Attempts to define the relationship between art and politics remain a constant concern in vast areas of the social sciences. This is primarily because each of these terms refers to historically and culturally unstable and distinct notions—it is not the same to speak of the relationship between art and politics in Greek culture, in the Roman Empire, in medieval Europe, in the Renaissance, or in modern or contemporary Europe or Latin America. But if, in addition to this, one tries to answer how art and politics can be linked, the first answer that emerges is the inference to the political context, given that it determines the political nature of artistic productions and that these productions are expressed in a conditional way through the theme that the work represents. That is to say, if any visual art, performance, or song refers to a political reason or circumstance, it would be an example of what has been said before. But if we consider the complexities of this intersection by recognizing that these fields are dynamic and flexible, interwoven with diverse and multiple discursive connections, we can affirm that, in their different modes of operation, art and politics share the desire to influence and transform the conditions of existence. This synthesis of the relationship between these two fields, which builds upon the work done in the Working Group on Art and Politics in 2017 and 2019, serves as a starting point for further exploration of artistic and cultural practices as builders of meaning and political action.

We often face the challenge of reformulating conventional ways of understanding the relationship between art and politics, which subordinate art to a role of illustrating the letter of the law or conceive of politics as partisan actions. Added to this is the problematization of the center-periphery dichotomy and the current universe expanded by technological advances that allow greater access to the production, distribution, and reception of works of art, leading to the constitution of new forms and sensibilities. This framework encourages us to continue exploring the complex richness of the symbolic flow where the identities of peoples, nations, and territories are mobilized within the hegemonic relations inherent in the nature of globalization. The tensions between the global and the local become, in the field of the arts, new forms of representation of these realities, “which redesign the economic and communicative landscape of Latin American society and culture, and also encourage discussion around new models of knowledge reorganization capable of analyzing social and cultural changes in Latin America” (Richard, 2005, p. 456)

Reviewing a set of experiences at the intersection of art and politics from a Latin American perspective allows us to understand the strategies that art and activism have used in our region to make visible, challenge, or question social problems and situate them conflictively in the public sphere. For Latin American art, this process implies “that the international gaze of its peripheral condition not compete with the center in discursive artifice or rhetorical complexities but, rather, illustrate ‘its commitment to reality’ by emphasizing a greater contextual referentiality” (Richard, 2007, p. 79).

In this sense, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han warns us of the following: “Today there is no cooperating, interconnected multitude capable of becoming a global protesting and revolutionary mass. On the contrary, the solitude of the isolated, detached self-employed individual constitutes the present mode of production. (...) Total competition leads to an enormous increase in productivity, but it destroys solidarity and the sense of community. A revolutionary mass is not formed with exhausted, depressed, isolated individuals.” Based on this, what is the role of the artist? (...) The artist must question paradigms through the construction of new aesthetic approaches to interpret the community through their artistic expressions. Through them, history speaks, the present sings in all its complexities, and through their art, the material and spiritual contradictions experienced by human beings are revealed” (Byung-Chul Han, 2003, n.p.).

Over the past few decades, Latin American art has been expressing the “call to action,” where artists, poetry collectives, theater groups, music collectives, comics collectives, architecture collectives, graphic activism groups, and human rights movements, with their well-known photographs, have actively and effectively taken action. “Silhouette” or of the first marches of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who themselves constituted an artistic act, by circulating around the square with their diaper-headscarves holding banners with photos of their children; or environmental movements, or feminist organizations, among others, have contributed countless poetic practices, shaping an aesthetic of to be social and estar Political expression, manifested in all forms and in any way, to demonstrate, resist, invent, or propose social change. In this sense, the experimental artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo has expressed the “necessary need” (Vigo, 1976, n.p.) to make direct contact with realities in order to create new possibilities of representation and aesthetic circulation “with a sufficient dose of nonconformity, subversion, and global and particular relationships” (Vigo, 1976, n.p.), for the construction of a collective memory based on the “critical testimony of socio/political/economic realities” (Vigo, 1976, n.p.).

Following this perspective, we can say that Latin America shares a common memory where the body of artistic representations has expressed our social conflicts and struggles. The 21st century finds studies on the constitutive relationship between art and politics facing variables that present the challenge of continuing to critically examine the ease of image transmission in the age of information and digital technologies; the productive mobility of artists; the ever-increasing distribution of Latin American art worldwide and within our own continent; the active role of minorities and the issues surrounding non-sexist and feminist education; respect for and non-discrimination against sexual minorities; justice and reparations for victims of human rights violations; the relationship between the State and Indigenous peoples; centralism; public space and communities; migration policies; and the vicissitudes of the region's own politics, marked by debates between neoliberal policies and those that promote the recovery of the State as guarantor of the rights and well-being of its citizens.

In this direction, the languages, techniques, procedures, and forms that these relationships invite us to understand construct sensory data, transforming it into objects of culture, politics, and civilization. Thus, the different systems for integrating sensory perceptions culminate in the creation of new objects of a human nature, enabling societies to develop their own existence within the cultural landscape of the continent. The visual arts, performing arts, popular and contemporary dances, music in all its forms, urban murals, digital art, film and audiovisual arts, literature and the arts of Indigenous peoples, and transdisciplinary productions that combine contributions from different art worlds are constantly redefined in opposition to established canons, primarily those based on traditional aesthetic criteria, by exploring the expressive potential of politics through other figurative and creative forms of human language.

Our questions in this group's proposal arise from the tension between considering the complexity of artistic languages ​​and social meanings, the relationship between image and word and their modes of signifying communicationally, sensitively, and socially, and their ways of narrating the world. Another of our objectives is to explore artistic processes, considering their different scales of production, circulation, and consumption, focusing on the specificities and possible connections with globalization, localities and communities, urban landscapes, art, mobilizations and the public sphere, bodies and gender, and "unfinished memory," among others. This proposal seeks to bring together and update, from different fields of knowledge, the production of knowledge, research, and debates surrounding contemporary Latin American art and aesthetic representations.

We therefore propose, in line with the Working Group on Art and Politics 2017-2019, to continue re-problematizing the conventions and prejudices inherent in canonical and homogenizing discourses that understand the aesthetic act as separate from its political and social relations, and that prevent a comprehensive enjoyment of the aforementioned epistemological property of the work of art. “The art world is a complex, dynamic world, in which different factors intervene. It is not only about the quality of the work, the genius of the artist, or the eye of the collector, but many factors intervene that are called “agents” of the art world. These are the critics, the historians, the formation of magazines—ephemeral or long-lasting—, the space that art criticism occupies in a medium” (Giunta, 2012, n.p.).

Today more than ever, it is necessary to examine in depth the different layers of the cultural process before describing the features of a work and its thematic lines. In the case of Latin American culture, understood within long processes of emancipation, and as a constant reinterpretation of these conflicts through the arts over more than two centuries, and within a multiculturalism resulting from the original richness of each region and the incorporation of European and African popular cultures through immigration, it is necessary to speak, therefore, of the "residual" and the "emergent" as a constant and real mechanism that operates in the reinterpretation of identities (Williams, 1977). We propose the following general objectives of the Working Group:

Objectives:

* To critically analyze the articulation between art and politics as practices of expression and emancipation in Latin America, with activisms typical of the era and their historical roots in culture.

*To deduce from this study the strategies that art and activism have used to express socio-cultural situations in public spaces.

*To articulate a perspective on the political nature of art in Latin America based on the exchange and joint socialization of research methods among the members of the Working Group.

*Understanding the revolution digital as a synthesis of historical processes in the development of aesthetic languages.

*To generate publications, conferences and meetings that strengthen the power of art as a political language.

 The narratives constructed by culture are those that allow us to recover, through artistic memory, testimonies of the socio-political processes of our time. In this sense, film, literature, and journalism are linked in their role as generators of narratives for understanding and constructing worlds. These constructions become active in the popular, feminist, activist, diverse, and creative movements of recent years, fueled by the advancement of technologies alongside ancestral practices.