Forms of Disbelonging in Contemporary Latin American Aesthetics

FLORENCIA GARRAMUÑO

Cambridge

Conferencia; David Rockefeller Seminar; 2012

Harvard University

Contemporary aesthetics’ transformations propitiate modes of organization of the sensible that puts into crisis ideas of belongingness, specificity and autonomy. Following Jacques Rancière, in the new aesthetic landscape, “all artistic competences step out of their own field and exchange their places and powers with all others. We have theatre plays without words and dance with words; installations and performances instead of “plastic” works; videoprojections turned into cycles of frescoes; photographs turned into living pictures or history paintings; sculpture which becomes hypermediatic show, etc., etc.” In the field of visual arts, this landscape has been insistently analyzed in a theoretical reflection that was propelled by the powerful impact that conceptual and installation art brought to art’s territory. Arguably, the field of literature has undergone a similar expansion of its means of expression. Literary explorations that juxtapose fiction and photography, images, memories, autobiographies, blogs, chats and email texts, as well as essay and documentary texts that bear witness to a new testimonial condition, are now everywhere, as works as diverse as those by W. G. Sebald, Bernardo de Carvalho, John Berger, João Gilberto Noll, Fernando Vallejo or Nuno Ramos evince. Along with this expansion of literature, in Latin America many of these new literary explorations establish connections among different fields of aesthetics, like the crossover of installation art and literature or language shows in the cases of Nuno Ramos and Mario Bellatin, or the archival impulse that uses images and language in the art of Rosângela Rennó, Antonio José Ponte and Jorge Macchi. ¿In what sense do these transgressions and expansiveness propose new ways of dwelling in the world? ¿How does this porosity of boundaries propitiate modes of dis-belonging that offer images of expanded and hospitable communities? ¿To what extent fundamental notions of aesthetics had been substituted in contemporary art by the production and circulation of affects? ¿How does this questioning of belonging redefine the ways of understanding Latin America and its productions? Although not all of these questions can be answered in the space of this article, they guide me in the project of understanding the proliferation of these forms of disbelonging in Latin American Aesthetics.