Latinx-Canadian Visual and Media Arts as Decolonial Efforts: Mapping and Questioning Initiatives Across Canada
Who said there is no Latin/Latinx art in Canada? Yesterday, I had the pleasure to chair an amazing discussion on Latin/Latinx Art in Canada with four amazing scholars of Latin/x- Canadian Art, Analays Alvarez, Zaira Zarza, Tamara Toledo and Sarah Shamash at UAAC/AAUC 2022 Stay tuned for our upcoming book on the topic!
Here is more info on the panel and the presentations:
Latinx-Canadian Visual and Media Arts as Decolonial Efforts: Mapping and Questioning Initiatives Across Canada
THU OCT 27 / 11:00 – 12:30 / EAST COMMON ROOM, RM 1034
Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, Simon Fraser University, Chair and Organizer
At a time when institutions and academia embrace a call for decolonization, what role do Latinx-Canadian visual and media art initiatives play in this process? Can we consider them as acts of epistemic disobedience within a settler-colonial context? Does the emergence of a Latinx-Canadian identity contribute to dismantling internal colonialism (Cusicanqui 2012) and current regimes of coloniality of power and knowledge (Quijano 2007; Lander 2000)? Or rather, do such identity constructs become complicit in reinforcing dominant and colonial structures? This panel seeks to investigate how Latinx-Canadian scholars, curators, artists, and cultural producers situate themselves and their work within ongoing decolonial efforts in Canada, acknowledging how categories of identity and cultural belongings are entangled in a complex web of colonial pasts and presents. We are interested in papers addressing current and past Latinx-Canadian visual and media art initiatives, especially, but not exclusively, those located outside of Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver.
keywords: Latinx-Canadian, decolonization, visual arts, media arts, Canada
B.3.1 Media art practices as intercultural performance—activating communities of resistance
Sarah Shamash; University of British Columbia, Emily University of Art + Design
The project to decolonize media art cultures and studies through scholarship, making, teaching and curation is only achievable, I argue herein, through networks of solidarity and by activating communities of resistance (Mohanty). As Patricia Hill Collins explains, transformative knowledge emerges from collective experiences, not individual “knowers” (Fighting Words). Some of the questions I examine are: How is visibilizing Latin American, Latinx visual cultures, particularly from oppressed peoples and groups, revelatory of community resistance to colonial power relations? What are the aesthetics of community resistance in Latinx, Latin American media art production and how does examining these aesthetics shift media art pedagogies in the academy? This presentation focuses on how a personal media art research-creation practice is part of communal endeavors to assert intercultural identities and realities within the Canadian nation state that disrupt canons of whiteness and contribute to plural knowledge systems (as part of decolonization within the academy). Through community formations, solidarities, and networks—even those that are geographically distant from my localization on unsurrendered Coast Salish territory—my research-creation practice is centered on Global South and decolonial thought and action with a focus on Latin American (Brazilian), Indigenous, Chicana feminist knowledge production. While co-existing with community as a valid form of knowledge is not always recognized in the academy, I explore pedagogical and creative methods that activate community knowledges as a form of social practice that enhances, pluralizes and radicalizes conceptions of media art valuation. Whether as a member of intersecting communities (feminist, media art, Latinx), or through engaging media artworks, texts, and guest speakers in the classroom, and/or through public curatorial programs, I examine how activating these diverse Latin American, Latinx centric knowledges is a form of performing complex intercultural identities that affirm social heritages, interconnected solidarities, and ‘imagined communities’ of resistance.
Sarah Shamash is an independent media artist, scholar, educator and curator. She currently teaches film studies and visual cultures at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University of Art + Design with a focus on Global South, Latin American, Latinx, Black and Indigenous knowledges and media production. She is a member of the matricentric art collective art/mamas and a member of decolonizing initiatives in the housing cooperative where she lives on unsurrendered Coast Salish territory in Vancouver. She recently launched her film, From Chile to Canada: Media Herstories in a community screening that focuses on an archive of Chilean feminist art videos from the 80s. In collaboration with members of ReDOC, a Mexican based documentary research network, her recent curatorial project, From Abya Yala to Turtle Island, was launched as a three-part film series from February – April 2022. She views, teaching, making, writing, and curating as part of an interconnected, pluriversal approach to research creation.
B.3.2 Bodies of Contestation: Canadian Women Artists from Latin America
Tamara Toledo, York University
As we question western canons and, in an effort, to decolonize subaltern presence of Latin American and Latinx diaspora within Canada, it is important to indicate how their positionality influences and directs their practices. How they navigate erasure. To what extent their in-between state facilitates a relationship of solidarity with Indigenous communities rather than as settlers, regardless of their circumstances of migration. Cold War geopolitics, neoliberalism, patriarchal systems, along with identity politics have provided material for four women artists from Latin America who navigate a system that perpetuates marginality and exclusion in Canada. They have adopted this place as their home and work within Western Eurocentric spaces, accentuated by systemic racism, and centuries of colonialism. Their practices have been ignored despite their relevance and contributions to discourses within contemporary art. Claudia Bernal, Maria Ezcurra, Julieta Maria, and Helena Martin Franco’s geo-political and socio-cultural contexts offer sites of contestation, their counter-narratives offer a voice for peripheral identities, and their position as women who defy patriarchal structures of power denounce genocide and violence. They inspire a decolonizing framework of study and offer a site of transformation where their position can trace moments of erasure and empowerment. By decolonizing public spaces, presenting proposals of contestation, all within the power of their own bodies, these artists embark on a path to decentering, altering, reconfiguring, and constructing counter-hegemonic narratives that defy traditional canons. They resist the condition of “Third World” classifications by redefining the production of knowledge based on experience, collaboration, community engagement, knowledge sharing, activism, resiliency, and a combative spirit that accompanies each of their practices.
Tamara Toledo is a Toronto-based curator, scholar, and artist. Toledo is co-founder of the Allende Arts Festival, the Latin American Canadian Art Projects, and Sur Gallery. For over a decade, she has curated exhibitions and projects offering spaces and opportunities to artists of the diaspora to present their work. Through her project, the Latin American Speakers Series, she invites internationally renowned contemporary artists and curators to Canada to articulate and discuss issues of identity and intercultural dynamics in contemporary art. Toledo has presented her work at various conferences in Montreal, New York, Vancouver, Chicago, Mexico City, and Toronto and her writing has appeared in ARM Journal, C Magazine, Fuse, Canadian Art, and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal of the University of California. Toledo is currently the Director/Curator of Sur Gallery, the only space dedicated to contemporary Latin American art in Canada.
B.3.3 On the Name of Inclusivity: “Latin American and Latinx-Canadian Turns” in Montreal
Analays Alvarez Hernandez, Université de Montréal
In this paper, I will focus on the relationship between art institutions, and Latin American and Latinx-Canadian artists in Montreal. In the last 20 years, Montreal’s museums, art centers, private galleries, university and municipal galleries and artist-run centers appear to manifest an ever-growing interest in these artists. That said, these institutions’ approaches vary and sometimes have different outcomes than the intended ones. To discuss these approaches and their outcomes, I propose to briefly delve into an artist and curator residency and the recent activity of an exhibition center. The Residency of the Americas is a program funded by the Montreal Council for the Arts and spearheaded and hosted by the Darling Foundry since 2008. In 2016, it underwent a significant change; since then, the residency has been entirely dedicated to artists and curators “from” Latin America. This “Latin American turn” was motivated, among many other reasons, by the organizers’ willingness to reserve this program for artists who have less “access” to this kind of opportunity and international contemporary art networks. In 2020, a Mexican-Canadian artist, lecturer, and scholar was appointed as general and artistic director of SBC gallery. This hiring has had a major impact on this exhibition center’s functioning and the thematic scope of its exhibitions and events. For instance, in 2021 SBC gallery dedicated its programming almost exclusively to showcasing Latinx-Canadian artists, and the trend continues today. The analyses of these residency and programming’s exhibition center will allow me to explore different approaches to “inclusivity”: Do the Latin American and Latinx-American turns respectively taken by the Residency of the Americas and SBC Gallery reinforce invisibility and subalternity conditions attached to Latinx-Canadian artists, or, on the contrary, offer them a space to thrive? In short, with this paper, I intend to stress the urgency to go beyond the implementation of “inclusive” strategies and operate structural changes that dismantle (art) institutions’ coloniality of power.
Analays Alvarez Hernandez is an art historian and independent curator. Her research focuses on contemporary art, with an emphasis on public art, global art histories and diasporas, Latinx-Canadian art, and curating. Her main research projects focus on “domestic art galleries” in (post)socialist societies, and the activity of Latinx-Canadian artists. She has recently co-edited Latin American Art(ists) from/in Canada: Expanding Narratives, Territories, and Perspectives (LALVC, University of California Press, Winter, 2022) and “Revised Commemoration” in Public Art: What Future for the Monument? (RACAR, Fall, 2021). Currently, she is Assistant Professor at the Université de Montréal.
B.3.4 Screening Latinx-Canadian Cinemas: Film Curation as a Counter-Archival Practice
Zaira Zarza, Université de Montréal
In 1995, Colombian-Canadian film producer and programmer Ramiro Puerta initiated Cruzando Fronteras or Crossing borders, a foundational meeting of Latin American diasporic filmmakers in Toronto. This gathering originated the now known as Alucine Latin + Media Arts Film Festival. To date, Alucine has been one of the leading platforms for the exhibition of Latinx-Canadian cinemas across the country. This paper seeks to explore film curation as a critical tool for audiovisual heritage preservation that helps shape cultural memory and reclaim screens for subaltern communities. In doing so, I will analyze Alucine’s programming strategies as a process that contributes to both the dissemination and construction of diasporic counter-archives from Latin America in Turtle Island. Drawing from silenced archivism theories, I will particularly consider how this case study rescues stories and practices marginalized or absent from Canada’s official film history. In this process, I argue that the festival configures new audiovisual repositories with increasing self-management and broader documentary autonomy. I will discuss how Alucine has participated ––or not–– in the archival mobilization of Latin American and Latinx-Canadian narratives in three main ways. First, by surveying selected films that utilize archival footage to memorialize and remediate the cultural past of the region and its diasporas. Secondly, I will scrutinize the ways in which programming and exhibition have contributed to the creation of a counter-archive through documentation of discussion sessions, design of promotion materials, etc. All these resources, mainly located in personal repositories of curators and filmmakers, are examples of people-to-people, non-institutional or “minor” archived that help preserve the festival’s memory as well as that of its community.
Zaira Zarza is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at Université de Montréal. She obtained her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University and holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Art History from the University of Havana. She was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta and a Cinema and Media Arts Sessional Assistant Professor at York University. As a programmer, she has worked at the Toronto (TIFF) and Cartagena (FICCI) international film festivals. She also directed the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Film Festival, Boston 2019. In 2015, Zarza founded Roots and Routes: Cuban Cinemas of the Diaspora, an itinerant project for the promotion and circulation of film and media works made by Cuban migrants. Her current SSHRC-funded project focuses on documentary activism in Latin America. Other research includes Latinx-Canadian cinemas and the economies of Caribbean film