Affiliated Researchers:

• Martí Peran, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
• Juan Vicente Aliaga, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
• Néstor García Canclini, Distinguished professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana de México and Researcher Emeritus of the National System of Researchers in Mexico
• Giuliana Bruno, Harvard University, Visual and Environmental Studies, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Martin Grossmann, Universidad de Sao Paulo, Brasil. Director, Institute of Advanced Studies USP. Director of the Cultural Centre Sao Paulo, from August 2006 to May, 2010
• Joaquín Barriendos, Columbia University, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, New York, USA
• Marquard Smith, Westminster University of London, UK and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Visual Culture
• Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh, Gender and Contemporary Art, Edinburgh, UK

In turn, the project’s main objectives will be organized through the development of the following strategies:

1. It will frame the proposal in terms of a history of culture and identity as a way to expand the territory of art into the realm of culture. This cultural history will be in constant flux between Art History and Visual and Cultural Studies.

2.It will replace a linear, stylistic and teleological history (dominated by the concepts of break, return, originality, ownership/authorship, the death of the author), with one that focuses more on internationalism, nationalism, diaspora, multiculturalism, globalization, localism and multiculturalism, as these concepts seem to respond to one common denominator: their proximity to the idea of culture beyond art, and their commitment to the conception of identity beyond language. This approach will also imply the analysis of a new prototype of artist as an “inhabitant of the global world”, interested in social discourse –not as a class-based discourse, but rather as a territorial understanding of society. The global artist will be understood as a figure that is not so much a creator of images but rather a researcher of images. S/he will collect, create and exhibit information in order to unveil and analyze censured, humiliated and defiled conditions in the contemporary world: democracy, justice, otherness, migration, uprootedness, diaspora.

3.It will conduct field work in order to collect the artistic practices of several authors (both in metropolitan areas and cosmopolitan environments, as well as peripheral and / or diasporic zones). This will result in a sampling of creative projects made by artists belonging to a new global-mapping -Latin American, African, Asian, American, European and Spanish-based artists- under the following headings: a) nationalism, b) multiculturalism c) new internationalism d) postcolonial discourse e) the concept of living on the border f) the situation of the diasporic artist in the metropolis g) periphery and centrality h) glocalism i) new ethnicities in the postnational world j) interculturality or shared universality k) cosmopolitanism (new relationships between the local and the global through conversation and translation l) deterritorialization in the framework of global economy.

4. It will work on designing a new model for interdisciplinary discourse. From the methodological point of view, this model will allow art historians, film theorists, cultural geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and other academics to focus their collective interest on art and cultural globalization.

The proposed project is proposed as one of its priority goals continue the research conducted in the previous project HAR2919 / 17403 CRITICAL CARTOGRAPHY OF ART AND VISUALITY IN THE GLOBAL AGE: New Methodologies, Concepts, and Analytic Scopes Part I, CCAV / ART Part II, expanding both the field of study as the objectives of initial work. All this from the following key contributions:

• Continue specific boundary line as it relates to the field of collective and competitive research covering National Research Programs.
• Strengthen a team of teachers and researchers from different departments of Art History, Visual Studies, Cultural Studies and Global Studies both from the University of Barcelona, departments and other national and international universities. Researchers those who are interested in critical approaches to the impact of globalization, migration and international circulation of Visual Culture.
• Consolidate internationally and specifically under the “Horizon 2020” program, a financial instrument for implementing research and innovation of a research group that promotes stable mainstreaming and “theoretical soil” of knowledge in the field history of global contemporary art, plus the necessary collaboration of universities, museums and all cultural institutions that have similar objectives to the germ of the project. In this sense it operates under the provisions of programs for research and technical development to be developed by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).
• Achieving academic internationalization of content and art historical objectives of the project submitted and equipment research and proposed work. We count on the participation in the task force recognized theorists of Global Cultural Studies internationally. Between such international researchers, we highlight the presence of Néstor García Canclini (Universidad Nacional de Mexico), Giuliana Bruno (Harvard University, USA), Martin Grossmann (Universidad de Sao Paulo, Brasil), Joaquín Barriendos (Columbia University, Nueva York, USA), Marquard Smith (Westminster University, UK), and Angela Dimitrakaki (University of Edinburg, UK).

From the scientific point of view, the main aim of the project presented for the period 2014-2016 (CCVA / ART II) is to create a new framework that generates theoretical, historiographical and critical devices that allow contextualize and make sense of the practical contemporary art generated in the process of “globalization” that is under today’s society and semantically structured around the values ​​of identity, multiculturalism and interculturalism town.

Contextually, these objectives based on the recognition that society is moving in a space of a deconstructed Empire (Hardt and Negri theories about it), emerging with a new global order, as a new form of sovereignty as part of an irreversible process globalization, transnational corporatism, and multinational capitalism in the field of economic and cultural exchanges. In this sense one of the goals inherent in the project is theoretically involve the phenomenon of globalization in artistic matters, moving from their places of academic reference linked to the field of cultural theory and cultural studies (Frederic Jameson, The Cultures of Globalization, 1998).

This will facilitate a contextualization / displacement of the artistic work of a number of artists today under a dense circuit communication networks that enable the realization that in the context of globalization, what matters is the import and export of cultures, is say, an overcoming egalitarian redistribution of the old dichotomy between colonizers and colonized cultures.

This context that justifies and encourages discourse exhibitions / mounts / performaciones in a globalizing coordinates of significance that activate critical practices of art and its institutions, and those that referred to the postcolonial field of study is critically positioned in the anti-colonial struggles for social and cultural liberation.

The research bases and consistent knowledge enunciated have no purpose in themselves, but in the projection and diffusion of the issue of globalization and visual heritage that globalization brings. A visual-artistic heritage (performative nature and all creative transformations etc.) not only be considered evidence of this but fundamental element of the configuration and evolution of society in its various aspects. This heritage is the result of the transformation of artistic creation and the company itself have suffered over the last decades and which can be considered an expression of a certain way of conceiving and expressing the reality of great wealth and social and cultural diversity , and the different ways that each culture has understood and reused.

The right and proper knowledge of that as part of reality is fundamental and highly profitable in a society, if profitability is not associated in first grade with the economy. THE CCVA / ART II project includes a very special way this aspect of the investigation and especially to cater to this need from the recommendations carried out by the European Charter for Researchers 2005 urging researchers to disclose to society their work so that it can be understood by non-specialists, thereby improving understanding of science by the public.