Art & the Public Sphere - Latin-American Performance, Activism and Public Space, Apr 2023

This article analyses a series of works by contemporary Brazilian artist Virginia de Medeiros, that derived from her exposure to the struggles of the Movimento dos Sem Teto do Centro de São Paulo (MSTC) (Movement of People Experiencing Homelessness in the Centre of São Paulo). A social movement led by women, the MSTC fights for the right to adequate housing. Medeiros’s works result from her coexistence with socio-economically deprived individuals and communities and racially and sexually marginalized groups. It embodies the politics of affect and economy of care of a feminist practice that involves solidarity, respect and the acceptance of difference. In this article, I argue that her works forge affective alliances, mutual trust and friendship, thus affirming new subjectivities and reconfiguring the real by drawing on desire and fiction.

In 2002, Emilio García Wehbi’s multi-site performance artwork, Proyecto Filoctetes: Lemnos en Buenos Aires saw the dissemination of 23 lifelike human puppets across Argentina’s capital, each with a gesture and position intended to intimate a state of unconsciousness or death. Participant-observers of the artwork recorded reactions to the puppets using written fieldnotes, video and photography – objects which now describe the performance in posterity through a digitized archive. This article focuses on the project’s transformation – its distorting and refracting – of a real-world social relation, arguing that its effects work to implicate the spectatorial gaze, producing a state of perceptual responsibility as a fantasy of solidarity and potentiality. The multiple layers of knowledge which make up shared social realities are examined through de Sousa Santos’s term ‘abyssal thinking’ (2007) as grounds for understanding relations between subjects and political conditions of modern State formations.

Art accompanies demonstrations, deriving motifs from them and strengthening the sense of community by developing a collective imaginary. In times of repression, violence and censorship during the Chilean dictatorship, the interdisciplinary artistic collective Colectivo Acciones de Arte (1979–83) transformed the streets into their exhibition space. Decades later, the collective Delight Lab paid tribute to CADA. The connection between the two collectives is approached from a mnemonic perspective. The research design focuses on memory activism showing how the recurrence of certain images from the past contributes to empower contemporary movements.

What could be the place of men and masculinity in recent social and feminist movements? Regarding the works Precipitar (2019) and Ante(s)jardín (2018–22) by the Chilean artist Sebastián Preece, this article observes some artistic practices that are capable of contributing, from alternative expressions to hegemonic masculinity, new critical thoughts and perspectives on gender and performance studies. Far from the city’s physical space where the 2018 feminist marchas and manifestations took place in Santiago de Chile, Preece dedicated himself to sweeping an abandoned warehouse and observing for five years how through natural light and water, it began to generate, among that rubble, a garden. In this way of working, a clue seems to emerge to subvert what the Argentinean anthropologist Rita Segato calls the ‘mandate of masculinity’ in the sense that he turned that shed into a safe place to display the emotions that the mandate restrains men from feeling in public and propose an art form of masculine action that is silent and subtle in its interventions.

The purpose of this article is to explore and reflect on the concept of performative agency and feminism applying Haraway’s Cyborg analytical model to the creative work of Chilean artistic collective LASTESIS as a case study. Based on a review of the literature, the article examines the concept of performative feminist agency and how this agency functioned in artistic and political action in more than fifty countries around the world. The data includes class lectures from the course digital media, participation and agency at Uppsala University, previous research about the performance Un violador en tu camino (A Rapist in Your Path) by the Chilean feminist collective LASTESIS, other studies into performative agency, and LASTESIS zoom conferences. The collected data leads to the analysis of the following four themes: feminism, language, participation and agency. These topics are important for comprehending how performative agency can empower individuals to speak out against injustices. Methods of inquiry included phenomenological reflection on data elicited by feminism, agency and language. These findings have important implications for the broader domain of participation and agency. The theoretical lens provided an overall orientation, using the speech act theory and the sociotechnical theory, transformative perspectives that shaped the questions asked, providing a call for action. Haraway’s Cyborg analytical model helped to guide as to what issues are important to examine. The study did not find any other case as ‘complete’ as A Rapist in Your Path, meaning the theory behind the production and how it went viral around the world; but a comparative study case was not the focus. This study attempts to contribute to the knowledge exploring the influence of participation, language and feminism on performative agency.

Review of: Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism, Paula Serafini (2022)

Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 287 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-82650-455-5, p/bk, $34.95

ISBN 978-0-82650-456-2, h/bk, $99.95

ISBN 978-0-82650-457-9, e-pub, $19.99

ISBN 978-0-82650-458-6, PDF, $19.99

Review of: Rapa NuiTheatre: Staging Indigenous Identities in Easter Island, Moira S. Fortin Cornejo (2023)

New York: Routledge, 204 pp.,

ISBN 1032277394, h/bk, $144, p/bk, $54.99

Review of: Performance, ciudadanía y activismo en Chile, 2010–2020, Paulina Bronfman Collovati and Natalia Bronfman Elphick (2022)

Santiago de Chile: Editorial OSOLIEBRE, 223 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-56371-039-7, p/bk, $25.00