Super 8 Film: Experimentation and the Avant-garde

Sandra Pinardi looks at Super 8 filmmakers in Venezuela such as Carlos Castillo, Diego Rísquez, and Julio Neri who, in the 1970s and 80s "...[expanded] cinematographic discourses through cross-contamination with other artistic practices, [while offering] a sharp critique of the potentialities and limits of visual culture, and its strategies for establishing imaginaries and symbolic determinations."

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Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape

In the book that they edited along with Dayron Carrillo Morell, Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape, Lisa Blackmore and Jens Andermann ask what an environmental aesthetics might look like beyond landscape's historical use as an apparatus for colonialism and capitalism. Choosing not to posit a definitive answer, they instead offer examples of contemporary Latin American artists who are developing postnatural and posthumanist interventions that open the way for new understandings and critiques of the neocolonial commodification of landscape.

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Art and Politics: Notes for Considering a Tense Relation

In Luis Miguel Isava's summation of the VII Seminario's discussions about the relationship of art and politics, he reminds us that both terms are historically and culturally unstable and must be understood in context. Isava identifies two impacts of political art in our time: the articulation of ideology and exposure of injustice that occurs in art made in response to a crisis, and the transformation of experience, which has the more radical effect, that is the result of art that questions the very forms of cultural expression.

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Art, Politics, and Evidence

Erik del Bufalo says that in art, the political is expressed not through its message but its aesthetics, and that it is in the modifications of art's intrinsic forms where political evidence can be found, not in its ideas, which are extrinsic.

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Cha/Cha/Cha: A Latin American Twist to 1970s New York

Cha/Cha/Cha, an ephemeral magazine distributed as informal typed pages to individuals in New York's underground art scene in the 1970s, was remembered only through rumor and reputation until copies resurfaced in the archives of one of Cha/Cha/Cha's founders, Marta Minujín. Aimé Iglesias Lukin reports on the conversations the publication recorded between Latin American artists living in NYC that anticipated and directed the path of identity politics in the 1980s.

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Unforeseen Outcomes For an Artificial Democracy or An Old Brazil for the 21st Century

Brazil's apparent economic and political stability in the early 2000s was put into question by recent social protests there, revealing ideological nuances that were unknown to most. Bernardo de Souza analyzes what had been overlooked in Brazil's political and social structure and history that made the protests both surprising and inevitable, and the role that the social, economic and intellectual elites have played in this reconfiguration.

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Notes on the Political Power of Performance

Performance, as an ephemeral event that takes shape as an “extra-ordinary present” that causes a temporal rupture, has an intrinsically political nature. However, says Sandra Pinardi, that extra-ordinary, singular present may “[migrate] toward diverse types of materiality that offer it persistence and permanence.” Pinardi provides several examples from contemporary performance to discuss ways in which this shift may affect its political power, putting performance in danger of losing its character as event and becoming spectacle.

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The Film 3_Eras

Maria Virginia Jaua's film, "3_Eras", was inspired by the late Spanish philosopher José Luis Brea's book "Las tres eras de la imagen", and reflects on the technical and theoretical circumstances of images and their effect on the production, distribution, reception, and potential of images through three phases of history.

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Art, Diasporas and Globalization in Mexico: On the Limits of Instability

José Luis Barrios observes that the intersection of globalization, the social dynamic of capital, and contemporary diasporas have produced "a new configuration of economic and political relations...that makes way for a mode of production best described as neo-slavery." He looks at three artists whose work "traces a certain aesthetic condition of migration...." and calls to account the hegemonic systems of power that generate violence, inequality, and the expropriation of immigrant bodies.

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Actions and Reactions in Art and Politics

Ileana Ramírez is organizer of this year's Seminario Fundación Cisneros, "Disruptions," which will focus on connections between art and politics in Latin America through a one-day conference in addition to parallel programming. Additionally, six texts for the CPPC website have been especially commissioned that will augment "Disruptions' themes.

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The CPPC Enters Its Fifth Decade of Building Bridges, Not Walls

Patty Cisneros looks ahead as the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros begins its fifth decade of initiatives supporting knowledge of and appreciation for the art of Latin America.

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Margarita D'Amico

Miguel Miguel García offers a tribute to the important contributions to Venezuelan art and culture by Margarita D’Amico (1938-2017), a tireless promoter of the artistic vanguard.

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