El artículo analiza en términos históricos y contemporáneos los "momentos indigenistas" en el arte latinoamericano, considerando el giro indigenista contemporáneo. Se evalúa críticamente la distancia entre la exposición Radical Women. Latin American Art, 1965-1985 y la Bienal de San Pablo 2021. Se analiza la diferencia entre ´representación´ y ´participación como términos claves en el análisis de la presencia de mujeres artistas de los pueblos originarios en relación con el mercado curatorial.The article analyzes in historical and contemporary terms the "indigenist moments" in Latin American art, considering the contemporary indigenist turn. It critically evaluates the distance between the exhibition Radical Women. Latin American Art, 1965-1985 and the São Paulo Biennial 2021. The difference between ´representation´ and ´participation´ as key terms is considered in the analysis of the presence of indigenous women artists in relation to the curatorial market.Fil: Giunta, Andrea Graciela. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Giunta, Andrea Graciela

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1/12/23, 12:15 Representation and Participation: Indigenous Latin American artists in the Transition between Two Centuries — AWARE Archive…https://awarewomenartists.com/en/magazine/representation-et-participation-artistes-indigenes-latino-americaines-dun-siecle-a-lautre/ 1/4ResearchREPRESEN TA TION ANDPARTICI PA TION:INDIGE NOUS LATINAMERICAN ARTISTS INTHE TRANSI TIONBETWEEN TWOCENTURIES27.01.2023 | ANDREA GIUNTASeba Calfuqueo, A imagen y semejanza [To her image andlikeness], 2018 (detail), installation, photograph (110 x 65 cm), 2photographs (2 x 4 cm), shelf and magnifier, register by DiegoArgote © Courtesy Seba CalfuqueoIt is not that there have been no reappraisals or attempts to find the ways in which pre-Hispanicimaginary has been incorporated into Latin American art. The indigenist tradition has foundexpression since the founding of Latin American nation states in the nineteenth century. The 1920sand 1930s saw two important movements, Muralism in Mexico and Indigenismo in Peru. There hasThis article’s title is taken from the title of a piece by Rosana Paulino (b. 1967), an Afro-Brazilian artistwho has become a reference for new generations of artists struggling to transform the politics of artisticrepresentation. In writing about the exhibition 34 Panorama del Arte Brasileño (Museu de Arte Modernade São Paulo, 2015), which presented carved stone sculptures, Brazil’s oldest artworks, alongside thework of six non-Indigenous artists invited to address the abstract art Indigenous past, she asked why nowork by contemporary Indigenous artists was included.  I’ve altered her original phrase –“representation without participation” – swapping “without” for “and” to underline the necessity andurgency of transforming this situation. There are more than five hundred groups of Indigenous peoplesamong the Latin American population, but their work is barely starting to become visible in thecontinent’s predominantly white art landscape. How can an inclusive art historical narrative beproduced? This article offers an evaluation of the representation and participation of artists linked tothe continent’s first peoples in contemporary Latin American art. It explores both the work of non-indigenous artists in relation to the cosmologies of first peoples, as well as the active participation ofindigenous artists. It touches on not only the work of women but also non-binary artists.1In order to produce a representation with participation it is necessary to form alliances, open doors andcontribute to strategies to empower Indigenous artists and cultures. While the process of participationby Afro-descendant artists started at the end of the twentieth century and is now being consolidated,  inthe case of original peoples, their presence in contemporary art is more recent, framed by the situationfollowing the outbreak of Covid-19.2Archivesof Women ArtistsResearch& ExhibitionsAW ARE1/12/23, 12:15 Representation and Participation: Indigenous Latin American artists in the Transition between Two Centuries — AWARE Archive…https://awarewomenartists.com/en/magazine/representation-et-participation-artistes-indigenes-latino-americaines-dun-siecle-a-lautre/ 2/4also been an abstract indigenist current, exemplified by artists such as Elena Izcue (1889-1970) in Peruand Rosa Acle (1919-1990) in Uruguay.The work of the Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger (b. 1933) also takes up the question of tribal peoples.Her performance photos mock the exoticisation generated by tourism when it erases specific identities,cultures and problematics.With her quipus and singing, the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948) evokes, introduces andreferences an abstract, general idea of Indigenous presence. Although she had a genealogical DNA testdone to prove her Indigenous origins, her work simply references a generalised identity, unsituated inthe voice of today’s multiple Indigenous problematics.In the context of the fifth centenary of the conquest of Latin America, Indigenous imaginaries werepowerfully reactivated. This interest arose in an international context marked by exhibitions such asthe renowned Magiciens de la terre held in 1989 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.Maruch Sántiz Gómez (b. 1975) has been producing remarkable work since the 1990s. A member of theTzotzil community in Chiapas, Mexico, she had no formal art education and spoke no Spanish. Later,during a workshop in her community, she learned photographic and darkroom techniques from JohnTaboa and María Maronel. In 1991 she began making Creencias de nuestros antepasados [Beliefs of ourancestors], a collection of traditional sayings that concentrate and seek to preserve her community’swisdom. Each saying is accompanied by a photo depicting seeds, leaves, animals and so on. In the wayshe connects images and texts, M. Sántiz Gómez produces a sophisticated poetics. Although sheidentifies as an artist and has gallery representation and collectors, both private and institutional (suchas the Daros Latinamerica Collection and the Museo Reina Sofía), have acquired her production,changing fashions have damped the interest in her work shown in previous decades. This exampleserves as a crucial warning about the way those of us who have the power to intervene in the art worldoperate.By bringing together disparate artworks and time periods, T. Escobar also seeks to identify and morewidely promote craftspeople who explore novel approaches. For instance, the innovative use of clay andfire by Juana Marta Rodas (1925-2013) and her daughter Julia Isídrez (b. 1967) have transformedtraditional ceramics. They appropriated the industrial furnaces introduced by the InternationalDevelopment Bank in the 1980s. It is interesting to note that when these kilns were first built, pottersturned their backs on them as useless for the small pieces they were then making. Years later thefurnaces were appropriated and reactivated to make much bigger ceramics and new forms echoingSince the 1970s the ethical, aesthetic and political photos of Claudia Andujar (b. 1931), a Swiss-bornBrazilian artist who lives in São Paulo, has familiarised the public with Yanomami Indigenouscommunities.  By publicly exposing the appropriation of their lands, pro-mining government policiesand the clearing of the Amazon, C. Andujar has played an exemplary role as an activist in the struggleto save Yanomami lives and culture. Nevertheless, her photos leave no agency to the Yanomamicommunity to decide how their story will be told and express their sensibilities.3The work of the Uruguayan artist Nelbia Romero (1938-2015) also denounces the genocide ofIndigenous peoples. In Sal-si-puedes [Escape-if-you-can, 1983] she exposed the massacre of the Charrúapeople in 1831, drawing a direct line between the violence of Uruguay’s founding as a country in thenineteenth century and the military dictatorship of 1973-1985.4The Indigenous presence has been and still is powerfully visible in Paraguay, represented by theoreticalwork and the acquisitions practices of Ticio Escobar (b. 1947) and Ricardo Migliorisi (1948-2019), basedat the Museo del Barro in the city of Asunción. This museum’s holdings include a broad representationof contemporary Indigenous cultures, along with colonial-era and contemporary artworks, resulting in aunique juxtaposition. It celebrates beauty rather than exoticism, providing a reading of Indigenous artthat T. Escobar put forward in his extraordinary books La belleza de los otros. El arte indígena delParaguay [The Beauty of Others. Indigenous Art in Paraguay,1993] and The Curse of Nemur: In Searchof the Art, Myth and Ritual of the Ishir.  With the exception of the Museo del Barro, Indigenouscommunities are not systematically represented in any contemporary art showcase.51/12/23, 12:15 Representation and Participation: Indigenous Latin American artists in the Transition between Two Centuries — AWARE Archive…https://awarewomenartists.com/en/magazine/representation-et-participation-artistes-indigenes-latino-americaines-dun-siecle-a-lautre/ 3/4Guarani culture, with its funerary urns and vessels to hold water and food. This new approach isinfused with references to an imaginary, mestizo animality. Form no longer follow functionality in theseoversized works. While both artists were invited to Documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012, they have notfound a home in the contemporary art world. Curators showed an interest in them during a certainperiod but then they faded out of fashion.In Chile, Seba Calfuqueo (b. 1991), a non-binary artist of Mapuche origin, makes installations andvideos about subjects such as migration, deterritorialisation and the construction of the links betweeneroticism, pornography and photography in the twentieth century. In one of their installations theyjuxtapose an erotic photo of a nude European female, a picture of a Yahgan Indigenous woman taken in1882-1883, and a self-portrait where they reproduce the position of the women in both photos. S.Calfuqueo contrasts the European vision of sexuality with their own, which is non-binary and non-essentialist.Returning to the Yanomami nation, which extends along the Brazilian-Venezuelan border, we shouldalso note a recent transformation in which new collection policies have brought about increasedvisibility for artists such as Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (b. 1971), from the Yanomami community of PoriPori, in Venezuela, who makes drawings on natural fibres. He first interacted with contemporary art inthe early 1990s when he held a workshop on making paper by hand with the Mexican artist LauraAnderson Barbata (b. 1958). In 2020 the Malba contemporary art museum in Buenos Aires acquired aseries of his work. It was exhibited at the New York Armory Show (at the Marlborough gallery’s stand),along with art by L. Anderson Barbata.Brazil has also witnessed significant changes regarding the representation of Indigenous peoples incontemporary art. Although the 2014 show Histórias Mestiças at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in SãoPaulo included Yanomami drawings that were then still anonymous (from the Claudia Andújarcollection), today Indigenous artists and curators speak for themselves.Curator Pablo José Ramírez (1982-) was born in Guatemala, and works between there and London,where he is Adjunct Curator of First Nations and Indigenous Art at Tate Modern. He studies therelationship between pre-Hispanic, pre-colonial cultural expressions and contemporary art. Startingfrom the concept of culturas planetarias (planetary cultures, not global, a term associated with financeNevertheless, recent conflicts demonstrate that the conversations are not simple. In 2019 SandraBenites, of the Guaraní Ñandeva people, became the first Indigenous curator at MASP, São Paulo’smuseum of contemporary art. The significance of this event was highlighted by an article in The NewYork Times, which reported her intention to include women artists of “various ethnicities anddisciplines, like a Guajajara performance artist, a Karajá photographer, a Huni Kuin painter, andGuarani and Maxacali audiovisual artists”, and quoted her expressing aim to ensure women artists as“protagonists of their own voices.”  In May 2022, while preparing the exhibition Historias Indígenas,she and the show’s adjunct curator Clarissa Diniz resigned. In an open letter they revealed that themuseum had eliminated photos from the Movimiento Sin Tierra, a landless peasant movement, with thepretext that these photos had not been included in time, when the proposal for the exhibition wassubmitted to museum authorities. The two women disputed this argument, saying that they had neverbeen given any timeline so that this decision was a concealed form of censorship.  Museums may seekto be more inclusive, but have they found how to carry out a real dialogue?67In the context of pandemic turbulence, the curators of the Bienal de São Paulo decided that the term“diversity” (women, Afro-descendant and Indigenous artists) would be the key for its 34th edition in2021. They invited Jaider Esbell (1979-2021), a Macuxi artist and activist, who in turn suggestedbringing in many other artists from his community. In an interview he explained that taking part in anexhibition in the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo was not so easy, that he had to go up against thebiennial’s organisers who were prepared to show his work but not that of others in his community.  TheParaguayan museum director T. Escobar had a pessimistic take on this biennial. He understood that thefocus on “diversity” was simply a turn in the curatorial market.  Obviously there is a big symbolic andpolitical difference between speaking in the name of, speaking from a position of empathy arising fromengagement in the conversation, and speaking from the positions of the expelled and subalterns.891/12/23, 12:15 Representation and Participation: Indigenous Latin American artists in the Transition between Two Centuries — AWARE Archive…https://awarewomenartists.com/en/magazine/representation-et-participation-artistes-indigenes-latino-americaines-dun-siecle-a-lautre/ 4/4How to cite this article:Andrea Giunta, "Representation and Participation: Indigenous Latin American artists in the Transition between Two Centuries."In Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions magazine, . URL :https://awarewomenartists.com/en/magazine/representation-et-participation-artistes-indigenes-latino-americaines-dun-siecle-a-lautre/. Accessed 1 December 2023capitalism), he argues for post-identitarian discourses that are permeable and open to new connections.He formulated these ideas while in Europe, where his own mestizo experience is subjected to thoseconceptual and discursive matrixes. He identifies the subaltern status he left behind with histransformation into a global mestizo subject. Living in London affords him an epistemic distancing thatseeks connections that go beyond identities. Can people who still live in their original contexts producesuch a distancing? Is that an option for people who live in the Paraguayan Chaco, the Amazonrainforests or the Mapuche Nation, fighting to keep their territory and culture, people for whomcosmopolitanism means nothing but ever-expanding capitalist plunder?When Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and I curated Radical Women: Latin America, 1960-1985 in 2017, there waslittle presence of women artists linked to Indigenous world outlooks, since so few had participated inthe art scene. People at the margins of the art world are occasionally invited to take part in groupshows, biennials and publications, and then forgotten. They are represented, but don’t participate, toonce again cite R. Paulino. It seems that we are on the cusp of a change in which women and non-binary Indigenous artists can finally and superbly expand cultural dialogues.Translated from Spanish by Leo Stephen Torgoff.Andrea Giunta is Principal Researcher at CONICET, Argentina. She is also a professorof Latin American, modern and contemporary art at the Universidad de Buenos Aires,where she obtained her doctorate. She was co-curator of the exhibition Radical Women:Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum,New York; and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2017–2018). She was also chief curator ofthe Mercosur Biennial 12 in Porto Alegre, Feminine(s): visualities, actions, affections in2020 and the exhibition Pensar Todo De Nuevo (Rethink Everything) (Rolf Art, BuenosAires, 2020, and Les Rencontres d’Arles, 2021). She is the author of The PoliticalBody: Stories on Art, Feminism, and Emancipation in Latin America, published byUniversity of California Press (2023).An article produced as part of the TEAM international academic network: Teaching,E-learning, Agency and Mentoring.© 2023 Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions.Tous droits réservés dans tous pays/All rights reserved for all countries.

Representation and participation: Indigenous Latin American artists in the transition between two centuries

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Representation and participation: Indigenous Latin American artists in the transition between two centuries

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