Ruben Yepes Munoz

Art and Politics: The—Latin American—Perspective of Visual Studies1

Over the past year, I have been tracking the emergence of visual studies in
Latin America, within the framework of a book project on the current state of
cultural studies in this region (Restrepo and Rufer, 2019). I am not only excited
to see that visual studies is gaining strength in our hemisphere, but also that the
field is acquiring a distinct Latin American flavor. Drawing from this research, I
will refer to the contribution of visual studies to the study of the relationship
between art and politics in Latin America.
Firstly, I will argue that visual studies allows us to rethink the study of the
political dimension of visual art, by virtue of three epistemic displacements in
relation to art history: 1) from visual objects to visual practices; 2) from the
primacy of aesthetics to the primacy of the social; 3) from the study of politics to
political intervention. Secondly, I will demonstrate that these displacements do
not bring visual studies into conflict with Latin American art history but allow the
field to further through other means the critical projects of art history and criticism,
particularly those that have to do with the sociopolitical contexts and dynamics of
our hemisphere.
Before I address these points, I would like to stress the difficulty in defining
visual studies: the different tensions and disputes within the field and between it
and other academic fields, the inherent openness of its “object” of study and its
inherent mobility and transdisciplinarity make any claim to a conclusive definition,
in the very least, questionable. Consequently, the characterization of visual
studies that I offer should not be viewed as the only one possible but as a
positioning, a commitment to a version of visual studies that may be relevant to
the Latin American context.
Allow me to also stress that it is too early to speak about Latin American
visual studies. However, we cannot ignore the particular features of the visual

1
This paper is a translation of my article “Arte y política: La perspectiva
–Latinoamericana– de los estudios visuales” (2019). The article is revised
version of a conference paper delivered at the XII International Seminar of Art
Theory and History, organized by the University of Antioquia and held in
Medellin (Colombia) in September 2018.

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 Ruben Yepes Munoz

studies emerging in our hemisphere. In saying "Latin America" I do not refer to a

geographical location, and even less to an epistemic or cultural identity. Instead,
I am referring to a geo-epistemic perspective. We cannot ignore the epistemic
and cultural heterogeneity of our subcontinent, nor the metropolitan power
inscribed in the adjective "Latin American." But neither can we ignore that, as
Daniel Mato (2002: 21) observes, “Latin America” denotes a geo-historic and
critical location, marked by a subaltern position within the geopolitics of
knowledge, historical trajectories with shared roots, convergent social structures
and exclusions, and interrelated intellectual and political projects. This
geo-epistemic perspective has undeniable links with the geographical region,
but also deterritorializes it, extending it to other geographic locations.

First displacement: from visual objects to visual practices

Having roots in art history, it could be assumed that visual studies would
extend its approach and methods to the “expanded field of image,” the universe
of images comprised not only by works of art but also mass media and publicity
images, visual digital media, fashion and scientific images, among many others.
However, visual studies do not build their object qua object but as practice. They
understand "culture" as anthropology and cultural studies understand it, i.e. as
the set of practices that produce the universe of meanings in which individual
and collective experiences unfold. Thus, for some authors, their object of study
is not only images, visual objects or vision but visual culture, the set of practices
of meaning production in which the visual plays a key role. The visual arts would
be one of the fields of visual culture, although not necessarily the most
important.
Although not incorrect, this definition is insufficient for two reasons. a)
Because visual studies is not the only field that studies visual culture. Art and
film history, media studies, the sociology of the image and cultural studies also
address visual culture. b) Because it does not reflect the interest of visual
studies in the relationship between visual culture and power, which is precisely
what distinguishes them from the other fields that also study visual culture. It is
better to say that visual studies focus on visuality, understood, making recourse

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to the WJT Mitchell’s (2002: 170) well-known formulation, “the visual production
of the social and the social production of the visual.” A key aspect of visuality is
the articulation between visual practices and power. This articulation does not
occur in images or objects but in practices; it is not a quality immanent to objects
but a process, something that must be produced. Let us note that this definition
is more current in Latin America than in the North, where the term "visuality" is
typically used to refer to the broad spectrum of visual practices. In fact, this
usage is so prevalent that in English-speaking academia that the name "visual
culture" is sometimes used instead of "visual studies".
The focus on visuality instead of visual images or objects enables an
approach to visual culture as process or, if one refers, as mediation. This
process interrelates various factors: different cultural and social actors, the
discourses mediated by visual objects, images and actions and the discourses
that frame them, the affects produced through this conglomerate of elements
and, crucially, the reception of such images, objects and actions.
Methodologically, this approach involves the study of the articulation between
the visual and the social, that is, the contextualized study of the visual; in cultural
studies, this approach is called radical contextualism2. Although visual studies
practitioners rarely use this term, generally they do acknowledge that it is not
enough to interpret or textualize the visual object or image, one must also locate
them in the network of relations of production, presentation and circulation that
enable and inform their collective meaning. This contextual approach largely
explains the inter and transdisciplinary nature of visual studies.
This has implications for the study of the political dimension of art, if we
understand “politics” broadly as anything and everything that contributes to the
reproduction or transformation of power relations and structures. It implies, first,
that politics has to be approached as a dimension that arises at the intersection
of practices and contexts, that is, at the juncture of the cultural and the social. In
this perspective, the political is not an intrinsic property of images, objects or
actions but arises from the assembly of heterogeneous elements and practices
that constitute them as works of art. The political in art is spatial and temporarily

2
See Grossberg (2010).

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 Ruben Yepes Munoz

contingent; we could say that it is an event. A work that produces transformative

effects in one context can have regressive effects in another; it all depends on
how it is put into practice, how it is inscribed in a network of practices and
meanings. In this sense, what matters is not the artwork’s theme, content or
discourse but the articulations that it allows and its articulation between with its
sociopolitical context. This means that every work of art, insofar as it is socially
meaningful, bears a political dimension.

Second displacement: from the primacy of aesthetics to the primacy of the

social
If aesthetics is art history’s main frame of reference, the social field is that of
visual studies. Aesthetics has given art history the criteria for defining what
classifies as a work of art and the values by which such works are judged.
Conversely, visual studies judges the relevance of visual practices based on
their role in power relations, in processes of social reproduction or
transformation. Thus, the art practices that interest visual studies are those that
mediate power relations, the practices that acquire relevance within the dense
network of relationships that constitutes the social field.
The privilege of the social implies that, contrary to what art history may have
once intended, visual studies cannot aspire to the construction of a stable frame
of reference that may allow it to decide which practices to address and how to
address them. The complexity and dynamic nature of the social field does not
permit it. Although there are of course structures, these are not only in
continuous transformation but can also be disarrayed by emerging social forces.
The political is not constituted a priori and definitively, nor can it be prescribed
theoretically; therefore, for visual studies context should not be constructed
abstractly but in each case, within each study, elaborated through careful
empirical observation. Theory can and should guide this construction, but it
cannot replace it.
The privilege of the social also implies the repeal of cultural hierarchies. This
is a point that destabilizes art history and that has caused sharp debates within
English-speaking academia. The most notorious scenario of this debate is the

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(in)famous "Visual Culture Questionnaire" (October, 1996), edited by Hal Foster

and Rosalind Krauss. As José Luis Brea writes, visual studies "collapses the
insurmountable walls that, within the disciplines dogmatically associated with
their objects, separate the art work from the rest of the objects promoting the
production and communication of symbolic meaning" (2005: 3). For visual
studies, no field of visual culture has privilege over the production of meaning.
Art, with capital A, can be of great social relevance in some contexts and
situations; in others, it may be secondary and even superfluous, while those
cultural practices labeled "popular" or “low” may in fact be highly relevant. The
efforts to preserve the canon of art history are regarded as part of visuality and
are therefore open to critical scrutiny. In this sense, the power relations within
the cultural field and the disputes concerning the legitimacy of cultural objects
are sometimes more interesting than the objects themselves.
However, the move from the aesthetic to the social does not imply
abandoning aesthetic issues. This distinguishes visual studies from other fields
that also study visual culture, including communication, the sociology of the
image and even cultural studies, which have been accused, not without justice,
of ignoring the aesthetic. Visual studies addresses the aesthetic dimension of
visual practices; however, the study of this dimension is contingent upon the
analysis of the role of such practices in the production of the social, whether in
maintaining hegemonic structures or within efforts to articulate new political
actions and projects. They understand that the aesthetic experiments of artists
and the debates around them mediate and influence social dynamics. They also
understand that these experiments can disrupt the hierarchies and
crystallizations of power, hegemonic values and ideologies, and the
reproduction of the most stifling identities and subject positions, or, conversely,
that they can contribute to the production of new identities, social relations, ways
of life, and images of the future. In this perspective, art is always political, while
claims that art is "autonomous" and "apolitical" reveal their ideological drive.
Visual studies displace aesthetics from the normative place it has occupied
within art history, which is to say that they give continuity to the “new” art stories

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—(neo)Marxist, feminist and queer—that explore the social impact of art beyond
aesthetics.

Third displacement: from the study of politics to political intervention

We may accept the first two displacements as accurate characterizations of
visual studies, regardless of whether we are located in the hemispheric north or
south. However, the third displacement I propose is more controversial,
particularly in the north, where studies of visual culture frequently omit the
political dimension of visual practices. In the north, visual studies has undergone
a similar process as that of cultural studies: they have lost political valence,
accusing a proximity with cultural anthropology that, rightly so, unsettles this
discipline. When North American visual studies does deal with politics, it usually
does so in an abstract manner, studying visual practices against the background
of a stable context constructed theoretically, with little empirical information.
Without saying that in the north all visual studies manifest this apolitical
character, it is clear that the political is not the key issue.3
In Latin America, visual studies not only study the political dimension of
visual practices, they also seek to intervene the cultural and social fields in which
these practices are inscribed. The study of the political in art has enjoyed a
healthy presence throughout Latin American art history and criticism. Moreover,
fields such as image sociology, cultural anthropology, communication and media
studies also address the political dimension of visual practices. However, I
submit that visual studies bring to the study of the political dimension of visual
practices a vocation for political intervention that is in other fields implicit rather
than explicit.

3
These statements about the depoliticized nature of North American visual
studies may seem controversial in view of the work of "canonical" visual studies
authors such as Mitchell, Mirzoeff, James Elkins, Norman Bryson and others.
However, my appreciation comes from the knowledge of the field that I obtained
between 2012 and 2017, when, as a PhD student in the United States, I was
able to verify, in congresses, PhD theses and keynote lectures, this lack of focus
on the political. Notably, Elkins, who in the early 90s was key in the positioning of
the field has recently written that “On the one hand, Anglo- American visual
studies has been political from its beginning; on the other hand, a great deal of
current writing is nonpolitical or apolitical” (2015: 6).

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 Ruben Yepes Munoz

What do I mean by "political intervention"? This is a fundamental aspect of

cultural studies, both in its British and Latin American versions, although not so
much of the cultural studies that have developed in North America and
elsewhere.4 Insofar as cultural studies is the epistemic matrix of visual studies, it
is also a characteristic of the latter. I am referring to the sort of intellectual work
that not only seeks to produce knowledge about certain practices, contexts or
situations but also seeks to have an effect on the power relations embedded in
them. As Eduardo Restrepo points out in relation to cultural studies, this type of
intellectual work employs strategies such as a) the interruption of the established
meanings and collective imaginaries that inform power relations; b) the
development, together with other social actors, of concrete actions, especially
pedagogical actions; c) the critical interruption and reconfiguration of the codes,
values and parameters of specific cultural fields (2012: 121-152). It should be
clear that I am not referring to alignment with a political ideology, and less to the
propagandistic use of scholarly work.
Visual studies embody this concept of intervention, of intellectual work as
praxis. However, and contrary to cultural studies, there exist in visual studies few
cases of field-based interventions. Instead, their main form of intervention is the
critique of visuality, as a practice conscious of being itself part of visuality. As
José Luis Brea writes, visual studies are "aware that they are actively involved in
the play of forces—the battle over cultural imaginaries—in which they intervene"
(2005: 12). By accounting for the assembly of materials, actions, discourses and
relationships that constitute visual practices, visual criticism mediates the
meaning of such practices. Insofar as this meaning informs social dynamics,
visual criticism also contributes to the transformation of the social field.
Regarding art, visual studies understand that critical writing, curatorial and
museological practice and pedagogical work are scenarios of political
intervention, the mediations through which academic/intellectual work can
influence the production of meaning.

4
Several authors have pointed out that cultural studies "depoliticized" within
American academia, including Stuart Hall (2010), Néstor García Canclini (1997),
Nelly Richard (2001), Daniel Mato (2002), and Armand Mattelart and Érik Neveu
(2002).

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Visual Studies and Art History in Latin America

As I already mentioned, I consider that we are seeing the emergence of a
distinctly "Latin American" visual studies. The caveat is that, to repeat, we use
this adjective not to refer to a geographical location or a cultural identity but to an
epistemic perspective, a set of positions linked to each other by their subaltern
location within the geopolitics of knowledge, by their interest in historical, political
and social problems with common roots, and by shared intellectual and political
projects (Mato 2002). The visual studies that is taking shape in Latin America is
not a simple translation of Anglo-Saxon visual studies; rather, it reframes and
develops various Latin American critical traditions, including studies of visual
culture developed within fields such as sociology, communication and media
studies, cultural studies, and art history.
We are particularly interested in the relationship with art history. In Latin
America this relationship is more one of continuity than conflict. In our
hemisphere, art history has been less animated by the technical, archaeological
and conservative spirit that has imbued much of North American and European
art history. Instead, it is animated by a critical and politicized spirit. This spirit has
encouraged the approach to issues such as the criticism of the principles of the
historiography of art, particularly the critical assessment of categories such as
"modern" and "postmodern", with their respective "isms"; the study of the
relationships between art and political and social processes, and the critique of
the geopolitics of knowledge that traverse the fields of art and art history. The
latter includes the problematization of the relationship between the global and
the local, of the geo-cultural hierarchies and of the relations between fine and
popular art, as well as the defense of indigenous aesthetics and the critique of
the international market of Latin American art.
Let us consider a few cases. The theoretical and art historical work of the
Peruvian author Juan Acha is notorious. Acha helped to make visible the
aesthetic cultures of Latin America. He also defended the Latin Americanist
project of a sector of modern art and insisted on the need for a “conceptual
independence” of Latin American art. Along the same lines, the work of the
Cuban critic and historian Gerardo Mosquera on the geopolitics of the “Latin

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American art” category, the stereotypes of Latin America that have circulated in
the international art market and the thematic reductionism through which Latin
American art has been approached in international circuits, has been very
influential. In a similar vein, the Paraguayan critic Ticio Escobar vindicates the
indigenous and popular art of his country and of other countries such as Brazil,
Argentina and Chile. We may also mention the work of Raquel Tibol on the
relation between art and politics in Mexican muralism, as well as Luis Martín
Lozano’s defense of the originality of Mexican modernism. The critical militancy
of Aracy Amaral on Brazilian modernisms and the relationship between art and
society in Brazil is equally worthy of mention.
After the end of the dictatorships in Argentina, a new generation of historians
and critics has shed new light on the avant-garde art of the Southern Cone. Here
we may locate the work of Luis Camnitzer, developed mostly in the United
States. Camnitzer draws from Dependency Theory and Liberation Theology in
order to position Latin American conceptualism as a mode of political
intervention, a positioning that includes the framing of certain actions of the
Tupamaro guerrillas as a precedent of conceptual art. We can also locate Ana
Longoni and Mario Mestman’s work on the politics of the famous “Tucumán
arde” art project, as well as the work of the Argentine historian Andrea Giunta,
also from within the United States, on the relationship between avant-garde art
and politics in the Southern Cone. Working from Colombia and later from her
exile in several countries, Marta Traba, an essential figure in Latin American art
history, draws from the “essayist” tradition and Dependency Theory in her critical
assessment of the mid 20th century modernization of Latin American art. In short,
we must keep in mind that politics has been crucial to the region’s art and art
history. Visual studies advances some of these concerns, energizing them with
new concepts and categories. Indeed, it is hardly surprising that most of the
visual studies authors who currently enjoy visibility come from a background in
art history and criticism, and in many cases work within these fields.
Perhaps we can find the paradigm of the continuity between art criticism and
visual studies in the work of Nelly Richard. Richard is known for her work as a
critic and curator in relation to the Escena de Avanzada (“Advanced Scene”), a

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term she coined to refer to a group of Chilean artists who confronted the
dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet through an experimental, cryptic and
marginal aesthetic language. Well-known Escena works are Carlos Leppe’s
photoinstallation El perchero (“The Coathanger”, 1975), Lotte Rosenfeld’s Una
milla de cruces sobre el asfalto (“A Mile of Crosses on the Asphalt”, 1979),
Eugenio Dittborn’s Pinturas aeropostales (“Airmail Paintings”, 1983), the
happening Inversión de escena (“Scene inversion”, 1979) and the No graffitis
(1983), both by the CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte) collective. Richard
became the organizer and curator of several exhibitions of this generation of
artists, and the mediating voice of their appropriation of the codes of minimalism
and conceptualism.
Although Richard insists that her project is that of "cultural criticism," her
work is not only widely recognized as one of the first contributions to Latin
American cultural studies but is also beginning to gain traction as an antecedent
of visual studies. Without overlooking the specificity of Richard's project, it is
undeniable that it bares more continuities and similarities than differences to
cultural and visual studies. Her focus on the relationship between culture and
politics, the transdisciplinary nature of her work, her location on the margins of
cultural institutions, and the situated and contingent nature of her theoretical
discourse, clearly align Richard with the discourse of cultural studies, particularly
in its Latin American version. In addition, the attention that cultural criticism gives,
in Richard's words, to “the complex symbolic-cultural refractions of aesthetics”
(2001: 195) bring Richard’s cultural criticism close to visual studies, particularly
to the sort of visual studies that are akin to the new art history and to the renewal
of the relationship between the aesthetic and the political developed by authors
such as Jacques Rancière and Georg Didi-Huberman.5 As Gabriela Piñero
summarizes, the “reformulation of the dominant knowledge Richard undertook
was based on a particular appropriation—singular and localized, Latin
American—of the epistemic breaks in which cultural studies first and visual
studies later on participated” ( 2017: 253).

5
Regarding this, see López (2016).

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Richard does not conceal the proximity of her work to visual studies. In her
lecture "Visual studies, Politics of the Gaze and the Critique of Images", she
highlights the positive effect of the undermining of the centrality of art vis-a-vis
other forms of visual culture produced by the emergence of visual studies.
Richard included the text of her conference in Fracturas de la memoria
(“Fractures of Memory”, 2007), a compilation of her art essays from the years of
the Pinochet dictatorship and the ensuing transition period. In hindsight, Richard
says that these essays “seek to enhance art criticism through—sufficiently
inquisitive and disturbing—new diagrams of the gaze, in order to alter the flat
universe of images that the mass media visuality of capitalist globalization
condemns to a rapid dilution through incessant circulation”(2007: 10). The same
critical spirit imbues another compilation of essays, Campos Cruzados
(“Crossfields”, 2009), in which Richard writes that the work of criticism consists
in “doing, undoing and redoing meanings (....), unleashing antagonisms of
interpretation and “freeing, through writing, the art works and culture itself,
alternative forms of subjectivity, different from those programmed by the
orthodoxy of canons”.6 Thus, it is not too controversial to affirm that Richard is
the figure of Latin American critical intellectuality who most clearly contextualizes
visual studies’ critique of art and its focus on the relationship between aesthetics
and politics. In fact, some of her latest works could be placed without problem
within visual studies, were it not because we must respect the consolidated
trajectory of her cultural criticism.
Lastly, there is an aspect of Richard's intellectual work that we must
emphasize: her political intervention. Through her work as the Escena de
avanzada’s main curator and critical voice, her work in the Journal of Cultural
Criticism, her subsequent publications on art and culture during the dictatorship,
and her polemics within the Diploma in Cultural Criticism program at ARCIS,
Richard developed a praxis characterized by micropolitical intervention.

6
Nelly Richard, in her presentation of Campos cruzados, at the Editorial Fund
House of the Americas in Havana, Cuba. Available at the La Ventana-Casa de
las Américas website,
http://laventana.casa.cult.cu/noticias/2009/03/31/nelly-richard-inventar-las-fuerz
as-de-cambio/. Accessed April 25, 2019. See also Richard (2009).

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Regardless of the debates concerning the success of her interventions, we must

highlight that Richard's intellectual work brought to the study of visuality a
willingness to intervene similar to that which cultural studies offers to visual
studies as a source of inspiration.7
It is not a coincidence that a good number of the authors who are energizing
the field of visual studies come from art history. If in an epistemic sense Latin
American visual studies moves between cultural studies and art history, in an
institutional sense it emerges from art history. This is made evident by reviewing
the scholarship produced within the main nodes of the development of visual
studies, including the recently closed Center for Visual Studies and the
Foundation for the Study of Contemporary Images and Visuality (iViCON), the
digital journal e-imagen, the journal El ornitorrinco tachado—which is associated
with the only postgraduate program in visual studies that exists in Latin America,
in Toluca, housed in a department of contemporary art history—and the Latin
American Visual Studies Network, whose growing list of affiliates includes a
large percentage of art historians and critics. To these nodes we can add the
academic centers located in the United States such as the Center for Latin
American Visual Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, founded and directed
until 2013 by Andrea Giunta.
A common denominator of the work being produced within these and other
institutional nodes is the attention to the articulations between artistic practices
and the sociopolitical contexts in which such practices take place. An increasing
body of scholarship addresses artistic intervention into matters such as local and
indigenous identities, the identities, dynamics and oppressions related to gender
and sexuality, the co-optation of the visual arts by Latin American states for the
formation of hegemonic national identities, and the articulation between
institutional and popular art, among other topics.
Finally, I would like to briefly refer to two themes that are key in both Latin
American art history and visual studies. The first is the framing of power and
violence within visual practices. Attending to both the heterogeneous and
structural nature of violence and the insistence of visual studies to give equal

7
Regarding this debate, see Lazarra (2009).

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importance to all visual practices, the visual art that addresses issues of power
and violence is frequently studied in relation to other practices. A case in point is
the work of Iara Lis Schiavinatto, who addresses various aspects of the visuality
of the Portuguese-Brazilian empire, including images created as part of scientific
taxonomies, the post cards exchanged between Portugal and Brazil, the role of
drawing within literate society and the codification of power in portraits of
government men, merchants and lawyers. Another example is Sven Schuster's
research on the relationship between visual culture and memory, as well as his
work on the role of a variety of “public images”—paintings, photographs,
banners, coins, symbols, maps, stamps and films—in the formation of Latin
American nations. We can also cite Carlos Ossa's research on the role of the
visual in the formation of the19th-century Chilean nation, where the first
photographic and cinematographic images fulfilled the function of mediating
between “a baroque vision of power and a positivist conception of order ”(2015:
213). Sebastián Díaz-Duhalde, working from the United States, has investigated
the representations of war and state violence in Paraguay and the Southern
Cone. Díaz-Duhalde focuses much of his efforts on examining the political and
historical uses of a variety of visual materials, including paintings, war
photographs, prints and illustrations, in the context of the War Against Paraguay.
We can also mention the various articles in which Marta Cabrera analyzes the
role of the visual arts and mass media images in the visibility and invisibility of
violence, the memorialization of the armed conflict and the construction of
national narratives in Colombia. It is interesting to see how visual studies allows
for the analytic interrelation of different visual practices, in such a way that the
structural relation between power and violence is revealed. In this way, visual
studies not only gives continuity to the projects of the historians and art critics
who have worked on similar issues, they also refocus the relationship between
art, power and violence.
The second theme is the geocultural and geopolitical location of Latin
American art. As I have already mentioned, this is not a new concern within Latin
American art history. For decades, art historians have denounced issues such
as the assimilationist rhetoric regarding the modern art of our hemisphere, the

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interference of the United States in the efforts of local states to govern the
development of visual art, the lack of acknowledgment of local artistic
movements, the stereotypes and reductive views of Latin America, and the
co-optation of Latin American political art by the cultural market.
A particularly interesting case of the intervention in the geopolitics of artistic
and visual practices is Graciela Speranza’s Atlas portátil de América Latina
(Portable Atlas of Latin America, 2012). This is Speranza's response to Atlas.
How to Carry the World?, the great exhibition of images of the 20th and 21st
centuries held at the Reina Sofía Museum in 2010 and curated by Georges
Didi-Huberman, in turn inspired by Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosine. Speranza
was disturbed by the absence of Latin American images in Didi-Huberman’s
show. To Speranza, this suggests that “the extension of the global map seems
to owe more to the voracity of the market than to the democratizing theoretical
crusades of post-colonialism, multiculturalism and subaltern studies”(2012: 12).
Speranza does not hold Didi-Huberman responsible for this omission; instead,
she attributes it to the fact that the unconscious memory of the West continues to
ignore the contributions of the periphery. Her intervention responds to the
persistence of geocultural hierarchies both below the politically correct surface of
globalization discourse and within the identity categories forged from and in
opposition to it. Drawing, among other authors, from García Canclini and Nelly
Richard, Speranza assembles works of art, images, literary and theoretical texts,
not in order to rescue some forgotten Latin American cultural identity but to
inquire into the ways in which we “represent the world through imaginary
cartographies, register new urban psychogeographic experiences, open up
networks of flexible relationships or seclude ourselves within enclosed spheres,
reveal surviving trends within art history, rethink identity, territory, roots,
language and ideas of the homeland” (2012: 17). Although the portable Atlas is
itself an intervention in the field of visual culture, it remains to be seen what a
corresponding exhibition of images might look like.
Speranza’s Atlas takes us to one of the most interesting lines of work in
relation to the geocultural and geopolitical dynamics of art and visual practice. I
am referring to the approaches to the visual dimension of coloniality, i.e. the

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power structures of colonial origin that persist in contemporary forms of power,

social organization, subjectivities and cultural values. This subject has been
developed within Latin American social sciences and cultural studies. It has
roots in Liberation Philosophy and Dependence Theory, which have not only
informed these fields but also Latin American art history. Its main instantiation
may be found in the critical discourse of decolonial aesthetics, developed mainly
by Walter Mignolo, and in the critique of the coloniality of seeing put forward by
Joaquín Barriendos. The book Estéticas decoloniales (Decolonial Aesthetics,
2012) was edited by Mignolo and Pedro Pablo Gómez from the presentations
and debates that took place within the homonymous seminar held in 2010 at the
Francisco José de Caldas University (Bogotá).8 Mignolo had already addressed
the issue of decolonial aesthetics in his article "Aiesthesis decolonial" (2010),
which helped shape the seminar. He also served as co-curator of the artistic
exhibition held in parallel to the seminar. According to Mignolo, we need to
“decolonize aesthetics in order to free aiesthesis” (2012: 40), that is, to unleash
aesthetics from European aesthetic normativity and its implicit racism and
ethnocentrism, in order to accommodate the sensitive experiences of
non-western societies that have been excluded by this normativity. Although
decolonial aesthetic practices do not only occur in Latin America—Mignolo’s
examples are drawn not only from Latin America but also from the United States,
Eastern Europe, and several Asian countries—it is undeniable that the
orientation they have taken in our region is marked by the trajectory of the artistic
and critical practices that, since the first decades of the Twentieth Century, have
responded to the demands of local aesthetics.
Barriendos has theorized, from a decolonial perspective, on the historical
structures of hegemonic visuality in Latin America. Drawing from the
contributions of Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Arturo Escobar, Santiago
Castro-Gómez and Mignolo, Barriendos (2011) demonstrates the existence of a
coloniality of seeing, which, together with the coloniality of power, knowledge

8
Mignolo points out that this issue was introduced in the decolonial project by
Adolfo Albán-Achinte, and initially counted on the important contributions of
Zulma Palermo. See “The New and the Decolonial,” in Walter Mignolo and
Pedro Pablo Gómez, (2012, 28-29)

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 Ruben Yepes Munoz

and being, constitutes one of the key patterns of colonial and neocolonial
domination. According to Barriendos, the visual regimes of colonial power set in
motion the processes of racial and epistemic inferiorization that persist within the
current ethnocentric logic. The historical modulation of the images of
cannibalism, of the “good” and “bad” savage and of primitive man is at the base
of the current visual regimes that produce racialized, inferiorized and objectified
alterities. Barriendos advocates an “interepistemic visual dialogue between
those visual regimes canonized by Eurocentric modernity and those other visual
cultures that have been racialized and hierarchized by the modernity/coloniality
project” (2011, 14). Although Barriendos provides few elements that may allow
us to imagine the terms of this interepistemic dialogue, the potential of his
decolonial perspective regarding the visuality established by colonial power is
undeniable. My perspective is that Latin American art is and has been a
privileged scenario for this interepistemic visual dialogue, and that presently
visual studies is the academic field best poised to further it.

Conclusion
I started by saying that visual studies gives continuity through other means
to the critical projects of Latin American art history and criticism. We have seen
how these other means relate to the three displacements of which I spoke: from
objects to practices, from aesthetic to social, from the study of politics to political
intervention. These "other means" are none other than the theoretical and
conceptual tools of Latin American critical thought, which have been forged in
response to the political and social dynamics of our hemisphere. Emerging from
the epistemic ground of cultural studies and placing itself between the social
sciences and art history, the visual studies that are emerging in Latin America
are poised to make important contributions to the study of the political dimension
of artistic practice. At the same time, they enable new critical approaches to the
latter, attending not only to their transformative scope but also their vicissitudes
and limitations, particularly in relation to other visual practices. By insisting that
artistic practices do not have monopoly over visuality, visual studies reveal the
cultural and social transversality of power structures, and invite us to build

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 Ruben Yepes Munoz

political articulations between seemingly dispersed visual practices. Crucially,

they invite us to understand intellectual work as political intervention, as an
aspect of the production and transformation of visuality.

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