Southern Conceptualisms Network: Founding Manifesto

Horacio Zabala, RevisarCensurar, 1974
Horacio Zabala, "RevisarCensurar", 1974

Southern Conceptualisms Network is an international platform for collective production, reflection, and setting in common of a political position. This Network was founded towards the end of 2007 by a group of researchers concerned with the need for a political intervention into the processes of neutralizing of the critical potential of a set of "conceptual practices" which had taken place in Latin America since the 1970s.

Southern Conceptualisms Network considers that, much like what happened to other emancipatory projects, the subversive potential of these "conceptual practices" was deconstructed by the force of State violence. The different attempts at re-activating this disruptive potential have been interrupted by the ongoing imposition of diverse mechanisms: the inoculation of collective memory by the State apparatus, the defensive oblivion assimilated by civil society, the de-politization of subjectivities in their neo-liberal economic context, the aesthetization of counter-culture, etc. More than thirty years after the irruption of dictatorships in most of Latin America, their traumatic effect continues to suffocate intelligent life in our societies and to inoculate the poetic and political potential of those experiences.

Southern Conceptualisms Network was born with the intention of contributing to the re-activation of this critical potential. The main objective of Southern Conceptualisms Network is, therefore, to reclaim the presence in sensitive memory of these experiences, in order to turn this memory into an antagonist force in the context of the contemporary cognitive capitalism.

Southern Conceptualisms Network is aware that museums, collectors and public and private art institutions that participate in the international contemporary art system are submerged in a heated debate around the visibility, property and administration of this artistic legacy and political experiences. It is therefore not gratuitous that, in the last few years, we have been witnessing a general process of institutionalization and canonization of the archives, documents, and other material and immaterial remnants derived from these "conceptual practices". Our goal to reconnect with these experiences, in order to re-activate their revulsive potential therefore takes up as a starting point the need to emphasize this realm in order to revert these processes of neutralization.

In this scenario, Southern Conceptualisms Network is conceived as a different possibility of politically thinking, doing, intervening, conceiving, exhibiting and historicizing the disruptive force and critical capacity of Latin American "conceptual" art practices.

Since its foundation in 2007, Southern Conceptualisms Network has been growing informally, based on the complicity, affections, solidarity and mutual trust of its members. With the idea of reinforcing its internal and external links, Southern Conceptualisms Network makes manifest its intention to be endowed, from now on, with better articulated organizational, economic, technical and political mechanisms.

Through this founding document, Southern Conceptualisms Network declares the following:

That Southern Conceptualisms Network is conceived as an international platform for collective production, thought and setting in common of a political position.

That Southern Conceptualisms Network assumes that researching, generating archives and producing experiments in re-activating the memory of experience are political, and not merely academic or professional practices.

That Southern Conceptualisms Network considers that the politics of constitution, circulation and acquisition of the archives must not only coincide in the recognition of the sequels of Colonialism, but also in the recognition of the presence of Colonialism in contemporary Latin America.

That the denomination Southern Conceptualisms Network has been adopted on the basis of following these three observations:

The tactical use of the terms "conceptualisms" and "conceptual practices". Southern Conceptualisms Network recognizes that, in the past 20 years, these terms have been used to engage in a historiographical, theory-based and critical task of de-hierarchization, impeachment and de-centering of the canonical narratives surrounding "conceptual art", understanding it not as a specific, delimited art trend, but rather as a different manner of practicing art and of understanding its social function.
The strategic use of the term "south". Its use has the goal of intervening in the geopolitical segmentations of a territory, Latin America, through the current hemispheric context. The geopolitical condition of "south" is not used as a metonymy of the geography of Latin America, but as a discursive tool for the dismantlement of "centrality" and the reversal of the epistemic "marginality" on the bases of which global "conceptualisms" have been historicized. Through the strategic and geopolitical use of the term "south", we intend to guarantee that the Latin American standpoint is not informed by a reclamation of a regional cultural identity, but, rather, that it allows the revision of the strict dichotomies that divide center and periphery; canon and counter-canon, First and Third Worlds, Western and non-Western.
The flexible use of the temporary delimitation applied. The decades of the sixties and the seventies are not definitive chronological landmarks for the Network, and neither are they fixed historiographical circumscriptions , but, rather, they represent the temporary and conceptual nucleus where the problematic which concerns the research of the Network is triggered.

General Objectives

Through this Founding Manifesto, Southern Conceptualisms Network declares as prioritary the following general objectives:

To generate research, archival policies and experiments in re-activating the memory of the experience of "conceptual" practices which took place in Latin American territory during the decades of the sixties and the seventies.
To get endowed with the technical, political, economic and institutional tools necessary for championing and articulating, in a networked manner, new research initiatives and new work focuses.
To collectively think and promote disruptive politics of exhibition, institutionalization, materialization, evaluation, circulation, promotion, acquisition and heritage of the archives relation to the "conceptual" practices in Latin America.
To promote a set of ethical proposals (different from the ones dominant in the market economy), as well as alternative political frameworks which can influence decision-making and practices in those international public and cultural policies related to the new forms of material, economic, artistic and symbolic plundering of Latin America.
To build spaces for the exchange, discussion, and political intervention of the research initiatives developed by the members of the Network and to generate, through these spaces, complementary or conflicting synergies with already established academic and institutional realms.

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