Situated Feminisms, Art, and New Technologies: A Study of the Aesthetic Technological Experiences of the Women’s Movement in Argentina (2013-2017)

I. INTRODUCTION

Women have forged a dense relationship between politics and the creative intervention of public space. They've enabled new meanings and significations through diverse artistic practices aimed at denouncing violence and the conditions of women's inequality within contemporary capitalism. These experiences have not only been formulated, thought through and executed by women who self-identify as artists or communicators, but also by those who have learned to inhabit the political body in a counter-hegemonic way. What's also called into question is the conception of canonized art, which relates to social events and takes forms differentiated from the traditional: installations (with applied technology or Artificial Intelligence), performances, sound poetry, contemporary dance, video art, among others (Cippollini, 2003). The intersections of art, technology and politics are grounded in a feminist and disruptive reading of public intervention, not only as a possible stage but also in relation to bodily dissidences, images (e.g., the case of "Guerrilla Girls"), sounds and words (Oliveras, 2011). In this triad, a new problem emerges related to the invisibilization of women's marginal place in certain artistic branches. In this new transnational identity constitution (Bidaseca, 2011), cyborg (Haraway, 1995) and framed in terms of potentiality (Butler, 2015), new conditions of possibility are established for those desiring bodies to inhabit their territories, intervene in them, produce common, egalitarian meanings and fight for rights within the very system of inequalities. A historical genealogical journey through Argentine feminisms (Bilbao, 2017 and 2019) allows for an understanding of other dimensions of the dominant conditions over practices and knowledge linked to art, technology and communication. The so-called popular feminisms, connected to artistic practice, enter this threshold of new significations regarding the potentialities of differentiated bodies due to their class, gender or ethnicity. Understanding the potentialities of an emancipatory movement in a particular historical moment shows why it constitutes an event (Lazzarato, 2006). From this, the paradigmatic singularities of creative strategies and aesthetic configurations linked to new technologies, contributed by feminisms situated around the various historical contingencies of women, emerge. The relations between gender studies, art, and politics in Argentina have a long and intense theoretical corpus and literature problematizing specific moments in social history, establishing particular links between these fields (Giunta, 2010, 2014; Gutiérrez, 2008; Longoni, 2009, 2010; Lucena, 2016; Mouffe, 1992; Muñoz, 2009; Pollock, 2008). The porosity that exists in the convergence of aesthetics, politics and gender enables a series of differentiated narratives that allow for the reconstruction of the national historical moment—that is, those moments we will call "cultural events" in present-day Argentina. In this sense, research linked to the experiences of the sixties and seventies vanguards (Oliveras, 2011, Casullo, 2006), protests against the advance of neoliberalism (Cippollini, 2003), the crises of 2001 (Moreno, 2011, Bilbao, 2017) and new artistic practices in present-day Argentina will promote the establishment of the corpus to be analyzed, considering various modalities of the artistic field and their relationship with new technological mediations in: visual arts, sound art, music, theater, performances, installations. The new ways of constructing gender transidentities through art become essential when developing a strategy of resistance to the system of discrimination and the possibility of constructing a historical narrative from other situated narratives. Practices linked to art in relation to gender and new technologies enable reforming a situation through denunciation and the visibility of an inequality problem and, on the other hand, enable the material possibility of inhabiting territories in a more democratic way. It's in insurrectionary action (Berardi, 2014, Didi-Huberman, 2017) where the genealogy of a space, a territory, a country, is found. The history of uprisings, the history of representations and artistic experiences of these uprisings, constitutes a way of organizing the identity of a country. Studies linked to emancipatory experiences cover a broad spectrum of research and conceptual and political contributions, fundamentally the materiality of collective experience based on the contingency in which social narratives carry political (and aesthetic) actions of this type (Kaufman, 2012). This study aims to configure a key categorical development for understanding social narratives anchored in the ways of analyzing how gender, technology, and the body (Butler, 2015, Haraway, 1995), aesthetics, and politics (Benjamin, 2015, Casullo, 2006, Oliveras, 2011) constitute a conglomerate of critical subjective knowledge and practices that aim to transcend, in terms of cultural event, the present-day Argentine context (Lazzarato, 2006, Kaufman, 2012, Bilbao, 2017). In this sense, it seeks to understand the formation process of the Ni Una Menos space (Argentina) and its organizational consolidation in 2015 (Rodríguez, 2015; Merchán and Fink, 2016, Bidaseca, 2017) and genealogically articulate it with similar experiences in Europe.

II. METHODOLOGY

A multimodal qualitative investigation is projected through an interpretive-hermeneutic methodology applied to the analysis of artistic experiences linked to new technological mediations. This includes audiovisual and photographic documents, narratives collected from multi-situated archives (Marcus, 2001), dense description (Geertz, 2006), and artistic research (López Cano, San Cristóbal, 2014). This combination is anchored in the indexical paradigm (Ginzburg, 1999) and in feminist and artistic epistemologies (Harding, 1998; Longoni; Giunta).

The research proposes a historical and contextualized analysis of artistic and political practices of Argentine feminisms, focusing on the 2013–2017 period due to the consolidation of aesthetic-political interventions and feminist articulations. These reflect not only national dynamics but are in dialogue with situated feminisms in Latin America and Europe, which provide alternative, counter-hegemonic readings of public space and gender relations.

The project is organized into the following stages:

• Bibliographic review and state of the art.

• Reworking of conceptual and methodological frameworks.

• Selection of methodological tools and systematization of materials.

• Empirical research: interviews with activists and artists; participant observation; analysis of artistic and media materials.

• Theoretical synthesis: development of an integrative analytical model.

• Drafting of working papers and presentations of preliminary results.

• Final analysis, conclusions, and writing of final report.

Each of these stages will be conducted over approximately three months of in-person research and three additional months of remote finalization, including data analysis, refinement, and dissemination of results.

1. WILLIAMS, Raymond (2009) Marxism and Literature (Buenos Aires: Las cuarenta). WITTIG, Monique (1992) The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press).