Non-Western tradition seminar – Mexico (Mexico City)

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Amongst the transformations and mutual appropriation of artistic traditions involved in the formation of Latin American culture, this meeting will discuss specifically those that preexisted before the conquest and colonization of America by Europeans, and the artistic traditions that were brought to the supposed 'New World' from Africa and Asia.
 

The seminar will also address the issue of how these ‘adulterated’ practices and productions, more or less distant from the Western canon, can be considered art works. In doing so, we take part in the contemporary recognition of the need to write a new history of art that takes into account local, dynamic, and complex conditions and visual manifestations across the globe.
 

Starting from a definition in the negative form – non-Western – is an approach that should be discussed as it silences these societies' modes of self-representation; likewise, the derogatory terminology applied to their artistic traditions (Primitivism, among others), and the obsession with classification in art history should be examined. The fact that this seminar will be held in the Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico, will enable the participants to rethink the power relations between societies and cultures considered 'strong' and 'weak'.
 

 

The main points of discussion in this seminar are:
 

• Survival: the (dis)continuities of pre-existing traditions in Latin America and those that migrated from Africa and Asia;
 

• Contamination: the changes underway in the artistic traditions involved in the Latin American cultural dynamic form, the confrontation and the mixture between them;
 

• Otherness: the contributions of conflicts and accommodations between artistic traditions so as to delineate visualities that are connected to different modernities.