Decoloniality in Latin American art

Posted on August 14, 2011 by mariaelena

(http://www.southernperspectives.net/region/latin-america/decoloniality-in-latin-american-art)
This paper by Mara Helena Lucero was delivered at the Southern Perspectives series at the
Institute of Postcolonial Studies on August 11 2011. It introduces recent Latin American thinking
about modernity, particularly in the concept of the decolonial.
Beyond the Favela, the Rua and the Museum: Reading Hlio Oiticica and Artur Barrio from
Decoloniality. Fluctuations and Paradoxes of a Latin-American Modernity[1]
I
Thinking about modernity in Latin America implies revising the
works of certain artists who have been protagonists of episodes of
rupture in the local as well as in the international cultural arena,
including the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. As we move in this
direction, it is possible to recognize visible signs of a decolonial
position in two emblematic artists of Brazilian, and thus Latin
American art: Hlio Oiticica (1937-1980)[2] and Artur Barrio
(1945). The aim of this paper is to focus on a reading of these two
visual trajectories, from a critical perspective that is rooted in what
Ramn Grosfoguel and Santiago Castro-Gmez (2007) have called
the decolonial turn, given that it is necessary to re-evaluate certain
cultural itineraries from an adequate epistemic framework if we are
to concern ourselves with a Latin American specificity. Decoloniality
formulates a vision of knowledge that is compatible with that of
postcolonial studies, an aspect that will also be taken under consideration. In this way, the
development of theoretical perspectives that aim for the expansion of discussions around the globalsouth implies pluralistic modes of perception and interpretation of the cultural productions that
emerge there.

Hlio Oiticia
Artur Barrio

Hlio Oiticica has gone through different artistic stages, from the two-dimensional paintings we
associate with the Frente group in the 1950s to his Cosmococas in 1973, or actions born out of

contra-blido toward the end of the 1970s. His explorations resulted in theoretically complex,
vigorous, and coherent constructions, that drew a personal itinerary that stimulated a permeable
corporeity: he would activate not just a connection with certain surroundings, but also perceptual
channels that, at times of oppression, would work as zones of self-conscious liberation and as
decolonial signs. Artur Barrio initiated, toward the end of the 1960s, a series of interventions in
urban and peripheral zones in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte. His well-known trouxas
ensanguentadas, pieces that alluded to physical remains that were wounded or devastated, operated
as provocation devices that altered the perception of the unaware walker-by, who would come
across these disturbing packages that were squirted and stained with a violent red as he stepped
along the city sidewalk.
Both trajectories have shown us visual propositions that, on one hand, instituted regional
expressions within an international artistic arena, expressions that are tied to the subversive
character of Latin American conceptualism a counter-discourse strategy that questioned the
political hegemony of the State and the fetishist condition of legitimated art. On the other hand, they
openly rejected the military dictatorship that took place in Brazil (1964-1985), which reached its
crudest and most violent moment in 1968, when the law AI 5 was passed to suppress the civil and
political liberties of Brazilian citizens.
II
Before developing the concept of decoloniality, lets consider the academic backgrounds of the
members of the modernity-coloniality network, the nucleus from which the concept arises. Certain
Latin American intellectuals, among them Anbal Quijano in 1996 and Ramn Grosfoguel in 1998,
while working in U.S. universities, began to debate colonial legacies, the geopolitics of knowledge,
and the coloniality of knowledge in Latin America. Up to par with researchers like Santiago CastroGmez, Walter D. Mignolo, Edgardo Lander, Fernando Coronil or Enrique Dussel, these
intellectuals participated in the activities of the modernity-coloniality network. As do Cultural and
Postcolonial Studies, el grupo modernidad/colonialidad reconoce el papel esencial de las
epistemes, pero les otorga un estatuto econmico, tal como el anlisis del sistema mundo [ the
Modernity/Coloniality Group recognizes the essential role of epistemes, but it assigns them an
economic status, like world-system analysis] (Castro-Gmez, Grosfoguel, 2007: 16-17). This
epistemic frame is in some ways linked with the theories of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, but it
has also avoided automatically introducing postcolonial reflections on the Latin American stage, in
order to examine regional singularities and to consolidate a discussion on Occidentalism by and
from Latin America. It is in this context that the term post-occidentalism has gained currency, as
a reformulation that conjugates decolonization and postcolonialism, where knowledge is forged in
interstitial or hybrid ways, pero no en el sentido tradicional de sincretismo o mestizaje, y
tampoco en el sentido dado por Nstor Garca Canclini a esta categora, sino en el sentido de
complicidad subversiva [ but not in the traditional sense of syncretism or mestizaje, and also
not in the sense given by Nstor Garca Canclini to this category, but in the sense of subversive
complicity] (2007: 20).
Strictly speaking, decoloniality, as it has been mapped out by Castro Gmez and Grosfoguel, insists
on the liberating nature of the term and encourages a second decolonizationof an intellectual and
cultural nature, in comparison with a first decolonization that is restricted to the legal-political level,
achieved by the Spanish colonies in the nineteenth century and the British and French colonies in
the twentieth century. The transition from modern to global colonialism took place without a
substantial transformation of binary organizations, such as the economic poles of centre-periphery,
thus reproducing political and economic submission. The crisis of the modern condition produced
cracks and variables in the historical canon of power that denied multiplicity, superposition or
hybridity, making a turn toward increasingly plural global presences. In spite of these changes, the
colonial traces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have endured. Thus, it follows that the

decolonial perspective pushes for a culture that is intertwined with decisive effects on ethnic, racial,
sexual, epistemic, and gender dimensions. In and of themselves, racial discourses provoke negative
consequences in the international labour system, a worrisome aspect for decoloniality.
Racial premises would justify the access of supposedly superior races[3] to better offers in the
labour market, as opposed to the inferior races that would be relegated to badly-remunerated
tasks, thus tracing a way of thinking that inherited notions of the nineteenth century. This condition
should be examined from a heterarchical perspective, where no level exists that dominates or
subjugates others but, instead, there is a multiple and shared influence that works for a new and
better paradigm. Let us remember that the idea of heterarchy, developed by sociologist Kyriakis
Kontopolous, is antithetical to hierarchy and undertakes the analysis of social structures by
including dysfunctional aspects in a partial, discontinuous, and non-homogenous way. Likewise,
decoloniality confronts coloniality of knowledge, which is grounded on an economic dimension as
well as on mechanisms of social control. As Mignolo (2007) has noted, decolonial thought has been
configured as a resistant and different zone from modernity/coloniality itself. In this manner,
coloniality exteriorizes the situation of domination of those who have been forcibly submerged in
modernity.
Even though the theoretical alignment of the modernity/coloniality group traces differences and
relocations with respect to postcolonial studies, they do share its interdisciplinary and
deconstructive character with respect to the Eurocentric, colonial paradigm. Mellino (2008) has
presented a revision of the term postcolonial in order to delineate a genealogy of its repercussions
and incidences in the international academic world. He makes a distinction between a literal and a
metaphorical interpretation of the concept of postcolonialism. In the first case, it would refer to a
post moment of decolonization in the political arena, or forms of emancipation from territorial
colonization at a given time period; in the second case, there appear far-reaching implications that
are not contained within a segment of time. The crucial precedents for this way of thinking are to be
found in Edward Said, an intellectual associated with anti-imperialist criticism; in Gayatri Spivak,
who detects, in British literature, the echoes of colonialism and imperialism that subsist beyond the
multiple cultural meetings, contacts, and shocks between Orient and the West; and in Homi Bhabha,
whose expressions of hybridity or the in-between have endowed us with the capacity to give a
name not just to the cultural interstices forged on fluctuating borders, but to new social actors who
do not have a fixed locus. Here, postcolonial criticism works through the deconstruction of the
Western imperialist subject, exploring the degree of epistemic violence in the narratives that are cast
upon cultural alterities.
From Saids, Spivaks, and Bhabhas contributions, the postcolonial paradigm came to be formed as
a desarrollo del pensamiento posmoderno orientado a la crtica cultural y a la deconstruccin de las
nociones, de las categoras y de los presupuestos de la identidad moderna occidental en sus ms
variadas manifestaciones [development of postmodern thought aimed at cultural criticism and the
deconstruction of the notions, categories, and presuppositions of modern Western identity in its
most varied manifestations] (Mellino, 2008: 51). For Homi Bhabha, colonial discourse attends to a
system of symbols and practices that organize social reproduction in colonial space. According to
him, the sense of post that is implicit in the term postcolonialism refers to a beyond and
embodies a certain inquietante energa revisionista [unsettling revisionist energy] (Bhabha, 2007:
21) that has the ability of transforming the present into a locus of experience and plurality. In this
operation (which, in the end, assumes a political stance), culture makes up a seminal dimension,
founding a estrategia de supervivencia es a la vez transnacional y traduccional [strategy of
survival that is at once transnational and translational] (2007: 212) and that establishes a space
in-between that allows for the emergence of hybrid and interstitial cultural signs.
III
In order to circumscribe the critical tone of the productions generated by the aforementioned artists,

let us remember that the tone that preceded conceptualism in Latin America stimulated reflections
on the idea of dematerialization. Mari Carmen Ramrez (2004) has pointed out that this cultural
project did not depend on centre or metropolitan phenomena, but transcended the opposition
centre-periphery and accentuated structural and ideological factors over perceptual conditions. A
systematic inversion occurred through Latin American conceptual experiences with relation to the
North American model, given the conditions of marginalization and repression that Latin America
experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. The revision of conceptualism in these latitudes obliges us to
approach it as the recovery of an emancipatory project (Ramrez, 1999: 557). These incipient
enunciations predict developments in global conceptual art from an eccentric position, outside or
displaced from the centre. Luis Camnitzer underlined certain mechanisms that marked Latin
America as a cultura de resistencia en contra de culturas invasoras [culture of resistance against
invading cultures] (Camnitzer, 2008: 31), whose visual and formal productions pollinated
dimensions of the political along with poetry and pedagogy. These sides merged, and the result was
a globality that transcended the dichotomy agitation/construction: the artist didnt propose
himself as an activist but as a builder of forms, objects, ideas that become embodied in the artwork.
There would be a Latin American specificity in contrast with the U.S. conceptual process,
observable when taking in account areas such as: the role of dematerialization, pedagogical
incidence, the application of the text or literature. For the Latin American case, the process of
dematerialization followed a politicized and politicizing condition, more than an aesthetic choice.
Oiticica developed part of his work in the period that immediately preceded as well as during the
Brazilian dictatorship. The 1964 Parangols were capes that were made of ephemeral materials,
outside the art circuit. The spectators, besides integrating the work, would make movements in
space to the rhythm of Rio de Janeiro samba, thus establishing a dialogue with the surrounding
context. In this way, there appeared a new una experiencia integradora donde la Percepcin cumple
el doble rol de estructurar y transformar el mundo de lo cotidiano () [integrative experience
where Perception has the double role to restructure and transform the quotidian world ()]
(Lucero: 2009a: 2). In 1965, the common denominator among artists and critics was their
opposition to the system through protests of a cultural nature, that took place in events such as
Propuestas 65 in So Paulo, an event that was similar to Opinio 65 in Rio de Janeiro. These were
interdisciplinary exhibits that discussed the fate of the arts after the military coup. Hlio, in
Propuestas 66, called this new trend our objectivity, thus underlining the avant-garde
characteristics of these encounters, as well as promoting a space of experimentalism where subjects
could free their imagination and, besides being part of that world, they could also be its creators.

Hlio Oiticica Parangol P 08 Capa 05 Mangueira, 1965; P 05 Capa 02, 1965; P 25 Capa 21Nininha Xoxoba, 1968; P 04 Capa 01, 1964. Image from Ivan Cardosos film H.O, 1979. Credits:
Catalogue Hlio Oiticica. The Body of Color, 2007, p. 317
Tropiclia from 1967 was the product of diverse appropriations, which allowed him to advance his
environmental agenda, and can be understood as an idea of a garden for sensory and graphic
experiences (Figuereido, 2007: 118). The notion of anti-art coined by Helio emphasized the artists
condition as an instigator of creation and that of the spectator as an active participant of the artwork.
Anti-art was the response to a collective need in relation to the creative action, that was exempt
from intellectual or moral premises: it was mans simple position within himself, in his vital
creative possibilities (Oiticica, 1999: 8). Dance was a direct search for the act of expression, and in
contrast with ballets mechanical choreography, the movement suggested by the dances of carnaval
was the equivalent to the exteriorization of the popular element in these communities. The collision
with preconceptions related to artistic practices formulated the connection between the collective
and individual expression the most important step towards this - (Oiticica, 2006: 106).
Artur Barrio has been a reader of Frantz Fanon (also Oiticica had a translated copy of The Wretched
of the Earth). This is an important detail that helps us understand his plastic choices as well as what
it means to produce art in the periphery of capitalism. The reference to residues of cheap materials
targeted hierarchies and reflected the idea of economic leftovers, or edge of the margin. In this
sense, la obra de Barrio incluye estrategias del Conceptualismo apelando al uso de elementos
precarios, banales y frgiles, trazando una opcin disidente respecto a los materiales industriales de
alto costo econmico [Barrios ouvre includes conceptualist strategies, that make use of
precarious, banal, and fragile elements that delineate a dissident alternative with respect to
industrial, high-cost materials] (Lucero, 2009b: 6). The sum of his aesthetic choices constituted the
equivalent of an attitude of resistance against others control over his own matter. La postura
esttico-poltica de Barrio es una toma de conciencia en relacin a la produccin del arte en el
Tercer mundo como resistencia a la contramodernidad [Barrios aesthetic-political position is an
act of conscience with relation to the production of art in the Third World as resistance to
countermodernity] (Herkenhoff, 2008: 15), if we understand countermodern in Homi Bhabhas
terms, that is, as related to neocolonialism. In this way, Barrio took a clear position before an

instance of oppression, that colonized liberty and the senses. In 1969, the artist piled up packages
that were toned with blood in one of the rooms of the Modern Art Museum in Rio, that were
presented under the title Situao..ORHHH.OU..5.000.T.E..EM.N.YCITY: the word situation set
a deviation from traditional notions of art, while emphasizing an attitude of spatial intervention.
One month later, those packages would be taken to the steps of the garden or to the street. The
project became more and more extended and in 1970 Barrio deposited the trouxas ensaguentadas
on the banks of the river that runs across the City Park (Parque Municipal).

Artur Barrio Trouxas ensanguentadas, in SituaoT/T1; Belo Horizonte, April, 1970; Credits:
Inverted Utopias. Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, p. 370
He then packed five-hundred plastic bags with human remains, such as nails or bones that were
splattered with bodily fluids, and he placed them in different sites in Rio and Belo Horizonte. The
trouxas were, according to Herkenhoff, evidenciadores or witnesses that altered or brought a
different dynamic to a particular state of affairs. These evidences or demonstrations translated into:
operations of repulsion against countermodernity; distributive circuits in the urban and marginal
fabric; objects that were anxious to force a confrontation with the visceral fear that emanated
from the dismembered or gashed organism; visual contaminations, fragmented bodies, paintings,
flesh, and finally, living mud. Also in 1970, he did an ambulatory experience that consisted in
spending four days and four nights without food or sleep, and just smoking manga rosa, a seed that
is grown (sativa) in Brazil that became popular during those years. His body was the physical
support for an action that became effective at every moment, in a way that was erratic and to-thelimit. The artist recorded these explorations in perception in a notebook and eight years later he
wrote a text defining the term deambulrio as a one that was written and inscribed on the body
(Klinger, 2007).
In Oiticica, the Parangols provoked an attitude of emancipation in all of the participants
perceptive dimensions. Each cape provided a different tactile arsenal, with different textures, and
colours, promoting a decolonial sense in two ways: the independence involved in dancing with the
piece of clothing, and the liberation of showing revolutionary and rebellious phrases: be marginal,
be a hero. The Tropiclia installation generated feelings of provocation and dislocation because it
subverted the order of conventional visuality. There, a cultural need irrupted that made it possible

for the subaltern to empower and renew himself, while rescuing the symbolic remains that
accumulated in the margins and infiltrated the artistic production, an enunciation that was also
political and that grew out of a bastard, emergent territory that induced new, contextualized ways of
seeing.
Barrio, on the other hand, swept away with the high cost industrial faade while augmenting the
symbolic value of throw-aways from the technological circuit. The trouxas ensanguentadas were
furtive cargo that reinforced a decolonial strategy, not just because of the precarious and ephemeral
materials from which they were made, but because of their subversive wink against despotism and
nationalized torture. He reconstructed private cartographies (the location of the packages) as well as
public ones, transforming the urban theatre through minimal interventions that were reiterations but
also effective. The wandering that went on for days, that put in risk his physical and mental health,
opened an erratic channel that, among other things, allowed him to explore his own bodily limits
and his autonomy of action a personal choice that is articulated within the mode of decoloniality.
IV
Why speak of a Latin American modernity that is vexed by fluctuations and paradoxes? From the
field of sociology of communication, Roncagliolo (2003) defines the broad concept of modernity
through its chronological and cultural aspects. When we think of the beginning of modernity since
the end of the fifteenth century (and through the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries), this
temporal category designates, in Bermans words, a whirl of interacting, parallel phenomena. But
this series of vertiginous events were directed toward three potential zones: a nucleus of cultural,
scientific, and ethical signification; another of a financial and industrial nature; and another with
political roots. The voracious development of economic modernization drove forward the
accumulation of capital, an action that was stimulated by the colonization that has expanded toward
non-Western territories since the fifteenth century. The projection of these modernising trends in
Latin America was attempted with great difficulty, The geo-social reality here differed so
profoundly from that of Europe: Amrica Latina fue una regin necesaria para la modernizacin
del mundo capitalista, pero ella misma no se moderniz cabalmente [The Latin American region
was necessary for the modernization of the capitalist world, but Latin America itself wasnt
completely modernized] (Roncagliolo, 2003: 114).
Some of these frictions stem from the persistence of unequal degrees of modernization and, as
Achgar (1993) notesquoting the Mexican writer Fernando Caldern, Latin America accepted
the cohabitation of the premodern, the modern, and the postmodern. Mixed temporalities exposed
paradoxes in our modernity, which provides the conditions of decoloniality.
I have noted here that decoloniality calls for a cultural, artistic, and intellectual decolonization. As a
critical category, it refutes Eurocentric views within the field of culture and confronts the heavy
weight of coloniality in the realm of knowledge. It opens other senses which, in confrontation with
the cultural mainstream, strengthen contortions that betray, perturb, and invert that mainstream. The
chain of signifiers is exposed in the objects themselves: the significances disperse, disseminating in
the multiple gazes of the spectators. The cultural movements that began in the 1920s and continued
in Latin America, and which became belligerently propelled in the 1960s, fought against this
condition of coloniality that was rooted for centuries, allowing for the emergence of a bsqueda de
conformacin de plataformas de pensamiento propias [search in the formation of self-made
platforms of thought] (Palermo, 2009: 16).
The restitution of local and regional materials, challenging the official status quo of art, and a
deeply politicized visual production, are pivotal characteristics of Oiticicas and Barrios
installations. Moving their actions to public or socially neglected areas places these aesthetic
versions on an institutional edge. At the same time, these artists proclaim, with a most fervent
individual freedom, a cultural act that is fuelled by decoloniality. Both Oiticica and Barrio revealed

a nucleus of signification that refers to disruptive gestures that, in turn, transcended legitimated art
media channels, slipping beyond the favela, the rua, and the museum. They bore witness to a state
of crisis not just in their own social and political context, but also in the notion of modernity itself
that, as a local phenomenon, was marked by fluctuations and paradoxes, thus producing a cultural
convulsion on the Latin American stage.

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[1] Translated from the original text in Spanish by Laura Catelli. The citations that appeared in
Spanish in the original have been kept in the original language of publication and translated in
parentheses.
[2] This presentation has been extracted from my Doctoral Dissertation, Approximations to the
Construction of a Methodological Device from the Crossing of Disciplines: Analyzing Productions
by Tarsila de Amaral and Helio Oiticica from an Anthropological Perspective. Here, decoloniality
is formulated as one of the key concepts for the examination of the artworks.
[3] The term race is used here in quotation marks in order to highlight its biologicist and
determinist sense. Let us take in consideration that the concept will be debated afterwards, given
that it connotes a strong colonialist view that stems from the reflections of authors such as Bernier,
Gobineau, Buffon, Renan or Le Bon. For more details, see Tzvetan Todorovs Race and Racism
in On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Harvard UP,
1994).
Dr Mara Elena Lucero teaches at the School of Humanities and Arts, Universidad Nacional de
Rosario, Argentina. She is Director of CETCACL (Centre of Critical Theoretical Studies of Art and
Culture in Latin America), Universidad Nacional de Rosario. She is the author of many publications
on Latin American art movements and artists, including Eugenio Dittborn, Cildo Meireles and
Adriana Varejo. She has also written widely on pre-Columbian cultures.