Dr Katerina Valdivia Bruch

Repensar el conceptualismo: vanguardia, activismo y política en el arte latinoamericano (1960s-1980s)

Edited by Katerina Valdivia Bruch 

E-book: ISBN 978-3-00-083860-6

PDF: ISBN 978-3-00-083610-7

333 pages, 90 images, Spanish edition

Berlin: Pluriverse Press

Preview of the book

This volume is a compilation of critical essays on the development of conceptualism in Latin America between the 1960s and 1980s. In this context, a group of artists committed to social change put into practice alternative forms of political action that involved questioning power structures and promoting solidarity and justice among different communities.

The book offers new perspectives on Latin American conceptualism, with examples from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. It highlights the contributions of local artists and thinkers whose proposals, in dialogue with other Latin American contexts, challenged the paradigms of international art and developed their own categories that reflected the uniqueness of their practices.

Among the topics covered are the emergence of critical positions for examining art from a Latin American perspective, the creation of new terminologies, the recovery of archives, the defence of historical memory, the proposals of third cinema, as well as exchanges with cultural diplomacy programmes and internationalism.

These approaches address Latin American conceptualism not only as an aesthetic movement but primarily as a process of knowledge production that integrates theoretical reflection with artistic practice, actively responding to the political and intellectual debates of its time.

My article with the title ¿Una guerrilla cultural? La escena del arte experimental en Lima durante el gobierno de Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975) has been published in Spanish in the journal Illapa Mana Tukukuq, vol. 22, no. 1, January-June 2025.

Abstract: This paper examines how the military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975) and the experimental art scene in Lima have been presented in exhibitions and international academic and curatorial circuits. It begins with a brief introduction, focusing on the characteristics of this regime and presenting examples of its cultural policies. The paper then reviews the literature produced in the 1970s and 1980s on the experimental art scene, contrasting these earlier accounts with a new historical interpretation that has circulated primarily outside Peru since 2007. Drawing on the notion of "cultural guerrilla", the essay questions the validity of this version of the period’s history. It also illustrates, through specific examples, how curatorial practices are contributing to a rewriting of Peruvian art history in order to integrate it into the international art circuit.