Concretizing the Revolutionary Utopia through Art in Latin America: Chilean New Song and OSPAAAL
Natália Ayo Schmiedecke | 9 April 2024 | 6 PM Gulf Standard Time (4 PM CET) | Zoom Webinar
Revolutionary expectation and rapprochement between art and politics were hallmarks of the long 1960s in Latin America. In this context, writers and artists felt responsible for contributing to the increase in the subjective conditions that would lead to Third World liberation.
This presentation analyzed how artists sought to realize the revolutionary utopia of the time by focusing on case studies corresponding to two revolutionary models that divided the lefts of the continent: the Cuban Revolution and the “Chilean road to socialism.”
The talk examined the graphic art of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) and the musical production of the New Chilean Song movement to identify different aesthetic resources used by artists to bring together different contexts, building in their works the desired identity and unity of what Fanz Fanon called the “wretched of the earth.” This presentation will also reflect on the limits of this project.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Natália Ayo Schmiedecke is currently a Research Associate at the Department of History of the University of Hamburg.
She obtained her PhD and master’s degrees in History from the São Paulo State University, in Brazil. She was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Campinas State University and a Visiting Researcher both at the University of Helsinki and the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. Her field of expertise is Latin American History of the 20th century, with an emphasis on the relationships between art and politics in Chile and Cuba during the Cold War.
She has authored the book Chilean New Song and the Question of Culture in the Allende Government: Voices for a Revolution (Lexington Books, 2022) and other books, chapters, and articles published in the Americas and Europe.