Outputs
ARTFICTIONS publications and outputs
Here you can find all the publications made by the ARTFICTIONS Team.
Where possible, we make the full texts of our publications openly available. If you are unable to access the full texts of any of our publications, please contact us and we will send them to you.
| Category | Category | Keywords | Year | Title | Abstract | Actions |
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Book |
Book | 2024 |
Cultural Labour and Contemporary World Literatures in Portuguese |
This book examines the evolution of contemporary narrative in Portuguese from the point of view of cultural labour. The main objective of this volume is to analyse the panorama of contemporary literary fiction in Portuguese under the prism of the economization of cultural creativity and the expansion of neoliberal understanding of creative subjectivity and self-realization. Assuming that neoliberalism still constitutes a haunting presence that becomes present in ways that are far from universal and homogeneous and that are shaped by coloniality, this book expands the debates on cultural labour and literary materialisms beyond European and North American contexts. Dealing with contemporary literary production from Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Macau, Canada and Goa, the volume also tries to reimagine issues of cultural labour and the expansion of artistic modes of self-definition from the point of view of contemporary literary production in Portuguese. | More details Read publication | |
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Book |
Book | 2023 |
Literary Fictions of the Contemporary Art System: Global Perspectives in Spanish and Portuguese |
The main objective of this book is to explain how contemporary literatures in Spanish and Portuguese are dealing with artistic creativity when artmaking is no longer a specialised field of cultural production, but rather an expanded field of socioeconomic interaction, personal and creative self-definition and collective imagination. The project positions the contemporary art novel as the most suitable place to understand how the economisation of cultural labour is affecting writers and artists alike. The authors examined in this book, including José Saramago, Rita Indiana Hernández, María Gainza, Mayra Santos Febres and Ondjaki (amongst others) explore the contradictions of the art market, the dynamics of art education, the multifaceted activity of curators and socially engaged artists in relation to broader debates on the role of culture in the configuration of socioeconomic dynamics. The book maps a new trend within contemporary literature that taps into the visual art system to reassess the role of literature in critical ways. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2024 |
Canta la Calle. Sonic affirmation and the politics of the carnivalesque in Cádiz |
This article combines ethnographic research and debates on cultural activism to challenge canonical views on carnival by positioning the festivity’s sonic dimension as an active force of placemaking that extends beyond the official timeframe of carnival. The paper centres on Cádiz, a Spanish city that celebrates one of the oldest and most influential carnivals of Southern Europe. Cádiz’s carnival is famous for the inventiveness of carnival groups made of local citizens who gather every year and dedicate months to prepare an original music repertoire. Seeking to expand our understanding of contemporary carnival, this article looks at how carnival in Cádiz has provided ground for a radical understanding of citizenship and political agency against neoliberal appropriations of the public space, as evident in the increasing weight of surveillance and gentrification. This article argues that carnival music provides a platform for radical ways of mobilising creativity to redefine placemaking. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2024 |
Allora & Calzadilla and the Planetary Consequences and Afterlives of Modernism in the Caribbean |
This article engages with the creative work of the duo of artists Jennifer Allora (b. 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla (b. 1971), attempting to make sense of the consequences and afterlives of modernism, which is to say, with the ways modernist aesthetics shape our present. My main aim is to expand on debates on aesthetic modernism to address the implications of the modern and colonial project as a planetary endeavor, one that is not limited to human beings and one that affects (and is affected by) the ebbs and flows of finance and debt, and also by energy, multispecies displacements, and climate colonialism. This is particularly important nowadays, when the possibility of a generic crisis looms over and conditions our sociopolitical imagination at a planetary scale. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2023 |
Batida and the Politics of Sonic Agency in Afro-Lisboa |
This article examines the politics of sonic agency in batida, the most successful recent electronic musical style emerging from Lisbon’s outskirts in Portugal. The genealogies of batida are closely linked to the emergence of a young generation of Djs do Gueto [Ghetto Djs] who unabashedly claim their right of belonging as major players within the Portuguese acoustic and cultural fields. We analyse batida as a space for agency and affirmative mobilisation of Afro-Portuguese populations. Two elements are of special interest: the digital recombination to celebrate the irreducibility of Afro-Portuguese experience, and the way in which racial exclusion, urban segregation, and racism are problematised through the act of inscribing the neighbouring sounds of peripheral neighbourhoods in their music. Through the examination of these two elements, we aim to position sonic agency as a central space in the configuration of racial politics and processes of nation building in the Portuguese case. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2024 |
Public Art and Social Media: Street Art Tourism, Sociocultural Agency and Territorialisation in Contemporary Lisbon |
This essay engages with Guias do Mocho [Mocho’s Tourist Guides], a bottom-up cultural tourism initiative emerging in Quinta do Mocho, a ‘peripheral’ neighbourhood of Lisbon, as a way of problematizing the relationship between public and street art and social media aesthetics. Scholarship on digital creative industries and street art tourism tends to emphasize the complicities of this kind of cultural experience with neoliberal understandings of the urban space. By examining an example of bottom-up, localized guided tours that operates through social media in the context of peripheral areas of Lisbon, we argue that public art and social media should be seen as part of a more complicated correlation, one in which the affects and effects of creative, site-specific projects are actively developed and expanded in unforeseen ways. Our research demonstrates that public art and social media are mutually developing a renewed economy of attention and system of valorization. The critical examination of both elements is compulsory when measuring the impact of art-driven processes of community development. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2023 |
Modos Artísticos. En torno a la novela de arte contemporánea como espacio de experimentación. Una mirada a Muerte Súbita (2013) de Álvaro Enrigue |
This article examines the creative potential and the experimental tone of contemporary fic-tion focusing on the art world. More specifically, the essay acknowledges Muerte Súbita (2013) by Álvaro Enrigue as a valuable example of the capacity of this kind of art novel to produce alternative understandings of the art system. Instead of representing historical characters or following the rules of the art field, contemporary art fiction works like a modified system that partially develops its own rules. Precisely, it is such original dimension what turns contemporary art novels into a laboratory where novel ways of uderstanding the articulation between artistic production, cultural labour and broader socioeconomic processes is being developed. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2023 |
¡Elige tu propia aventura! Reinventando los mundos del arte desde el Caribe |
En un momento clave para lo que se ha definido como “mundos del arte contemporáneo global”, el Caribe se adelanta a los debates del momento, generando un substrato cultural productivo e informe que ha permitido el surgimiento constante de prácticas artísticas activistas, colaborativas y de acción social mucho antes de que éstas pasaran a ser reconocidas. No se trata de que la creación contemporánea en la región sea difícil de categorizar; la cuestión principal es que el Caribe proporciona una especie de versión beta del juego que Steyerl planteara. La importancia de este trabajo colectivo es fundamental, más si cabe si tenemos en cuenta las circunstancias derivadas de la obsolescencia que Steyerl comenta, nuestra incapacidad para imaginar futuros más allá del colapso sistémico. Pensar desde el Caribe, por tanto, ofrece un nuevo punto de partida, una genealogía no tanto resiliente como generadora y expansiva que continúa parcialmente ignorada. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2023 |
Possible Spaces/Spaces of Possibility in Contemporary Brazilian Culture |
More details Read publication | ||
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2023 |
Trapping Ecosystems: Apeshit’s Politics of Post/coloniality |
On June 16, 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z released “Apeshit”—a trap-styled hip hop track featuring a chorus of “I can’t believe we made it / Have you ever seen the crowd going apeshit?” The much-commented-on music video for the track was framed as a hip hop takeover of the world’s most visited museum—Paris’s Louvre—featuring pop’s reigning power couple, marketed as “The Carters,” making themselves at home with a collection of dancers in flesh-colored black, brown, and beige bodysuits. While the video was generally received through the split-screen frame of either a cutting decolonial takedown of this monument to Western civilization or the ultimate in money-flaunting bling spectacle, a more subtle and complex set of issues is at play. This article examines the deep historical ambivalences at play in this pop cultural artifact. Employing multi-modal methodologies that combine visual and musical arts perspectives articulated via the frames of postcolonial studies, this analysis theorizes the cultural “traps” in effect. Ranging from the track’s “trap” sonic production and lyrical rhetoric of escape (“we made it”), to the historical trap of musealized colonial plunder and the Louvre’s labyrinthine, oft-subterranean floor plan, to the “trappings” of consumption, bourgeois self-making, and aesthetic contemplation, we seek to illustrate how this socio-cultural text destabilizes Enlightenment universalism and its public/private split. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2020 |
Ryder Meets Bourriaud. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and the Contradictions of “Creative Capitalism” |
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995) has been interpreted from multiple perspectives, with some critics highlighting the psychoanalytical and oneiric side of the novel while others focus on spatial and social elements. Engaging with all of these approaches, in this article I argue that Ishiguro’s fourth novel is eloquent of the main shifts in 1990s esthetics and cultural production. More specifically, in Ryder, the main character of The Unconsoled, it is possible to identify a relational artist who invests in dialogical exchange and social collaboration as creative strategies. From this perspective, I relate The Unconsoled to the emergence of relational esthetics and the so-called “social turn” in contemporary art. At the same time, however, I identify in The Unconsoled an interest in questioning the principles of contemporary collaborative artistic practices, defining consolation and social engagement as the complex yet unavoidable horizon of contemporary cultural production. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2022 |
Assessing the Neoliberal Künstleroman: “Creative” Self-Realisation and the Art World in Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall |
This article identifies fertile ground to explore the relationship between literature and neoliberalism in recent novels concerned with the analysis of the contemporary art system. Its main objective has to do with acknowledging the impact of artistic systems of valorisation and regulation in processes of self-definition and self-fulfilment taking place in broader spheres of the social. Simultaneously, the article also engages with the conditions of possibility of alternative art worlds. The article recognises the Künstlerroman form as a particularly suitable platform to understand the subsumption of literary production under neoliberalism. At the same time, it also acknowledges the potential of that form to articulate critical positionings against neoliberal reason while envisaging alternative futures. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2025 |
Living, Writing, Imagining (at) the End of Creative Capitalism |
Artistic capitalism has been with us for a long while. Yet something is wrong with it. We seem to be too stressed, too extracted, to invest more time and effort and subscriptions into curating our public personae. Back in the early 2010s, the idea that neoliberalism had entered a stage in which “artistic features” (a never-ending demand for originality, the articulation of systems of economic and social value based on flexibility and regulated transgression, the anesthetization of politics, the mobilization of creativity as a driving force of urban gentrification) seemed appealing. Ten years later, artistic capitalism (subjection by individualist subject formation) is decaying. We are not talking about a complete disappearance, a replacement. Things are subtler than that. The artistic imperative, the emphasis on participation and experience, the anxiety linked to like economies and profile capitalism, are still there. Yet there are new things, too. Technofascism, for that matter. This is not your average nightmare: whilst artistic capitalism relied on psychosocial isolation, the performance of narcissism and the establishment of hierarchies through a simulacrum of personal realization-as-differentiation, this new thing does not care about how curating has become part of the vocabulary of professional and personal self-realization or about the interiorization of extractive mode(l)s of self-exploitation. The farewell to artistic capitalism also implies a farewell to the human face of the capitalist imperative. Artistic capitalism relied on the collective fulfilment of the equation art=life; technofascism is creative in other, darker, ways. This essay explores this transition whilst remaining attentive to gaps and alleyways, but also to exit and resistance strategies. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2024 |
What is the contemporary in contemporary Caribbean art?(Forthcoming 2025) |
It would not be excessive to say that the production of art in the Caribbean within the last decades has largely exceeded the critical attempts to locate and historicize that production . In fact, historicizing has not been much in favor when it comes to Caribbean visual creativity, at least until recently. The reason for this is not just that the number of critical sources dedicated to map recent artistic phenomena are far more numerous than systematic historical accounts (which not necessarily have to be “the art history of art historians”, to borrow from Peter Osborne ). In any event, it is striking that the increasing number of exhibitions dedicated to map critically contemporary artistic phenomena from the Caribbean have largely avoided the task of defining what the contemporary stands for, assuming instead that the word can be taken at face value. Such assumption, in turn, implies ignoring another equally pressing question, namely what the most adequate critical and methodological tools for analyzing such temporal frame are. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2024 |
A+E (Abstraction and Extraction) (Under Evaluation, Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities) |
This article analyses the genealogies of mineral extraction and financial abstraction as part of a shared colonial-capitalist complex. Its main idea is that extraction and abstraction are not only related; they are, in fact, each other’s condition of possibility. Abstraction is more material than we use to think. Its domain includes cartographic knowledge, global finance, speculative thought. Extraction is more abstract than we use to think. Its domain includes selective disposability, containers moving endlessly, globally, value being attributed in non-obvious, selective ways. Assuming that abstraction and extraction are connected, that they share a history, implies therefore redefining the critical vocabulary that shapes contemporary socio-political expectations and determines our very (in)capacity to design liveable futures. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2024 |
Dancing Mastery. Unthinking Autonomy and De-Hierarchizing Dissidence through Fiction in the Contemporary Spanish State (under consideration, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies) |
This article argues that Julieta Singh’s decolonial redefinition of mastery provides an effective tool to analyse contemporary Spanish fiction concerned with precariousness and the materiality of artistic and cultural creativity. Engaging with Cristina Morales’ Lectura Fácil (2018) and Greta García’s Solo quería bailar (2023), I argue that contemporary Spanish writers are advancing useful ways of dealing with the unsustainability and ultimately murderous effects of capitalist productivity. Fictions such as Lectura Fácil and Solo quería bailar reveal the possibilities and challenges at play in oppositional politics and the limits of parliamentary politics (including the new politics resulting from the consolidation of political parties arising form assembly movements). Both texts also problematise the role that artistic capitalism played in generating an image of the Spanish State as a modern, fully democratised and cosmopolitan space. | More details Read publication | |
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Journal Article |
Journal Article | 2024 |
On Plants and Regimes of Waste. Reading Djaimila Pereira de Almeida’s A visão das plantas in Times of Systemic Collapse (under consideration in Portuguese Studies Journal) |
In a recent essay, Françoise Vergès (2019) has argued against the idea that a cleaned and confined environment could guide our way out of the nightmare popularly called Anthropocene. For Vergès, contained cleanliness and ordered vegetalia was central for the calculations of capitalism. Cleaned, “natural” environments were the condition of possibility of a system of extraction that kept the gendered and racialised bodies of the “cleaners” out of sight. Domestic and physical labour was mobilised and displaced as part of a regime of accumulation that relied on a logistics of waste (including disposable and extractive nature and wasted lives) to materialise a universalist logic of value. Waste and nature, contained unruliness and suppressed surplus, come together in Djaimila Pereira de Almeida’s A visão das plantas, which was also published in 2019. The journey of Celestino in the novel echoes the kind of redemption that walled natural spaces offer in Vergès’ apt reconceptualisation of more-than-human regimes of waste and value. Here the image of the so-called “tropical botanical garden” in Lisbon, the place where the novel’s setting, easily comes to mind. The attentiveness with which the former men-of-arms look after the garden space reveals the underside of an anthropocenic pastoral, in which recourse to the land and the flora can be strategically managed to generate a safeguarded postcolonial amnesia. This paper engages with plants and wasted lives in A visão das plantas to make sense of the role of “contained” and “looked after” nature as a platform for colonial governmentality and postcolonial dispossession within and beyond the Portuguese-Speaking world. | More details Read publication | |
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Book chapter |
Book chapter | 2024 |
Radical Listening as Collective Education. Learning from Cádiz Carnival Music |
This chapter examines Cádiz carnival music as a vehicle for radical socialization processes and political agency, as well as a platform for informal democratic public education. Unlike institutionalized artistic and literary manifestations, oral and popular creativity, such as carnival music, offers a complex rearticulation of street politics and civic agency. By analyzing textual and musical elements from the Cádiz carnival, it is argued that these performances shape political debate beyond mainstream media and parliamentary politics. Each year, numerous carnival groups in Cádiz compose and perform a new repertoire, keeping this tradition alive despite censorship and commercialization. This tradition not only provides updated information on local, national, and international issues but also offers a unique space for expression for socially disadvantaged communities. The auditory experience of carnival in Cádiz challenges social hierarchies and promotes a radical pedagogy that questions patriarchal and capitalist values. Specific analyses of the carnival groups "El Perro Andalú" and "La Oveja Negra" from the composer Antonio Martínez Ares show how these groups use carnival music to address and subvert regional stereotypes and socio-political issues. | More details Read publication | |
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Book chapter |
Book chapter | 2024 |
Reading the Empty Shelves: Thoughts on Imperial Debt, Reparation, and Museums |
This chapter engages with the temporal politics of imperial debt and post/decolonial reparations. By examining three novels that explore museum spaces and cultural artifacts in three African counties (Nigeria, Mozambique and Angola), we argue that literary creativity constitutes a fertile ground where the task of imagining and materializing reparation is already underway. The chapter also urges for an expanded topographic approach to processes of reparation, countering the idea that Western museums are the main actor involved in the process of decision making related to how to right the wrongs of colonialism and imperialism. In the three novels analyzed in this chapter, imperial debt and reparation are presented as structural, worldmaking processes, in which personal stories and cultural objects are indissolubly entangled into planetary logistics. | More details Read publication | |
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Book chapter |
Book chapter | 2024 |
Capitalismo artístico |
More details | ||
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Book chapter |
Book chapter | 2024 |
The Work of Literature and the Worlding of Contemporary Fiction in Portuguese. An Introduction |
This work situates cultural labour (the productive, material and transformative dimension of cultural production) as a central concern of contemporary literary production in Portuguese. During the last decade, debates over the space that literatures in Portuguese occupy within world-literary paradigms have been the object of renewed attention, with major contributions making a case for a critical reconsideration of issues of positionality, cultural commodification and the power dynamics at play in the production, circulation and consumption of textual and literary texts written in Portuguese. Different in aims, scope and theoretical underpinnings, these voices share a sense of discomfort resulting from the marginal role that literature in Portuguese has historically played within a world-literary field that still privileges texts written in English and/or produced within Western European and North American contexts. | More details Read publication | |
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Book chapter |
Book chapter | 2024 |
Activismo y performance en tiempos de neo-autoritarismo |
En este capítulo me propongo analizar la influencia y el impacto del arte activista en un particular momento histórico en el que la apropiación de tácticas propias de esta manera de crear por parte de la extrema derecha parece más común y presente a nivel global. Más específicamente, me interesa explorar las continuidades y discontinuidades existentes entre modos coloniales de control y violencia que afectan de manera acentuada a los cuerpos definidos por su racialización e identificación en cuestión de género. | More details | |
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Book chapter |
Book chapter | 2024 |
Caribbean Contemporary Art: From (Neo)Colonial Outpost to Creative Eco/System |
This chapter examines the ways in which contemporary Caribbean art joined and addressed global processes of marketization within the last four decades. It explores the inclusion of art from the region within the global art circuit, the establishment of regional networks of creation and distribution, and the configuration of alternative institutional platforms for the circulation and consumption of artistic and visual projects. | More details Read publication | |
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Book chapter |
Book chapter | 2024 |
Visualising the Capitalocene from an Artist Atelier in Santo Domingo. Tony Capellán’s Planetary Aesthetics |
This article zooms into a conversation exchange with the Dominican visual artist Tony Capellán to analise issues of cultural places of refuge, regimes of waste and plastic production, and art economies. This essay urges for a materialist understanding of artistic exchanges. It argues that the globalisation of contemporary art that reached its peak in the 1990s should be seen as part of broader world-ecological transformations. This means that contemporary artistic practice does much more than mirroring economic and ecologic matters; as an activity, it lies at the centre of a wide diversity of processes of socialisation and more-than-human assemblages. Starting from an exchange with Capellán and from a personal experience of visiting his atelier in 2010, this article reconsiders crucial aspects of Caribbean cultural production and planetary aesthetics. | More details Read publication | |
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Book chapter |
Book chapter | 2024 |
Glitter and Doom: Shining Presences, Worldmaking Practices, and the Political Economy of Colonial Inheritance in Times of Crisis |
The official inauguration of the Museu do Tesouro Real [Museum of the Royal Treasure] in 2022 begs the question of which memories and inheritances are brought to the fore in the reconfiguration of the former metropolitan space of Lisbon. The newly created museum provides a permanent home for the material highlights of a monarchic past; at the same time, through a strategic curatorial display, such past is carefully inserted within a broader narrative that brings together the city’s singular and diverse cultural capital, its contemporary economic splendour, and its safety (for jewels and visitors alike). The main aim of this chapter is to question the visual economy of shining presences in the articulation of processes and practices of worldmaking. Following Krista Thompson, the chapter asks what happens when we place the visual economy of shining presences at the centre of current debates on the consequences and afterlives of colonialism within and beyond the Portuguese-speaking world. Through an examination of shining objects, images, and bodies, the chapter highlights the fact that that a debate on decolonisation only makes sense if multiple forms of “shining” in public (instead that just these mobilised by official instances) are taken into consideration. | More details | |
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Book chapter |
Book chapter | 2025 |
Space Oddities |
Can utopias overlap? Can they coexist in space? Can they orbit the same star or dance to the rhythm of the same celestial body? What happens when overgrown utopias become sites of apartheid? | More details Read publication | |
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Book |
Book | 2025 |
The Afterlives of Anticolonial Aesthetics |
This book develops a critical intervention in the politics of time of anticolonial aesthetics. Engaging with recent debates on cultural activism and postcolonial and decolonial studies, the main objective of the volume is to examine the ways in which anticolonial cultural analysis and production keeps nurturing contemporary processes of progressive social transformation. The chapters in the volume argue that anticolonialism should not be bounded to a specific historical moment (that of postcolonial nation-building); rather, it should be seen as a fertile, radical tradition going beyond the specific event of decolonization and informing utopian and radical futures. The essays engage with this argument from a wide variety of disciplines, including film studies, art history, literary criticism, and cultural and visual studies and is intended for scholars, activists, and students across disciplines who are interested in the intersections of culture, politics, and social change. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Interventions. | More details Read publication |