Violence And Resistance Art And Politics In Colombia

This book explores the historical and contemporary connections between art and politics in Colombia. These relations are unique because of the ways in which they are saturated by violence, as the country has passed through conquest, struggles for Independence, fighting between political factions, civil war, paramilitaries, narco-traffickers and state violence. This seemingly unending stream of violence gives art in Colombia one of its main themes. The lavishly illustrated essays, written by Colombian authors, examine Colombian visual arts, music, theatre, literature, cinema, indigenous arts, popular culture, militant publications and recent protest movements, analysing them with tools drawn from contemporary philosophy and theory. Approaches include decolonisation theory, cosmopolitics, anthropology after the ontological turn, Colombian philosophy, feminism, and French theory. The essays all offer powerful understandings of how art has not only been complicit in perpetuating political violence in Colombia, but also how it has been a vital form of analysis and resistance.

This volume examines how violence and resilience is experienced in urban spaces, and explores the history of a variety of people told from the perspective of the margins. Reterritorializing the Spaces of Violence in Colombia provides critical and empirical examples of individuals and groups who believe in their collective power, reject war and violence, and manifest their resistance through art and activism in ways that rethread the social fabric. This book is the result of extensive fieldwork conducted over ten years in Medellín and Bogotá and it brings into focus the ways that hip hop, poetry, urban art, and the creation of communities and shared experiences bring about new ways to dignify life and inhabit the city. It analyses the contemporary history of Colombia by drawing on the critical perspectives and tools of various disciplines. It also puts into dialogue the diverse and innovative scholarship from the North and the South that addresses inequality, violence, trauma and resilience. Most importantly, it focuses on the challenges that women and young people face today in situations of conflict and post-conflict. This book will be of interest for researchers and students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as readers interested in issues of human rights and the history of the Americas.

Who, what, and where perceives, and how? What are the sedimentations, inscriptions, and axiologies of animal, human, and machinic perception/s? What are their perceptibilities? Deleuze uses the word ‘visibilities’ to indicate that visual perception isn’t just a physiological given but cues operations productive of new assemblages. Perceptibilities are, by analogy, spatio-temporal, geolocative, kinaesthetic, audio-visual, and haptic operations that are always already memory. In the case of strong inscriptions, they are also epigenetic events. In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to vibrate with increasing amplitudes at certain frequencies of excitation. In cybernetics and in theories of technology, it refers to systems’ feedback. In Native science, resonance denotes the axiology of positions and events. It’s a form of multi-species perception that emphasises emergent directionality and protean mnemonics. This transdisciplinary volume brings together key theorists and practitioners from media theory, Native science, bio-media and sound art, philosophy, art his- tory, and design informatics to examine: a) the becoming-technique of animal– human–machinic perceptibilities; and b) micro-perceptions that lie beneath the threshold of known perceptions yet create energetic vibrations. The volume shows distributed perception to be a key notion in addressing the emergence and peristence of plant, animal, human, and machine relations.

Contents.

Sabotage is the deliberate disruption of a dominant system, be it political, military or economic. Yet in recent decades, sabotage has also become an artistic strategy most notably in Latin America. In Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile and Argentina, artists are producing radical, unruly or even iconoclastic work that resists state violence, social conformity and the commodification of art. Sabotage Art reveals how contemporary Latin American artists have resorted to sabotage strategies as a means to bridge the gap between aesthetics and politics. The global status of and market for Latin American art is growing rapidly. This book is essential reading for those who want to understand this new, dissident work, as well as its mystification, co-option and commercialisation within current academic historiographies and art-world curatorial initiatives."

Why is Colombia so violent? Beyond even the horrors of the conflict between the guerrilla, the paramilitary, and the government, the history of the nation is scarred by acts of violence. It has also been marked by resistance to that history--by moments of hope.The Persistence of Violence transcends the obvious places as sources and indices of this story, delving into the complex and conflicted world of popular culture, from football to television to tourism to the environment.

Doris Salcedo, a Colombian-born artist, addresses the politics of memory and forgetting in work that embraces fraught situations in dangerous places. Noted critic and theorist Mieke Bal narrates between the disciplines of contemporary culture in order to boldly reimagine the role of the visual arts. Both women are pathbreaking figures, globally renowned and widely respected. Doris Salcedo, meet Mieke Bal. In Of What One Cannot Speak, Bal leads us into intimate encounters with Salcedo’s art, encouraging us to consider each work as a “theoretical object” that invites—and demands—certain kinds of considerations about history, death, erasure, and grief. Bal ranges widely through Salcedo’s work, from Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios series—in which the artist uses worn shoes to retrace los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) from nations like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia—to Shibboleth, Salcedo’s once-in-a-lifetime commission by the Tate Modern, for which she created a rupture, as if by earthquake, that stretched the length of the museum hall’s concrete floor. In each instance, Salcedo’s installations speak for themselves, utilizing household items, human bones, and common domestic architecture to explore the silent spaces between violence, trauma, and identity. Yet Bal draws out even deeper responses to the work, questioning the nature of political art altogether and introducing concepts of metaphor, time, and space in order to contend with Salcedo’s powerful sculptures and installations. An unforgettable fusion of art and essay, Of What One Cannot Speak takes us to the very core of events we are capable of remembering—yet still uncomfortably cannot speak aloud.