Art criticism produced in the Americas and the Lusophone world has built its theoretical repertoire in permanent dialogue with aesthetic categories originating from European and North American centers. Naturalism, formalism, phenomenology, semiotics, critical theory, postmodernity, visual studies, the decolonial turn: this transit has been and continues to be a condition of writing about art in these regions. Recognizing this condition does not require condemning the importation. It requires investigating what it produced, where it worked, where it generated structural blind spots, and where it was productively reformulated.
\nThe symposium’s hypothesis is simple but little explored: aesthetic categories in transit do not arrive intact. They undergo recodification when applied to artistic bodies whose formal, material, social and cosmological premises do not coincide with the contexts in which such categories were formulated. What that recodification produces\u2014when it does\u2014is a hybrid, unstable, frequently unnamed vocabulary that constitutes the real originality of peripheral art criticism. Reconstituting it is the object of this symposium.
\nThe temporal and geographic scope is deliberately broad. It welcomes work on the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries; on Brazil, Hispanic America, the Caribbean and the Atlantic Lusophone world (Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau); on art criticism in the strict sense\u2014texts published in newspapers, magazines, books, catalogs\u2014and on related forms: artists’ writings, manifestos, round-table debates, public controversies, criticism on digital platforms. It also welcomes research addressing local aesthetic traditions\u2014Afro-diasporic, indigenous, popular\u2014as producers of their own categories, rarely absorbed by the vocabularies of institutional criticism.
\nFive questions guide the symposium. First: how did specific categories (autonomy of the work, originality, modernism, avant-garde, object, apparatus, decoloniality) arrive in peripheral critical systems, who introduced them, and through what vehicles did they circulate? Second: what was done with them\u2014how were they applied, cut, displaced, contested? Third: what blind spots did they produce\u2014what artistic objects became illegible or impoverished by their application? Fourth: what alternative vocabularies emerged, or could emerge, from the categories of sensibility actually operating in local traditions? Fifth: did they contribute to significant transformations of the artistic field\u2014for example, prompting the formation of collectives, networks and associations, or the emergence of publications, art competitions, art spaces or others?
\nThe symposium seeks work that crosses disciplines. Art history alone is not enough. Literature, anthropology, sociology of culture, aesthetic education, studies of African and Afro-American cultures, indigenous studies and comparative studies offer tools that traditional art criticism does not produce on its own. We welcome early-career and senior researchers; papers in Spanish, Portuguese and English; perspectives from any of the three Americas and the Atlantic Lusophone world.
\nWe hope, in closing, to have constituted a preliminary map of the critical strategies invented in different peripheral systems to deal with the common problem of importation. We do not seek uniformity of solutions. We seek difference: what each critical system invented of its own, which may be seen by others as a possibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","simposio_area":[47],"class_list":["post-10364","simposio","type-simposio","status-publish","hentry","simposio_area-arte-y-estetica"],"yoast_head":"\n