Experimentation in art: resistances, expansions, dissolutions, and spillovers in Latin American artistic practices
Volume 21- Number 1 : January-July 2026
Guest Editor: Ana María Romano Gómez*
DEADLINE CALL FOR PAPERS DATE : July 12, 2025
This dossier intends to provoke and invites to share reflections, experiences, and processes around the complex and alchemical relationships that emerge in the encounter between the artistic creative purpose and the need to experiment in/from/with the limits of ideas, techniques, tools, resources, references, ways of doing and the relational dynamics in the surroundings and the context in which artistic creations are developed.
By placing ourselves in Latin America, we are interested in the framework that is articulated by the multiple perspectives that feed the bonds with this territory, that is to say, we do not limit ourselves only to what happens within what we know geographically as Latin America, but we keep in mind the complexities that arise when connecting the territorial notion with historical, cultural, social, political, symbolic, economic, spiritual factors, and thus open the proposal from a lens that expands the gaze regarding to Latin America.
From artistic experimentation, we want to problematize the colonial configurations that survive in different spheres and that override the critical spirit, ignore the particular processes, and end up homogenizing creation, whose manifestations we can observe in areas such as training processes that ignore the contexts in which they develop, the imposition of concepts, the installation of rules for creation or practices that harm creative autonomy, the standardization in the media and modes of circulation, or extractive forms of relations between people and all ways of life.
We are not looking for totalizing visions or neutral approaches to Latin America, we are trying to trigger crossroads between heritages and their mixed origins, renewed traditions, and ways of imagining, doing, and sharing. We aim to destabilize the "authoritative voices" that emerged within these colonial practices under the defense of expertise, to, on the contrary, invite processes in which configurations are attempted from experiences in and with Latin America. In this call, we invoke dissimilar perspectives on the political implications of experimentation. We are interested in weaving stories that feed that great prism that is experimentation in visual arts to resist linear, unidirectional, and univocal narratives.
Asking?
Dwell in the question and be open to curiosity, enter the creative process in the joy of feeling and leaving aside the urge to check, and go into the erotic possibilities of experimentation to be prepared, as Audre Lorde (1978) invites us, "not to settle for what is convenient, false, conventional or merely safe". Desire, that vital impulse, and game, that vital accomplice, open the doors to uncertainty, to instability, to shake with irreverence essentialist preconceptions such as the canonical mandates of "know-how", or the certainty of "doing it right", or the imposition of "foolproof protocols", or the need to comply with an "expectation", or the obligation of having to "produce" permanently.
Giving priority to the process over the result means examining the edges and putting the magnifying glass on the actions and happenings that are not perceptible at first sight to open the possibility of simultaneously inhabiting different perspectives. It is also to go astray before the diversity of likely paths. Or it can also be to submerge itself in the depths of an instant and to find itself in the unavoidable transmutation of vital essences.
The experimental is a provocation to (re)imagine, (re) build, (re) view. It helps us to expand creation on different shores, beyond the limits that have been installed for centuries in the West and that has allowed the emergence of postulates founded on the idea of "universality". In response, experimentation provokes us to place ourselves in the micro. Isn't it fascinating to imagine unpretentious creations like conceiving a "masterpiece" or the folly of "setting up a style"? As the composer Erik Satie (1999) illustrated it for us, in 1920, in his sharp style: "In art, there is no need for slavery".
I have always strived to confuse my followers, in form and content, in each new work. It is the only way for an artist not to set a style, that is, not to become a pedant". Likewise, experimentation inspires us to weave together and to remember the interdependence between individuality and community, offering us the possibility of thinking about roles in creation out of vertical hierarchical relationships, like a chain of command. Isn't it fascinating to exchange and allow ourselves to be permeated by other people's contributions? Likewise, it encourages us to review the ways of doing things that have been in place for a long time and that are transmitted as unchangeable truths that have forged fixed procedures, which generates resistance to renewal. Isn't it fascinating to take the risk of trying and dialogue with the shocks of hesitation?
In questions, listening is expanded. From questions, we overflow the custom.
What happens when we blur, create porosity, and expand disciplinary frontiers?
What happens when we dissociate ourselves from the need to create in a unique and static genre? What happens when we dispense paradigms?
What happens when we displace the authorship of the individual genius to a collective process?
What happens when roles in creation are released from exercising power relations?
What happens when we are not afraid of differences?
What happens when we stop savoring time?
What happens when the artwork disappears?
Experience, experience oneself, experience us.
[T1] Discovering lukewarm water
This dossier invites us to imagine, reflect, and do research about experimentation in art, more from hows than from whys. Inspired by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Salazar Lohman 2015), these hows are mobile, permeable, extensible, and flexible, they are woven from affection and affinities, and get along very well with permanent, extended, and curious listening. These hows are far from being models that replicate "successful" formulas; on the contrary, they are built from experiences, needs, games, and located searches; it is each experience that traces its limits and finds its grip; it is the practice itself, the one that reconsiders the technique, vocabulary, code, action, device, communication.
Artistic creation is not linear in its dimensions: learning, teaching, practice, design and development, materialization, etc. The contexts and socio-cultural circumstances are both personal and collective and, therefore, the approach in creative encounters requires listening to the time that each person needs; this listening sustains the processes of learning and knowledge, not only to give life to a work or any device but to make room for something fundamental such as feeling a part of something. These particularities in temporality are inherent to the experimentation processes.
If we look cautiously at expressions such as "discovering lukewarm water" or "discovering gunpowder," we note that they can compromise the creativity channel or limit the possibilities of exploration, since they do not consider these individual components and end up enforcing approval processes of personal histories.
Some of the problems arising from these approaches may end up in the invalidation of individual experiences for the sake of the implementation of "standards" or certain expectations that adjust the notion of expertise, or, also, the normalization of the concern for the search for what is new under precepts such as "never before seen", a gesture that invalidates personal courses and experiences within artistic practices. Composer Jacqueline Nova sharply stated in one of her Asymmetries radio programs, in 1969, that "the new must be approached as a need, not as a formula. The new will be produced by a historical necessity". Novelty would be recognized not as a slogan, but as part of the inherent transformations of the passage of time, likewise, each experience is transcendental, even if the results are known, because it is indisputable that each novel approach brings new experiences. Hence, the demand to be aware of "all the references" to invent something new is also controversial since it is not a checklist that ignores, in addition, the located condition of each process. Therefore, both in learning and in practice, interlocution and exchange are of immense value, as we learn from the playing and learning spaces that we find in childhood, where pleasure, motivation, and curiosity reign, to mention just a few fascinating particularities.
When reviewing alternatives to these mandates, exercises such as "do it yourself" (DIY) appear in the landscape, which invites disarm the standardizing impositions of sectors such as industry or the massification of education. As an extension of this proposal, the "do it with others" (DWO) arises, which undoubtedly opens incredible possibilities for experimentation as a space founded on the encounter, cultivates collective learning, embraces intuition, stimulates empathy, and is based on sharing knowledge. These collective spaces welcome the idea of a laboratory, provoking not only the possibility of deepening the artistic practices from different provisions but also the arising of different relational dynamics. As Nancy Stark reminded us: "Trust is not something that can be equated to blind faith" (Visioniarborescenti 2013), thus, in a space of experimentation we allow ourselves to go through the gaps knowing that we will not be short of air.
This is therefore a provocation to reconfigure and reconsider the inert approaches that take for granted the actions in any sphere of life, to generate, from experimentation in arts. These contingencies cover the intricacies of knowing ourselves as individual, social, and cultural beings. We are inviting you to expand the scriptural, to experiment with the writing itself. Collective texts are welcome, understanding this relationship not only when two or more people are writing, but also involving the co-authorship of the people interviewed or whose work is to be exposed through the writing submitted to the call.
We call for overgrowing/overflowing/overflowing ourselves. Therefore, we propose to venture, getting rid of categories (which, by their nature, are reductive and static) and fraying a conclusive image or notion of the experiential.
[T1] Possible reflection axes: proposals may consider an axis or crossings between the axes
- Experimentation in creation as a dissenting statement in the arts in Latin America.
- Experimentation as a catalyst in the arts disciplinary overflows, as well, as in the willingness to meet and exchange with other areas outside the field of art.
- Presence of ancestral practices and knowledge as substantial resources in Latin American artistic experimentation.
- Artistic experimentation as a stressful factor in training processes inside and outside the academy.
- Feminisms, cyberfeminisms, and transfeminisms: experimental practices enunciations in the arts.
- Artistic experiments in the approaches of counter-hegemonic creative mechanisms/processes to welcome artistic, social, and cultural insubordinations.
- Experimentation as an anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal political act in artistic creation: collaboration, community actions, self-management, independence, play, humor, free culture, and activism.
- Experimental artistic practice as a way of perception, beyond the aesthetic question and the production of artwork, for the dissolution/expansion of authorship, of the public, of genres, of the artwork, the imposition of times, means, and modes of creative production or strain the categorical notion of quality.
- Affections, desires, and subjectivities: in benefit of diversity and coexistence in experimentation processes in the arts. Overflowing the notion of niche and staying out of the mainstream or the "industry".
- Artistic experimentation developed in non-urban contexts, or carried out by groups and individuals who do not belong to the dominant populations of the circuits, or by groups and individuals who assume themselves to be gender-dissident, or in non-conventional spaces, or when these or more frontiers merge.
- Creative experimentation in arts using technologies (old, current, new, and unimagined) as triggers of political and ideological collisions.
- Experimenting with the arts not only in sensory, intellectual, aesthetic, and poetic provocations but also open to experiences to disassemble verticality in the roles in the creative processes.
- Listening as a mechanism of experimentation to open up artistic interactions in responsible and creative ways, dismantling any posture of superiority with both human and non-human life forms and environments.
- Inviting dreams, intuition, spirituality, and the supernatural to the creative processes in artistic experimentation.
References
Lorde, Audre. 1978. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” https://sentipensaresfem.wordpress.com/2016/12/03/ueecpal/.
Salazar Lohman, Huáscar. 2015. “On the community of affinity and other considerations to make us and think of us in another world.” El Apantle: Community Studies Magazine, n. º 1, 141-165. https://clajadep.lahaine.org/?p=28354
Satie, Erik. 1999. Notebooks of a mammal. Barcelona: Acantilado.
Visioniarborescenti. 2013. “The poetics of touch: Nancy Stark Smith, a pathway into contact improvisation”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6Pt0OXK7es
*
Ana María Romano G. es compositora, artista sonora, improvisadora, docente e investigadora colombiana. Sus intereses creativos se sitúan en la intersección entre el sonido y la tecnología, atravesados por preguntas desde la escucha, el espacio, el cuerpo, género y sexualidad, la improvisación y la experimentación. Sus indagaciones exploran paisajes sonoros, las relaciones interespecies y el ruido. Sus búsquedas le han permitido trabajar los medios acústicos, electroacústicos y la creación en ámbitos como instalaciones, video, artes escénicas, radio. Sus más recientes creaciones plantean la posibilidad de expandirlas para que puedan tomar nuevos rumbos, así una obra puede ser instalación, repositorio, concierto, archivo, o desplegarse a las artes escénicas. En su vida son de gran estima los espacios colectivos y colaborativos y el diálogo interdisciplinar. Considera inseparables las dimensiones políticas en la creación.
Sus obras han sido publicadas, comisionadas, premiadas y presentadas en diferentes eventos en Colombia, Alemania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bélgica, Bolivia, Brasil, Canadá, Cuba, Chile, China, Ecuador, España, Estados Unidos, Francia, Grecia, Inglaterra, Italia, México, Perú, Rusia, Suecia, Suiza y Uruguay. Ha sido artista en residencia en el Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras (CMMAS) y en diferentes espacios en Colombia y América Latina. Ha publicado artículos, investigaciones, ensayos, con el Banco de la República, IDARTES, Universidad Javeriana, Ministerio de Cultura, Revistas Arcadia y Diners, Buh Records, Contingent Sounds, entre otros. Ha sido editora de revistas, discos, plataformas digitales.
Feminista comprometida con la visibilización de las mujeres y las disidencias sexo genéricas en los ámbitos de la creación sonora experimental con tecnologías en América Latina, desde la Plataforma En Tiempo Real promueve la presentación de sus trabajos, labor que es reconocida por el medio musical y artístico dentro y fuera de Latinoamérica y que en 2019 la hizo merecedora a la nominación al Classical Next Award Innovation (Holanda).
Ha desarrollado una profunda investigación sobre la compositora Jacqueline Nova, artista fundamental en la música electroacústica en Colombia, abriendo múltiples actividades para la difusión de su obra, entre las que se resaltan: Editora Revista A Contratiempo número monográfico (2002). Curadora de la exposición “Jacqueline Nova. El mundo maravilloso de las máquinas”, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (2017). Asesora en la exposición “Jacqueline Nova: Creación de la Tierra”, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2020). Co-curadora y creadora de la versión multicanal de la obra “Creación de la tierra” para la 34 Bienal de São Paulo (2021). Investigadora y curadora del vinilo doble “Creación de la tierra: Ecos palpitantes de Jacqueline Nova (1964-1974)” Buh Records (Perú, 2022).
Actualmente investiga sobre las protagonistas-referentes de la música electrónica latinoamericana y produce desde En Tiempo Real el proyecto “El lado B que también es el lado A”, que consiste en diálogos intergeneracionales entre compositoras latinoamericanas para reconocer el trabajo de quienes han estado presentes desde los inicios de la música electroacústica y fortalecer vínculos entre las artistas.
Ha participado como organizadora, colaboradora y expositora en múltiples proyectos en torno al paisaje sonoro con diferentes aproximaciones: medio ambiente y cambio climático, ecosistemas, perspectivas sociopolíticas.
Es docente en la Universidad El Bosque. Coordina la Plataforma Feminista En Tiempo Real. Co-fundadora de PAISAJISTAS SONORAS – AMÉRICA LATINA, junto a la investigadora peruana Vanessa Valencia Ramos, plataforma que ha publicado la colección “Latinoamérica se escucha”. Co-creadora de Microcircuitos Plataforma Digital Regional, uno de los repositorios digitales públicos más grandes de música contemporánea y experimental de Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, México, Uruguay y Venezuela. Ha participado en la gestión del espacio digital GexLat Género – Experimentación – Latinoamérica. Integra la Red de Compositoras Latinoamericanas redcLa.
Presenta regularmente conciertos, así como actividades académicas, dentro y fuera de Colombia.
To submit your article for the current call for papers 20-2 "Dislocating the catastrophe: art, limbos and pulses", the article must be sent by registering on the OJS platform*. The journal only accepts articles within the thematic dossier calls.
*In case of problems to submit your article through the OJS platform, please send your application through the mail cuadernosmavae@javeriana.edu.co, attaching the requested documents.