29 January 2025

We are delighted to welcome our second guest blog post, this time by Paul Merchant, Associate Professor (Reader) in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol. Here Paul reflects on how his project on cultural responses to the Pacific Ocean in Chile and Peru led him to consider the coloniality of the art gallery space. 

NAUfraga, an installation by Cecilia Vicuña, at the 2022 Venice Biennale

Can the art gallery be a decolonial space? This wasn’t one of the research questions that I proposed for my project ‘Reimagining the Pacific: Images of the Ocean in Chile and Peru’ when I started it in 2021. As ever, though, research took me in unexpected directions, in this case into the world of international art exhibitions like the Venice Biennale. I had begun the project with a hunch that thinking about the modern history and culture of Chile and Peru from the perspective of the Pacific Ocean would yield valuable insights into ecological and social challenges, from the environmental impacts of overfishing and industry to histories of political repression and resistance. This indeed proved to be the case, but I also found myself thinking more and more about the nature of the creative process and artistic production itself. Without giving too much away from my current book project, The Ocean to Come: Pacific Futures in Chile and Peru, I have ended up convinced that the Pacific Ocean has long acted as a kind of laboratory for creative experimentation, and for imagining alternative futures.

Here is where the question of the decolonial appears. There is a substantial and contested body of literature discussing the meanings and implications of this term (from Aníbal Quijano to Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, to name just a few key thinkers). If, however, we take it in a fairly abstract sense, as indicating a desire to move away from or even overturn a Eurocentric hierarchy (which might be political, social, epistemic and/or aesthetic), then creative work centring the Pacific Ocean as a locus of knowledge, culture, and innovation might at least be in alignment with a decolonial perspective. Indeed, while it’s not an approach that has previously been adopted in Latin American studies, thinkers like Epeli Hau’ofa developed a Pacific-centred political ontology before the term ‘decolonial’ had entered widespread circulation (1994). I’ve thought through this question, and some of my doubts about the possibility of achieving a fully decolonial practice, in relation to two Chilean films, Patricio Guzmán’s El botón de nácar and Tiziana Panizza’s Tierra sola, in an article in the Bulletin of Latin American Research. Work produced by indigenous artists often has a stronger claim to a decolonial character: the performances and installations of Seba Calfuqueo, for instance, are consistently grounded in a Mapuche cosmovision and in the rejection of the current political order of the Chilean state.

Calfuqueo’s works also belong, however, to the sphere of elite gallery spaces. Whether video installation, sculpture or performance, while the works do have a digital existence online, they achieve their full expression when exhibited in locations such as Galería Patricia Ready or the Palacio Pereira in Santiago de Chile, or the Serpentine Gallery in London. The same might be said of other examples of the extraordinary creative flourishing of ecological art in Chile in recent years, from the works of Claudia Müller to the multimedia installation about the peatlands of Tierra del Fuego, Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol, which was shown in the Chilean pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022. It is important to state that in many of these cases, including those just mentioned, the final artwork is the product of collaborative engagement with local communities, often explicitly incorporating ways of thinking about the environment that sit at least partly outside colonial epistemes. The resulting intermedial works moreover often engage the visitor’s senses (for instance through the smell of peat, or the sound of water) as well as the intellect, operating in a register that Arturo Escobar associates with ‘epistemologies of the south’ (2018).  It is also true that since 2020, in particular, contemporary art institutions across the world have engaged in efforts to decolonise the logic behind their exhibition choices. To give one example: the curator of the 2022 Venice Biennale’s central exhibition, Cecilia Alemani, questioned ‘the presumed universal ideal of the white, male “Man of Reason” − as fixed centre of the universe and measure of all things’ in her exhibition notes. 

Nonetheless, the attribution of value or international recognition to the Latin American ecological works I have mentioned frequently remains dependent on their appearance in gallery or festival spaces that are located in the Global North and bear a hefty ticket price. Sometimes the gatekeeping of the contemporary art world involves a physical gate. Contemporary South American art is producing engaging and nuanced considerations of the coloniality of ecological knowledge. The question of who has access to these decolonial reflections is a thornier matter.

References and Reading Suggestions

Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hau’ofa, Epeli. 1994. ‘Our Sea of Islands’. The Contemporary Pacific 6:1, 148-161. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23701593.

Merchant, Paul. 2022. ‘“Collecting What the Sea Gives Back”: Postcolonial Ecologies of the Ocean in Contemporary Chilean Film’. Bulletin of Latin American Research 41:2, 209-226. https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.13231.

Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. ‘Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America’. Journal of International Sociology 15:2, 215-232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005.

Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2012. ‘Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization’. The South Atlantic Quarterly 111:1, 95-109. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1472612.

See also ‘Decolonize! What Does it Mean?’ from Oxfam.