Pablo José Ramírez is a curator, art writer and cultural theorist living and working in Guatemala and Amsterdam. He is the Adjunct Curator of First Nations and Indigenous Art at Tate Modern. His work revisits post-colonial societies to consider non-western ontologies, indigeneity, forms of racial occlusion, and sound. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2015 he co-curated the 19th Bienal Paiz ‘Trans-visible’ with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. Among his recent exhibitions are: ‘Más Allá, el Mar Canta: Diasporic Intimacies and Labour’, the Times Art Centre Berlin (2021); ‘La Medida del Silencio’, with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, NuMu, Guatemala (2020); ‘The Shores of the World: on communality and interlingual politics’, Display, Prague (2018); and he co-curated ‘Guatemala Después’, Sheila C. Johnson Design Centre, Parsons School of Design, New York (2016). He has lectured at the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Kunstinstituut Melly (FKA Witte de With), Gasworks, MAMM, University of Glasgow, University of Cape Town, Simon Fraser University, The New School, ParaSite, among others. He published for Art Agenda, Artforum, Miami Rail and artist catalogues. He was the recipient of the 2019 Independent Curators International/CPPC Award for Central America and the Caribbean and is currently the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of Infrasonica, a curatorial platform dedicated to the research around non-western sonic cultures. Ramirez is part of the curatorial team of the Carnegie International 58th.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned an LL.M and J.S.D. from Yale University and holds the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa, by McGill University. He is Director Emeritus of the Centre of Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and has written and published widely on issues such as globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, social movements and the World Social Forum, in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Danish, Romanian and Polish. His most recent project ALICE, ‘Leading Europe to a New Way of Sharing the World Experiences’ was funded by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council, one of the most prestigious and highly competitive international financial institutes for scientific excellence in Europe. Recent books of his in English include Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021); The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Duke University Press, 2018); Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (Routledge, 2014); Toward a New Legal Common Sense. Law, Globalization, and Emancipation - Third Edition (Cambridge University Press, 2020); If God Were a Human Rights Activist (Stanford University Press, 2015); The Pluriverse of Human Rights: The Diversity of Struggles for Dignity (Ed. with Bruno Sena Martins) (Routledge, 2021); Demodiversity: Toward Post-Abyssal Democracies (Ed. with José Manuel Mendes) (Routledge, 2020); Knowledges Born in the Struggle. Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South (Ed. with Maria Paula Meneses) (Routledge, 2019).

Indigenous Contemporary Art: decolonial discourse and a critique of multiculturalism since Wallmapu

–

Cristian Vargas Paillahueque is a Mapuche art historian, academic and researcher. He has a masters degree in Latin American Studies and is currently a PhD candidate in Latin American Studies at the Universidad de Chile.

He has worked at the Museum of American Popular Art at the University of Chile investigating the Mapuche collection (silverware, textiles, wood and pottery). He has also served as an external researcher at the National Historical Museum of Chile, analyzing Mapuche photographs. He has been a curator together with the artists Sebastián Calfuqueo and Paula Baeza Pailamilla.

His lines of research deal with the relationship between the image and the Mapuche world in various contexts, such as contemporary art, theater, film, and traditional Mapuche art.

Currently, he is conducting research on the notion of Mapuche art in the first half of the 20th century and its links with collecting processes in colonial contexts.

Works

—

Venuca Evanan is an artist and illustrator. She is the daughter of the traditional teacher Primitivo Evanán Poma and the teacher Valeriana Vivanco Espinoza, one of the first painters in the Sarhua community. She specialises in traditional painting styles, using natural colours, raw materials and a quill pen. She has more than seventeen years of experience in painting the renowned Sarhua tables and in experimenting with various two-dimensional formats. In her work, she represents a range of themes including the local customs of the Sarhua people, migration, community legends, the appreciation of the Sarhuina woman in society and her active role in contemporary visual arts. During the last years she has dedicated herself to the promotion and transmission of traditional Sarhua knowledge, in various workshops held in public and private institutions in Lima and in her community. In 2018, she participated in Ceará, a festival in Brazil. In 2019, she participated in an exhibition at the Pensacola Museum, Florida (United States), in addition to obtaining the Kuna Expressions Prize awarded by the Kuna company at the Lima Art Fair. For two consecutive years she has obtained the 3rd place in the Peruvian Birth contest organized by ICTYS. In 2019, she was a finalist in the MUCEN Central Museum contemporary painting contest. In 2020, she created an exhibition at the Yale Sacramental Institute and won first place in the 2020 ICPNA Contemporary Art Prize.

Thinking‚ ‘aesthetics of renunciation’ through indigenous knowledge Mogaje Guihu – painting and narrating la selva

—

Lena Geuer is a research assistant at the Institute of Art and Music at TU Dresden and teaches transcultural art history with a focus on modern and contemporary Latin American art. In her postdoctoral project, she investigates the relationship between art and ecology using aesthetic forms of renunciation. The art scholar completed her doctorate at the Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf within the framework of the Graduate School 'Materiality and Production' on the art of Argentina with a focus on the work of Marta Minujín and Luis Felipe Noé. Lena Geuer will soon publish her monograph on 'arte argentino' as well as the anthology Postcolonialism and Postmigration in collaboration with Ömer Alkin.

Tentativa

—

Bernardo Oyarzun was born in 1963 in Los Muermos, Chile. He lives and works in Colicheu, locality of the municipality of Cabrero in the Biobío region, Chile. Bernardo Oyarzún’s work is inserted in a proletarian context, its references are taken from the marginal sectors of society and have an anthropological foundation that is associated with Latin American identity, its native roots and mestizaje. He combines anthropological, social, historical, and ethnic elements in order to present, in a critical way, Chilean culture and society. For his installations, he commonly uses documents and photographs of his personal history and origins, which are linked to the native forests of southern Chile and Mapuche culture, indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina. His breakthrough was ‘Bajo Sospecha’ (‘Under Suspicion’, 1998), an exhibition inspired by a past event where he was arrested by Chilean police after being confused with a criminal. Oyarzún has exhibited at 18 solo shows in Chile and abroad, as well as 30 international exhibitions and biennales.

Long exposure photography from the zero parallel. Pre-Inca conception of time and its relation with Celestial Bodies

—

Following an MA in Photography at the UAL in 2016, Brenda Vega was awarded the Troika Award for Photography with the multimedia installation ‘Interfaced Nature’, with which she graduated from the Masters. She has since completed residencies at No Lugar - Ecuador, Lumen in London, SIM in Iceland, and has exhibited in solo and group shows in Chicago, London, Falmouth, Hangzhou, Tel Aviv, Madrid, Bogotá, Lima, Atina, Reykjavik, Quito and Guayaquil. Brenda is an Art and Photography Teacher at the College of Communication and Contemporary Arts of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. She is also currently a Doctoral Candidate in Critical Theory at 17 Instituto de Estudios, Mexico.