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Thea Pitman

Position
Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Leeds

Thea Pitman is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research interests lie in the field of contemporary Latin American cultural production, especially online, and more broadly digital, works, as well as the appropriation of new media technologies by indigenous communities.
She has published the anthology Latin American Cyberliterature and Cyberculture (LUP, 2007) and the book Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production (Routledge, 2013), both with Claire Taylor, as well as numerous other articles and pieces of short-form scholarship. Her current research focuses on indigenous new media arts in the Americas.

My current research focuses on a 2018 arts-based project that aimed to create a positive space for intercultural exchange and the lessening of prejudice on all sides between Indigenous peoples and ‘mainstream’ non-Indigenous society in Brazil. Arte Eletrônica Indígena promoted the cocreation of electronic art between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants and subsequently brought that co-created ‘indigenous electronic art’ to the Modern Art Museum in Salvador da Bahia for an exhibition. I am interested in the ways that the Indigenous partners in the project exercised curatorial agency during their time at the museum to effect a temporary decolonisation of the gallery space.

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/languages/staff/109/professor-thea-pitman
Vice President, Society for Latin American Studies  https://www.slas.org.uk

Seminar One Provocation: Intercultural encounters and Indigenous curatorial agency

Abstract: My current research focuses on a 2018 arts-based project that aimed to create a positive space for intercultural exchange and the lessening of prejudice on all sides between Indigenous peoples and ‘mainstream’ non-Indigenous society in Brazil. Arte EletrônicaIndígena promoted the cocreation of electronic art between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants and subsequently brought that co-created ‘indigenous electronic art’ to the Modern Art Museum in Salvador da Bahia for an exhibition. I am interested in the ways that the Indigenous partners in the project exercised curatorial agency during their time at the museum to effect a temporary decolonisation of the gallery space. My provocation will take the form of a screening of the short research video - Occupy MAM! (7:30 mins) - that I made to illustrate my findings regarding Indigenous curatorial agency during the exhibition of the Arte EletrônicaIndígena project.