Areas of Inquiry and Research
Art and Reception
This line of research brings together different researches that deal with the issue of reception and transit of objects, practices, theories and artistic traditions within the new geo-History of Art. From the historical commitment to new epistemologies and new investigative methods, such projects think about art, from any period or place, in immediate connection with its reception and culturalization processes.
The idea of reception and its central emphasis on the role played by “reading”, by appropriation and interpretation, should help us to understand how each artist, work or group dealt with the different models, patterns and traditions available in their cultural repertoire, whether they are indigenous or foreign. The idea of transit, in turn, points to the re-elaboration of the foundations of the historical and critical discourse that, for a long time, has associated artistic production with the specific place and time of production, leading to the questioning of the transience and mobility of art and culture in general.
Art and Alterity
Brought together are research projects that deal with the incorporation or the approach to critical and historiographical reflection of the art of objects, themes and issues that are usually associated with the anthropological or cultural fields, such as the relationship between artistic and ethnographic objects; also the intersection of objects, subjects and social facts; and the transfiguration of objects into rites, incantations and other processes that bring together art and life, among others.
This way, the proposed line of research is an answer to arguments against the possibility of elaborating a Global History of Art and to the risks of dispersion and dilution of the discipline in the search for greater breadth and new theoretical bases that bring together different objects, systems of thought, agents, institutions, cultural traditions, modes of action and reflection (to research, collect, exhibit, teach, write, edit, create).