III Encartes Photography Contest: Dissident Performing Interventions in Public Spaces

Wt is increasingly common for aesthetic interventions in public spaces to imprint counter-narratives to hegemonic power. Different cultural, political, gender, identity and ethno-national movements reappropriate and re-signify public spaces, monuments, official art and government buildings through symbolic performance and aesthetic intervention.

These actions represent metaphorical tactics to momentarily transform spaces of power into dissident spaces, of groups with unattended claims, minorities usually stigmatized, or invisible groups demanding rights. A police fence is transformed into a clothesline for denunciations, a border wall into a memorial for transmigrants, a statue of a virgin with a green scarf becomes feminist, to give a few examples. Aesthetic interventions are carried out as political conquests of dissident movements that inscribe their invisibilized identity traits or place their claims (often forbidden and repressed), through the furtive and immediate transformation of the usual landscape. These actions tend to deconstruct the hegemonic signs of different public spaces, official emblems, buildings symbolizing the power of government forces, and colonial monuments.

The multimedia digital magazine Encartes calls on students, specialists, activists and journalists to participate by sending photographs that capture interventions and symbolic takeovers of public spaces by dissident and resistance groups, such as:

  • Placement of antimonuments
  • Aesthetic intervention of walls, fences, bridges or places where deaths and disappearances have occurred, evidencing the silence and complicity of the State,
  • Performances and interventions in government buildings and squares
  • Interventions on national monuments and emblems

The selection of the best photographs will be part of the gallery that will accompany the virtual version of issue 8, volume 4 of Encartes magazine to be published in September 2021.

Characteristics for shipments:

  • Photographs must be self-taken.
  • Have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi.
  • Include a title and a maximum of two lines of context.
  • Place and date where the photograph was taken.
  • Author's full name.
  • Contact information.

Photos and additional data will be sent to the mail: encartesantropologicos@ciesas.edu.mx. The submission deadline is August 21, 2021 and entries selected for publication in issue no. 8 of the journal will be announced on August 29, 2021.

We look forward to your participation!