The field of arts and education in Latin America and the Caribbean is deeply permeated by the continuity of coloniality in the form of internal colonialism (González Casanova, 1969). The colonial pattern of power—a concept introduced by Aníbal Quijano—has shaped—throughout its long history since the 16th century—not only political and economic structures, but also epistemological and aesthetic ones, defining hierarchies of knowledge, sensibility, and cultural legitimacy. In this context, decoloniality emerges as a response from a critical praxis that seeks to dismantle the hegemonic narratives of modernity and affirm knowledge, languages, and modes of creation situated in the territories of the Global South.

In the artistic field, coloniality manifests itself in the imposition of canons, languages, and aesthetic and taste hierarchies, which function as new forms of social classification. In response, proposals for artistic pedagogies are emerging that reveal the Eurocentrism in academic training designs, aiming to broaden the experience beyond aesthetics to include other sensibilities and forms of knowledge—territorial, ancestral, communal, ethnic, and sexual. From this perspective, artistic and educational practices in Ibero-America, Abya Yala, and the Greater Comarca region on the continent and in the Hispanic islands of the Caribbean, need to be positioned as spaces of re-existence (Albán Achinte, 2017), rather than as mere resistance to the criteria stipulated by Eurocentric narratives.

One of the forms of decolonial knowledge production is research-creation (Gómez Moreno, 2017), such as arts research (Torlucci and Vonovich, 2018). Although decolonial art pedagogies already exist, they are exceptional experiences that open paths for rethinking education, aesthetics, and sensory experience from other epistemologies—ancestral, community-based, Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and feminist—capable of questioning the universality of the Eurocentric canon and enabling plural ways of knowing, teaching, creating, feeling, and living. Incidentally, decolonial pedagogy already has its antecedent in the "pedagogy of the oppressed" (Freire, Walsh).

Consequently, the project is thus inscribed in the tradition of Latin American critical thought and the current perspective of decolonial studies from where it engages in dialogue with other conceptual fields such as popular pedagogies that weave together in the region various dialogues between arts, education and critical thought, which reconfigure the links between aesthetics, politics and community.

Now, from a decolonial perspective, it is about constructing epistemic spaces at the border. And it is there that border thinking and decoloniality are complementary. In this sense, it is about understanding the coloniality of power as "borderization," as the ongoing construction of borders, and, in contrast, decoloniality as feeling, thinking, doing, and believing in borderland ways, as the place on and from the border of those classified, the vanquished, and the victims of modernity/coloniality. From there, from that epistemic space, is where the rooted and embodied border thinking proposed by Mignolo (2025) is constructed.

Coloniality creates borders intertwined by the power differential that, during the Cold War, linked the First World with the Third World (Anzaldúa, 2021). These border spaces, where meanings are negotiated, are those that can be fostered and expanded through decolonial pedagogies: constructing third educational spaces (Escaño and Dewhurst, 2024) to dismantle the coloniality of power, knowledge, being, and nature, in the sense proposed by Catherine Walsh (2013).

Moving beyond the long history of the Westernization of thought (Edmundo O'Gorman 1958, Serge Latouche, 1989) and production implies opening oneself to different cosmogonies, based on the understanding that knowledge arises from the world (Walsh, 2013) and not the other way around, as the scientistic paradigm has proposed. From this perspective, the relationship between universities and communities is transformed because, in principle, universities are understood within communities, shaped by the local and the situated. And, primarily, because the hierarchy of knowledge imposed by colonial modernity is broken down, along with the distinction between a false expert knowledge and a communal and experiential knowledge.

In this context, arts education can be understood as an emancipatory practice since, following Ana Mae Barbosa (2022), as decolonial education, it is a way of disrupting and fighting against the established order, a way of de-disciplining knowledge. Furthermore, from these new epistemological and ontological perspectives, we can rethink the connections between science and the arts as interconnected modes for producing knowledge that liberates us from the various historical oppressions of colonial modernity.

All of this is relevant at a time when Latin America is experiencing a historic moment of worrying right-wing advances and the restoration of perspectives that recolonize us and obstruct the construction of other forms of exercising sovereignty. The rightward shift of neoliberal policies (which in Europe combat the advance of nationalist right-wing movements) in the former Third World puts at risk not only our material resources, but also our bodies, our knowledge, our identities, and the alternative ways of exercising community that we were building.

Therefore, in this context, we need to build communal spaces that allow us to think, act, and live within the existential and disciplinary borders that we inhabit and that inhabit us. Civil and epistemic disobedience (Gandhi, Mignolo) is the sine qua non of liberation. To this end, revisiting artistic procedures and pedagogies can be a path that contributes to decoloniality. Concepts such as aesthesis, investigative creation, border thinking, buen vivir (good living), and communality, among others, become key to moving away from the universal proposals of modern aesthetics and opening ourselves to the sensibilities specific to our territories, since it is a matter of liberating the aesthesis that was colonized (controlled, managed, and normalized) by the canons of Eurocentric aesthetics (Kant, Hegel).

This project builds upon and expands the lines of work developed in the previous phase of the Working Group, which addressed the production of situated knowledge related to artistic and educational practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. That initial experience highlighted the power of cultural mediation projects, critical pedagogies, and collaborative practices for producing situated knowledge in and through the arts.

A program of activities is proposed that integrates theoretical research, research-creation, arts research, mediation practices, territorial laboratories, seminars, publications, and regional meetings, seeking to democratize knowledge and promote pluriversal futures. This proposal revalues ​​the arts as a form of production, research, and appreciation of transversal knowledge, challenging the logocentric paradigm upon which our educational institutions, and especially universities, were forged.

The modern configuration of art and education in Latin America is deeply intertwined with the coloniality of knowledge, being, and aesthetics, hindering the full recognition of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, community-based, and popular knowledge and artistic practices. Western aesthetic categories, consolidated since the 18th century, continue to define the criteria for legitimacy in educational and artistic systems.

It is argued that the arts are forms of thought and knowledge production, and that creative research and arts research constitute a way of knowing that transcends modern-colonial epistemology. In this sense, Torlucci and Volnovich (2018) challenge us to consider how artistic processes can shape modes of research and knowledge production. These authors question the approach that refers to research about the arts and propose rethinking research in the arts. This shift in perspective places us before a new scenario, “a field of possibilities for exploring comparative analyses and alternative research models that update intersections between perception and thought” (2018, p. 126).

Continuing this trajectory, the present project deepens the reflection on the relationships between arts, education, and decoloniality, articulating the contributions of the Latin American Decolonial School (Quijano, Dussel, Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres, Lugones, Segato) with experiences in research-creation, arts research, and artistic training. It also incorporates contributions from the field of cultural, artistic, and educational mediation as modes of intervention in different contexts. Cultural mediation is a way to foster the connection between the cultural-artistic and the educational, while also underscoring a commitment to the right to arts education.

Along these same lines, it is essential to incorporate the notion of third educational spaces as territories that enable the emergence of alternative pedagogies. We understand these spaces as hybrid and liminal zones where traditional hierarchies of knowledge are suspended. It is in these interstices that community-based artistic practices unfold their greatest potential, configuring themselves as meeting places, allowing for a collective and situated production of knowledge. From this perspective, the link between artistic pedagogies and decoloniality allows us to analyze and reveal the patterns that regulate epistemology, aesthetics, and pedagogy managed by the principles of modernity-coloniality.

The project's theoretical relevance lies in its commitment to articulating decolonial thought and artistic practice, reclaiming the arts as a field of epistemic production and as a form of enunciation from the margins, and systematizing practices that propose a "decolonial aiesthesis" (Mignolo, 2010). On a social and intellectual level, it seeks to strengthen ties between universities, artistic collectives, and communities, generating spaces for horizontal dialogue and collaborative creation.

This new work cycle also draws on the postgraduate seminar "Decolonial Artistic Pedagogies: Arts and Aesthetics in the Formation of the Colonial Pattern of Power," held at the National University of the Arts, as a training and action-research tool. This seminar serves as a platform for exchange that helps consolidate a research-creation and arts research network to address decolonial artistic pedagogies in the Global South, providing tools for cultural and educational transformation.

This political stance is also supported by the Declaration for the Right to Arts Education, drafted within the framework of the II International Congress "Territories of Arts Education in Dialogue", held in 2024. In that document, it is urged to "continue strengthening this rich political, conceptual and affective fabric that integrates arts and education (...) to continue imagining and inventing new worlds, enabling spaces for listening, teaching and learning, to weave together from the stories that brought us here, from our present realities and from the more just, more democratic, more egalitarian, more creative futures that we are committed to seeking" (AAVV, 2024)