Critical studies on design in Latin America: contemporary practices, discourses and debates

Dotor, Ángela (Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano)

Salazar, Edward (Universidad Santo Tomás)

Salive, María Clara (Universidad Externado)

Oscar Salinas (UNAM, México - in person)

Justification

The history of design in Latin America has narrated the influences and constructions of practices with an emphasis on colonial aesthetic and political models and ideals. However, in the contemporary context, there are different debates about the pathways, cultural expressions, and the various manifestations of resistance and subalternity through design which reveals important intersections with perspectives of gender, race, youth culture, conflict, and identities.

In this perspective, the history and practices of design in Latin America occupy a critical space that strengthens and narrates the different tensions in the construction of Latin identities and subjectivities from the point of view of aesthetics. Studies on identity, clothing, textiles, objects, graphic practices, and expressions configure the construction of knowledge for the field of design in the region from a critical or decolonial vision.

The Latin American context demands theoretical and practical perspectives from different disciplinary fields such as design, communication, social sciences, and humanities as well as from social movements and collectives that question the histories and constructions. In this sense, theories and practices, although in a stage of development as an autonomous field of studies in Latin American countries, converge, within a call for revision of the intercultural histories and processes of design to situated and intersectional thinking.

While there are global authors who have discussed cultural studies, forming an autonomous field, this roundtable invites us to recognize the (sometimes recent) studies of critical thinkers of design and culture in Latin America. Some of these are Walter Mignolo on decolonial thought, Arturo Escobar on the designs of the South, and Pía Montalva on the relations between politics and clothing in Chile. Other participants, such as Ochy Curiel, Mara Viveros and María Lugones, treat decolonial feminism. Although not all these authors speak directly of fashion and design, their Latin American thought provides a conceptual basis for the field of design, away from Eurocentrism. This contextual revision of the field proposes new practices in other territories, temporalities and experiences, outside modernity and outside the academy.

Objectives

To construct a historical and discursive narrative around design in Latin America based on critical reflections on the intersections raised in studies, practices and expressions that claim and recognize design practices outside hegemonic mandates.

Based on the above, we invite works that are framed within:

• Theoretical studies of intersectional and subalternate designs in areas such as gender, corporeality, identities, ethnic and racial experiences, among other readings of subjectivity.
• Practices of creation or research-creation of resistances and/or transformations of community industry and building that contribute to cultural, social and political development.
• Histories of designs in Latin America that make visible actors, processes, narratives of native peoples, effects of invasion and colonization in the Americas, and the phenomena of modernity.
• Epistemologies, pedagogies and knowledge creation from the South regarding designs that provide theoretical tools for the advancement of the field.