This book studies the period of the Chilean political graphic art (posters, public art). The author inquires into the unexplored area between the "golden age" of the political poster during the Popular Unity and the poster produced after the 1973 coup d'état in exile. And it does so by taking the experience of two graphic collectives that until now had been left in darkness: the Association of Young Plastics APJ (1979-1987) and Tallersol (1977). In this sense, this book does more than fill a void, for "filling" already announces a fiction of totality; As we know, a field of knowledge is never completely saturated: there is always emptiness and there is full, and such dynamics is what produces possibility and future. This is well known by Nicole Cristi and Javiera Manzi, the authors of this book, who have the audacity to construct with rigor and passion a story that places and restores the artistic-political itinerary of two essential collectives of graphic action of the dictatorial period, In turn, are the tip of a much wider skein of coordinations, groupings and experiences still very little explored by historiography and local criticism. A plot of which the posters shown here - almost for the first time - are a historical and technical mark. So, this book does not come to fill, but to reopen the discussion about graph and politics, a book that also has the generosity to leave offered multiple edges to explore on the field of cultural resistance to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet
Former visual arts director in Colombia's Ministry of Culture (1997-2001), and after more than 10 years in the United States, author Miguel Rojas-Sotelo explains how the new Colombian Constitution (1991) shaped cultural policies and the production and professionalization of visual art, literature, and mass media. The book "examines the insistence of Colombian middle class intellectuals to reexamine the founding events of the nation, including the scientific, geographical and ethnographic Expeditions of the mid-19th century. This tendency responds to a nostalgic desire to claim an uncompleted process to construct modernity. It is an example of societal schizophrenia but at the same time of social sensitivity that seeks to understand the nationœs present by uncovering the retro. A comparative examination of the work of the artists María Elvira Escallón (b. 1954) and Libia Posada (b. 1961) is used to illustrate aspects of public life and its interactions with the domestic sphere in Colombia. Subsequently, the text focuses on the cultural violence that has marginalized, exoticized and racialized certain population groups that are constitutive of the nation. This section presents the case of Abel Rodríguez (b.1941), a Nonuya indigenous man who has over the past decade, like a modern day successor to the Expedition naturalists, dedicated himself to illustrating thousands of botanical and animal species. Rodríguez is an example of a process of adaptation and capture that has rejected the denial of non-Eurocentric viewpoints that marked the logic of the Expeditions and of Western scientific thinking. Such responses are now embedded in the processes of cultural construction inaugurated by the 1991 Constitution and the emergence of new cultural markets in the country. Finally, the work of Juan Obando (b. 1980) illustrates an interstitial space that gives rise to a critical/anarchic possibility. The book discusses the way in which an image has been constructed of a docile nation based on a popular culture that has been domesticated by the forces of the global market (associated in this case with narcoculture). The international brandingʺ of the country and its bizarre domestic mirror are present in Obandoœs work, apparent in its bi-directional movement: at the same time central to, and on the margins of, national debate: operating, like many contemporary creators in the country, along a geological fault line." (HKB Translation)--Verso Cover
En Deudas coloniales: el caso de Puerto Rico, Rocío Zambrana ofrece una robusta conversación con pensadorxs, creadorxs y activistas de Puerto Rico y el Sur Global, así como con algunxs de lxs observadorxs más conocidxs en el contexto europeo y norteamericano, en torno a la deuda como forma y práctica de captura, sujeción, control y desposesión que profundiza y expande el alcance de la modernidad capitalista colonial. Al mismo tiempo, Zambrana insiste, el caso particular de Puerto Rico demuestra que, para lograr lo anterior, el capitalismo requiere la continua "actualización" de la condición colonial como orden racista, no sólo como subordinación jurídico-política, en "condiciones materiales e históricas alteradas." La deuda financiera en la colonia, entonces, es una "manifestación de la deuda histórica" de la conquista y la esclavitud, fungiendo así como agente del régimen de raza/género/clase que "la colonialidad del poder" (el concepto es de Aníbal Quijano) perpetúa en el presente a través de nuevas rondas de invasión, saqueo y explotación. No obstante, Puerto Rico también ejemplifica, plantea la autora, formas esperanzadoras de "organizar el pesimismo," que pueden advertirse en variadas prácticas de resistencia, tales como el rehusarse, la subversión y el rescate/ocupación. Éstas interrumpen la sujeción de la deuda, tanto financiera como histórica, pese a los inherentes desafíos de la cooptación neoliberal. Así sea con gestos que parecen inconsecuentes o temporeros, nuestras resistencias constituyen modos descoloniales y reparadores de "vincular la vida." Con la publicación de esta traducción de Raquel Salas Rivera al español, nuestras series Otra universidad y Libros libres continúan aportando saberes a las luchas por el archipiélago liberado al que aspiramos y que forjamos, día con día, en cada una de nuestras subversiones. --- In Deudas coloniales: el caso de Puerto Rico, Rocío Zambrana offers a robust conversation with thinkers, creators, and activists in Puerto Rico and the Global South, as well as with some of the most well-known analysts in European and North American contexts, on debt as a form and a practice of capture, subjection, control, and dispossession that deepens and expands the reach of colonial capitalist modernity. To achieve this, as Zambrana shows through her analysis of Puerto Rico's particular case, capitalism requires the colonial condition's constant "updating" as a racist order, and not only as a juridical-political subordination, in "altered material and historical conditions." Financial debt in the colony, then, is a "manifestation of the historical debt" from conquest and slavery, thus operating as an agent of the race/gender/class regime that Aníbal Quijano's "coloniality of power" perpetuates in the present through new sequences of invasion, plunder, and exploitation. However, the author argues that Puerto Rico also exemplifies hopeful forms of "organizing pessimism," which can be noticed in various resistance practices, such as refusal, subversion, and rescue/occupation. These interrupt the subjection of both financial and historical debt, despite the inherent challenges associated with neoliberal cooptation. Even when its gestures might seem inconsequential or temporary, our resistance constitutes decolonial and reparative modes of "life binding." With the publication of this translation into Spanish by Raquel Salas Rivera, our series Otra Universidad and Libros Libres continues contributing to the struggles for the liberated archipelago we aspire to and craft, every day, in all our subversions.
