Contenu du sommaire : Activisme artistique et performance en Amérique latine (XXIe siècle)

This article aims to analyze certain practices of artistic activism in recent Venezuela, to characterize them in a different way in relation to the more militant activism of the last decades of the last century. The cases of Dale Letra, Las Piloneras, El Bus TV and Labo Ciudadano are specifically analyzed. Starting from the notion of agonism, developed by Chantal Mouffe, these practices of artistic activism are studied as social relations that try to activate more horizontal and less personalistic forms for politics through artistic experimentation. Finally, the political implications of the concept of community are explored from the reflections of Roberto Esposito, to argue that these practices of artistic activism seem to start from a post-identity notion that implement less militant and partisan ways of weaving social ties in times of a worrying polarization of Venezuelan politics.

The ARDA collective commits itself daily, autonomously and in a network, to the application of the Integral Sexual Education Law and to the decriminalisation of abortion. Their actions focus on the staging of all “cuerpos gestantes”. The lack of visibility of plural maternity wards, of representation and of anchoring points have led the collectives to rethink the processes of creation and accessibility of institutional archives. Within the framework of the performances for the decriminalisation of abortion, ARDA's performances proposed a queer-cuir (re)corpography, which questions not only the fabrication of the “feminine” body but also the fabrication of maternity as an obligatory passage, inherent to cisgender women. Their performances –“Volcán” (2019) et “Gestar”– and the use of a praxis of the queer archive as a power-knowledge device helped to make the whole of the “cuerpos gestantes” visible.

This article presents an analysis of Lukas Avendaño's Réquiem para un alcaraván, presented at Centro Cultural Rojas of Universidad de Buenos Aires in 2012. As the play occurred during the last release presentation of El Teje. Primer periódico travesti latinoamericano, the crossings and turnings of a sector of the transvestite/ trans movement in the city of Buenos Aires and the muxe zapoteca community that Avendaño represents. On the other side, on May 10th 2018 his brother Bruño Avendaño was disappeared, joining his name to a long list of Mexican people which are victims of state and non-state violence. As a way to denounce the lack of answers from the legal system and the government, Lukas Avendaño made the performance Buscando a Bruno. In both plays the performer establishes a political gesture through which he turns his autobiographical experience into a collective act, to subscribe to Emilio Santiesteban's (2008) frequently mentioned phrase that echoes in the Mexican activism of today and its' art practices: “What place does an art of the body have in a country of disappeared bodies?”

Sayak Valencia's artistic proposal in Interpelación confronts the hegemonic heteronormative world and the world of sex-dissidence, making the genders unclear in order to reveal the essentialization of the relations of domination that lead to the trivialization of gender violence. Her approach is pedagogical since the video performance was made from a performance made in Madrid in 2007 and because Sayak Valencia adds to the irruption and the wandering in the public space a text that wants to be a manifesto (Welcome to hairy tales) that manipulates with a lot of humor many philosophical concepts related to the understanding of the sex-gender-sexuality system. We will analyze this performance around the key Butlerian concept of interpellation, and that of the gay ghetto according to the proposals of Sam Bourcier, without omitting to resituate it in the Mexican context which, for two decades, has seen an explosion of macho violence.

I propose to analyze here the Albertina Carri's documentary series dedicated to childbirth The beautiful labor (2013). It constitutes an intervention in the Argentinian context in the period in which the law Nº 26.485/2009 to eradicate violence against women offers a legal framework to understand obstetrical violence that remains insufficiently applied. This documentary series interrogates the control of women's bodies and sexuality, the pathologization of childbirth, the naturalization of violence generated by the historical, religious and scientific legacies that shape practices, as well as the medical, technological and economic regulation of labor. Denouncing the exclusion that affects women's discourses, the documentary series is instead dedicated to staging and valuing them.

In recent years, several artistic activism collectives have been active in Argentina, intervening in a performative way in the physical and digital public space with various tactics. In this article, we analyse the virtual actions of two of the most representative groups of this movement –La Compañia de Funciones Patrióticas (CFP) and the association CRIA (Creando Redes Independientes y Artísticas)– respectively at the origin of two events that took place during the social confinement decreed in 2020: Relato situado. Memoria del aislamiento and LA CRIATURA-20. Based on a work of web ethnography, the aim is to reconstruct the social and aesthetic problems of these groups and to analyse the effects of their actions both on their members and on their audiences with regard to the constitution of a “virtual community” during the Covid‑19 pandemic.

This writing will analyze feminist and LGBTIQ strategies of artistic denunciation and intervention concerning racist, classist, sexist, capacitist and punitivist expressions that have arisen in state discourse while conceiving of the care of the self and others. We will explore actions performed by artists and collectives from Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. Fully aware of the important differences in state policies in these three governments in general terms and specifically as it concerns their responses to the covid19 crisis, we have noticed, however, certain points of contact, latencies, in the way the question of care is inscribed as a problem of security. We will be examining certain artistic actions that perturb this notion from the Asamblea de Trabajadoras.en Tiempos de Pandemia (Union of Female Workers in Times of Pandemic, Arg.), the Grupo de Arte Callejero (Street Art Group, Arg.), the Coordinadora Feminista 8M (8M Feminist Coordinating Committee, Ch.), the chilean visual artists and performer Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste, and the promoters of the “Marcha a Rè” (“the drive-in-reverse rally”) in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

This article aims to problematize in the light of artivism the process of self-organisation and political expressions of Latin American migrant women in Toulouse. We take an approach to feminist and gender studies on the issue of women's migration in order to analyzer their visibility in feminist political spaces. Seeking to establish the construction of our artivist identities, we make a chronological compilation of our biographical journeys, linked to a memory of the performative actions that marked our meeting. These same artistic proposals have triggered new initiatives and organisational perspectives. Finally, activism acquires a significant value as a means of political and artistic expression, where the racialised body performs in order to become politicised and emancipated.

This work proposes a reflection on the potential of performance to build bridges between the different feminisms currently expressed in France. To do this, I will analyze the case of Las Sueltas, a group of Latin American feminists based in Toulouse. Specifically, I will focus on the analysis of a performance carried out in the demonstration of March 8, 2020. How to bring feminisms together without erasing the differences and inequalities present among those who embody them?, is the main question that guided the research that here it is presented.