Miguel L Rojas-Sotelo
Duke University, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Nicholas Fellow, Nicholas School of the Environment
Duke Kunshan University | 昆山杜克大学, Division of Social Science, Visiting Professor, International Master in Environmental Policy, DKU
Miguel Rojas-Sotelo works at the intersection of ethnic/Indigenous studies, environmental and health humanities, critical human geography, and border cultural theory. As a scholar, filmmaker, visual artist, and media activist he studies how indigenous (settled or displaced) and natural spaces are shaped by modernity and how they mobilize to adapt and resist. He is particularly interested in how indigenous communities, articulate their archival knowledge, racial and class politics, the spatiality of those processes, and how they are manifested in the landscape via visual, audiovisual, oral, and textual narratives. Miguel was the first Visual Arts Director at the Colombian Ministry of Culture (1997-2001). He serves on the board of Repurpose IT Indigenous Education NGO; a co-founding member of the Mingas de la Imagen working on hemispheric intercultural dialogues; and a co-founding scholar of the Centro de Estudios Ecocríticos e Interculturales at Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá.
Miguel won the 2017-2018 National Prize in Art and Essay Criticism awarded by the Colombian Ministry of Culture for his text SOBERANIA VISUAL EN ABYA YALA (Visual Sovereignty in Abya Yala) the first text that recognizes indigenous visual and cultural production in Colombia- an English version is found in the edited volume "Abiayalan Pluriverses: Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies" ( 2023-4). In 2018, Miguel was co-president of EILA V (Encuentro Intercultural de Literatura y Artes Amerindias | Intercultural Encounter of Amerindian Arts and Literatures), held in Bogotá, Colombia. In 2022, co-edited a multi-volume series (with Miguel Rocha Vivas and Paolo Molano) titled Mingas de la Imagen: Estudios Ecocríticos, Indígenas e Interculturales (Ediciones U. Javeriana) with the funding support of the Cultural Conservancy and the Mino Niibi Fund. In 2023 released his monograph, Territorio Encarnado. Ejercicios de soberanía visual. Visualidades, textualidades y estéticas situadas en la producción cultural artística en Abya Yala (Universidad Distrital, ASAB).
In his book IRRUPCIONES, COMPRESIONES | CONTRAVENCIONES (Irruptions, Compressions, Contraventions), University of Los Andes Press (2016); Chapter two: De Raíz (Uprooted) tells the story of Indigenous Nonuya cultural producer Mogaje Guihu (Abel Rodríguez Muinane). His scholarly writing has been published and distributed by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and Duke Press, Routledge, Palgrave, Ediciones Uniandes, Ediciones ASAB, Ediciones Universidad Javeriana, ASP Books, and Ediciones Cubanas, among others. He has published multiple books, including the monographic artist’s book GRAPHIC IN TRANSIT | Sergio Sánchez Santamaría (ASP Books, 2021) on the work of this Nahua/Africana artist heir of the TPG; and BE PATIENT | SE PACIENTE artistic and medical entanglements in the work of Libia Posada (ASP Books, 2018), on health aesthetics, collapsing systems of welfare due to race, gender, and class in Colombia via the work of Libia Posada. Besides, he has produced exhibitions and documentaries along with indigenous producers in Mexico, among others: SACBÉ: The Path of wellbeing (2017) with Maya filmmaker Edwin Noh and Mauricio Andrada; Guardians of the Huaihe River (2020), with Yumin Wang, on the life of photo documentalist Huo Daishan (an indigenous man of Henan) about his struggle for environmental justice in China; in 2022 finished six-part short film series on issues of interculturality with indigenous poets Hugo Jamioy, Wiñay Mallki, Humberto Ak’abal (rip), Elicura Chihuilaf, and indigenous filmmakers Keratuma Domicó and Olowaili Green.
Miguel is PC at the Duke Center for Latin American Studies and teaches at the Nicholas School of the Environment and the Duke Center for Documentary Studies on environmental justice and communication. Miguel was visiting faculty at Duke Kunshan University for the International Master in Environmental Policy (IMEP) and the undergraduate program teaching Environmental Justice, Visual Communication, and Indigeneity (2018-2019).
Rojas-Sotelo is a citizen of Colombia, born in Bacatá and raised in the Ubaque (muísca) rural mountains of Cundinamarca.
Phone: (919) 681 3883 | (919) 748 0666
Address: 2204 Erwin Road, 133 John Hope Franklin Center. Duke University. Durham, NC. 27708
Miguel won the 2017-2018 National Prize in Art and Essay Criticism awarded by the Colombian Ministry of Culture for his text SOBERANIA VISUAL EN ABYA YALA (Visual Sovereignty in Abya Yala) the first text that recognizes indigenous visual and cultural production in Colombia- an English version is found in the edited volume "Abiayalan Pluriverses: Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies" ( 2023-4). In 2018, Miguel was co-president of EILA V (Encuentro Intercultural de Literatura y Artes Amerindias | Intercultural Encounter of Amerindian Arts and Literatures), held in Bogotá, Colombia. In 2022, co-edited a multi-volume series (with Miguel Rocha Vivas and Paolo Molano) titled Mingas de la Imagen: Estudios Ecocríticos, Indígenas e Interculturales (Ediciones U. Javeriana) with the funding support of the Cultural Conservancy and the Mino Niibi Fund. In 2023 released his monograph, Territorio Encarnado. Ejercicios de soberanía visual. Visualidades, textualidades y estéticas situadas en la producción cultural artística en Abya Yala (Universidad Distrital, ASAB).
In his book IRRUPCIONES, COMPRESIONES | CONTRAVENCIONES (Irruptions, Compressions, Contraventions), University of Los Andes Press (2016); Chapter two: De Raíz (Uprooted) tells the story of Indigenous Nonuya cultural producer Mogaje Guihu (Abel Rodríguez Muinane). His scholarly writing has been published and distributed by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and Duke Press, Routledge, Palgrave, Ediciones Uniandes, Ediciones ASAB, Ediciones Universidad Javeriana, ASP Books, and Ediciones Cubanas, among others. He has published multiple books, including the monographic artist’s book GRAPHIC IN TRANSIT | Sergio Sánchez Santamaría (ASP Books, 2021) on the work of this Nahua/Africana artist heir of the TPG; and BE PATIENT | SE PACIENTE artistic and medical entanglements in the work of Libia Posada (ASP Books, 2018), on health aesthetics, collapsing systems of welfare due to race, gender, and class in Colombia via the work of Libia Posada. Besides, he has produced exhibitions and documentaries along with indigenous producers in Mexico, among others: SACBÉ: The Path of wellbeing (2017) with Maya filmmaker Edwin Noh and Mauricio Andrada; Guardians of the Huaihe River (2020), with Yumin Wang, on the life of photo documentalist Huo Daishan (an indigenous man of Henan) about his struggle for environmental justice in China; in 2022 finished six-part short film series on issues of interculturality with indigenous poets Hugo Jamioy, Wiñay Mallki, Humberto Ak’abal (rip), Elicura Chihuilaf, and indigenous filmmakers Keratuma Domicó and Olowaili Green.
Miguel is PC at the Duke Center for Latin American Studies and teaches at the Nicholas School of the Environment and the Duke Center for Documentary Studies on environmental justice and communication. Miguel was visiting faculty at Duke Kunshan University for the International Master in Environmental Policy (IMEP) and the undergraduate program teaching Environmental Justice, Visual Communication, and Indigeneity (2018-2019).
Rojas-Sotelo is a citizen of Colombia, born in Bacatá and raised in the Ubaque (muísca) rural mountains of Cundinamarca.
Phone: (919) 681 3883 | (919) 748 0666
Address: 2204 Erwin Road, 133 John Hope Franklin Center. Duke University. Durham, NC. 27708
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Directed by Mauricio Andrade-Bilche & Miguel Rojas-Sotelo
Assisted by Edwin Noh.
Quintana Ro, Mexico, and Durham, North Carolina.
30 min.
2017.
How to build bridges between Duke and the Durham Latino communities? How to make them simultaneously bi-directional ones? In other words, how to offer means for the Latino community to have greater access to the university and to have Duke students engage the community both in the community and at Duke? Duke University has been changed by these relationships, as will the community that surrounds us; thus the metaphor of the two-way bridge.
See more (also in Spanish) at: https://sites.duke.edu/bridges/
Created and programed by Miguel Rojas-Sotelo
Visit site: https://sites.duke.edu/watertowns/
水上城镇EFAF是一这是一个国际性的活动,以特定的环境主题为特色,展示了近期和历史上的纪录片和艺术作品。主题指导节日的原则,但不限制内容或参与;水乡EFAF是一个开放的平台。
https://sites.duke.edu/watertowns/
Parte de: www.mingasdelaimagen.org
Presentando a: Miguel Rocha Vivas
Y a los Oralitores: Hugo Jamioy, Fredy Chicangana, Anastasia Candré (qdp), Liliana Ancalao, Estercilia Simanca, Elicura Chihuailaf, y Humberto Ak‘abal (qdp).
Con la participación de:
Mogaje Guiju (Don Abel Rodríguez), Tirsa Chindoy, Miguel A. Ramírez, Benjamín Jacanamijoy, Jeisson Castillo, Lorenzo Mashna, Paul Worley, Federico Luisetti, Jorge Cadavid, Iván Vargas, Fernando Urbina, Luz María Lepe, Teresa Dey, Pablo Mora, Colectivo Audiovisual Wiwa, Luis Enrique Tuntaquimba, Carlos Miguel Gómez, Jitoma Ñue, Wendy Call, Dalia Patiño-Echeverri, Juan Duchesne-Winter, Simone Ferrari, Janeth Lilian Calambás, Eliana Jeanel Palacio, Mariela Pujimuy Janamejoy
Pedro José Velasco Tumiña, Yana Lucila Lema Otavalo, Vilma Rocío Almendra Quiguanás.
Agradecimientos
Centro Ático, PUJ - Casa Misak - ONIC.
THE CULTURAL CONSERVANCY - UNIVERSIDAD JAVERIAN
See related article:
"Narcoaesthetics in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States: Death Narco, Narco Nations, Border States, Narcochingadazo?" Miguel L. Rojas-Sotelo. Latin American Perspectives. First Published January 16, 2014. Research Article. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X13518757
Embodied Enactments. Edited By Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo, Kevin G. Guerrieri. Palgrave 2022
ISBN 9780367722807
This volume explores how Colombian novelists, artists, performers, activists, musicians, and others seek to enact—to perform, to stage, to represent—human rights situations that are otherwise enacted discursively, that is, made public or official, in juridical and political realms in which justice often remains an illusory or promised future.
Part I: Human rights narratives, micronarratives, and subjectivation
2. The deaths inscribed in us: art, memory, and public space in Doris Salcedo
Miguel Rojas-Sotelo
Practices of visualization of crimes against humanity in Colombia have triggered members of the civil society to become active defenders of human rights. The use of images, marches, and social performance are part of a toolbox of social protest. Women have suffered disproportionately, and are becoming the front line in the struggle for human rights in Colombia. Doris Salcedo is one of them, who for 30 years has used her art to bear witness, embody, and enact action; what started as an individual approach has become a collective ethic and aesthetic method to find ways of mourning
(and even confronting) the deaths inscribed in us.
See an excerpt of the text (also in the link below).
Mingas de la imagen reúne las contribuciones de cuarenta y ocho colaboradores, de diecinueve países, tres continentes, y una veintena de pueblos indígenas y de universidades del mundo. En este libro se dan cita numerosas lenguas indígenas, incluyendo el castellano, y se presentan textos que concitan la rigurosidad investigativa con la creatividad visual, narrativa y poética. Las mingas de la imagen son una serie de experiencias de educación y creación entre culturas, realizadas en colaboración con creadores, académicos y estudiantes en Colombia. Como resultado de estas mingas, se han derivado procesos de gran alcance, por ejemplo, el V Encuentro Continental de Literaturas Amerindias, la Red de Creación Intercultural y el Centro de Estudios Ecocríticos e Interculturales; también este libro que inaugura una nueva colección en estudios indígenas, interculturales y de la tierra.
[SEE SELECTION IN THE PDF BELOW]
DESCRIPTION:
Publisher: Artist Studio Project Publishing LLC. Raleigh, NC: 2021.
Language: English
Notes: Includes bibliographical references, list of images, artist cv.
Description: xx, 289 p. (304 p.); 152 illustrations; 30 x 21 x 2 cm [11 3/4x 11 1/2 x 3/4″].
Editors: Miguel Rojas Sotelo & Rafael A. Osuba.
Illustrator | Artist: Sergio Sánchez Santamaría. All art by Sánchez Santamaría, otherwise named.
Preface By: Robert Healey.
Contributing Text By: Carlos Guevara Meza, Miguel Rojas Sotelo, Raúl Moarquech Ferrera Balanquet, José Calle, Steven Campbell, and Bill Fick.
Cover Design: Rafael A. Osuba, Miguel Rojas Sotelo.
Image by: Sergio Sánchez Santamaría. (Benito Juarez o el Nacimiento de la república. 2017)
© Artist Studio Project Publishing LLC (ASP Books) 2021
© Sergio Sánchez Santamaría
IN COLLABORATION WITH:
Duke University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), Duke University Center for International and Global Studies (DUCIGS), Duke University Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies (AAHVS) and Duke Arts.
Quotes:
“As a lover of Mexican culture in general and of the TGP in particular, I am delighted that Sergio Sánchez Santamaría is carrying on their great tradition.”
Robert Healey, collector.
“The work of Maestro Sánchez Santamaría has a clear ‘classic’ air, so to speak. He immediately remembers the best of that revolutionary left-wing nationalism of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP).”
Carlos Guevara Mesa, art critic.
“Sánchez Santamaría and Elizabeth Catlett, have engaged in constant interventions with the sociopolitical and cultural local context of many regions; and, as conscious producers of memories, aware of their voices, have manifested their collective capacities to reclaim their existence. Acquiring the designation of La Tercera Raíz, the third root”
Raúl Ferrera-Balanquet, author and art critic.
“I was always attracted to Sergio’s mastery of the craft, his ability to create mood, movement, light, darkness, tensions, emotions. A mastery not seen since the days of Posada or Leopoldo Méndez.”
José Calle, collector.
“Sergio is as passionate for printmaking as he is to make poetry with it.”
Steven Campbell, artistic director Land Fall Press.
“I definitely consider him to be one of the outstanding printmakers alive today!”
Bill Fick, artist and printmaker.
“Alluding to the famous phrase of the great José Clemente Orozco: ‘If I hadn’t been an engraver I would have wanted to be an engraver.’”
Sergio Sánchez Santamaría.
Soberania Visual en Abya Yala (Visual Autonomy in Abya Yala) present the work of a group of contemporary indigenous artists of the continent underlining their situated, relational, and contextual practice. From visual journals, photography, performance, public art, and installation these producers related their artistic practice to local histories of resistance, cultural revival, sustainability and social activism.
The edition also present three other essays (two shorts and one long) that were awarded or recognized in the edition of the event.
In Spanish. (for english version contact the author)
SEE A 40 PAGES FRAGMENT OF THE TEXT BELLOW
https://www.amazon.com/Be-Patient-Se-Paciente-Entanglements/dp/0998174939/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536825947&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=BE+PATIENT+%7C+SE+PACIENTEArtistic+and+Medical+Entanglements+in+the+Work+of+Libia+Posada
English.
The book presents an account of how cultural production in the form of contemporary art, literature, and mass media has shaped the writing of Colombian history under the neoliberal model, the new national Constitution (1991), and its cultural policy. The resulting new critical imaginaries are framed in the supposed modernization of the State, characterized by a decentralizing mission, a feverish obsession with the archive, the professionalization of the art space, and the establishment of a marketplace that seeks the impossible “general equilibrium” in the midst of the internal conflict and its resolution. In four chapters the text offers a comparative reading of the work of artists, writers, and popular media in relation to the new Constitution (of 1991) and the cultural policies develop in the mid 1990s and their effects today. Artist such as Maria Elvira Escallón (1954) and Libia Posada (1961), from multiple perspectives portray situations of the national context as they relate to the state of the commons and its interaction with the domestic world.
The cultural violence that, within the same expeditionary logic, has marginalized, exoticized, racialized, and denied viewpoints of a non-Euro centric nature is explored with the case of Mogaje Guihu (Don Abel Rodriguez, 1941), an indigenous elder from the Amazon who serves as an example of both the adaptation and illustration processes, as well as a true relational possibility within the hyper-institutionalized space of the world of art. Finally, the construction of a tamed national identity is based on a popular culture which has been domesticated by the forces of the global market. The branding of the country and its bizarre mirror appear in the work of Juan Obando (1980), who reveals an interstitial space where a critical/anarchist possibility emerges within the hyper-institutionalized space of the art world.
By: Juan C. Guerrero-Hernández, Pablo Batelli-Gómez, Santiago Rueda-Fajardo, Miguel Rojas-Sotelo. Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, Universidad de los Andes.
Rojas-Sotelo, “Caminar, explotar, olvidar” (p. 72-101).
https://premionalcritica.uniandes.edu.co/wp-content/uploads/PNC-III.pdf
Walter Benjamin solía transitar por las ciudades europeas entre las guerras mundiales del siglo veinte (Venecia, Berlín, Moscú, Marsella, Ibiza y París, entre otras). Fue observando en París las ruinas del capitalismo industrial moderno, simbolizadas en las viejas arcadas comerciales, donde entendió que la historia debía ser escrita con melancolía.
A fines de los 80 y principios de los 90, las principales ciudades en Colombia se encontraban en un estado de alerta que las hacía silenciosas desde temprano, no por la famosa “ley zanahoria”, sino por la “guerra total contra el estado” declarada en mayo de 1989 por los capos de la droga. Para evitar la extradición, los llamados narcoterroristas lideraron una campaña de terror y muerte. En 1989, nueve años antes de los ataques de Al Queada en Kenya y Tanzania y más de diez años antes de Septiembre 11 de 2001, Pablo Escobar ya había logrado poner una bomba en el vuelo 203 de Avianca, destino Cali. El avión explotó saliendo de Bogotá, matando a sus 107 pasajeros.
Pero, ¿qué tiene que ver esto con el interés y preocupación que el artista contemporáneo en Colombia tiene con respecto a la ciudad y sus transforma- ciones?
En este ensayo marcaré 1989 como año del nacimiento de lo “contemporáneo” pues fue en ese entonces cuando comenzó un nuevo imaginario global que define las prácticas culturales de hoy...
Online at: https://premionalcritica.uniandes.edu.co/wp-content/uploads/PNC-III.pdf
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
Download the book:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38071721/Libro-Proyecto-Pentagono-Ministerio-de-Cultura
Download: http://www.mincultura.gov.co/recursos_user/Artes/37.pdf
This chapter brings the embodied, situated aesthetic practice of a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural producers into dialogue with decolonial approaches and Indigenous and Native American Studies from the North American academy. The notion of embodiment derives from the way each subject literally carries its territory and develops a critical yet sensible individual and collective interruption in the way academic disciplines look at cultural products, categorizing and compartmentalizing them in taxonomical exercises of capture and control. I use trans-Indigenous and decolonial practices to identify critical departures from coloniality (the beyond, expressed in the prefix “trans-”) and the points of origination in coloniality itself. These producers work on intercultural dialogues and do not make what we consider art (in conventional terms) but mostly perform acts and events that interrupt spaces within and outside academic locations, supporting ways of exercising aesthetic sovereignty and forms of liberation. Their work, however, is read within the realm of visual studies.
With: ERIKA WEINTHAL, MIGUEL ROJAS SOTELO, KRISTINE PERRY, CARL BRUCH and ÁNGELA MARÍA AMAYA ARIAS
by Miguel L. Rojas-Sotelo
Duke Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA
Arts 2023, 12(4), 127; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040127
Received: 3 March 2023 / Revised: 11 June 2023 / Accepted: 15 June 2023 / Published: 25 June 2023
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rethinking Contemporary Latin American Art)
The Tree of Abundance is an origin story for many nations in the Amazon basin. It recounts a time when all people(s) lived under a mother tree, until those with an ax arrived and the tree collapsed. This is the act of coloniality, which produced a new landscape. The story serves as a conceptual metaphor to analyze the production of an emerging generation of contemporary visual makers of indigenous origin. These cultural producers are set in a historical context, which represents long temporalities of cultural-production resistance and re-existence in Latin America (called here Abya Yala). The text introduces a way to rethink contemporary art in the region under conditions of coloniality and names the artists “embodied territories” since they have particular connections to the places they live and work. This article is organized into three parts presenting artwork by several indigenous and intercultural subjects (with emphasis on those living in indigenous territories of Colombia): (1) A short genealogy from modernity to contemporaneity brings indigenous cultural production to the academic space as another source for a critical understanding of the lived experience in Abya Yala. (2) An account of themes derived from the contested histories highlights how indigenous and intercultural artists produce responses to them. (3) The genealogy and themes are then set in spatial terms offering two case studies, on one hand, the toppling of historical figures by indigenous activists as performance in the public space and, on the other, the exhibitions “Visual Sovereignty” and the “Indigenous Salon Manuel Quintín Lame”. The article concludes stressing how this emerging generation builds on long genealogies of sovereign representation, responding with a wide range of contemporary means (visual, textual, bodily, and multimedia) to issues that still affect their communities (land grabs, resource extraction, racialization, marginality, etc.). Adaptation, resistance, and re-existence occur when embodied territories recognize historical realities (time), location (space), and forms of liberation (action) within coloniality.
Directed by Mauricio Andrade-Bilche & Miguel Rojas-Sotelo
Assisted by Edwin Noh.
Quintana Ro, Mexico, and Durham, North Carolina.
30 min.
2017.
How to build bridges between Duke and the Durham Latino communities? How to make them simultaneously bi-directional ones? In other words, how to offer means for the Latino community to have greater access to the university and to have Duke students engage the community both in the community and at Duke? Duke University has been changed by these relationships, as will the community that surrounds us; thus the metaphor of the two-way bridge.
See more (also in Spanish) at: https://sites.duke.edu/bridges/
Created and programed by Miguel Rojas-Sotelo
Visit site: https://sites.duke.edu/watertowns/
水上城镇EFAF是一这是一个国际性的活动,以特定的环境主题为特色,展示了近期和历史上的纪录片和艺术作品。主题指导节日的原则,但不限制内容或参与;水乡EFAF是一个开放的平台。
https://sites.duke.edu/watertowns/
Parte de: www.mingasdelaimagen.org
Presentando a: Miguel Rocha Vivas
Y a los Oralitores: Hugo Jamioy, Fredy Chicangana, Anastasia Candré (qdp), Liliana Ancalao, Estercilia Simanca, Elicura Chihuailaf, y Humberto Ak‘abal (qdp).
Con la participación de:
Mogaje Guiju (Don Abel Rodríguez), Tirsa Chindoy, Miguel A. Ramírez, Benjamín Jacanamijoy, Jeisson Castillo, Lorenzo Mashna, Paul Worley, Federico Luisetti, Jorge Cadavid, Iván Vargas, Fernando Urbina, Luz María Lepe, Teresa Dey, Pablo Mora, Colectivo Audiovisual Wiwa, Luis Enrique Tuntaquimba, Carlos Miguel Gómez, Jitoma Ñue, Wendy Call, Dalia Patiño-Echeverri, Juan Duchesne-Winter, Simone Ferrari, Janeth Lilian Calambás, Eliana Jeanel Palacio, Mariela Pujimuy Janamejoy
Pedro José Velasco Tumiña, Yana Lucila Lema Otavalo, Vilma Rocío Almendra Quiguanás.
Agradecimientos
Centro Ático, PUJ - Casa Misak - ONIC.
THE CULTURAL CONSERVANCY - UNIVERSIDAD JAVERIAN
See related article:
"Narcoaesthetics in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States: Death Narco, Narco Nations, Border States, Narcochingadazo?" Miguel L. Rojas-Sotelo. Latin American Perspectives. First Published January 16, 2014. Research Article. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X13518757
Embodied Enactments. Edited By Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo, Kevin G. Guerrieri. Palgrave 2022
ISBN 9780367722807
This volume explores how Colombian novelists, artists, performers, activists, musicians, and others seek to enact—to perform, to stage, to represent—human rights situations that are otherwise enacted discursively, that is, made public or official, in juridical and political realms in which justice often remains an illusory or promised future.
Part I: Human rights narratives, micronarratives, and subjectivation
2. The deaths inscribed in us: art, memory, and public space in Doris Salcedo
Miguel Rojas-Sotelo
Practices of visualization of crimes against humanity in Colombia have triggered members of the civil society to become active defenders of human rights. The use of images, marches, and social performance are part of a toolbox of social protest. Women have suffered disproportionately, and are becoming the front line in the struggle for human rights in Colombia. Doris Salcedo is one of them, who for 30 years has used her art to bear witness, embody, and enact action; what started as an individual approach has become a collective ethic and aesthetic method to find ways of mourning
(and even confronting) the deaths inscribed in us.
See an excerpt of the text (also in the link below).
Mingas de la imagen reúne las contribuciones de cuarenta y ocho colaboradores, de diecinueve países, tres continentes, y una veintena de pueblos indígenas y de universidades del mundo. En este libro se dan cita numerosas lenguas indígenas, incluyendo el castellano, y se presentan textos que concitan la rigurosidad investigativa con la creatividad visual, narrativa y poética. Las mingas de la imagen son una serie de experiencias de educación y creación entre culturas, realizadas en colaboración con creadores, académicos y estudiantes en Colombia. Como resultado de estas mingas, se han derivado procesos de gran alcance, por ejemplo, el V Encuentro Continental de Literaturas Amerindias, la Red de Creación Intercultural y el Centro de Estudios Ecocríticos e Interculturales; también este libro que inaugura una nueva colección en estudios indígenas, interculturales y de la tierra.
[SEE SELECTION IN THE PDF BELOW]
DESCRIPTION:
Publisher: Artist Studio Project Publishing LLC. Raleigh, NC: 2021.
Language: English
Notes: Includes bibliographical references, list of images, artist cv.
Description: xx, 289 p. (304 p.); 152 illustrations; 30 x 21 x 2 cm [11 3/4x 11 1/2 x 3/4″].
Editors: Miguel Rojas Sotelo & Rafael A. Osuba.
Illustrator | Artist: Sergio Sánchez Santamaría. All art by Sánchez Santamaría, otherwise named.
Preface By: Robert Healey.
Contributing Text By: Carlos Guevara Meza, Miguel Rojas Sotelo, Raúl Moarquech Ferrera Balanquet, José Calle, Steven Campbell, and Bill Fick.
Cover Design: Rafael A. Osuba, Miguel Rojas Sotelo.
Image by: Sergio Sánchez Santamaría. (Benito Juarez o el Nacimiento de la república. 2017)
© Artist Studio Project Publishing LLC (ASP Books) 2021
© Sergio Sánchez Santamaría
IN COLLABORATION WITH:
Duke University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), Duke University Center for International and Global Studies (DUCIGS), Duke University Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies (AAHVS) and Duke Arts.
Quotes:
“As a lover of Mexican culture in general and of the TGP in particular, I am delighted that Sergio Sánchez Santamaría is carrying on their great tradition.”
Robert Healey, collector.
“The work of Maestro Sánchez Santamaría has a clear ‘classic’ air, so to speak. He immediately remembers the best of that revolutionary left-wing nationalism of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP).”
Carlos Guevara Mesa, art critic.
“Sánchez Santamaría and Elizabeth Catlett, have engaged in constant interventions with the sociopolitical and cultural local context of many regions; and, as conscious producers of memories, aware of their voices, have manifested their collective capacities to reclaim their existence. Acquiring the designation of La Tercera Raíz, the third root”
Raúl Ferrera-Balanquet, author and art critic.
“I was always attracted to Sergio’s mastery of the craft, his ability to create mood, movement, light, darkness, tensions, emotions. A mastery not seen since the days of Posada or Leopoldo Méndez.”
José Calle, collector.
“Sergio is as passionate for printmaking as he is to make poetry with it.”
Steven Campbell, artistic director Land Fall Press.
“I definitely consider him to be one of the outstanding printmakers alive today!”
Bill Fick, artist and printmaker.
“Alluding to the famous phrase of the great José Clemente Orozco: ‘If I hadn’t been an engraver I would have wanted to be an engraver.’”
Sergio Sánchez Santamaría.
Soberania Visual en Abya Yala (Visual Autonomy in Abya Yala) present the work of a group of contemporary indigenous artists of the continent underlining their situated, relational, and contextual practice. From visual journals, photography, performance, public art, and installation these producers related their artistic practice to local histories of resistance, cultural revival, sustainability and social activism.
The edition also present three other essays (two shorts and one long) that were awarded or recognized in the edition of the event.
In Spanish. (for english version contact the author)
SEE A 40 PAGES FRAGMENT OF THE TEXT BELLOW
https://www.amazon.com/Be-Patient-Se-Paciente-Entanglements/dp/0998174939/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536825947&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=BE+PATIENT+%7C+SE+PACIENTEArtistic+and+Medical+Entanglements+in+the+Work+of+Libia+Posada
English.
The book presents an account of how cultural production in the form of contemporary art, literature, and mass media has shaped the writing of Colombian history under the neoliberal model, the new national Constitution (1991), and its cultural policy. The resulting new critical imaginaries are framed in the supposed modernization of the State, characterized by a decentralizing mission, a feverish obsession with the archive, the professionalization of the art space, and the establishment of a marketplace that seeks the impossible “general equilibrium” in the midst of the internal conflict and its resolution. In four chapters the text offers a comparative reading of the work of artists, writers, and popular media in relation to the new Constitution (of 1991) and the cultural policies develop in the mid 1990s and their effects today. Artist such as Maria Elvira Escallón (1954) and Libia Posada (1961), from multiple perspectives portray situations of the national context as they relate to the state of the commons and its interaction with the domestic world.
The cultural violence that, within the same expeditionary logic, has marginalized, exoticized, racialized, and denied viewpoints of a non-Euro centric nature is explored with the case of Mogaje Guihu (Don Abel Rodriguez, 1941), an indigenous elder from the Amazon who serves as an example of both the adaptation and illustration processes, as well as a true relational possibility within the hyper-institutionalized space of the world of art. Finally, the construction of a tamed national identity is based on a popular culture which has been domesticated by the forces of the global market. The branding of the country and its bizarre mirror appear in the work of Juan Obando (1980), who reveals an interstitial space where a critical/anarchist possibility emerges within the hyper-institutionalized space of the art world.
By: Juan C. Guerrero-Hernández, Pablo Batelli-Gómez, Santiago Rueda-Fajardo, Miguel Rojas-Sotelo. Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, Universidad de los Andes.
Rojas-Sotelo, “Caminar, explotar, olvidar” (p. 72-101).
https://premionalcritica.uniandes.edu.co/wp-content/uploads/PNC-III.pdf
Walter Benjamin solía transitar por las ciudades europeas entre las guerras mundiales del siglo veinte (Venecia, Berlín, Moscú, Marsella, Ibiza y París, entre otras). Fue observando en París las ruinas del capitalismo industrial moderno, simbolizadas en las viejas arcadas comerciales, donde entendió que la historia debía ser escrita con melancolía.
A fines de los 80 y principios de los 90, las principales ciudades en Colombia se encontraban en un estado de alerta que las hacía silenciosas desde temprano, no por la famosa “ley zanahoria”, sino por la “guerra total contra el estado” declarada en mayo de 1989 por los capos de la droga. Para evitar la extradición, los llamados narcoterroristas lideraron una campaña de terror y muerte. En 1989, nueve años antes de los ataques de Al Queada en Kenya y Tanzania y más de diez años antes de Septiembre 11 de 2001, Pablo Escobar ya había logrado poner una bomba en el vuelo 203 de Avianca, destino Cali. El avión explotó saliendo de Bogotá, matando a sus 107 pasajeros.
Pero, ¿qué tiene que ver esto con el interés y preocupación que el artista contemporáneo en Colombia tiene con respecto a la ciudad y sus transforma- ciones?
En este ensayo marcaré 1989 como año del nacimiento de lo “contemporáneo” pues fue en ese entonces cuando comenzó un nuevo imaginario global que define las prácticas culturales de hoy...
Online at: https://premionalcritica.uniandes.edu.co/wp-content/uploads/PNC-III.pdf
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
Download the book:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38071721/Libro-Proyecto-Pentagono-Ministerio-de-Cultura
Download: http://www.mincultura.gov.co/recursos_user/Artes/37.pdf
This chapter brings the embodied, situated aesthetic practice of a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural producers into dialogue with decolonial approaches and Indigenous and Native American Studies from the North American academy. The notion of embodiment derives from the way each subject literally carries its territory and develops a critical yet sensible individual and collective interruption in the way academic disciplines look at cultural products, categorizing and compartmentalizing them in taxonomical exercises of capture and control. I use trans-Indigenous and decolonial practices to identify critical departures from coloniality (the beyond, expressed in the prefix “trans-”) and the points of origination in coloniality itself. These producers work on intercultural dialogues and do not make what we consider art (in conventional terms) but mostly perform acts and events that interrupt spaces within and outside academic locations, supporting ways of exercising aesthetic sovereignty and forms of liberation. Their work, however, is read within the realm of visual studies.
With: ERIKA WEINTHAL, MIGUEL ROJAS SOTELO, KRISTINE PERRY, CARL BRUCH and ÁNGELA MARÍA AMAYA ARIAS
by Miguel L. Rojas-Sotelo
Duke Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA
Arts 2023, 12(4), 127; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040127
Received: 3 March 2023 / Revised: 11 June 2023 / Accepted: 15 June 2023 / Published: 25 June 2023
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rethinking Contemporary Latin American Art)
The Tree of Abundance is an origin story for many nations in the Amazon basin. It recounts a time when all people(s) lived under a mother tree, until those with an ax arrived and the tree collapsed. This is the act of coloniality, which produced a new landscape. The story serves as a conceptual metaphor to analyze the production of an emerging generation of contemporary visual makers of indigenous origin. These cultural producers are set in a historical context, which represents long temporalities of cultural-production resistance and re-existence in Latin America (called here Abya Yala). The text introduces a way to rethink contemporary art in the region under conditions of coloniality and names the artists “embodied territories” since they have particular connections to the places they live and work. This article is organized into three parts presenting artwork by several indigenous and intercultural subjects (with emphasis on those living in indigenous territories of Colombia): (1) A short genealogy from modernity to contemporaneity brings indigenous cultural production to the academic space as another source for a critical understanding of the lived experience in Abya Yala. (2) An account of themes derived from the contested histories highlights how indigenous and intercultural artists produce responses to them. (3) The genealogy and themes are then set in spatial terms offering two case studies, on one hand, the toppling of historical figures by indigenous activists as performance in the public space and, on the other, the exhibitions “Visual Sovereignty” and the “Indigenous Salon Manuel Quintín Lame”. The article concludes stressing how this emerging generation builds on long genealogies of sovereign representation, responding with a wide range of contemporary means (visual, textual, bodily, and multimedia) to issues that still affect their communities (land grabs, resource extraction, racialization, marginality, etc.). Adaptation, resistance, and re-existence occur when embodied territories recognize historical realities (time), location (space), and forms of liberation (action) within coloniality.
North Carolina is home to a rich diversity of voices, which is reflected in its community of Latin American artists. Work from Place of Encounters | Lugar de Encuentros often straddles two worlds, reflecting both birthplace and chosen home, exploring tension and harmony in the relationship between the two. From film to installation art to paintings
to photography, this exhibition delves into the variety of migrant experiences, offering a space for connection, and a chance to encounter another’s experience through art. Artists include Nico Amortegui (Colombia), Cornelio Campos (Mexico), Rodrigo Dorfman (Chile), Mario Marzán (USA Puerto Rico), Renzo Ortega (Peru), and Rosalía Torres-Weiner (Mexico).
Texto en Castellano: https://cameronartmuseum.org/pdf/2023_INT_BROCHURE_PlaceOfEncounters-Spanish_FINAL.pdf
varias ciudades del país (particularmente en Cali), y el movimiento Indígena (la Minga Indígena del Cauca y El Movimiento de Autoridades Indígenas del Sur Occidente, AISO), juntando reclamos históricos y actuales. Nos interesa enfocarnos en la dimensión estético-política de sus acciones, y en la manera en que ésta repercutió en el paisaje físico, social y simbólico de los espacios urbanos en los que se desarrollaron los eventos del paro nacional. Allí se anunció una solidaridad cruzada, donde la protesta, el autocuidado, el derrocamiento, y el levantamiento de contra-monumentos, así como la resignificación de espacios urbanos funcionaron como expresiones de
horizontalidad y restitución histórica. Son experiencias que complejizan la movilización y la sitúan como algo mucho más activo y creativo que un solo estallido. El resultado fue la constitución de procesos autónomos en busca de una nueva cultura política, en diálogo con otros procesos antagónicos con respecto a una derecha-neoliberal, hasta hace poco hegemónica en Colombia. Sin desconocer el espacio de tensiones que estuvo en juego (y los entramados de violencia simbólica y física), nos interesa pensar tales experiencias estético-políticas como apuestas por la construcción de un espacio común heterogéneo y conflictivo, que se resiste a la privatización
neoliberal de la vida, a la desposesión del futuro, a la negación de las capacidades de los cuerpos cualquiera, y al bloqueo de sus poderes afectivos disruptivos.
for themselves, asking for the guarantee of their human rights. This volume presents nine articles that articulate how social movements are organizing themselves, taking to the streets and social media platforms to counterbalance inequity and find representation. The nine contributions revise the contexts in which protests, uprisings, pickets, and parades have taken place in the last decade. The contributions also analyze how effective these manifestations have been in terms of their goals and the (in)direct outcomes, as well as their short- and long-term impact on societies at both local and global levels.
Manifestaciones democráticas en Latinoamérica y el Caribe
La democracia en América Latina y el Caribe sufre de una compleja crisis de representación ciudadana. Este es el caso en países como Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, México, Bolivia y Uruguay. A pesar de su base criolla y patriarcal, un punto de inflexión para la democracia en estos siete países se dio a principios del siglo XXI, cuando trabajadores, mujeres, jóvenes, pueblos originarios, comunidades LGBTQ y colectivos de “discapacitados” se alzaron pidiendo la garantía de sus derechos humanos. Este volumen presenta nueve contribuciones que articulan cómo los movimientos sociales se
organizan, tomando las calles y las plataformas de redes sociales para contrarrestar la inequidad social y lograr representación. Las
contribuciones revisan los contextos en los que se han producido
protestas, levantamientos, piquetes y puestas en escena en espacios públicos en la última década. El conjunto de contribuciones también analiza cuán efectivas han sido estas manifestations ciudadanas en términos de sus objetivos y los resultados directors e indirectos, así como su impacto a corto y largo plazo en las sociedades locales y a nivel global.
Palabras clave: Iconoclasta; memoria; historia; despojo; violencia; indígenas; justicia; vandalismo; fabulación; soberanía estética
Iconoclasm, Indigenous Justice, History, and Memory. Acts of Imagination and Sovereignty
Abstract
"When rewriting the history of our country, we don’t need any more symbols of colonization or an apology for violence", were two of the reasons given by the Misak indigenous people to justify their iconoclastic actions against monuments that conveyed a whitewashed and uncritical view of a nation with an undeniable colonial legacy. The article retells a few experiences that stem from the debates around the symbolic value of representation, memory, history, and justice, as they are upheld by indigenous peoples in the Colombian agora. But this phenomenon is not exclusive to one Latin American country: the very fact of its existence responds to local forms of governance and a drive toward cultural reconstitution. Focusing on nation-building processes and the race-based repercussions that stem from the past and the present as a result of the adoption of a classicist educational and cultural model.
Keywords: iconoclasm; memory; violence; indigenous peoples; aesthetic sovereignty
This chapter embraces a cultural and environmental approach. By using rhetorical images and transplanting them into cultural practices, this chapter attempts to
correlate individual practices to the body of the nations in the discussion.
Visual artists Libia Posada (Colombia) and Qin Ga (Mongolia/China) deal with issues of social mapping. Posada’s iconic photo series, Signos cardinales [“Cardinal Signs”], 2008–2018, and Ga’s famous performance piece, the 微型長征 [“Miniature Long March”], 2002–2005, and his latest 围栏计划 [“Grassland Fence Project”], 2019, bring issues of mapping and the body to the center of the discussion of how modern China and Colombia deal with issues of territoriality, displacement, and their own revolutionary histories that—as tattoos and scars—shaped the social and physical formation of the body-nation. It then moves to decentered spaces such as Inner Mongolia, the core of carbon mining in China, and La Guajira in the north-eastern border between Venezuela and Colombia, where El Cerrejón, the largest open-pit carbon mine in Latin America, is located. By studying cultural products such as Zhao Liang’s documentary film 悲兮魔兽 [“Behemoth”] (2016), or the poetry of contemporary Wayúu indigenous writers from la Guajira, Vito Apushana (Miguelángel López), and Estercilia Simanca, this section recognizes the common spaces and practices that make the two regions subject to the forces of global capital and to fall under the spell of Western progress and development ideals. Finally, the chapter focuses on a group of films, documentary and fictional, that use observational modes of narration to share horizontal and vertical flows of people across the territories of both continents that change the cultural geographies of the globe: Lixin Fan’s documentary 归途列车 [“Last Train Home”] and Cary Fukunaga’s fictional film Sin Nombre [“Without a Name”] both premiered in 2009; and Oscar Quemada-Díez’s La jaula de oro [“The Golden Cage”], from 2014, produce family portraits—individual and social—about two of the largest perennial exoduses the world is facing—one, internal; the other, transnational.
Get the volume or the chapter at:
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030557720?wt_mc=Internal.Event.1.SEM.ChapterAuthorCongrat
This is an ebook project (bilingual) edited by Duke University Press and Hemi Press (NYU).
Adelante el pasado: oralidade e visualidade, ato e evento nas práticas artísticas do mundo indígena contemporâneo.
Adelante el pasado: orality and visuality, act and event in the artistic practices of the contemporary indigenous world.
Resumen
Adelante el pasado es un ejercicio de lectura de la producción de dos cultores visuales del mundo indígena de Abya Yala: Rosa Tisoy-Tandioy, artista inga de Colombia, y Benvenuto Chavajay, artista maya de Guatemala. Mediante su práctica artística cargada de visualidad y acciones-eventos, presentan estrategias conceptuales cercanas al llamado giro de(s)colonial que dan cuenta de sus experiencias como creadores contemporáneos en Latinoamérica.
Resumo
Adelante el pasado: oralidade e visualidade, ato e evento nas práticas artísticas do mundo indígena contemporâneo é um exercício de leitura da produção de dois artistas visuais de Abya Yala: Rosa Tisoy-Tandioy, artista Inga da Colômbia, e Benvenuto Chavajay, artista Maia da Guatemala. Através de sua prática artística carregada de visualidade e eventos-ações, apresentam estratégias conceituais fechadas ao chamado giro dê-colonial, que explicam suas experiências como criadores contemporâneos na América Latina.
Abstract
Adelante el pasado: orality and visuality, act and event in the artistic practices of the contemporary indigenous world is an exercise in reading the production of two visual artists from Abya Yala: Rosa Tisoy-Tandioy, Inga artist from Colombia, and Benvenuto Chavajay, Maya artist from Guatemala. Through their artistic practice loaded with visuality and events-actions, they present conceptual strategies closed to the so-called decolonial turn, which account for their experiences as contemporary creators in Latin America.
Ch. 31. The final chapter in this part, and in the handbook, provides a further critical analysis of the role and potential of collaboration and solidarity with regard to the important flows and counter-flows of ideas, people and objects. Turning his attention to the ‘state of the arts of the global South’, Rojas-Sotelo traces cultural and artistic flows and exchanges within, across and from the global South. Echoing the histories and debates traced throughout the handbook, Rojas-Sotelo notes that ‘most of the global South . . . was transformed by modernity/coloniality, their experiences interconnected under global routes of exchange and diverse forms and processes of migration’. Against this historical backdrop, throughout which the arts of the South have simultaneously been ‘treated as primitive, uncivilized, savage and non-refined, but [also] as a source of inspiration for the Western Euro-North American art history’, and as objects to the collected, consumed and commercialised, Rojas-Sotelo examines artistic production in/from the South with a particular focus on tropicalism, hybridity and bordering. In so doing, he highlights diverse conceptualisations of the South – including Mosquera’s categorisation of ‘the issue of “Third World” or “Art of the South” not as a geographic problem but as a problem of the geography of power (Rojas Sotelo, 2009, p. 163)’ – the significance of race (and whiteness) in processes of artistic cultural production, circulation and consumption, and the development of pluriversal approaches that challenge, resist and fill gaps in existing epistemologies and ontologies, both of the North and the South. Also he highlights the extent to which ‘decentred authors from the South, have been documenting how a potent cultural trialectic took place: indigenous and black artistic expression fertilised white modernism, just as white art forms helped shape the indigenous and black modernisms in the South’. Within
the context of such trialectics and other forms of interconnections and intersections, throughout his chapter Rojas-Sotelo asserts that ‘the margin is where their power resides’, while also noting, with reference to bordering, that ‘[a] mestizo/liminal and alternative culture has surfaced from the borders, fractures and crevices, creating a physical and symbolic ethos expressed in the work of the Chicana intellectual Gloria Anzaldúa (1988).’ Indeed, Rojas-Sotelo demonstrates the significance of multiple processes and directionalities of interrelatedness, whether through modes of resistance (against Northern denigration or appropriation of Southern art and artists) or collaboration (with differently positioned and situated artists and audiences). Such modes of collaboration include those showcased, created and nurtured through the Havana Bienalle which, since 1984 ‘has been known as “the Tricontinental art event,” presenting artists from
Latin America, Africa and Asia, as well as Southern artists living in the North’. Indeed, as is powerfully argued by Rojas-Sotelo, and as we have aimed to demonstrate throughout the course of this handbook:
The stories of the peoples of the South cannot be disentangled from those of the global North, as these stories refer to the building of nation-states and the participation of the people of the South in the economies, cultures and epistemic understanding of the world. In effect, while acknowledging the ongoing exclusion and marginalisation of Southern art and Southern ways of knowing, being and acting, Rojas-Sotelo nonetheless concludes that ‘[a]ll these prominent examples of counter-flows, subaltern, situated and localised cultural production from the South may give a hopeful picture of how the world has become more interconnected, diverse and democratic.’ Advocating for the creation of more diverse and meaningfully collaborative spaces, and for the incorporation of both aesthesis (‘the sensing and feeling in opposition to the pure formal in aesthetics’) and ‘decolonial aesthetics’, Rojas-Sotelo powerfully argues that ‘[b]y reconnecting cultural and artistic production to life itself, in relational terms, by readapting ways of living, belonging and listening to the past and present, alternative systems of governance beyond modern democracy
and late capitalism are possible.’ This aim is part of the overarching project that we believe the chapters in this handbook help us better understand, and work toward.
estado de lo público y su interacción con el mundo doméstico. Su trabajo revela el deterioro de esa modernidad en el ejercicio de lo patrimonial (duro) y del cuerpo (blando), y que mediante modelos de inclusión y participación en el espacio del arte, posibilita la emergencia de prácticas como las del arte situado (site specific) y en relación, que hacen contrapeso por
su énfasis en lo procesual, efímero a lo puramente objetual y de mercado.
Abstract
An essay about the time / space in the colombian art scene as shaped by the historical determinants of the late 20th and early 21st century presents the insistence of the intellectual middle class and the art world in revisiting founding moments of the nation, such as
scientific expeditions, a trend which is perhaps explained by nostalgia or interest in claiming an incomplete modernity. It could well be a symptom of social schizophrenia and, simultaneously, a sensibility that seeks to understand the present of a nation in everything retro. This section makes a comparative reading of the work of the artists María Elvira Escallón (1954) and
Libia Posada (1961), who, from diverse perspectives, offer an account of the situations of the national context related to the state of the public and its interaction with the domestic world. Their work reveals the deterioration of this modernity in the exercise of the property (hard)
and the body (soft), which, by models of inclusion and participation in the space of art, makes possible the emergence of practices like site-specific and relational art to counterbalance its emphasis on process, ephemeral to the purely objectual and the market.
Abstract
This reflection presents, in a compressed form and in four installments, the time / space of the Colombian art scene, as shaped by the historical determinants of the late 20th and early 21st century. The first part gives an account of how writing the history of Colombian art responds to cultural policy pathways that are part of the consolidation and development of neoliberal models applied to the modern nation. These have triggered criticism, essays and monographic productions that chronicle the new artistic practices from multiple perspectives. The resulting criticism are framed in the alleged modernization of the state, characterized by a decentralizing vocation, a feverish obsession with the archive, the professionalization of the art space and the establishment of an art market that seeks the impossible “general equilibrium”. In this manner, local stories with global aspirations re-register the Colombian experience within the Western family in the hegemonic timeline, its maps and its markets.
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.
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).
Fredric Jameson Gallery, Friedl Building, East Campus. November 11-15, 2013
The work is a perspective, an intervention, and an invitation for diverse audiences to engage with art and artist. Students, artists, researchers and faculty at three universities in three cities in two countries are collaborating on this exhibit: the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín, Emerson College in Boston, and Duke University in Durham. We integrate publications, pedagogies, and practices of writing with those of art, architecture, science and social science to focus on some our world’s most pressing local and global 21st-century problems.
Curators: Juan Luis Mesa S, Luis Eduardo Serna, Miguel Rojas-Sotelo, J. Samper.
Artists: Julio César Bedoya, José Alexander Caicedo Castaño,
Luisa Fernanda Cárdenas Zapata, Esteban Llano Piedrahíta,
Andrés Felipe Salas Carmona, Susana Moncada Sanchez,
Vita Osorio Sanmartin
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.
Being a schoolteacher his entire life, Don José Cupertino uses a type of primitivism, to portray the life of Maya communities in the highlands of Guatemala, with special attention to women and children, the ones who were more impacted by the conflict, giving voice to those who did not have one. His works appear in churches, municipal buildings, schools and other public venues in his province; he also sells his work throughout Guatemala. His work on the civil conflict has been featured in the documentary film Brother Towns | Pueblos Hermanos, by Charles Thompson and Mike Davey (2010).
The exhibit “Mayan Life Under Guatemala’s Civil War” features a group of works from Don José Cupertino’s series titled “No Más Guerra” (No More War), which depicts the violence of the conflict against Maya communities, as well as the violence exerted in previous eras to indigenous groups in Guatemala. His work sometimes juxtaposes historical times (the conquest, colonial times, and contemporary events) to reflect on the long temporalities of indigenous resistance and perseverance towards repression by part of colonial or state forces. Don José Cupertino has graciously agreed to lend some of the pieces of the series to be on display during the week of the consortium conference and hopes that these works might help educate a broad audience and bring about peace in his country and beyond.
Don José Cupertino’s art is a form of primitivism and realism. His paintings depict everyday scenes of the Mayan experience, with a particular focus on the displacement and return of many Maya communities after the civil war of the 1980s and 90s. As is well known, Guatemala suffered a brutal civil conflict, which left profound marks on the country, among them the massive migration to neighboring Mexico and the U.S. being the most prominent. Cupertino’s art represents these experiences in his personal style. He also portrays Guatemalan rural life and Mayan traditions and customs connected to their millenary way of life and as a means of healing social wounds.
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.
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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.
Shoot in Pittsburgh, PA, a post industrial city of the rust-belt of north east US during 2007, the documentary explores the margins of the city which was suffering a process of gentrification. The presence of squatters (anarchist and activist) in the cultural scape of the city was appealing as property values decreased. The depopulation factor, due to de-industrialization by 2007 reached its peak. By the time, fifteen thousand properties were abandoned and the city was in a process of re-urbanization. Street art, social activism sprouted as a result of an alternative urban culture, exacerbated by the Afghan and Iraqi wars, as well as the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The new flow of Latino Immigrants coming to fill the gap of workers, establishing mix, hybrid communities in which alternative media (radio and community TV) played a role in the marches of 2006 and beyound. Andalusia functioned as a bridge, representing a political branch of art in a mostly apolitical scene. The documentary shows the various non-profit activities young activist were involved in the city at the time. Among them, Free Ride, a bike coop; Indymedia Pittsburgh, Rustbelt Radio, Book'em (a books for prisoners program), Prisoners Mural Project, urban gardening, the music scene, among others.
By Miguel Rojas Sotelo & Gioconda Perez Snyder (2007)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWg-P-x17e8
La Declaración de Merida.
U Ye’esaj t’aanil u noj kaajil Jo’ (in Maya)
While participating in Arte Nuevo InterActiva_07 in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, I visited a group of Maya adults who were in the process of becoming literate in their own language. According to the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), there are about 1.2 million Mayas in Yucatán, representing 59.5% of the state's population, in 2015 there are a total of 560.000 Maya-speakers of the language. Although this may seem like a high figure, many of them do not write or read in Mayan. Seeing the Maya students’ courage and perseverance while they learned how to read, write, and speak their mother tongue was inspirational and transformative, they talked about X-ja'il T’aan (x-ja’il = house, t’aan=word). A place, no physical, in which language is incorporated, where living words could become actions in order to reach their culture, to get it back. In 2009, as as part of El Narcochingadazo, a collaborative art-project with fellow Mexican-American artist and friend Pedro Lasch, a collectively authored statement was produced, in the fashion of a cadavre exquis. Back in Mérida, as part of InterActiva_09, the statement became a declaration, it was workshopped, translated, read, and broadcasted in Mayan, as the launching of the project, initially by participants of the literacy group in the University of Yucatan and later in the local Mayan radio station.
These multiples ways to look at environmental issues are connected to situated and contextual ways to be in the world. From reflection to action, many of them identify an issue, give light to it, and make a call for small actions.
Producers of the shorts are not profesional filmmakers, most of the time are students or community leaders finding ways to communicate their ways they live in the world, alongside nature.
LIST OF ENTRIES (up to 2018)
ELECTRICITY FUTURES 16:35
Green Models 10:26
Decommissioned 12:04
Live Consciously 2:52
Light 1:46
Sharks: Feared and Food 4:50
Water . 4:31
Get to Know WWF-China through a Glance at the Shanghai office 3:37
Human Wildlife Conflict: India and China . 5:24
Bird Window Collisions at Duke Kunshan University . 4:45
A Reflection on City Zoos 7:03
Surrounding the Lake. 3:45
New Naturalist (2018). 13 min. 13:00
Narrating Nature. Behind the Sarah Duke Gardens. 2018 7:54
Narrating Nature. SONG OF THE SEA . 15:01
NARRATING NATURE: RESTORING NATURE. THE CASE OF SANDY CREEK PARK . 14:37
NONUYA nonuya ENGLISH SUBS . 13:23
TAKING ACTION. Duke's Climate Plan (2017). 13:02
LEEDingtheway . 8:24
ENVIRONMENTAL | ART | HUMANITIES III. 1:38:15
ENVIRONMENTAL | ART | HUMANITIES. NARRATING NATURE II. 3:45:51
ENVIRONMENTAL | ART | HUMANITIES. NARRATING NATURE I. 2.32.11
Miguel Rojas-Sotelo, Duke University.
Moderador: Desiderio Navarro.
Habana, 24 de Mayo de 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdkwTXAThF4&feature=youtu.be
We worked under two scenarios.
LOSING PROTECTION & AFTER DACA. Perspectives from the US., Mexico, and Beyond.
We featured young Latinx leaders from several organizations.
Define American
NC Dream Team
The Other Dreamers en Acción
The Immigrant Youth Forum
NC Alerta Migratoria
And invited a number of speakers:
Adonia Simpson, Ariel Ruiz Soto, Carlos Garrido, Carlos Spector, Rossy Antúnez, Ellen Holmes, Li Chen Chin, Alexandra Delano.
March 1-3, 2018. Otros Dreams en Acción is a bi-national grassroots comm
global audiences and institutions her work relates to debates on the relationship between monuments and memorialization, memory and history. Analyzing selected works produced by Salcedo, I explore the dual dimension of time and space, the global and the local, and how they play a fundamental role in Salcedo’s awareness, experience, and critical orientation that has led to her recognition in the international arena.
Doris Salcedo: Challenging History and Memory. Miguel L. Rojas Sotelo, Presented as a requirement to obtain an MA in History of Art and Architecture. Repository. Frick Fine Arts Library. University of Pittsburgh, 2004
See an updated version titled: The deaths inscribed in us Art, memory, and public space in Doris Salcedo.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003154167-3
In: 1st Edition. Human Rights in Colombian Literature and Cultural Production. Embodied Enactments
Edited By Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo, Kevin G. Guerrieri
Copyright Year 2022
Here: Duke Students in conversation with Duke Workers. Honoring not only their labor, but their experiences as people that share our daily spaces. Some of them are going to be out of work a early to Jan 2, 2013 due to new regulations on hiring workers by sub's at Duke.