A message from the coordinators.
By: Maria Berbara, Carmen Fernández-Salvador, Patricia Zalamea
The Amazon basin as connecting borderland: examining cultural and artistic fluidities in the early modern period is a collaboration aimed at fostering academic networks among South American scholars in the early stages of their career. To choose the Amazon basin as our focus underlines the need to connect our countries as a region and to rethink the ways in which South American art history is taught and studied, mostly in terms of national borders. The project is fully funded by the Connecting Art Histories initiative from the Getty Foundation.
The Amazon is the borderland of the three participating countries – Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador – but it is also a fluid space that connects the region. By emphasizing cultural and artistic exchange, convergence, and confrontation, as well as the mobility and circulation of artists, techniques, artworks, and materials, a sustained study of the Amazon shifts attention away from main artistic centers and their national narratives in favor of a new way of interpreting Latin American art. Thus, we foreground rurality, sites, artworks, and hybrid styles that have often been marginalized. This project is particularly relevant in the present moment, considering the threat that increased extractivism poses to the environment and to the indigenous peoples from the Amazon rainforest.
The project is organized in two seminars, each lasting one academic year. The first year, centered in Ecuador, begun its activities in August of 2023, and will be completed in July of 2024. In the second year, activities will be based in Belém do Pará, beginning in August of 2024 and ending in July of 2025. The seminars include monthly online meetings and lectures, as well as a yearly on-site study trip.
During the first year, the teams’ members and a selected group of young scholars from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru went on an immersive 10-day bus journey from Quito to Cuenca passing through the Ecuadorian Amazon, were they visited, among other places, the Museo Arqueológico y Centro Cultural de Orellana, the Fundación Sacha Warmi and the artisan workshop of Macas. The group also lodged at Casa Kichwa in the village of Sarayaku, by the Bobonaza River.
The posts collected in this blog bring together some of these travelers’ experiences during the trip and reflect upon the ways in which these experiences connect to the participants’ individual projects.
We first met in 2010 and have successfully collaborated in various projects ever since. We were introduced to each other by late art historian Rick Asher, who had designed the idea of having smaller, closed-door conferences happening right before the large CAA meetings. These pre-conferences, which included scholars living in countries in which art history was emerging as an academic discipline, aimed at discussing south-south institutional and individual collaborations, as well as sharing the difficulties and challenges of working in our field in less privileged parts of the world. The three of us participated in the pilot of these conferences, which had been generously funded by the Getty Foundation and which exist to this day.
The three of us were part of another Getty sponsored project – “Unfolding Art History in Latin America” – which took us to Rio, Buenos Aires, México and Quito between 2012 and 2015. Other collaborations and partnerships included, among others, “The Italian Renaissance as seen from Latin America”, funded by the Villa I Tatti – the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and hosted by Universidad de Los Andes in 2012; “Spolia Sancta: Fragmentos y envolturas de sacralidad entre el Viejo y el Nuevo Mundo”, a joint project hosted by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid between 2016 and 2019; as well as two seminars hosted by the Villa I Tatti in Florence and several collaborative publications, including, most recently, Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Officina Libraria / Harvard University Press, 2022).
We are early modernists working in the field of art and cultural history between Europe and the Americas. We are also educators deeply invested in strengthening south-south collaborations which will create and sustain academic exchange between younger scholars in our part of the world. The countries we are representing in this project – Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador – share borders with the Amazon, a zone of encounter between indigenous, European, and African cultures. It is a privilege to collaborate in this joint project that brings together young scholars from South America, who are the future of the discipline in the region, in the hopes that they too will build long-lasting sustainable networks.