Focus on Latin American Art and Agency – Serie

For more than a decade the Mexico City–based artist, architect, and cultural agent Pedro Reyes has been turning existing social problems into opportunities for effecting tangible change through collective imagination. By breaking open failed models and retooling them with space to project alternatives, Reyes’s art enables productive diversions of otherwise destructive forces. Ad Usum: To Be Used is the second volume in the series Focus on Latin American Art and Agency, which is dedicated to contemporary cultural agents, a term that is perhaps best understood through the words of Reyes himself: “changing our individual habits has no degree of effectiveness” as “progress is only significant if you start to multiply by 10, by 100, by 1,000.” Rather than merely illustrate his work, this collection of images, interviews, and critical essays is intended as an apparatus for multiplying the possibilities when art becomes a resource for the common good.This full-color illustrated survey of Reyes’s projects includes critical essays by José Luis Falconi, Robin Greeley, Johan Hartle, Adam Kleinman, and Doris Sommer, as well as interviews between the artist and such seminal thinkers as Lauren Berlant, Michael Hardt, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Antanas Mockus.

Cultural Agents Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus systematically reflects on the practices and legacy of one exceptional cultural agent, Antanas Mockus, twice Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. His accomplishments bear witness to the potential of creative, symbolic practices as a trigger for social change. His failures, in turn, demonstrate what happens when cultural agency and epistemic legitimacy take divergent paths. Mockus’s example motivates us to further revise and sharpen our understanding of what cultural agency is in the present day by bringing into focus some of the most formidable challenges that public humanities face when they travel South and struggle to become genuinely global.

Pre-Texts is a methodology developed by Doris Sommer for education professionals to stimulate close reading and critical-thinking skills by making art based on challenging texts. This book is a manual of sorts. Presented in both English and Spanish, it gathers vivid descriptions and images of dozens of different Pre-Texts activities held across the globe, in person and in online forums, with groups diverse in age, background, and native language. Pre-Texts International features testimonials from both facilitators and participants, who describe in detail the planning, procedures, and activities they carried out and attest to the methodology’s efficacy and adaptability in a wide range of contexts.