COORDINATORS
Brenda Werth is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at American University in Washington DC. Her research interests include Latin American theatre, documentary film, performance, gender, memory studies, and translation. She is currently working on a project exploring the politics of non-fiction in twenty-first century Argentine documentary theater and film.
Paola S. Hernández is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her areas of research and teaching include Latin American theatre and performance, sites of memory, and human rights. Her current project examines the role of the “real” in visual arts, contemporary documentary theatre and urban ethnography in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Peru.
Jorge A. Hernández Esguep, Professor & Director of the Institute of Visual Arts, Faculty Of Architecture and Arts of the Universidad Austral de Chile. His research focuses on the fields of performance, Fluxus, art / action and urban intervention. He is co-founder of Black Angels where he took part in the exhibition of Losing the Human Form at the Reina Sofia National Museum (2013).
LOCATION
Sala Victor Jara, DETUCH
DESCRIPTION
This group seeks to explore the visual poetics of direct action-art in the form of performance and urban intervention in the social, political, and cultural landscape of Santiago de Chile. Our objective is to create intellectual and artistic dialogue between literary, critical, and theoretical texts and to use that dialogue to guide our interaction with urban spaces in Santiago charged with historical and political meaning. As a group, we will explore the affective resonance of walking through, embodying, and participating in the political and historical resignification of these emblematic city spaces. We will collectively examine the role of art and performance in a political framework by considering the history of Chile’s socialist tradition and the impact of political parties like the Unidad Popular. We will also take into account the utopian discourses related to the hombre nuevo in Latin America, as well as the role of the arts in resisting the last military dictatorship. Finally, we will explore recent student movements in Chile as a new iteration of artistic and political intervention in the city. For our final project, work group members will develop a creative group project (e.g., documentary, installation, intervention) designed to revive and engage the social, political, and cultural histories of these diverse urban sites.