Areas of Inquiry
Art and Reception
Brings together research that addresses the problem of reception and transit of objects, practices, theories, and artistic traditions within the new geo-History of Art. Based on a historical commitment to new epistemologies and new investigative methods, such projects think about art, from any period or location, in immediate connection with its processes of reception and culturalization.
The idea of reception and its central emphasis on the role played by "reading," appropriation, and interpretation should serve to help us understand how each artist, work, or group dealt with the different models, patterns, and traditions available in their cultural repertoire, whether autochthonous or foreign. The idea of transit, in turn, points to the re-elaboration of the foundations of historical and critical discourse itself, which for a long time associated artistic production with the specific place and time of production, leading to questioning about the transitoriness and mobility of art and culture in general.
Art and Otherness
It brings together research projects that address the incorporation or approximation with critical and historiographical reflection on art of objects, themes, and issues usually associated with the anthropological or cultural field, such as the relationship between artistic and ethnographic objects; the intersection of objects, subjects, and social facts; the transfiguration of objects in rituals, enchantments, and other processes that bring together art and life, among others.
In this way, the proposed line of research responds to arguments against the possibility of elaborating a Global Art History and to the risks of dispersion and dilution of the discipline in the search for greater scope and new theoretical bases that bring together different objects, systems of thought, agents, institutions, cultural traditions, modes of action and reflection (researching, collecting, exhibiting, teaching, writing, editing, creating).