Let’s imagine Latin America, it always looks alike

Abstract

This article questions the influence art has in the process of construction social imaginaries around a territory. Specifically on the Latin American one, we observe that works of the last decades have fed, for example, the fluid association of art and politics, and the almost forced anchoring to temporalities more past than present.

For that reason, we evoke four artistic projects that have been exhibited with emphasis in their Latin American being to ask what this categorization is due to, and what consequences it brings for the imaginary constructions of Latin America.

In the first part we will question the particular univocity in homologging the term "political" to that of "resistance", just as the word "Latin American" usually refferes non-territorial characteristics but social and temporal ones, marked by a particular historiographic past.

In a second place, we will record some effects of this, for example, the confirmation of marginality, the complicity with exhibition circuits placed in influential territorialities, and the establishment of politics as an obligatory command in the production of "Latin American art".