CREACIÓN Y CRÍTICA: REFLECTING ON THE POWER AND LIMITS OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN OUR CONTEXT

March 1–7, 2025 (La Nueva Fábrica, Santa Ana / Guatemala City / hybrid on Zoom)

La Nueva Fábrica is thrilled to announce a new workshop series titled Epistemologías Activas (Active Epistemologies). These workshops create a space to reflect together on how different systems of knowledge, knowledge-making, and knowledge-sharing relate to one another. Each session will bring participants into conversation with practitioners from a range of disciplines and epistemic traditions.

The first intensive workshop in this series is led by Sebastián Eduardo Dávila.

This reading, writing, dialogue, and listening workshop brings together students and researchers, artists, curators, educators, and creators to articulate and share critical reflections on contemporary arts, their power, and their limits for free or situated creation. Based on short texts written and circulated in advance among participants, the sessions will take as their guiding axis a series of contemporary creative practices.

According to Mapuche researcher Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta, contemporary Indigenous creations do not break with the past. For example, they engage with archaeological and ethnographic collections not as sources of inspiration, but through memory and the continuity of peoples in Abya Yala. These will serve as a basis for critique and reflection on the arts as an institution, as a practice, and as a means for the representation and transmission of culture, knowledge, and meaning.

The discussion and reading sessions will be complemented by public talks given by national and international guests on critical genealogies in the history and terminology of art, as well as from a hemispheric and counter-disciplinary perspective.

Among the invited participants are Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta (Wallmapu/Chile), Milvian Aspuac (Guatemala), Camila Caris Seguel (Guatemala), Andrea García Rodríguez (Mexico), and Francisco Huichaqueo (Wallmapu/Chile).

This workshop is free of charge. The participation limit is 15 people, and the application deadline is December 30, 2025, at 6:00 p.m., Guatemala time.

Find the form here.

Sessions will be held in person (La Antigua or Guatemala City on Sunday 03/01, Friday 03/06, and Saturday 03/07) and in hybrid/digital format (03/04 and 03/05). Your interests and any scheduling or transportation limitations will be taken into account in the design of the workshop.

Image from the installation Ancestors Today: Visual Stories of Migrant Women, Francisco Huichaqueo / Colectivo de Mujeres Arte Popular, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.