Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place, and History

Future Souths, initiated and introduced by Verónica Tello, is the culmination of an online dialogical project that began in 2017.

Future Souths is written by eighteen authors from the Americas, Australia, Asia, South Africa and Europe, radically reconsidering the geo-spatial bases and biases of contemporary art history and discourse. It proposes a fluid, collective, contingent re-consideration of key art concepts from embodied and geo-located vantage points, perspectives, and experiences of the south. The dialogues explore methods, concepts, and theories grounded in the materialities of archives, histories, borders, and context-specificity. The authors denaturalise the global north-centrism that dominates contemporary art discourse and vocabularies, including its privileging of historical signifiers such as “1989.” Future Souths affirms the generative possibilities of southern thinking and methods, specifically communal ones, for manifesting new futures for contemporary art history. 

With the rise of globalisation and the end of the Cold War, the centre-periphery dichotomy has collapsed, heralding a supposed end of Eurocentrism and the dawn of the contemporary. Yet, despite all the talk of decentralising discourse and the infrastructures of global art, the West, or the global north, still dominates. Future Souths offers an alternative history and geography of contemporary art discourse, rediscovering its multiple beginnings, initiators and routes.

Authors: Essays by Verónica Tello, Dylan A. T. Miner, Zoe Butt, Edgar Alejandro Hernández, Rolando López, Carla Macchiavello, Walter D. Mignolo, Rachel O’Reilly, and Ruth Simbao; and dialogues with the aforementioned and Jennifer Biddle, Katherine Carl, Fernando do Campo, Chandra Frank, Srdjan Jovanović Weiss, Angela Mitropoulos, James Nguyen, Salote Tawale, and Jean-Sylvain Tshilumba Mukendi.

Design: Zenobia Ahmed and Alexandra Margetic

Publishers: Third Text Publications and Discipline: London and Melbourne/Naarm

Reviews

At a moment when dominant conceptual and economic frameworks (capitalism, nationalism, and the prison industrial complex) from the global north are collapsing under their own weight, Future Souths inspires us to discard familiar geographical and temporal vocabularies. Essays and dialogues among artists, scholars, and activists offer alternative models for new conceptual pathways, evaluate the productivity of “weak” histories, offer methods for politically resistant collectives, and insightfully insist that we begin to properly imagine spaces of justice and equality.

JENNIFER A. GONZÁLEZ, editor of Chicana and Chicano Art: A Critical Anthology, with Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega, and Tere Romo (Duke University Press, 2019)

Future Souths offers important new and old ways to think about multiple directionalities of influence, politics, and placement that reorganise the cartographies of knowledge as a feminist and dialogic practice. The book breaks open the understanding of thinking as a monocultural and unidirectional affair and instead invites us into a world of dyads, trios, cosmologies, and inter-relations, thereby obliterating the distinction between art and politics as separate worlds.

– MACARENA GÓMEZ-BARRIS, author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017)