The symposium entitled Unlearning the Modern: Art and Indigeneity in Latin America,1 which was organised by Hyundai Tate Research: Transnational and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, took place on 8-10 November 2022. The event was held as a continuation of the previous online conference and digital project Constellations: Contemporary Indigenous Art from the Americas,2 which the same institutions organised in 2020.
The title of the conference generated keen debate from the outset, both around the choice to maintain historical categories which are currently being interrogated in Latin American art discourse, as well as because of the absence of certain ideas which are central to this subject such as decolonisation, anticolonialism and antiracism. This unease led to a critical discussion on the effectiveness of categories such as “Indigenous”, “Indigeneity”, “First Nations” and “Native Peoples” in the context of contemporary art.
I highlight this initial debate precisely because of the comprehensive nature of the discussion on Indigenous art in Latin America. The field is not limited to the question of cultural difference, but also incorporates the political agency and strategies enacted by Indigenous artists to counter the historic inequality they have experienced in the art world: actions which undoubtedly destabilise the ideological foundations of the debate itself. Situated in this context, contemporary Indigenous art serves to reactivate ever-pertinent reflections on the link between art and politics.
Through posing a number of different questions, the conference precis acknowledged the complexity of this field: “What aesthetic expressions have been encrypted or erased in what we know as modern Latin American art? Is it possible to conceive of an Indigenous modernism that puts its genealogy into crisis? How can we construct a history of Indigenous art from a vernacular perspective, beyond Indigenism as an expression of national folklore?”.
Given the heterogeneity of contemporary Indigenous art production, these questions sparked stimulating discussion and prompted new lines of enquiry throughout the course of the symposium: is Indigenous art necessarily anti-modern or is it a narrative that, without losing its origins, appropriates elements of modernism to reconceptualise it? How does the field of art engage with historical categories such as “Indigenous” from a critical and heterogeneous perspective, acknowledging the colonial origins that construct it, while also recognising the political reclaiming of it by the communities themselves? And finally, to what extent do debates on contemporary Indigenous art practices challenge other disciplinary fields, such as anthropology or archaeology, leading to interrogations of their own methodologies and historical approaches to communities and their production?
These questions are being raised through aesthetic and conceptual reflections in an emerging debate led by Indigenous groups about their relationship with art institutions. This process renders Indigenous communities the undeniable agents of the discussion, thus departing from strategies of invisibility or subordination which, historically, have permeated many representations of the Indigenous world. As such, no discussion of Indigenous art is possible without the communities’ perspectives of their own production.
The conference brought together a plurality of voices and varied experiences. It allowed similarities and contradictions from distinct contexts to converge, but also drew attention to the intersections that unite a cross-border impulse to decolonise art. In my view, this perspective does not mean the artists in question necessarily renounce or abandon the canonical categories of art, but rather it transforms them through their own practices and systems of knowledge.
Emiliana Cruz’ keynote lecture introduced her robust project of linguistic documentation foregrounding the confluence of memory and landscape. Her approach posits a bridge between these two components with a methodology that prioritises political commitment to the community in which her work takes place. Given the productivity-focused perspective of the art circuit, methods and approaches are often side-lined with focus placed on the outcome rather than the process, meaning that certain areas of potential contribution to the field are neglected. Indigenous language emerges as one of these areas, Cruz explained, drawing on her practice of sharing stories while going on walks with elders and others in the community. It is, however, regaining prominence and adapts in line with historic transformations in communities. Through exercising the right to communicate in their own languages and epistemologies, relationships to the environment, space and time are revitalised.
It is precisely in relation to Indigenous art that it is worth emphasising the emancipatory and political power of the articulation of language. In fact, many of the artists who presented during the conference titled their works in their respective languages, not only in acknowledgement of cultural difference, but also as a conceptual act that shapes alternative engagement with the content and visual language of their pieces, thus developing intercultural bridges and decolonising strategies.
The first panel discussion, entitled “Interiors and Edges of the Amazon and the Andes” featured Venuca Evanán, Aimema Úia and Santiago Yahuaricani. The presentations of each artist’s work revealed the range of references and challenges that epitomise the vibrancy of Indigenous art, both in terms of the materiality of the work – often arising from traditional techniques and natural pigments – as well as the themes evoked and particular languages constructed, features that stretch the conventional notions held about the artists’ own “traditions”. In Santiago Yahuarcani’s work, there is not only an emphasis on the value of the cosmovision, its imaginaries and the proposed dialogue between them, but also a focus on memory and political violence, which he detailed in his works inspired by his community’s resistance during the Rubber Fever and Genocide. This aspect of his work is significant since the problematisation of memory is crucial to the work of Indigenous art.
Aimema raised another important facet of this discussion by pointing to the collective practices within communities that connect to and reclaim ancestral knowledge (the value of mambe, yucca, tobacco etc.), in his case through painting. This intergenerational approach serves to rescue what is theirs, that is, fostering “a reconnection with the origin as a strategy for decolonisation”. For many Indigenous artists, this type of thinking is deepened by the experience of migration to cities and introduction into the art world, a transition that often involves the impulse to maintain traditions, to keep sustaining and sharing them, while at the same time incorporating new forms into their practices.
Lastly, Venuca Evanán’s presentation drew attention to how certain traditional Indigenous practices, perceived as the artistic legacy of specific cultural groups, are redefined through the integration of new approaches to work with this heritage, in her case, the sarhua boards. Endowed with internal transformations, these reimagined practices point to the complexity of communities, embodying political positions that refuse any idealised perception of Indigenous groups as unchanging or univocal. As we’ve seen, this characteristic can be understood in relation to other approaches such as that of intersectionality and its link to community experiences being reinterpreted through art. In addition to the revitalisation of traditional practices, Evanán’s presentation involved the reporting and revival of stories that Indigenous women are often denied even within their own communities. Counter to this suppression, Evanán’s work reconfigures women’s empowerment over their bodies and erotic lives, and also proposes an antipatriarchal visual language.
In the lecture “Loss of the chu’lel: Artistic and Anthropological visions”, Pedro Pitarch and Abraham Gómez examined the discourse around the current status of Indigenous art and the relevance of narratives that are being constantly re-examined. They referenced the importance of critiques levelled at disciplines that have historically constructed otherness from colonialist frameworks and how these same fields must reconsider their own practices, especially regarding the use of outdated imagery and representations of cultural production. For example, the perceptions of Indigenous groups as anchored to the past, to rurality, or only as “cosmovisionist” subjects, while their practices and production are in actuality much more malleable, therefore showing, to paraphrase Oswald Andrade, the anthropophagic quality of embracing and creating new elements.
Contributing to the conference’s decolonising conceptual framework, Abraham Gómez presented his reflections on the themes of searching and loss that run through his experience and testimony. These processes connect the boundaries of the contemporary and the ancestral, showing them not as irreconcilable entities, but as an amalgam of constant movement through the recovery of the chu’lel. These experiences are an important part of what in Western terms can be understood as artistic research, but viewing it from this perspective alone demonstrates the limited scope of the discourse to account for broader realities, realities that go beyond the artistic or purely representative and also function as a process of healing. This last aspect is a particularity of Indigenous art that calls for more open consideration.
The last panel of the programme, entitled “Mesoamerica, Again”, featured María Sosa, Édgar Calel, José Chi Dzul and Angélica Serech. Covering a range of perspectives, their works pointed to a shared cross-border memory, whose impressions started from colonial imaginaries and the critiques that surround them, but converged to reconfigure this heritage through new explorative approaches. María Sosa gave a broad overview of Mesoamerican aesthetics and the impact that they had in the face of colonial power and its attempts to erase them. She then reflected on the forms and echoes in which this violence and its repercussions still persist today. By drawing on contemporary art practices such as installation and performance, she develops artistic modes of documenting these processes. On the other hand, Chi Dzul shared his objections to the category of “Indigenous”, given the role that the term still plays in the construction of otherness, versus the concept of “multiculturalism” which, in his view, better exposes difference as a field of convergences and divergences. His work embodies this perspective, exploring everyday experiences to represent the multicultural and give prominence to Indigenous language. By deploying a range of forms and techniques, his practice results in a unique typography and a conceptual framework focused on the image/text relationship.
Finally, from the Maya Kaqchiquel perspective, both Angélica Serech and Édgar Calel presented on their personal approaches to exploring traditional techniques, iconographies and various contemporary media. Serech comes from a family of weavers and drawing on her inheritance of this legacy, she discussed the singularity of the textile as a unique and unrepeatable art form. Emphasising that its production goes beyond clothing and decorative objects, she portrayed it as a mode of epistemic justice insofar as textiles constitute forms of meaning and communication for different Indigenous communities: “in the absence of words, it is better to weave them”. From this basis, her practice aims to elicit new knowledge through the transformative union of traditional languages with contemporary montage and installation. Lastly, Calel presented Obsidian Dream, a film he developed with Fernando Perreira dos Santos that was part of the Berlin Biennial (2020). This piece explores audio-visual means of depicting memories of an Indigenous population, for example, through the artist wearing a jaguar skin as a synecdoche to represent broader Indigenous cosmologies, and spoken words that reference the linguistic diversity of Guatemala. Calel also pointed to an ongoing preoccupation: “How can we develop other lines of thought and reflection on our own production and also on the production of others who are part of other territories?”.
The last day of the conference was held in the Anahuacalli Museum and included a tour of its grounds, exhibition halls, and the storage spaces where Diego Rivera’s collection is kept. This led to a discussion on the problematic dynamics of collection and its relationship with Indigenous art, the ways institutions respond to communities’ demands regarding management of and access to these pieces, as well as issues of restitution, repatriation and reparation. Later, in the last lecture of the conference, Gabriel Pareyón gave an extensive overview of Náhuatl categories and concepts found in ethnohistoric and colonial sources. These proposed a comprehensive way of conceiving elements of nature that allows us to expand our notions of aesthetic experience.
By way of conclusion, it is worth pointing out some of the problems that arose throughout the conference and which strike me as pertinent to explore in greater depth on other occasions. First, several of the presentations highlighted episodes of discrimination and racism that occur within the art world, exposing the way supposedly inclusive institutions continue to undervalue the Indigenous world, sometimes due to the self-taught nature of Indigenous production. Institutions thus enforce the weight of their cultural capital to the detriment of Indigenous cultural richness. This discrimination also often stems from enduring colonial practices that dictate how Indigenous production should be received, for example, referring to it as craft only to avoid defining it as art, or approaching its subjects in relation to the cosmovision, without appreciating the political dimension of artists’ works.
Secondly, in my opinion, it is necessary to approach the category of “Indigenous” in art not only as a colonially-constructed marker of otherness, but also by incorporating the experiences assigned to it by Indigenous groups themselves as a reclaimed political category. For it is not the same to identify as Indigenous in Latin American contexts where, in comparative terms, the population is smaller and a policy of invisibility of these groups still persists, versus others, where there are greater advances in the recognition of cultural diversity and Indigenous rights. Furthermore, we must approach it from a heterogenous perspective by including recent diasporic experiences.
Finally, we must understand that the demands of Indigenous groups for greater prominence and inclusion in the cultural sphere is an exercise of the rights pledged in national and international agreements, and which states and their institutions must fulfil. So, when Indigenous production is included in the contemporary art world, it is because communities have situated their struggles in its spaces, and more than making symbolic gestures, institutions are demarcating rights. It is welcome indeed that institutions such as those that organised this conference have learned how to accept these demands and shown significant intent to decolonise their narratives.