CONVENERS
Esther Gabara works on literature and visual culture in modern and contemporary Latin America. She is author of Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil and is currently working on a book manuscript, “Non-Literary Fiction: Invention and Interventions in Contemporary Art of the Americas.”
Fernando J. Rosenberg is the author of Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America. His current research focuses on the intersection between juridical narratives and artistic practices. He co-edited with Jill Lane an issue of emisférica entitled Performance and the Law (3.1, 2006). His second book is After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts and Film in Latin America.
Camilo Trumper studies politics, the public sphere, and urban and visual practice in the Americas. His book, Ephemeral Histories: The Politics of Public Space and Public Art in Chile examines the myriad ways urban residents have claimed new political spaces and identities. It finds that ephemeral intrusions upon the urban landscape altered the very style and form of post-war politics.
LOCATION
7/18 – 7/20: H306, Tecnoaulas FEN
7/22: G14 FAU
DESCRIPTION
This work group plays on the concept, sound, and act of “mirar de reojo,” and invites scholars, artists (visual and performance), and activists to practice looking sidelong at neoliberalism. The phrase sets up a position and an action in and of the look—one that implies both transversality and repetition— to look askance and to look again. It promotes awareness of the refractions and reflections of neoliberalism over time, a gaze that suggests curiosity and disbelief, uncertainty and critique. If Santiago de Chile was, in a sense, ground zero for the experiment with neoliberalism in the Americas, it has also been a battleground for critical responses. “Mirar de reojo” enables an awareness of neoliberal origins, continuity, and crises, and a lens onto positions, practices, and experiments of seeing other forms of life in and from here. We ask: If some visual practices offer means of survival and persistence of an imagination other than liberalism, and/or of its transcendence? Could a sidelong glance give a glimpse of the incipient, the unconscious, the unrepresentable? How might “mirar de reojo” shed light on contemporary social movements addressing education, income inequality, migration, and political legitimacy? Do issues of memory and human rights illuminate or obscure those rights of gender and ethnic minorities, and the post-human rights of nature and the animal, or other transversal glances at the Western individualistic core of the neoliberal ethos? This group addresses these questions from the intersection of performance and visual arts, Latin American and Latino/a Studies, and art practice, activism, and theory.