Related Losing the Human Form

One of the primary aims of this seminar is to facilitate testimony and oral discourse as a stimulant and as a counterpoint to exhibition discourse and, at the same time, to produce a debate between the artists and agents that were involved and a new generation of historians and critics that are rewriting Latin American art practices as they overflow toward a context that has more social and political activism, but that is also more subjective, identitary and sexual.

The friction of bodies is a film and video series that presents a broad panorama of different artistic and political manifestations from the 1980s, which arose during and co-existed with the years of repression in Latin America. Many of these videos and films, most of which have never been shown publicly outside of their original contexts, demonstrate the emergency of new political subjects and forms of subcultural participation. The program also includes recent film proposals that look back at the agitated times of the 1980s in this context, to offer different readings or to activate a memory still throbbing within us.

This presentation introduces the publication Losing the human form. A seismic image of the 1980s in Latin America, conceived in connection to and in dialogue with the exhibition of the same name. The publication, unlike a conventional catalogue, does not enumerate the works and practices found in the exhibition but rather presents itself as yet another (possible) mechanism by which to activate these practices in a reflection about the present.