Amakaba, 2021, introduction video (still). Courtesy of Amakaba
Activism and Collective Practice
Political activism in Latin American Art has been canonised as a distinctive feature of the region’s artistic production since the 1960s. However, recent thinkers have criticised the divorce of intellectualised institutional practices from the insurgent social forces that motivate and propel such forms of resistance. This panel will examine how grassroots movements have deployed artistic practice as a form of activism. Women’s rights collectives and activist groups have succeeded in raising awareness of social struggles and have carved spaces of representation for groups that are marginalised or cast as subaltern.
Keyna Eleison is a curator, writer, researcher, Griot heiress and shaman, narrator, singer, and ancestral chronicler. She holds an MA in Art History and a BA in Philosophy. She is a member of the African Heritage Commission for helping the Valongo Wharf region gain recognition as a World Heritage Site (UNESCO). She was a curator in the 10th International Biennial of Art (SIART), in Bolivia. Currently, she's a chronicler for a contemporary & Latin America magazine, and a Professor at the School of Visual Arts at Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro. She's also the Artistic Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro in partnership with Pablo Lafuente.
Ventura Profana was born in Salvador, in 1993. She lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
The daughter of the mysterious entrails of mother Bahia, Ventura Profana prophesies multiplication and abundant black, indigenous and travesty life. Doctrinated in Baptist temples, she is a missionary pastor, evangelist singer, writer, composer and visual artist, whose practice is rooted in researching the implications and methodologies of Deuteronomism in Brazil and abroad, through the spread of neo-Pentecostal churches. Praises, like the sting of a dagger licked with wax and rust in Pharisees’ hearts.
Decolonising film: representations of indigenous injustice and insurgency in the cinema of Jorge Sanjinés and the Grupo Ukamau
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Anneli Marisa Aliaga is a British/Bolivian MPhil student at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge (CLAS) working on Andean studies, postcolonialism and decolonial cinema. Anneli completed a cultural undergraduate degree at the University of Durham where she wrote a comparative cinema dissertation that discussed the ethics of filmmaking practices and their effects on representing racial ‘Others’ in Peru and Bolivia. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the bilingual Bolivian magazine Bolivian Express. In La Paz, Bolivia, Anneli collaborated with the political cinema group Fundación Ukamau where she presented her research at their workshops and was invited to attend the film set of the group’s upcoming film Los viejos soldados (2022).
Collective Constructions: Decolonising Art and Public Space in Cali, Colombia
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Felipe Hernández is an Architect and Director of the Centre for Latin America Studies at the University of Cambridge (CLAS). He teaches architectural and Urban Design, while giving courses and seminars in the Theory and History of architecture and urbanism. Felipe has worked on Latin America and other areas in the Developing World, including Africa and South-East Asia, publishing multiple edited volumes and monographs, most recently Bhabha for Architects (Routledge, 2010) and Beyond Modernist Masters: Contemporary Architecture in Latin America (Birkhauser, 2009).
Liliana A. Clavijo is Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at the Universidad del Valle in Cali where she leads the Projects Department and the MA in Architecture and Urbanism. Her research examines collective housing, modern and postmodern architecture, cultural heritage and learning in the Latin American context. She is author of Preservar el fuego. Residencias BCH en Bogotá, Esguerra & Herrera 1961 - 1964 (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2019) and co-author of Lago & Sáenz. La materia y el vacío (Universidad del Valle, 2021).
Danitza Luna lives and works in La Paz, Bolivia. Luna is a cartoonist and graphic designer, who graduated with a degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, specialising in sculpture. Since 2011, she has been part of the anarcho-feminist movement ‘Mujeres Creando’, one of the most important and influential political platforms in the country, which develops artistic intervention and performance projects in public spaces, as well as art and screen-printing workshops and educational programmes at universities and women’s unions. Amongst the recent exhibitions she participated in on behalf of ‘Mujeres Creando is ‘Muros Blandos’, held at the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum (Santiago de Chile, 2017), where she developed - alongside artists and activists Esther Angollo and Maria Galindo - a series of provocative and satirical murals that brought to light certain political and religious controversies regarding gender identity. In 2016, she created (also alongside Esther and Maria) two commissioned projects for the International Bolivian Biennial of Arts, ‘Altar Blasfemo’ and ‘Escudo Anarco-Feminista Antichauvinista’, which were displayed on the murals of the National Museum of Art in La Paz. In Colombia in 2015, she participated in the Medellin International Art Meeting ‘Historias Locales / Prácticas Globales’. Alongside other members of her collective, she coordinated a screen-printing workshop titled ‘Grafica Feminista, No acepto ser cosificada’ at the Museum of Antioquia.
Meditation, Intelligence, Community
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Tabita Rezaire is an artist, devotee, yogi, doula, and soon to be farmer. As an eternal seeker, Tabita’s yearning for connection finds expression in her cross-dimensional practices, which envision network sciences - organic, electronic and spiritual - as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness. Embracing digital, corporeal, and ancestral memory, she digs into scientific imaginaries and mystical realms to tackle the colonial wounds and energetic imbalances that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Through screen interfaces and healing circles, her offerings aim to nurture our collective growth and expand our capacity for togetherness. Tabita is based near Cayenne in French Guyana, where she is currently studying Agriculture and working on her website Amakaba.org - her vision for collective healing in the Amazonian forest. Tabita is devoted to becoming a mother to the world.
The colonial matrix of subjectivation
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Kira Xonorika is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and theorist. Her work draws on the complexities of trauma and colonial powers, pathologization, trans and queer temporalities, knowledge production from the Global South, internet aesthetics, and resilient organization. She teaches art and Paraguayan art history at the National University of Asunción. She was a Beijing +25 Outright Fellow and was a speaker at the UN Generation Equality Forum and Hague Talks. Her writing and research have featured internationally in the Independent Chair of Trans* Studies (Universidad de Buenos Aires), Genderit, Tonantzin, and e-flux.