ART B2021

About this course

Organized around aesthetic modes and models of cultural production emerging from and elaborated in latinoam�rica (Latin America, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and their diasporas in the United States) the class explores strategies and concepts such as rasquache, domesticana, malflorismo, DIY, plagio, piracy, bootleg, talacha, squatting, hoarding, gambiarra and interrogates their accompanying tensions and pitfalls: the romanticization of poverty, extractive and racialized discourses, and essentialism. The class will delve into the roots of many of these modes in an expansive, quotidian lexicon of creative ingenuity and vitality employed to describe the relationship between labor and life. The course welcomes participants to untether discourses around precarity aesthetics from Euro-centric biases, contexts, and terms. In the midst of current world emergencies, we will seek to understand what studying socio-cultural responses to crises, inequalities, and dispossession teaches us?