Situated Artistic Practices that Weave Bonds: intersection between body-territory and counter-pedagogies of cruelty in Aguascalientes

Abstract

Based on participatory research, this article addresses the work of four artists from Aguascalientes—Alicia Cruz, Olga Terán Cortés, Berenice Cortés Campos, and Sareli Mendoza—whose works address themes such as the body, territory, and cruelty. It seeks to show how these artists, through performance and community exercises, develop counter-pedagogical practices of cruelty that resist the most common and dominant forms of violence and representation in hegemonic art forms. Their actions and discourses focus on generating community bonds, challenging violence in representations, and reclaiming ancestral and territorial knowledge. This article adds to the importance of a situated, feminist and decolonial thought that allows to articulate knowledge, affections and struggles around art, the body and territory through five keys for a feminist critique of art that contributes to the “project of vincularity” (Segato, 2018) versus the “project of things” through the concept of body-territory, to rethink the art-community relationship from a situated and relational perspective.