Unmaking to Make: Art as Decolonising Practice in Latin America’s Future, Past and Present - Modern Americas

Unmaking to Make reorients global conversations on decolonization by centring Afro-Diasporic and Indigenous perspectives from across Latin America. Through a wide-ranging selection of texts, including critical essays, curatorial reflections and interviews, it explores how artistic practice actively theorises, models and enacts alternative modes of living, offering a vital counterpoint to the ?decolonising? agendas often adopted in North American and European contexts.

Organized into four thematic parts: counter-genealogies, institutionalities, the decolonisation of language and plural temporalities, the volume shows how art reshapes knowledge, unravels colonial narratives and builds new vocabularies of power. Contributors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Martinique, Mexico, Peru and beyond reveal the region?s deep histories of cultural resistance and the close ties between art and social life.

They also ask how museums, universities and cultural institutions might be reimagined in contexts of structural precarity and political urgency. Drawing on the generative potential of creative practice, the book highlights Latin American art as both a body of theory and a method for imagining new futures. This volume is an essential resource that recognises embodiment, collaboration and plurality as vital to dismantling colonial regimes ? and envisioning genuinely inclusive futures.