Re-Tracing Methods: Rethinking Media Art Histories and Relations Between the North and the Global South

Abstract

This paper examines the work of Mexican artist Marcela Armas, and the Colombian artistic duo Martinez-Zea (Camilo Martinez and Gabriel Zea). Although different at the aesthetic and conceptual level, the works of these artists turn attention toward the observer, but only to emphasize her profound conflictive, precarious, yet interdependent relation with other subjects. Their work also explore relationships between self and Other, North and South. I advance thee main claims: First, in the work of Armas and Martinez-Zea I identify an urgency to re-orient the categories, discourses, and political positions that art and artists occupy in both the North and the Global South. Second, I argued that demonstrating that artists from Latin America have made keen contributions to the history of art is an incomplete project if the paradigms we use to write media art histories do not change. Third, I posed that art historians and curators can influence a shift of positions by carefully examining the themes and the orientations they use to frame their research and develop methodologies which confront rather than confirm predefined ideas about the political positions that subjects from the North and South occupy. My methodology pushes media art history beyond its comfort zone by focusing on questions of aesthetics, embodiment, geopolitics, subjectivity, and history propelled from queer phenomenology as well as gender and postcolonial perspectives (Ahmed; Gonzalez).