Politics of Feeling

Abstract

This is a transdisciplinary doctoral research that investigates the historical role affects and aesthetics have played in both colonial domination and decolonial indigenous resistance and autonomy in the Southeast of Mexico. The project studies interwoven aesthetic and affective dimensions in their discursive, textual, visual, and performative forms, aiming to demonstrate and describe the key role that the intersection of affects and aesthetics play in both domination and emancipation. The Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) and the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) are the case studies of this research project. In-depth and participatory field research in Mexico and Europe allowed me to gather data in order to analyze the ways in which aesthetics and politics of affectivity relate to each other in the mentioned social movements. Latin American decolonial and indigenous thought–together with postcolonial theory, black, feminist, and queer studies, among other fields– allow for a critical genealogical and historical revision of colonialism in the region and its implications, on the one hand, and their actions and responses to it, on the other, focusing on significant threads of subaltern practices and indigenous thought related to politics of affects, from the colony until today. This is analyzed through the articulation of indigenous thought, post- and decolonial studies, critical theory, cultural studies, aesthetics, history, affective theory, psychology, and politics. This research takes the fields of aesthetics and arts as political sites, potentially as sites of resistance, emancipation, and production of critical knowledge that enable us to transcend epistemic limitations of conventional theoretical and academic inquiry. By doing so, I wish to also further explore the methodological possibilities between ethnographic methodology and aesthetics.

Short biography

Gerardo Montes de Oca Valadez (1978, Guadalajara Mexico) is a psychologist, psychotherapist, activist, artist and curator. He studied Clinical and Social Psychology at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, and Visual Culture at Aalto University in Finland with one year exchange in the Master in Arts & Science in the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, awarded with the DOC Fellowship Programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), the Completion Dissertation Grant of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Liebelt Stiftung Hamburg Grant. During his early years as a psychologist, he participated in different research projects in Social Psychology around the topics of health and migration while practicing private Psychotherapy. Eventually his interests in arts led him to study photography and sound art and later on his masters degree in Visual Culture and Contemporary Art. His practice is politically informed and in his Ph.D. research project that he articulates his different interests and experiences. He has exhibited, performed and curated in different spaces and institutions in Mexico, USA and Europe.