The face occupies a central place in numerous visual and material traditions of indigenous America. Beyond its function as an identifying feature or individual representation, the human and non-human face appears as a surface of transformation, manifestation, relation and presence. Sculpted, painted, modeled, covered, fragmented or multiplied, it actively participates in objects, images, architectures, landscapes and transformed bodies, as well as in ritual, political, aesthetic and cosmological processes.
This symposium proposes to explore the face as a visual, material and conceptual problem in the context of indigenous creativity on the American continent, from the pre-Columbian past to contemporary expressions. We are particularly interested in papers examining how different cultures of the Americas have conceived the face in relation to notions of image, animation, personification, vision, corporeality, transformation, alterity, memory, presence or power. The symposium also seeks to open a space to reflect on the face as a point of tension between the individual and the impersonal, the relationships between face and mask, face and surface, face and landscape, as well as on practices of facial/bodily modification, ritual display, architectural figuration, anthropo- or zoomorphic objects and graphic or writing systems.
The symposium invites proposals from art history, archaeology, anthropology, visual studies, photography, philosophy, indigenous studies, history, literature and other related fields. The aim is to bring together diverse perspectives that allow us to think of the face not as a universal and stable category, but as a historically and culturally situated construction, capable of articulating complex forms of presence and relation in indigenous America.
