Line of research: Art, Reception, Alterity
Lattes: https://lattes.cnpq.br/8906432700087424
email: valeriaquino@gmail.com
Research Project
Alterity and subjectivity in autobiographical narratives: paths of re-existence
The research project Alterity and subjectivity in autobiographical narratives: paths of re-existence investigates recent transformations in the field of contemporary Brazilian art through the articulation between autobiographical practices, decolonial thought, and counter-colonial perspectives. The study is grounded in the understanding that Brazilian art has, over recent decades, been traversed by a “decolonial turn,” understood as a critical and epistemological shift that challenges Eurocentric paradigms of knowledge production, representation, and artistic legitimization. The research examines how indigenous, black, peripheral, female, and dissident artists have developed aesthetic practices that not only address coloniality as a theme, but also challenge the very regimes of visibility and recognition that structure the modern/colonial art system. Within this framework, the notion of counter-coloniality expands decolonial critique by affirming modes of existence, cosmologies, and forms of relation to the body, memory, territory, and collectivity that directly confront modern and colonial logics. The project understands these transformations in dialogue with the so-called crisis of representation in contemporary art, marked by the questioning of traditional forms of representing the subject, experience, and memory. In this context, practices such as performance, testimony, installation, and autobiography displace art from the field of representation toward that of presence, embodied experience, and critical intervention. Autobiographical narratives are understood not as individual or confessional accounts, but as practices of subjectivation and symbolic elaboration of experience. Drawing on authors such as Christine Delory-Momberger, Maria da Conceição Passeggi, Elizeu Clementino de Souza, Judith Butler, and Adriana Cavarero, autobiography is conceived as a relational, ethical, and political process in which the subject constitutes itself through self-narration in dialogue with alterity, collective memory, and the discursive regimes that traverse it. The autobiographical “self” is no longer understood as a fixed identity, but rather as a situated and processual construction shaped by struggles over recognition. In dialogue with Latin American decolonial thought and with the notion of re-existence formulated by Adolfo Albán Achinte, the study interprets these autobiographical practices as aesthetic and political strategies of world-making. Re-existing means reinventing modes of existence and producing other forms of sensibility, memory, and political imagination. Within this context, the research analyzes how certain contemporary artistic practices displace traditional regimes of representation by mobilizing situated experiences, collective memories, and forms of enunciation traversed by alterity. In dialogue with authors such as Suely Rolnik, Leda Maria Martins, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, the study investigates how contemporary Brazilian art has produced practices of presence and subjectivation that challenge colonial dispositifs of visibility, legitimacy, and recognition. Methodologically, the project proposes the construction of an interdisciplinary field situated at the intersection of contemporary art, anthropology of art, autobiographical studies, and decolonial and counter-colonial theories. Engaging with authors such as Alfred Gell, Anna Grimshaw, and Ticio Escobar, the research understands art as a relational, situated, and politically implicated practice, rejecting universalist and extractivist approaches to knowledge. The study seeks to understand how autobiographical narratives, articulated through contemporary aesthetic practices, reconfigure notions of subjectivity, authorship, memory, and experience, contributing to a decolonial and counter-colonial critique of modern regimes of representation and to the production of other modes of existence and creation within the context of contemporary Brazilian art.