2025 Theses Doctoral

Geometrías radicales: militancia y experimentación en el cine, la música y la arquitectura de los largos sesenta en América Latina

Vergara Torres, Eduardo Andres

This dissertation proposes a reconsideration of the relationship between political militancy and artistic experimentation during the Latin American long sixties, with emphasis on the early cinema of Raúl Ruiz, the music of Sergio Ortega, Frederic Rzewski and Yuji Takahashi, and the architecture of the collective Arquitetura Nova in Brazil. Far from being a subordination of art to the dogmas of the revolutionary left, these experiences constitute moments of formal and radical political exploration, where aesthetic forms are articulated with social mobilization.

The objective of the project is to dismantle a series of tropes that have dominated cultural criticism since the 1980s, according to which militant art would have been eminently literal, vertical, homogeneous, and refractory to experimentation.

The dissertation concludes that militancy in the socialist or communist parties from different latitudes was not incompatible with radical experimentation in the art of the long 1960s. Many of the most audacious forms of Latin American art emerged precisely from the internal tensions and impasses of the movements and parties themselves, which appear here as structuring principles within the works. The radical geometries that these experiences deployed in their production were new ways of articulating artistic experimentation with political processes.

The dissertation seeks to restore the critical power of militant art by showing that it was capable of avoiding dogmatism, cultivating heterodoxy and enriching the repertoires and political imaginaries even of contemporary movements. These legacies appear not as archives of the past but as tools to face the present and build the future.