Decentering Transnationality. The Impact of Latin American Artists in Post-War Europe.

Europe, – followed by North America after 1945 – became the nexus of migratory flows of artists, objects, ideas, and cultural agents, particularly from Latin America. Yet, while the presence of Latin American artists in the United Kingdom and France has been the subject of extensive and ongoing research projects, the same is not true for other European countries eschewing the powerful axis of Paris - London - New York. The workshop welcomes research contributions that decenter such canonization of the transnational to recover histories that involve other places of arrival and a new polycentric understanding. What was the impact of artists settling at the so-called margins of Europe? How did they contribute to an ongoing international dialogue crossing the European continent and a process of hybridization of local narratives? Surveying the ferment that developed within a more diverse network, the workshop aims to decenter transnational art histories that have privileged certain sites of interest. It also strives to contribute to a diverse, more encompassing, understanding of the transnational and a multifaceted yet global modernity.

While scholarly research has focused on mobility, mapping, and circulation, we aim to shift the focus to the emergence of multilayered identities by investigating the reception of artists, objects, ideas, and cultural agents in European countries other than main centers. For example, in Amsterdam artists from Latin America developed artistic strategies and independent initiatives that played an important role in the experimental art scene in the Netherlands and abroad. In Italy, the arrival of performance art from Argentina found a favorable reception in the Rome-based experimental theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, anticipating later performative works. These countries, together with the GDR and Eastern Europe have largely been left out of transnational studies concerning contacts and journeys with and from Latin America.

Pioneering a new field of research, the workshop at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History on March 3–4, 2025, explores how the migration of artists, cultural actors, objects, and ideas from Latin America to Europe impacted also supposedly marginal local art scenes, in the decades spanning from the 1950s to the 1980s. This proves the importance of these newly discovered trajectories in contributing to larger studies on global migrations. The presence of these artists in Europe modified not only the relationship between them and their countries of origin but also affected their arrival places, fostering the creation of hybrid art scenes and moving beyond issues of national exceptionalism. Welcoming contributions regarding understudied countries and their histories offers new directions in writing transnational histories of art. It expands on recent scholarship examining how exiled artists reshaped the urban spaces they established themselves.

We invite abstracts (max. two pages) and a short CV to: lara.demoribiblhertz.it

Deadline: October 20, 2024

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

- Histories of migration and exile
- Critique of the concept of “Global South”
- Challenging the binary opposition: Western and non-Western art
- Rethinking transnationality
- Latin American art as an export product
- Western hegemony through the art system
- Transnational itineraries, circulation and encounters
- The role of institutions and infrastructures
- Multi-local networks
- Cities, sites and other spaces of interaction
- Cosmopolitan identities and internationalist ambitions
- Shifting concepts of transnationalism, post-nationalism, internationalism
- Strategic regionalisms
- Colonial and decolonial connections

This conference is organised by Lara Demori, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for - Art History in collaboration with Elize Mazadiego, University of Bern, and Felipe Martínez, University of São Paulo.