Residency period: August 1, 2017 to July 31, 2018
IEAT resident, Professor Maria Angelica Melendi de Biasizzo graduated in Literature from the Facultad de Psicologia y Letras – Universidad de Buenos Aires (1967) and in Visual Arts from the Guignard School of the State University of Minas Gerais (1985). PhD in Literary Studies from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (1999). Currently, she is an associate professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and belongs to the Editorial Board of Revista Pós at the same institution. She has experience in the field of Arts, with an emphasis on Foundations and Criticism of the Arts, working mainly on the following subjects: contemporary art, memory, art, body and photography. She investigates memory strategies developed by contemporary art in Latin America in relation to state terrorism and social violence, a subject on which she has published books and articles in national and international journals and academic journals. She is coordinator of the Art Strategies in the Era of Catastrophes Research Group (www.estrategiasarte.net.br) and editor of Lindonéia Magazine (online).
PROJECT: WHAT REMAINS OF THE DICTATORSHIP: TRANSGRESSION IN THE ART OF LATIN AMERICA BETWEEN TWO CENTURIES.
The project intends to investigate the artistic practices of some Latin American countries — Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, among others — from the redemocratization process that began, approximately, in the 1980s. It is not intended to elaborate a critical history of art in recent years, but to investigate the latency of authoritarian processes in works of art and critical discourses carried out during the period of redemocratization. The project proposes, firstly, to investigate the different redemocratization processes on the continent, to analyze their specificities and the possibilities of establishing comparative studies with countries where “authoritarian” or façade democracies were in force. For this, we will research Latin American artists and works from the period considered in order to establish a corpus of work, establish some categories and put them to the test in relation to research advances. We will conclude by examining the category of “Brazilianness” as proposed by Adriano Pedrosa, in order to understand whether this category makes sense and, if so, understand the set of formal and meaningful specifications that characterize it.