The call for papers for the tenth edition of post(s) is now open. In this issue, we will receive academic essays analyzing the issues raised by X. Andrade (Universidad de los Andes, Bogota). In keeping with our interest in creative writing, we also invite visual essays and performative writings that present experimental and creative modes of knowledge production.

All submissions will be received through the OJS platform. For more details on the publication process, download our guide for authors.

In recent decades, the crossings between social sciences and different disciplines related to design and the social life of images and things, with different artistic practices, have proliferated and become ways of rethinking the craft of research and the production of knowledge in different registers that transcend the textual device and become circuits such as laboratories, multimedia platforms, festivals, galleries, museums, public spaces and community interventions. 

This panorama of exchanges occurs, however, in a context in which cultural othernesses reappear with force in public debate and set up tendencies to rethink difference in terms of radical alterities with their perverse consequences for the return of questions of representation that seemed obsolete after the postmodernism of the 1990s. The politicization of current experiments thus has a problematic status in relation to the various disciplinary closures against which they serve as openings and counterweights.

Symptomatically, curatorial practices have acquired a specific weight among the mechanisms of reconfiguration of the interdisciplinary transactions described above. Although the so-called "curatorial turn" has been consolidated in the field of visual arts since the 1990s, it has had its own temporalities and scales for other circuits. Recently there are those from Europe and the United States who appropriate this terminology to characterize the contemporary scene in a wide range of disciplines, such as anthropology, design and architecture, media studies, performance and fashion, cinema and transmedia forms.

The preponderance of curatorship in art has given rise to heated discussions on the role of the curator as conceptualizer, mediator, agent or manager. In other disciplinary and interdisciplinary circuits, meanwhile, there are emerging debates, effects and practices to which this call primarily wishes to give space. Given that the field of art holds a symbolic capital that allows it to challenge the political correctness of the academy, it is necessary to explore the critical potential of its parodic, ironic, sarcastic, humorous, iconoclastic and/or pataphysical strategies in order to produce original reflections on the possibilities of awakening looks that centrally take the image and different regimes of the aesthetic within assemblages and installations that make use of multiple devices and media, including texts but rethinking them in dialogue with different notions of curatorship and various forms of conceptualism beyond the established references in the history of art.

The intersections created from multiple borrowings and mutual intrusions not only give rise to encounters and appropriations but, fundamentally, to productive tensions that tend to reconfigure what is done in ethnography as well as in other fields that, like design and science, make use of its methods for creative, speculative and applied purposes.

Based on ethnographically grounded studies and experimental essays, this call promotes the theoretical deepening of how aesthetics and different technologies are integrated in these practices and how they affect the traditionally established boundaries between research and creation. We encourage the submission of articles and multimedia essays that conceptually, historically and ethnographically intervene in the ways of doing research and rethinking creation at the crossroads between social sciences, art, design, communication and other disciplines, providing reflexive interest to the academic micro-practices themselves and the tensions that characterize a heterogeneous field in the production of emerging knowledge, with particular attention to what is done and thought from the social sciences and art from Latin America. 

The social uses of images, their virtual circulation and consumption practices through devices and applications, and the infinite constitution of media archives in the network force us to think about interdisciplinary practices that take these new forms of assemblage into account, in which the image is an active part of exchanges and uses that go beyond merely representational issues and that bring us closer to different curatorial practices, many of them vernacular, on images. Consequently, we are also interested in interventions that radically rethink the nature of fieldwork and the empirical in dialogue with archives and digital worlds. 

Conceptualisms and ethnography as curatorial practice deserve special attention in this call for papers and require closer mappings of their multiple genealogies, a problem already raised for decades in art. How, then, to understand the "conceptual" properly in emerging forms of anthropology and other disciplines in dialogue with art strategies? What are the consequences of curatorial intrusion for the conceptualization and methods of working-with-images and things? How is the aesthetic brought into play in these forms of assemblage? What kind of ethnography is emerging from these practices?

About our guest editor

X. Andrade

Ph.D. in Anthropology, The New School for Social Research, New York. Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Image Laboratory, Department of Anthropology, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá. Project Evaluator for the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research since 2007. Life President of Full Dollar, an anthropology company that deals in contemporary art circuits since 2004.

Recent books:

Narcolombia: Líneas de Investigación y Creación sobre Estética y Narcotráfico en Colombia. (2020).

The Vulgarity of Democracy: Political Pornography, Masculinity and Politics in Ecuador (2019).

Webpages:

https://narcolombia.club/

https://corporacionfulldollar.wordpress.com/