Political Violence Mapping: Latin-America
There is no cry of pain that in the future does not have, at last, as an echo, a joy.
Anonymous
The map lies. Traditional geography steals the space, just as the imperial economy steals wealth, official history steals the memory, and formal culture steals the word.
Galeano, Eduardo. Muddled: School world upside down.
This project has the support of INAMU (National Institute of Music -Argentina-), FNA (National Fund for the Arts -Argentina-), the department of performing arts of the University of Gothenburg and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
Political Violence Mapping: Latin America investigates and creates representation mechanisms around different forms of violence within the Latin American territory. We study the ways in which the main actors of the hegemonic system (states, media, cultural and educational organizations) operate by covering up, justifying, blurring and silencing genocides, wars, state terrorism, forced migrations, political re-education, among others.
PVM explores non-conventional forms of dramaturgy seeking to produce diverse spatio-temporal apprehensions in the audience. From a transdisciplinary, horizontal and collaborative work perspective in teams of various sizes -from small groups to the community- we are always open to the exchange of practices and knowledge because we believe that this is how other methods of creating, researching and acting emerge.
Our productions and investigations seek to question the hegemonic modes of production of contemporary aesthetic discourse from a non-centralist and non-universalist position, that is, peripheral, heterogeneous and of alterity. The intention of this questioning is to be able to generate spaces where it is possible to hear the voices of those subalternized human groups whose memories have been silenced by past and present colonialism.
That is why it is important for us to be able to operate in the opposite way to how hegemonic contemporary art does it, seeking to blur the following elements: 1) clearly defined authors, 2) private exhibition spaces with a clear curatorial logic -even within the current hyper-complexity- and 3) a management of time-space that is limited, class-oriented and face-to-face where art is only experiential for those who can afford the combo that the infrastructure of aesthetic enjoyment of hegemonic contemporary art requires.
About the art-work
Political Violence Mapping: Latin America (PVM) is an aesthetic organism made up of a series of works whose objective is to conceive a transdisciplinary[1] ecosystem in which the arts, social sciences, new technologies, oral tradition and pre-conquest American rituals coexist.
PVM has 3 plot topics that can work as autonomous entities, or exist at the same time in different spaces: colonialism, armed conflicts and silence.
Objectives
The objectives of this project are:
- Design communication strategies through aesthetic experiences.
- Generate representation mechanisms that overlap “classical” disciplines (Social Sciences and Humanities) through a transdisciplinary approach and from artistic-research.
- Promote a new way of experiencing history, of creating spaces for community reflection and of carrying out scientific dissemination as ways of democratizing culture.
Key Questions and Justification
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregno a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.
How can we create a new approach and a new type of voice to speak about violence in “sub-developed” regions?
- What roles could arts have within the scope of social sciences study and vice versa?
It is important for us to carry out this type of work because through a transdisciplinary body with a broad adaptation spectrum, it will be possible to encompass the flows of history and it will be possible to reach a much larger audience than the social sciences or the arts cannot by themselves.
Structure of the art-work
Orality is a deterritorializing mode of representation, in which memory is in constant reformulation or journey.
Cocimano, Gabriel. La tradición oral latinoamericana, Las voces anónimas del continente caliente. [The Latin American Oral Tradition: The Anonymous Voices of the Hot Continent]
In Political Violence Mapping: Latin America a rake is carried out through the continent asking and trying to answer what, for what, who, how, where, when and why political violence exists and occurs. PVM is a constellation of events/scenes from different historical time-spaces constituted by:
Colonialism mapping
A - Antikuna (Andes Mountain Range in Quechua language)
B - Afro-Latin-American
C - The Beast (Neo-colonialism)
Latin American armed conflicts mapping, XX and XXI centuries
A –Malvinas Argentinas (Sound Installation)
B – War on drug trafficking
C – Colombian Guerrilla
Mapping of Silence
A – Black Silence
– Genocide of Patagonia originary peoples (Sound Installation or Blind Theater)
B – White Silence
– Ecocide (Performatic Installation, Happening, Conference)
Other pieces related to the Mapping
- Basic Racist Glossary (Season 1)
- REC Malvinas (Sound Installation - Piece with instructions)
- La terre de Feu (Live musicalization of silent movie)
- Noncorrespondence (Sound installation for Rio Negro Internation Art Biennal 2022)
[1] Transdisciplinarityconcerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines. Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge.
Basarab Nicolescu, La transdisciplinarité, manifeste (Monaco: Rocher, 1996). Translated into English by Karen-Claire Voss as Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (New York: SUNY Press, 2002).