Curating dehumanization in the age of hyperglobalization : approach to treating with global latino art practices

"Curating Dehumanization in the Age of Hyperglobalization: Approach to Treating with Global Latino Art Practices" is a curatorial project. I am looking, from a transnational perspective, at different artworks from the last 40 years that deal with dehumanization, a form of classification in which people consider some human beings better than others or even deny any kind of humanity to some of them. I am particularly considering examples of dehumanization based on gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and at their intersections. As I am dealing with a cognitive problem that has social implications, I am analyzing creative and artistic art practices through the lens of art therapy, and I am showing the role these practices can play on a collective scale. Thus, I classify the artworks I am working with into two categories: diagnosis and prognosis. Using these categories, which along with therapy and prophylaxis compose the main areas of medical practice, I show how these artworks describe some of the forms in which dehumanization manifests in our present and imagine some future consequences of this pathological classification. I am using a diverse body of work that spans through different media, but also through different territories. As I am looking at the age of hyperglobalization, I consider several artworks that take place in Latin American countries like Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, or Mexico; at hybrid spaces like the Caribbean (including some French and English-speaking regions) or the Mexico-US border; and at Latino artists that work in Asia, Africa, North America, or Europe. In "Diagnosis" I first look at waste and waste classification in contemporary Brazil and classify selected artworks according to the materials they employ. While focusing on Brazil, I discuss several contemporary visual, photographic, and filmic works created in the 1980s and beyond. But I focus much of my attention on Carolina Maria de Jesus's Quarto de despejo (1960). Then I look at femicides on the US-Mexico border and I focus on a short text by Sergio González Rodríguez that forms part of his book of essays, The Femicide Machine. I also consider here other artworks that employ a strategy of showing violence by concealing it through language. In "Prognosis" I discuss different artworks that visualize different dehumanizing futures. I divide them according to their relation to two diametrically opposed figures and could become even more prominent in the future: refugees and tourists. My exploration of refugees is guided by several installation pieces by the French-Brazilian artist Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, who provides glimpses and feelings of possible post-apocalyptic futures where all spaces are potential shelters, and all people are potential refugees. On the other side, I will use the figure of the tourist to understand the configuration and marginalization of the touristic setting. Accordingly, I look primarily at several performances by Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco, who plays the role of the touristic attraction or of the anthropologist/tourist of the future who sees in our society the last remnants of humanity.

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Iberian and Latin American Cultures.
Advisor: Barletta Vincent
Briceno Ximena
Kwon Marci
Peponi Anastasia-Erasmia