Curating and the Legacies of Colonialism in Contemporary Iberia

By Carlos Garrido Castellano

Combining postcolonial studies, curating and contemporary art, this book surveys the role played by artistic curatorship and contemporary art museums in the shaping of identities and cultural planning in contemporary Iberia. The book’s main hypothesis is that contemporary art has been pivotal in the construction of contemporary Iberia, a process marked by the attention paid (in heterogeneous, not always satisfactory ways) to the entanglement of the legacies of colonialism and the present-day status of Iberian territories as cosmopolitan societies now integrated in the European Union. It is argued that, at least from the 1990s, curating emerged as a key activity for Iberian societies to display and configure an image of themselves as modern and fully integrated in the European cultural landscape. Such an image, however, had to cope with the legacies of colonialism and the profound socioeconomic transformations of these societies. This book is concerned with bringing together, while redefining and expanding, Iberian and curatorial studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786838759

Book preview

Introduction

Fictions of Cosmopolitanism, Spectacles of Alterity. Curating and the (Un) Making of Coloniality in Contemporary Iberia

Illustration

CARLOS GARRIDO CASTELLANO AND BRUNO LEITÃO

In 2010 the itinerant European biennial Manifesta landed in Murcia in the south-east of the Spanish State.1 Since the Manifesta is one of the most important contemporary art events in Europe, the chosen venue came as something of a surprise. The eighth edition of Manifesta was unique for two reasons: for the very first time, a team composed of three curatorial and artistic collectives was selected, deviating from the scheme where an individual curator is at the forefront of these events. Secondly, and more important for the focus of this book, the exhibition was grounded in the idea that Europe (and particularly south-eastern Spain) was indissolubly linked to Africa. As Manifesta only targets ‘peripheral’ cities across Europe – locations where the continent’s history and cultural identity emerge as somehow different – both the topic and the venue chosen for the edition were highly significant. Murcia’s ‘peripherality’, however, was not exempt from contradictions and calls for further examination. For the organisers of Manifesta 8, Murcia’s peripheral condition emerged from its proximity to the Moroccan coast. For the Murcian artists and curators involved in the biennial, peripherality meant something altogether different, in relation to the shifting and increasingly institutionalised artistic landscape of the Spanish State. The same disparity of views and expectations was also present in the selection of artists and artworks included in the biennial. While many local artists approached the migrant African population living and working in the region, international artists were prone to address Murcia’s ‘Africanity’ from a vaguer perspective. Whereas in the first case there was a risk of eroticising and othering the migrant population, potentially projecting Orientalist stereotypes onto North Africa, in the second case, the same risk affected the south-eastern Spanish context where the biennial was taking place. In both cases, more than discourse and identity construction were at stake: the point was not only which discourse of Europe (and the Iberian space) was being portrayed by Manifesta. The socioeconomic implications deriving from the kind of model for cultural development followed in the territory were also crucial. Since success in attracting the itinerant biennial also implies placing cities in the spotlight of the art world and attracting large amounts of funding, its presence would also be fundamental for issues of urban remodelling and regional development.

Indeed, Manifesta 8 provides a remarkably accurate snapshot of the main concerns of this book. Curating and the Legacies of Colonialism in Contemporary Iberia deconstructs the idea that Portuguese and Spanish postcolonial societies are exceptional. Although we recognies the singularities of both Portuguese and Spanish visual and curatorial practices, we also argue that a comparative, Iberian approach is not only possible but also highly productive. While the artistic debates emerging in Portugal and within the territories of the Spanish State have not found many points of contact, this book will examine the Iberian curatorial landscape as a shared reality. That was our main concern in January 2017, when we organised a meeting Península: procesos coloniales y prácticas artísticas y curatoriales, in the Hangar, Lisbon.2 Península was a network of researchers, practitioners and activists created in 2012 around the MNCARS (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía). The Lisbon meeting sought to break from the Spanish-centrism that had dominated the activity of the network until then, which despite its ‘peninsular’ name, had never ventured into Portuguese territory. Although Península dissolved soon after 2017, the debates held in Lisbon were crucial in revealing the existence of common ground and the need to keep taking account of the specificities of each Iberian context when dealing with curatorial and cultural production. This book owes much to – and intends to continue – these productive Iberian exchanges and (mis) understandings.

Curating and the Legacies of Colonialism in Contemporary Iberia conceives curating as a key frame through which contemporary Iberian identities are produced. The editors and contributors to this book envisage curating as a practice that has long exceeded the scope of displaying a specific set of artworks, and therefore goes well beyond exhibition-making to engage productively with educational and infrastructural features. Our understanding of curating challenges the idea of curators as all-powerful organisers of cultural forms, focusing on the fluid redefinition of roles and functions that characterises contemporary artistic practice. The essays commissioned for this volume explore a broad, heterogeneous range of practices, including artistic interventions, art education and cultural programming. We consider Iberian art centres and curatorial practices as crucial in the configuration of modern and cosmopolitan identities in the Iberian territories. At the same time, however, these centres and practices have been shaped by the contradictions emerging in the (re-)construction of modern societies after the long dictatorships of António de Oliveira Salazar (1933–68) and Marcelo Caetano (1968–74) in Portugal and Francisco Franco (1936–75) in the Spanish State. Understanding the role of curatorial practices becomes essential for addressing the contradictions lying behind the democratisation and globalisation of Iberian societies. This is the main issue the book will address. In the Iberian context it was art institutions that advanced and championed the definition of democratic cultural identities, a necessary step in the process of democratising and modernising Iberian societies after the long dictatorships of Salazar, Caetano and Franco. Our interest in curating is motivated by the outstanding importance of the exhibitional and spectacularised forms of display that accompanied the creation of museums and contemporary art institutions across the Iberian territory, including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC) in Badajoz, the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the Serralves Museum in Porto, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in Barcelona, the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC) in Seville. These institutions, many of them created during the economic boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s, have been seen by some as a platform for expressing anxieties about democratisation and the individual freedom of Iberian societies.3 At the same time, they played a complex and often controversial role, promoting democratic citizenship but also neoliberal consumerism, championing a ferocious competition that sought to place Iberian cities on the peninsular and European map as cosmopolitan and modern cultural capitals.4 Museums and contemporary art centres became crucial in fostering processes of urban transformation through the confluence of signature architecture, foreign investment and a careful rebranding of the ‘local’, as the case of the Guggenheim Bilbao exemplifies.5 Through these transformations, contemporary art institutions were used to craft a renewed image of Iberian cities as cosmopolitan cultural hubs, an image simultaneously conceived to meet the expectations of the democratised local societies and to (attempt to) ‘catch up’ with contemporary cultural trends after decades of isolation.

Explaining these processes, the essays commissioned and compiled in this volume present curating as a privileged location where strategies of territorialisation, cultural affirmation and socioeconomic rebranding converge. One of the most direct consequences deriving from this perspective concerns the need to question and historicise the preponderance of art exhibitions. Within the Iberian context as elsewhere, exhibitions became the privileged form of cultural production linked to contemporary art, as they were perfectly suited to cope with the expectations of the myriad centres and museums that proliferated by the end of the twentieth century. Exhibitions and curating were not neutral platforms regulating artistic taste; rather, they should be analysed as part of a broader logic and ideology of cultural production. It is by no means paradoxical that the task of curating, which emerged within the Iberian context of the end of the 1980s as an omnipresent reference in the contemporary art medium, was the result of a process of informal apprenticeship by its practitioners. The so-called ‘curatorial turn’ of contemporary art was marked in the Iberian context by a generation of self-taught professionals coming from a wide range of fields and, more often than not, arose from an academic system that was still struggling to throw off the influence of dictatorial, conservative and provincial educational models. Juan Vicente Aliaga contends that the process of apprenticeship for the first generation of curators operating within the Spanish State was made ‘in fits and starts’ and with a high reliance on foreign scholarships, something that also applies in the Portuguese case. This lack of a formal curatorial tradition certainly shaped the way that curatorial activity evolved. It undoubtedly helped to enshrine celebrity curators coming from abroad, but it also granted Iberian curators a degree of freedom that more formal education and professional training might have limited.

For Jesús Carrillo, the emergence of curating in modern and contemporary art institutions was not only fundamental for the promotion of democratic aspirations for renewal pursued by Iberian governments; it also naturalised a particular view of artistic creativity based on spectacular gestures, urban renewal and rampant marketisation as the unique arena in which questions relating to cultural production should be resolved:

It is not simply that the governments drove the marketisation of the art world and the revival of the object as a consumer good following the general international trend, but rather that through the emphatic identification of this transformation with the modernisation and Europeanisation of the country, the symbolic worth of art was used to define the identity of the new Spain as a capitalist democracy.6

This policy resulted in the adoption of an institutional landscape where every city embarked on a ferocious competition for singularity and relevance, attempting to propose and arbitrate on the contemporary within an already overcrowded map of cultural institutions. The strategies adopted to this end have been carefully characterised by Jorge Luis Marzo and Patricia Mayayo in the following terms:

Emphasis on macroactions (especially in the construction of large features, but also in the organisation of big events such as fairs or biennials), to the detriment of grassroots work or investment in education; a tendency to political cronyism that affects not only the criteria for granting aid and subsidies […] but also the relationship between different administrations […] a lack of strategic planning […] and finally unabashed interventionsim from the seat of power that hampers the participation of civil society, of ‘living culture’, in the design of cultural politics.7

If contemporary art acted within the Spanish State as the distorted mirror of Iberian societies in search of an image of themselves as modern, cosmopolitan and fully integrated, something similar happened in Portugal, a country with one of the longest-lasting relationships with colonialism. As in the case of the Spanish State, the construction of a new and democratic Portuguese society was haunted by the legacy of the country’s colonial experience. In this context, new exclusions have emerged disguised as intercultural citizenship, turning cultural production into a space of negotiation where that legacy is simultaneously reproduced and challenged.8 In Portugal, private collections or donors become arbiters of national taste through the organisation of art exhibitions locally and through a system of scholarships and a careful selection of the artists who would represent the image of the nation abroad. The Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Serralves Foundation in Oporto acted as de facto public art institutions in terms of funding and prestige, determining the tone of what is shown in each city, and actively taking part in the process of touristification that affected Portugal, and specifically Lisbon, during the 2000s.9

Despite having been critically underrepresented in the debates on artistic production and cultural institutions in the Iberian context, coloniality is a fundamental piece of the puzzle we have just described.10 Associated with the making and display of modern and cosmopolitan urban spaces was the revision of Portugal’s and Spain’s roles as former colonisers and the silencing of the legacy of that role in the last three decades. The specific time period covered by this book is characterised by a profound shift in Iberian demographics: the democratisation of Iberian societies turned their traditional role as producers of outward migration upside down, making Iberia a privileged receiver of migratory flows within the context of the European Union. If the practice of curating and the ‘boom’ of modern and contemporary art institutions emerged side by side with the ethnic transformation of Iberian societies due to migration, we should also recognise that the arrival of individuals from a wide variety of locations, including former colonial territories, also took place while objects and artworks from these territories were being displayed by institutions such as the Museo de América in Madrid or the Museu de Oriente in Lisbon. Migration and display were therefore part of what Ariella Azoulay, speaking of the recent migratory crisis in the Americas, recently conceived as ‘two intertwined regimes of treatment and maltreatment of objects and people – appropriated objects are well documented and taken care of by museums’ experts, and people are declared undocumented and subjected to maltreatment by border patrol police protocols.’11 Within the Iberian context, the act of perpetuating the legacy of colonialism was directly related to the technologies of display put into motion by curatorial devices. These must be seen as active agents in the making of cultural policies simultaneously shaped by and shaping visual and epistemic regimes.12

This book explores how curating may serve both to uncover and silence difference, and to critically address it. Coloniality shaped many aspects of the process of democratisation and modernisation of Iberian cities. It acted as catalyser of the Portuguese and Spanish governments’ obsession with promoting an international image of themselves as advanced examples of multicultural integration and cosmopolitanism. For instance, the ‘golden age’ of the Spanish empire was recycled as a central part of the foreign artistic policy of the Partido Popular conservative government around the turn of the century and used to naturalise a universalist and triumphalist image of the Spanish State.13 Not only was the imperial grandeur claimed by the propaganda machines of the Estado Novo and Francoist dictatorship kept partially alive during democratic times, but at the same time, museums and contemporary art centres were crucial in producing updated iterations aimed at presenting Iberian societies as exemplary cases of conflict-free multicultural integration. In attempting to cope with the new ethnic reality resulting from the arrival of individuals and communities from former Portuguese and Spanish colonial territories (though not reduced to these contexts), curatorial discourses were crucial in producing, and also confronting, assumptions and discourses about the continuities of coloniality, alongside the whitewashing of its most controversial side. Crucially, that controversial side was never relegated to a local dimension; rather, it was negotiated at a transnational level. This becomes evident, for example, if we look at a practice that became especially visible during the 1990s: the importation of curators and prefabricated ideas on coloniality. Foreign celebrity curators (such as Dan Cameron, Okwui Enwezor and Gerardo Mosquera) were invited to produce exhibitions in an attempt to place Iberian museums in the international spotlight. There is no doubt that the results of the collaborations between these curators and the Iberian museums that hosted them were critically sharp and timely. The main issue has nothing to do with these curators or with the exhibitions they produced, but is rather related to the fact that many of the practices dealing with alterity and coloniality and also many critical discourses on the same topics were literally ‘imported’ and used as yet another marker of cultural prestige, thus reproducing an interpretation of Iberian societies that is belated and dependent on foreign sources, and will set the tone for Iberian postcolonial thought.14

The spectacularisation and marketisation of contemporary art also affected how alterity was discussed and presented.15 As museums and contemporary art centres favoured exhibitions over any educational, research or display activity, in some cases they ended up investing in spectacular mega-exhibitions that in many cases were disconnected from the ethnic background of the places where these exhibitions took place. A good example of this is the above-mentioned Manifesta. Another example that epitomises the contradictions arising from the (lack of) articulation between the curatorial proposal and the transnational arena where it is intended to be consumed is Lisboa-Luanda-Maputo, an exhibition originally commissioned by the Camões Institute in 2007 as an itinerant project. Although designed as a collaboration between three nations, the exhibition did not achieve its goal of travelling to the African capitals. Worse still, the presence of Luanda and Maputo alongside Lisbon was justified as part of a centuries-old ‘sisterhood’ with Lisbon based in the Portuguese nation’s role in ‘initiating planetary culture [sic]’.16 Implicit in the logic of the exhibition was the promotion of the notion of ‘Lisbonness’ and Portugalidade as white, European and unproblematically linked to the supposed glories of the empire. In this case, the idea of the ‘encounter’ between three cities and the multicultural and transcontinental background of the exhibition served exactly the opposite purposes it claimed to have: it erased the multi-ethnic make-up of Portuguese society and the situations of marginalisation that many racialised subjects still suffer in Portugal. It essentialised and thematised Africa, rendering it visible and apprehensible, but only for a Portuguese audience.

Finally, it perpetuated metropolitan longings and anxieties by claiming the centrality of the Portuguese capital in the formation of global creative capital. Like many of the examples analysed in this book, Lisboa-Luanda-Maputo raises important methodological questions. It demonstrates, for instance, that an examination attentive only to the discourses at play in each exhibition does not fully address the contradictions implicit in the ways in which each curatorial practice works. It also urges us to conceive curating as a conflicted field where multiple agencies and expectations are produced and negotiated. These are some of the recurring questions asked by the authors integrating this volume.

Returning to our central topic, we can see how coloniality is also present in the ways that certain regional identities within the territories of the Spanish State were configured vis-à-vis the centralised presence of Madrid. For Selma Reuben Holo, ‘it is the broader-based institution of the museum that has succeeded most in normalizing the culture of pluralism.’17 She adds that ‘the cultural policies developed by the new government were strategically designed to aid in the important task of convincing the populace that the emerging democracy was, in the name of Spain, endorsing the country’s heterogeneity.’18 This became evident through the Pactos Autonómicos that led to the creation of Comunidades Autónomas between 1981 and 1992, which provided an occasion to redefine (not without symbolic and even physical violence) existing regional identities or to produce new ones. Again, modern and contemporary art institutions played a central role in the configuration and redefinition of many regional and national identities. In the articulation of new identity discourses, the special bonds of these territories with extra-peninsular realities were justified by occasionally taking into account and occasionally consciously ignoring the colonial origin of these bonds.

This is the case of Extremadura, where the region’s involvement in the colonisation of the Americas (Extremadura being the birthplace of many conquistadores) was recovered by art centres such as the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC) as an identity marker.19 A similar process can be found in the Canary Islands in the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), which sought to define Canarian identity as a result of the archipelago’s bonds with Europe, America and Africa.20 Both centres claimed and produced alternative modernities by engaging with both regions’ complex relationship with the Spanish colonial enterprise. Both gave space to the exhibition of art from Latin America and Africa in an attempt to counter the ‘Europeanised’ idea of the contemporary that Madrid was supposed to promote. In doing so, they challenged the narrow logic that defined artistic modernity according to a Western-based universalist idea of artistic modernity.

In any case, contemporary Iberian curating did not just aim at displaying coloniality as a fait accompli; it also reflected on how alterity was commoditised and transformed into a topic. If curating was a fertile ground for many ‘equívocos [misunderstandings]’, unintentional or otherwise, it also became the perfect ground for experimenting with more active ways of addressing the social contradictions deriving from the continuities of racism and other legacies of colonialism in the Iberian space. As the essays gathered in this book demonstrate, curating encouraged the devising of transgressive and activist creative strategies. Art institutions acted as platforms for inclusive and radical civic politics, voicing, presenting and reproducing cultural emancipation. A good example of this is provided by the decolonial walks offered by Ruta de Autor in Barcelona, a group of artists and activists that proposes an alternative, radical approach to the city’s history through carefully ‘curated’ itineraries. One of them shows, for instance, the economic impact of transatlantic commerce in the development of late twentieth-century Barcelona, making a connection between the urban remodelling that took place around that time and more contemporary processes of gentrification and touristification. Similarly, the cultural geography of Lisbon or Madrid is being challenged by the action of racialised collectives claiming ownership of the public space and directly confronting the racial marginalisation lying at the heart of the constitution of that space. These practices enshrine as many contradictions as the first examples we have mentioned. In fact, they stretch and blur the boundaries between curation, creativity and affirmative action and, consequently, they redefine the basis and the objectives of critical thought. This book is a direct result of this redefinition.

One question remains. Does the emergence of spectacularised art institutions provide enough ground to establish an Iberian comparison? It is clear that such proliferation of cultural institutions responds to a larger neoliberal transformation arising out of a shift in the uses of cultural production,21 though with the appropriation of creativity and flexibilisation as the driving forces of a deregulated version of neoliberalism.22 This process is strongly linked to art’s role in gentrification and urban transformation.23 From this perspective, contemporary art politics played a tripartite role within the Iberian context. It created and displayed an image of normality, modernism and cosmopolitanism after the dictatorships, promoting the idea that there was a democratic public sphere. It prepared the grounds for exporting a ‘new’ image of Spain and Portugal abroad. And it went some way towards shaping regional and national identities. It is from this perspective that we believe that a comparative approach is more than justified.

Curating and the Legacies of Colonialism in Contemporary Iberia comprises three sections dealing with curating and coloniality in different ways. The first focuses on the relationship between display and difference. The second, on how curating fused with a broad range of institutional practices including cultural programming and art education. Finally, the third section covers activist and interventional practices that go beyond the reach of the museum. The essays in the first block provide an in-depth account of exhibitions and museum-based curatorial practices that developed postcolonial approaches to the Iberian reality between 1990 and 2010. The block starts with consideration of the potential that curating offers for a redefinition of the scope and methodology of Iberian Studies. Despite the proliferation of debate forums in Europe and the United States, curators and visual creators have rarely taken part in conversations on the discipline. Breaking with this lack of communication, in his essay Carlos Garrido Castellano suggests that a critical examination of the contemporary Iberian curatorial landscape reveals many of the contradictions affecting the region around the turn of the twenty-first century. More than this, he argues that a focus on the curatorial leads to a useful redefinition and updating of the main concepts and problems determining Iberian Studies. In her chapter, Olga Fernández López takes up some of the considerations of the previous essay to consider the thorny relationship between modernity, democratisation and coloniality in the context of the Spanish State. Fernández López argues that in this case we find a ‘systemic coloniality’ that affects not only the ways in which art and cultural institutions work, but also the strategies developed by artists and other creators. At the same time, however, she acknowledges the role of curating and artistic practice in fuelling a ‘slow process of consciousness and visibilisation of the continuity and effects of colonial processes’. Pep Dardanyà adds another layer of complexity to this discussion on the transformative capacity of curating by addressing how cultural diversity was mobilised in the case of Barcelona. Dardanyà explores cultural diversity as an ambivalent resource that could drive either recognition or further exotification and commodification. In any case, he acknowledges the importance of curating and more specifically of exhibitions (which for him work ‘as a format of representation and strategy for social communication’) in the process of defining positive uses of diversity. It follows an interview with curator and director of the Centro de Arte y Naturaleza (CDAN, Huesca, Spain) Juan Guardiola. Guardiola has been responsible for three large-scale interrogations on the colonial visual repository of the Spanish State. His work spans across the territories of the Philippine Islands, the Sahara and the Americas. In this conversation, Guardiola reflects on his experience as a curator in public institutions while analysing some of the curatorial strategies put into practice in order to challenge representational shortcomings when approaching the Spanish State’s colonial history and its continuity in the present. In his essay, Manuel Gago focuses on the construction of Galician identities through exhibition-making. Gago’s chapter provides an exhaustive discussion of the evolution of cultural politics in Galicia over more than thirty years in relation to his own experience as a curator of large-scale shows. This chapter identifies in art exhibitions a platform where a more open notion of the public space can be articulated. Finally, section 1 closes with an examination of a somewhat neglected topic: the absence of Equatorial Guinea from the Spanish cultural imagination. With a focus on photography display, Inés Plasencia ponders whether art exhibitions could raise new questions about history and coloniality through more engaged and activist-led uses of cultural and curatorial production. In doing so, this essay anticipates some of the major debates and concerns of the following two sections of this book.

The second section covers curatorial practices that go beyond the contemporary art exhibition form and explore alternative ways of engaging broader and more diverse audiences. This section opens with a chapter on ethno-racial agency and coloniality in the context of the art institutions of the Spanish State. Suset Sánchez reveals how black bodies have rarely occupied exhibition rooms and museums in the Spanish State. In her view, the prevailing absence of racialised subjectivities in the curatorial discourses of artistic institutions in the Iberian Peninsula reflects the prevailing silence on racism and coloniality in the Spanish public sphere and civil society. By exploring a group of initiatives that began to challenge this silence around the 2010s, Sánchez reveals hidden correlations between the visual marginalisation of slavery and racialised subjects, and broader social problems relating to citizenship, migration and discrimination. A similar view is developed in the essay by Adonay Bermúdez with a special focus on the Canary Islands. As Bermúdez explains, the Canary Islands cannot be detached from Africa. The migratory bonds between both entities make any separation impossible. The representations of Canarian indigenous communities are clearly connected to African art, especially the north and west of the continent. Bermúdez’s essay is concerned with critically revisiting the links between the Canary Islands and Africa by stressing the weight of shared stories of colonial and postcolonial categorisations. Finally, the conversation with curator Elvira Dyagani Ose, currently a lecturer at Goldsmiths and director of The Showroom (London) and formerly curator of renowned institutions such as Tate Modern, rounds up these two essays’ insights into the role of curating in making Africa (in) visible within the Spanish State. Ose, one of the leading specialists in contemporary African art, addresses her own curatorial experience in Spain in relation to issues of representation, social engagement and curatorial innovation. The book’s second block closes with two interrelated essays focusing on contemporary Portugal. Bruno Leitão addresses a crucial episode in this process of decentralisation. By analysing the outcomes of the Gulbenkian Foundation-driven programme, Próximo Futuro, Leitão weighs the project’s ambitions against the expectations and the artistic literacy of Portuguese art audiences up to the beginning of the 2000s. At the same time, he provides a critical view of the trajectory of António Pinto Ribeiro, the main curator of Próximo Futuro and undoubtedly the curator in Portugal with the longest-standing interest in providing more resources to curating as a way of dealing with the legacies of colonialism. For her part, Marta Lança addresses her own experience as founder of Buala, the most exhaustive and consistent digital platform dealing with postcolonial criticism in relation to contemporary creative practices in Portuguese-speaking contexts. Lança provides a critical view of the difficulties of running a platform with the characteristics of Buala. At the same time, she remains attentive to the potential of digital cultural programming and the role of artistic archives in relation to cultural networking. It is this role, she argues, that allows initiatives such as Buala to challenge the colonial legacy at play in the fact that many creative practices coming from Portuguese-speaking contexts are still displayed and discussed, mainly in Lisbon.

The book’s last section revolves around critical artistic discourses, activism and artistic interventions, rethinking how the Iberian visual imagination is still marked by the sequelae of colonialism. The first essay, by María Íñigo Clavo, explores how individual artists have also been central in challenging the normalisation of a colonial visual regime in the territories of the Spanish State. Dealing with the artistic responses to the Latin American bicentenaries commemorated in 2010, the essay considers the relevance of American revolutions (rightfully acknowledging the centrality of the Haitian), and then approaches the work of contemporary artists such as Santiago Sierra, in whose polemical work, issues of human exploitation and objectification are brought to the fore. Sharing some of the concerns of Íñigo Clavo’s essay, Cristina Balma-Tívola takes us back to Barcelona to explore the evolution of the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món. Balma-Tívola examines the local cultural ecology arising around the museum in relation to issues of institutional power and privilege and international funding. In her essay, Aurora Alcaide Ramírez analyses ARTifariti, a collective artistic action initiated in 2007 in the Western Sahara. ARTifariti claims the right of Sahrawi people and peoples to their land, their culture, their roots and their freedom. The event’s format is that of an annual meeting of artists intended to redefine the Tifariti enclave, generating a spirit of coexistence in which interrelation and communication transcend the artistic fact itself and in which art assumes its public, reflective and political role. By shifting from the previous essays’ interest in individual creativity and anthropology museums to issues of artistic collectivism and collaborative creative activism, Alcaide Ramírez provides a valuable counterpart to the previous essay, making us aware of the institutional and curatorial dynamics regulating artistic consumption and circulation. In their essay Nancy Garín and Antoine Silvestre explore how colonialism has always used legality to ground the myth of Western universality. Through a group of young artists that establish their lugar de habla (place of enunciation) in relation to their racialised experience of being migrants within the Spanish State, both authors explore how the supposed universality of European legality coexisted with a radical differentiation between metropolitan and colonial territories. For them, a double standard was established, supporting and hiding at the same time a modern, European ‘civilisation’ considered universal and located at one of the edges of the chasm dividing North and South. This made colonial territories invisible, giving free rein to the atrocities of capitalist accumulation. Arising from this context, in their essay Garín and Silvestre suggest that contemporary decolonial struggles are not limited to former colonial territories, but they also grow and are embodied in power metropolises. The conversation between curator and architect Paula Nascimento and art historian Adriano Mixingue takes us to Angola and Portugal, precisely to address the possibility of articulating decolonial alternatives through curatorial practice. Both