The documenta Institute is pleased to announce a cooperation with CELA and CALAS. The aim of this cooperation is to promote research into art and exhibition studies on Latin America.
documenta Professor Liliana Gómez will assume the roles of newly elected CELA spokesperson and co-director of the CALAS Regional Center in Quito, formalizing the collaboration. This cooperation will create an academic space and strengthen transdisciplinary and transregional collaboration in the social sciences and humanities on art and exhibition research between Latin America and Germany. With the documenta Institute, the focus on art and exhibition research and the history of documenta in the global context of the biennials - for example in São Paulo or Havana - is now being advanced. The transdisciplinary perspective of this collaboration places exhibition practice in a political and social context and questions the role of North-South relations in art between Germany and Latin America. Questions of memory in post-conflict societies, the articulation of law, extractivism and the planetary significance of Latin America form the joint research focus.
The Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos (CELA) bundles Latin American research at the University of Kassel and represents this research as an institution regionally, throughout Germany and internationally. CELA sees itself as an interdisciplinary research center that is open to various forms of cooperation. For international cooperation partners and Latin American colleagues interested in cooperating with Kassel, CELA acts as a point of contact and supports the initiation of projects through its network.
CALAS (Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies) is an international research network funded by the BMBF, which has its headquarters in Guadalajara, Mexico, and also maintains regional centers in Argentina, Costa Rica and Ecuador. CALAS examines crises and reactions to crises from a transdisciplinary perspective and assumes that Latin America is characterized by a particularly creative search for cultural and political strategies for overcoming crises, which are researched jointly by the social sciences and humanities.
Prof. Dr. Liliana Gómez underlines the importance of the collaboration: “Global contemporary art in particular shows that artists from Latin America and its diaspora have long been part of an extremely innovative art development that is rightly increasingly being received internationally and shaping global art debates.
I am therefore very pleased that this cooperation strengthens the focus on art and exhibition research in its social relevance in and with Latin America and, in addition to the content-related and academic exchange, also promotes and deepens an important institutional exchange with local partners.”
The cooperation provides for the pooling and networking of research in this area, in particular collaboration on joint events and new research projects with researchers, artists, curators and institutional partners in Latin America and Germany.
