Mapping Decolonial Aesthetic Practices in the Américas
This Tome book is part of the hybrid digital media course “Mapping Decolonial Aesthetic Practices,” co-taught by Professor Ana Paulina Lee and Digital Mapping Instructor Will Geary, in the Latin American and Iberian Cultures Department at Columbia University. The course is a comparative study of decolonial aesthetic practices in the hemispheric Americas, with a focus on understanding the relationship between art, politics, memory, and data visualization. Contributors’ projects featured here explore decolonial perspectives (Gómez-Barris 2017) and aesthetic practices of visual disobedience (Cornejo 2014). Students also engaged in their own creative forms of decolonial mapping to locate epistemic and material violences that maintain and reproduce colonial legacies of racial and gendered violence, exploitative labor, social death, forced migration, uneven urbanization, among other pressing issues. Throughout, the projects examine the knowledge-building practices that go into visualizing text and data, always reflecting upon the decisions that underlie which kinds of information and stories get told and how. This collection showcases a network of resistance, tactics, strategies, social movements, and ongoing creative practices to critique the potential and limitations of visualization as devices for activism and propaganda.
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Published on: May 1, 2017