics of Urban Culture). Historically, many artists from the so-called “Global South” have taken on a social commitment and have explored this possibility in expanded terrains of artistic practices. In Latin America, from Mexican Muralism to New Cinema, going through Peruvian indigenismo, Brazilian Neo-Concretism, etc., have all accounted for this; a dimension of testimony and collective participation in public space takes part in the “should be” of this art.

The production of the visual artists Juan Obando (Colombia), José Ignacio García (United States–Mexico), and the Narcochingadazo collective (United States–Mexico– Colombia) under the umbrella of what they call “narcoaesthetics” is linked to contemporary
democratic processes in Colombia and Mexico and the implementation of branding techniques aimed at offsetting these countries’ bad image due to the drug issue. From a decolonizing reading of their work a definition of “narcoculture” emerges that, along with other cultural forms, complements an understanding of the ways in which the narco phenomenon is reshaping the region after the consolidation of the late phase of modernity.
La obra de los artistas visuales Juan Obando (Colombia), José Ignacio García (México– Estados Unidos) y la colectiva Narcochingadazo (Estados Unidos–México–Colombia)
pertenece a la categoría de lo que ellos llaman la “narcoestética” y está vinculada a procesos
democráticos contemporáneos en Colombia y México, al igual que a la aplicación de técnicas destinadas a contrarrestar la mala imagen de estos países en el tema de las drogas. Una
perspectiva decolonizadora nos brinda una definición de “narcocultura” que, junto con otras formas culturales, ayuda a entender las maneras en que el fenómeno del narco está formateando a la región después de la consolidación de la última fase de la modernidad.
Cite:
Rojas-Sotelo ML. Narcoaesthetics in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States: Death Narco, Narco Nations, Border States, Narcochingadazo? Latin American Perspectives. 2014;41(2):215-231. doi:10.1177/0094582X13518757

GLOBAL CARIBBEAN V
Longing – belonging – extoling gloCal Caribbeaness

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.”
― August Wilson, The Piano Lesson

In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon wrote “I belong irreducibly to my time.”  With all the significant differences between the worlds in which Fanon lived and ours, perhaps it is us who must admit that we continue longing as much he did to live in a different time. Irrefutably, we belong to a moment, “global coloniality,” that as for Fanon, as for the subjects of today’s Caribbean and Global South Diasporas in the North, needs to accomplish Decolonization.  In regards to art production, we belong to what is called contemporary art, a hegemonic construct. On one side, contemporary art is subject to a history, the art history that have privileged a western linear narrative and the institutions of the art world; its production, circulation, and consumption is limited to those institutions (the art schools, the gallery, art fair, the museum, etc.) and its agents (professional artists, curators, critics, collectors, etc.). On the other side, art produced in contemporaneity also pertains, as explained by Irit Rogoff, to a “certain number of shared issues and urgencies, a certain critical currency, but perhaps most importantly a performative enablement—a loosening of frames all around us.”  In some way contemporaneity has been set as a bounding concept for the work produced by cultural subjects in the centers of production of today global art scene. However, cultural subjects come and go, entering (even momentarily) the scene, which means, that there is another production that can move around more freely, employing and deploying a range of theoretical, methodological and performative-rhetoric and modes of operation. A production that inhabit terrains that not pertain exclusively to the traditions of the west; in todays art word, such production somehow intersects aspects, not previously known, and are starting to be inhabited and shared productively. This is an aspect of the Decolonial in art, which has been possible thanks to global coloniality, cultural producers from those territories are now aware of the silenced voices of subjects historically under the colonial matrix of power, now emerging from the global south and present at the center of the scene. 

In today’s Miami, a new meca of contemporary art, with all its history and stories of displacement, relocation, settlement, development and crisis; in addition to the multi-layered flows of migrants coming from the North and the South, and the ones endogenous of the archipelago, because Miami is also the Caribbean, the issue takes central stage. Actually, the problems that Fanon observed and diagnosed in the colonies were never only relevant among them only. Coloniality is where knowledge, race, and gender was forged, initially in the colonies, on the slave ship, on the plantation, in the intimate spaces of home, in the state, and in the relationship between empire and colony, also in the new forms of modern mechanized and industrial production, which is perpetuated in today’s digital era, and anchored between notions such as center and periphery. Miami is there between the center and the margin, between the global and the local (GloCal).

The central goal of this project is to expand the bridges between Duke and the Durham Latino communities and simultaneously make them into bi-directional ones.  In other words, we will seek to offer means for the Latino community to have greater access to our university and to have Duke students engage the community both in the community and here at Duke.  Duke can be changed by these relationships, as will the community that surrounds us; thus the metaphor of the two-way bridge.

Through collaborative art and interpretation as well as bidirectional learning, this project will teach the various constituencies the geopolitical implications surrounding immigration, immigration policy, border crossing, and integration of diasporic communities into local and national communities.  Students and faculty may become better positioned to offer innovative solutions in the form of policy and research, as well as to help educate the greater community.

The written curatorial statement from the organizing committee of the 11th Havana Biennial arrived via email the same day that we were preparing a dossier for the Romanian magazine IDEA. As we put together a brief history of “Decolonial Aesthetics” meetings and some portions of the “Decolonial Manifesto,” we discussed the need to bring to the biennial some of the critical and creative processes emanating from the decolonial collective. Previous editions of the biennial were overcharged with doses of “postmodernity,” marginal notes on the  ”postcolonial” condition, and celebrations of the “altermodern” (with its postproduction and relational dimensions). These were present in the curatorial practices, as well as in several of the presentations at the Theoretical Forum during the 2006 and 2009 editions. As we kept reading through the Biennial‘s curatorial statement, its content promoted a heated discussion among us where the idea of presenting a panel on decolonial aestheSis at the Havana Biennial became seen as not only relevant but also, and above all, necessary. - See more at: http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-at-the-11th-havana-biennial/#sthash.ponGdV1V.dpuf