Monstruos a través del tiempo: emisarios políticos, en prácticas culturales, artísticas y educativas

Abstract

With an extended span of time, this work proposes an approach to cultural practices with the creation of monsters as thematic core. I study resonances and transformations of their cultural as well as political and aesthetic role, in processes of imperial expansion, at the different stages of my sculptural and visual work, and in artistic education spheres with children and young people. The monsters that emerged in the acute process of the conquest and colonization of the American territory are crossed here with those I have conceived as a ceramist and graphic artist, to mobilize in public spaces my exercises of critical thinking and labor-union activism. They also meet other monsters created with children and young people; in the classrooms I share as a teacher. The research-creation experience gathered here gives account of three ways in which the monstrous has taken concrete forms -verbal, visual and three-dimensional- for the confrontation of the otherness, in cultural and political battles of domination, resistance or in the search for alternatives that make coexistence more flexible.