Paper short abstract:

In this paper I focus on how contemporary art practitioners in in São Paulo's Residência Artística Cambridge engage with notions of epistemic disobedience and the production of knowledge, both responding to, and generating theoretical insights for a decolonial practice.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I focus on how contemporary art practitioners engage with notions of epistemic disobedience and the production of knowledge, both responding to, and generating theoretical insights for a decolonial practice. Based on ethnography of a year-long artistic residency programme, the Residência Artística Cambridge, a programme conducted within a 17 storey occupied building in the centre of São Paulo, I highlight how an artistic practice based on contexts rather than objects led artists to encounter, respond to and articulate an entirely different notion of 'participation' than that put forward by Claire Bishop (2004, 2006, 2012) or Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). This type of participation finds an echo with the emphasis the modernidad/colonialidad network and Global South platform more widely places upon knowledge generation and I suggest that what characterized and shaped these processes was their location: marginal to the apparel of mainstream academia, and positioned at the porous frontier of institutional and non-institutional contemporary art spaces, these practices occur instead from within a skein of networks and hierarchies deriving from multiple modes of life. If shifting the basis of our knowledge is shifting our way of being in this world, the artists of the Residência point toward how artistic practice can be theorized as relational and transformational, resignifying meaning to bring about as yet unknown imaginaries and societal change.