Essay on Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin America

Abstract

This essay aims to trace an overview of the decolonial aesthetics through the analysis of artistic expressions that occurred in Latin American territory. This analysis will allow us to enhance the cultural and artistic practices within its plurality and the typical spatial archetypes within its temporal resignification. The necessity of creation and the search for new epistemological fields translate the historical movements of the Latin-American cultural mouvance and the juxtaposition of temporalities, practices and the confluence of knowledge. We can find a stage of resistance and socio-historical borders subverted, mainly in the context of artistic and cultural manifestations and its capacity of invention and relativization. This essay aims to bring a reflection on the construction of cultural spaces and the dismantling of a single hegemonic perspective to define the artistic practices. The analysis and the epistemological questioning of the Latin-American trans-historical movement delineates an overview of the history of artistic productions that came out of practices and every-day life inventions and the elaboration of temporary spaces of claim and contestation through exhibitions, performances, festivals, and so forth. The idea of subverting a geopolitical imaginary and a cartography of the world (even if initially in local dynamics) consists of a central focus of this work.