Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses how Latin American artistic practice dismantles the linear temporality of coloniality. Drawing on ethnography it focuses on art's potential to enact diverse futures from a non-linear standpoint, a subversive refusal to comply with the colonial project's teleological violence.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses recent theorisations of art's potential to enact non-linear temporalities, thus calling into question the ordered teleological violence of colonial matrices of sociality. Addressing theories of 'imminence', 'becoming' and 'critical fabulation', the paper takes its lead from Néstor García Canclini's understanding of how art situates us 'in a prior moment, when the real is [still] possible, when it has not yet broken down'. By placing artistic practice into dialogue with the prefigurative politics of David Graeber and Ailton Krenak, the colonial project's teleological impetus is revealed as normative and regulatory and resolutely premised on a linear understanding of time. Drawing on ethnographic work located in Brazil, the paper demonstrates how art disaggregates space and time, opening possibilities for the unexpected and unforeseen - a decoloniality latent with open-ended meanings and being. What are the consequences of such a theorisation? If we accept that much artistic work in Latin America does not, and never did, obey linear coloniality, then each work is not discrete and bounded; instead, each work, within its particular set of ancestral relations, is a vessel of interpenetrating moments and realities. Art inscribes in the now - in a creative gesture - a future as yet uninscribed; Latin American art, in its refusal to conform to linearity must necessarily present the continual elaboration of the new.