In Latin America, the relationships between art and politics constitute a privileged field for understanding contemporary transformations in processes of symbolic production, disputes over memory and territory, forms of collective action, and modes of subjectivity production. At the international and regional level, approaches can be identified in this area that articulate cultural studies, social theory, political philosophy and cultural policy analysis, among others. Within this framework, this symposium proposes to investigate the following questions: How do artistic practices intervene today in the configuration of the common? In what ways do they dispute meanings around territory, memory, inequalities, identities or possible futures? What role do cultural policies, institutions and digital platforms play in these processes?
Far from proposing an idealizing view, the power of artistic practices becomes evident—practices that can be understood not only as aesthetic expressions (valid, though limiting), but as constitutive devices of the contemporary political-affective fabric, intervening in the configuration of social imaginaries, in the dispute over meaning and in the problematization of the material, institutional and territorial conditions in which they are inscribed. That is, on one hand, analyzing them as technologies of subjectivation that produce affects, perceptions and modes of relating to the world; and, on the other, examining the institutional, normative and material conditions that structure their development, circulation and recognition.
The aim, then, is to enable diverse disciplinary crossings, not to construct univocal views, but to complicate and problematize the current context and its unfolding, while also imagining new possibilities. From these temporal and disciplinary crossings, this symposium, through the presentation of case studies and situated questions, aims to contribute to inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue among different perspectives from both the artistic field and the political-social field, recognizing cross-cutting concerns in approaches to processes of subjectivation and in debates on the scope of cultural policies as spaces of articulation between the artistic and the political (or between the aesthetic and the ideological).
The call is directed at empirical research, theoretical developments, research-creation experiences and case studies linked to any of the following axes: 1) policies for the performing arts; 2) disputes over meaning, extractivism and artistic resistance; 3) image, apparatus and the production of subjectivity: film, territory and platforms; 4) public policies for books, reading and literature; and 5) visual practices and policies.
The symposium seeks to bring together contributions from different disciplinary fields and research traditions to strengthen dialogue among artistic studies, cultural studies, social sciences and the humanities. It is expected to contribute to the construction of new theoretical and methodological tools for analyzing the links between artistic production, cultural policies, technologies, inequalities and processes of subjectivation in the contemporary Americas.
