Unmaking to Make: Art as decolonising practice in Latin America’s future, past and present, edited by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, María Iñigo Clavo, Beatriz Lemos and Florencia Portocarrero, 2026, UCL Press
Are colonial institutions wresting control of the agenda of decolonisation?
It’s a back to front but important question that is being addressed in academia which responds to the irony that the discourse of decolonisation pioneered by Latin American thinkers in the last 15 years is increasingly being monopolised by the neocolonial centre.
This speaks to the way “peripheral” knowledge production is linked to the dynamics of global power, constantly created but quickly coopted by dominant structures in the “centre”—and in the world of art it has concrete implications.
As the editors of Unmaking to Make: Art as decolonising practice in Latin America’s future, past and present believe, the performative ripple effect of epistemological innovation suggests there have been an “increasingly superficial and problematic forms of engagement with decolonisation occurring in North American and European art spaces.”
They write: “Over recent years, that conviction has only grown as the production of the discourse of decolonisation has become ever more monopolised by the institutions of the Global North—whether pertaining to the arts or academia—and such discourse’s relationship to artistic practice has shifted from one of theoretical inspiration to mere illustration.”
Latin America and its universities occupy a particularly important position in the evolution of decolonial theory, with a body of scholarship developed by thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Ramón Grosfoguel, Arturo Escobar, Enrique Dussel, María Lugones and Nelson Maldonado-Torres gaining widespread interest since the 1990s.
Turbocharged by the bicentennial celebrations of independence across the region, what has been called “the decolonial turn” has come to influence disciplines such as art history, anthropology and the fine arts among others.
These celebrations catalysed a critical examination of the region’s colonial experience, and artworks produced in this period often responded critically by challenging official narratives of nation-building.
In particular, they drew attention to the systematic exclusion of Indigenous and Afro-Latino communities from state histories mostly shaped by processes of racialised “whitening”.
There have been many examples of this phenomenon, and it has not been confined to Latin America, but the representative example cited by the editors is that of Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra Heshiki.
Gamarra responded to the conspicuous lack of commemoration in Spain with a critical exhibition “Buen Gobierno” in Madrid in 2021 that addressed the neocolonial aspects of Spain’s relationship with Latin America today.
Similarly, the editors note, Brazil’s 2012 Quota Law sparked a paradigm shift in the direction of research and knowledge production, making plain the dominance of a Euro-American canon and how the country’s intellectual history needed to be revisited.
They write: “In the present context, what was once a peripheral position has today become an all-encompassing point of reference. The call to decolonise has become a powerful force, a rallying cry, and at times, a strategic means to bring about public programmes, events and exhibitions in contemporary art.”
Yet at the same time, as institutions have jumped on the bandwagon of initially speculative ideas, they have also sought to conceal their own colonial antecedents, with the result that in many cases there has been little concrete, meaningful change.
At the heart of the problem is the obvious contradiction that thinkers who are most likely to be in the vanguard of this form of knowledge correction must do so from within the academic institutions that maintain the status quo.
The aim of Unmaking to Make is not to simply critique this situation, but to reflect on how artistic practices from outside the North American and European canon reflecting knowledge that has so often been rendered invisible can engineer change.
The collection brings together 17 contributions to discuss the epistemological impact of the colonial project, how Latin American institutions have responded to paradigms of racialisation and erasure, and in what sense artistic practice can enable the plural knowledges of the future.
Part I of the book explores genealogies of decolonisation, ranging from anticolonial movements to postcolonial theory and the more recent decolonial turn.
Reflections question established academic frameworks and open space for resistance to them. One notable contribution is by Maya K’iche’ anthropologist María Jacinta Xón Riquiac, who explores the idea of hacking the spaces of environmental politics from the perspective of the feminisation of ecological struggles.
Part II brings together perspectives on the evolving role of museums and art institutions in Latin America and their efforts to dismantle entrenched hierarchies and engage with frameworks of coloniality.
As this section shows, since the nineteenth century categories of art in Latin America have adhered to Eurocentric paradigms imposed through colonial institutions which established Western aesthetic hierarchies that determined what could qualify as art
The book reproduces a conversation between Elvira Espejo Ayca, director of the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore (MUSEF) in La Paz, Bolivia, and curator Florencia Portocarrero.
Their dialogue explores the challenges and tensions of integrating the knowledge of Indigenous and peri-urban communities into traditional museum structures.
Part III explores Mesoamerican mythologies, Afro-diasporic cosmologies and contemporary artistic practices to build a critique of language systems that naturalise inequality and oppression.
A chapter by Mexican artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo, for example, considers the symbolic and aesthetic universe of the artist’s cinematographic work, constructing a complex narrative that intertwines Mesoamerican cosmologies, contemporary violence and devastated ecology
The final part of the book uses the concepts of time and space to consider ways of intervening in the struggle against coloniality, indicating how escaping the “linear” present can help to create plural futures.
The last chapter by Fernanda Pitta, Glicéria Jesus da Silva (Glicéria Tupinambá), Mariana Françozo, Renata Valente, Brigitte Thierion and Pascale de Robert, for example, mines the cultural and historical significance of Tupinambá bordunas (clubs) in eastern Brazil and their importance for Tupinambá memory, cosmology and identity.
Unmaking to Make is an enlightening collection of perspectives putting artists themselves at the cutting edge of decolonial theory and practice that highlights institutional obstacles to change, and how the creative Latin American mind is challenging them.
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Categories: Caribbean, Central America, Europe, International, North America, South America