(POSTPONED) Art in Dialogue: "Dismantling the Nation - Contemporary Art in Chile"

The first academic volume to theorize and historicize contemporary artistic practices and culture from Chile in the English language, Dismantling the Nation takes as its point of departure a radical criticism against the nation-state of Chile and its colonial, capitalist, heteronormative, and extractivist rule, proposing otherwise forms of inhabiting, creating, and relating in more fluid, contingent, ecocritical, feminist, and caring worlds. From the case of Chile, the book expands the scholarly discussion around decolonial methodologies, attending to artistic practices and discourses from distinct and distant locations—from Arica and the Atacama Desert to Wallmapu and Tierra del Fuego, and from the Central Valley, the Pacific coast, and the Andes to territories beyond the nation's modern geographical borders. Analyzing how these practices refer to issues such as the environmental and cultural impact of extractivism, as well as memory, trauma, collectivity, and resistance towards neoliberal totality, the volume contributes to the fields of art history and visual culture, memory, ethnic, gender, and Indigenous studies, filmmaking, critical geography, and literature in Chile, Latin America, and other regions of the world, envisioning art history and visual culture from a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective.

For more information visit: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/9k41zh29x

Florencia San Martín is Assistant Professor of Art History at Lehigh University, where she teaches and writes about contemporary and Latin American art, history of photography, and decolonial methodologies. She is co-editor of the volume The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (Routledge, 2023), and curator of the exhibition Todavía somos el tiempo: arte y resistencia a 50 años del golpe at the National Center of Contemporary Art in Chile (2023). Florencia is currently writing a monograph on New York-based artist Alfredo Jaar.

Matthew Bush's research and teaching examine contemporary Latin American narrative and culture, focusing primarily on Mexico, Peru, and Argentina. His most recent book Other Americans (2022) examines the representation of Latin America across a host of mediums including Hollywood films, Netflix series, and contemporary novels, to probe the role of negative affect in hemispheric relations.

Art in Dialogue is a series of interdisciplinary conversations between members of the university and the wider community - reflecting the ways in which their work is dynamically engaged with other fields of inquiry.