Unmaking to Make
Art as decolonising practice in Latin America’s future, past and present
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn (Editor), María Iñigo Clavo (Editor), Beatriz Lemos (Editor), Florencia Portocarrero (Editor)
Series: Modern Americas
Unmaking to Make reorients global conversations on decolonization by centring Afro-Diasporic and Indigenous perspectives from across Latin America. Through a wide-ranging selection of texts, including critical essays, curatorial reflections and interviews, it explores how artistic practice actively theorises, models and enacts alternative modes of living, offering a vital counterpoint to the ‘decolonising’ agendas often adopted in North American and European contexts.
Organized into four thematic parts: counter-genealogies, institutionalities, the decolonisation of language and plural temporalities, the volume shows how art reshapes knowledge, unravels colonial narratives and builds new vocabularies of power. Contributors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Martinique, Mexico, Peru and beyond reveal the region’s deep histories of cultural resistance and the close ties between art and social life. They also ask how museums, universities and cultural institutions might be reimagined in contexts of structural precarity and political urgency. Drawing on the generative potential of creative practice, the book highlights Latin American art as both a body of theory and a method for imagining new futures. This volume is an essential resource that recognises embodiment, collaboration and plurality as vital to dismantling colonial regimes – and envisioning genuinely inclusive futures.
List of figures List of contributors
Introduction: Artistic practice and the unmaking of coloniality
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, María Iñigo Clavo, Beatriz Lemos and Florencia Portocarrero
Part I: Counter-genealogies
1 Counter-histories, ‘Maya hackers’ and everyday life resistances
María Jacinta Xón Riquiac
2 Crossroads of popular arts: cultural resistance, artisanal practices and the racialisation of developmentalism in Ecuador
María Elena Bedoya Hidalgo and Pamela Cevallos Salazar
3 From decentralised mestizajes in Peru to mestizo masks in the Spanish pavilion. Some genealogical routes of the decolonial in Latin American art
Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, María Iñigo Clavo and Agustín Pérez Rubio in conversation
4 Tracing the encontronazo, a Ladino genealogy of Afro-diasporic female art through Leliá González’s Améfricade
Karo Moret Miranda
Part II: Institutions amidst colonial legacies
5 Reconsidering the ‘art museum’. Some reflections on the history of the MALI collections
Ricardo Kusunoki and Sharon Lerner
6 Community of praxis: integrating Indigenous knowledge in the management of the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore in La Paz
Elvira Espejo Ayca and Florencia Portocarrero in conversation
7 Museums under construction María Berríos and Pablo Lafuente in conversation 8 The ‘Indigenous turn’ and the rise of Amazonian art: insights from the seminal work of the Seminario de Historia Rural Andina (SHRA)
Gabriela Germaná and Florencia Portocarrero
Part III: The decolonisation of language and vocabularies of power
9 About what we can say
Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro
10 Tzitzimime Trilogy. Or, devourers of filth born from injustice. Or, ecstatics on the edge of the abyss. Or, bristled their contours with knives
Naomi Rincón-Gallardo
11 This we can do, this is not impossible
Beatriz Lemos and Denise Ferreira da Silva in conversation
12 Poetics of decolonial ecologies in theory and practice
María Iñigo Clavo and Beatriz Lemos in conversation with Maria Thereza Alves and Malcom Ferdinand
Part IV: Temporality as plural possibility
13 Lightning flashes of future
Andrei Fernández
14 Futures uninscribed: contemporary Indigenous artistic practice
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn
15 ‘Welcome to the future’. Spatio-temporal reconfiguration on stage and the (im)possible prefiguration of the anticolonial
Claudio Alvarado Lincopi, Olivia Casagrande and Roberto Cayuqueo Martínez
16 Across cultures, knowledge and disciplines: talking about collaborations
Giuliana Borea, Venuca Evanán, Gabriela Germaná, and Rember Yahuarcani
17 Ibirapema cosmotechnics
Fernanda Pitta, Glicéria de Jesus Silva, Mariana Françozo, Renata Valente, Brigitte Thierion and Pascale De Robert
Glossary
List of Latin American Institutions
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781806550029
Number of illustrations: 73
Publication date: 01 February 2026
EPUB ISBN: 9781806550036
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn (Editor) 
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is Associate Professor of Art and Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles.
María Iñigo Clavo (Editor)
María Iñigo Clavo is a writer, curator and Associate Professor of Arts and Humanities at Open University of Catalunya in Barcelona in a collaborative program with Reina Sofia Museum.
Beatriz Lemos (Editor)
Beatriz Lemos is Coordinating Curator at Instituto Inhotim in Brazil.
Florencia Portocarrero (Editor)
Florencia Portocarrero is a writer, curator and Lecturer for the Masters in Art History and Curating at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru.
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