Wars, dictatorships and present-day violence are not fought only on the terrain of weapons or laws: they are also contested in the field of the sensible, in what a society can see, hear, name and feel. Art intervenes precisely there. This symposium, situated within the area of Art and Aesthetics and in dialogue with gender studies and the field of human rights, examines how artistic and aesthetic practices work through the memories of violence and contribute to imagining and building cultures of peace in the Americas.
\nWe start from the premise that the aesthetic is political. Images, sounds, gestures and bodies staged do not passively illustrate memory: they produce it. A mural, a performance, a song, a collective embroidery or a gallery of absent faces do not passively represent what occurred, but rather reorganize what can be perceived, enable forms of listening previously denied, and gather heterogeneous publics around demands for truth, justice and reparation. In the face of fear, silencing and the forgetting administered by neoliberalism, these practices sustain mourning, activate shared affects and install new “ways of seeing” violence and inequality.
\nA gender perspective organizes this inquiry. Bodies\u2014sexed, racialized, feminized\u2014are simultaneously targets of violence and surfaces of inscription for memory and resistance. We are interested in the aesthetics produced by women and sexual dissidences, the affective grammars of care, pain and rage, and the ways in which art renders visible historically silenced gender-based violence and sustains collective agencies against it, drawing on critical and decolonial feminisms of the Global South.
\nThe symposium calls for interdisciplinary contributions around four axes: (1) aesthetic and memorial devices\u2014visual, performative, audiovisual, sonic, textile\u2014and their affective power in the face of violence; (2) bodies, affects and feminist aesthetics: practices that contest gender-based violence and weave networks of care and repair; (3) archive, art and denunciation: works and forms of activism that document, exhibit and transmit experiences of political violence, exile and disappearance; and (4) street aesthetics: artistic interventions in protests, uprisings and recent mobilizations, where performances, images and symbols reconfigure public space.
\nTwo concerns run through the whole: collaborative and participatory methodologies\u2014including the use of artistic devices in social research and in work with communities\u2014and a situated ethics, sensitive to context and respectful of community knowledge and memories, framed by human rights.
\nWe invite researchers, artists, curators, teachers and cultural managers to examine how art transforms the experience of conflict into sensible matter and, in doing so, opens paths toward reparation, coexistence and peace in the Americas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","simposio_area":[47],"class_list":["post-10391","simposio","type-simposio","status-publish","hentry","simposio_area-arte-y-estetica"],"yoast_head":"\n