The origins of this book stretch back to a workshop on Cultures of Anti-Racism, held on 3 February 2017 in Manchester. It was organised by Peter Wade and James Scorer, colleagues in the University of Manchester’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), and it brought together fourteen UK-based academics to present their work on diverse facets of anti-racist and decolonial art practices. The collaboration was partly intended to foster the existing links between the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures and the School of Social Sciences that CLACS had made possible, but it also drew on common interests in artistic production and identity – Wade’s work on race, nation and music in Colombia; Scorer’s work on comics in Latin America. The workshop led to the volume Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean (2019), edited by Wade and Scorer, with the participation of a third editor, Ignacio Aguiló, another CLACS colleague, who had just published a book, The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina (2018), on race and nation in Argentina, seen through the optic of various artistic creations.

The workshop also acted as seed-bed for discussions between Wade, Aguiló and Lúcia Sá – also a CLACS colleague – about the possibility of seeking funding for a project that would pursue the same theme, this time in depth and making use of hands-on research work with artists. Sá had been directing a project, Racism and Anti-Racism in Brazil: The Case of Indigenous Peoples (with Felipe Milanez as co-investigator), that established a research network bringing together Indigenous leaders, artists and intellectuals with academics to ‘discuss the rise in racism and violence against Indigenous peoples in Brazil, as well as strategies to resist it and contain it’.Footnote ¹

The stars were aligned, then, and over the next year, Wade, Aguiló and Sá met regularly to design the CARLA project.Footnote ² Given our individual experiences and networks, the three of us opted to focus the project on Colombia, Argentina and Brazil, respectively, and we each invited colleagues from those countries to participate as co-investigators: Mara Viveros Vigoya (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Felipe Milanez (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil) and Ezequiel Adamovsky (CONICET, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina). Our choice of co-investigators was guided by our personal networks and the specific experiences of each colleague: Mara Viveros’s well-known work with Afro-Colombians, plus her previous collaboration with Wade on the project Latin American Anti-Racism in a ‘Post-Racial’ Age (LAPORA);Footnote ³ Felipe Milanez’s established record of working with Brazilian Indigenous artists – for example, in the project ‘Sustainable’ Development and Atmospheres of Violence: Experiences of Environmental Defenders;Footnote ⁴ and Ezequiel Adamovsky’s pioneering historical research on race, class and nation in Argentina.

We invited other colleagues to act as advisors, due to their recognised expertise and experience: Liliana Angulo Cortés (independent Colombian artist and curator), Pedro Mandagará (Universidade de Brasília) and Alejandro Frigerio (CONICET, Universidad Católica Argentina). We also asked Mónica Moreno Figueroa (University of Cambridge) – director of the LAPORA project – to be our overall project advisor. The bid was submitted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in July 2018 and in June 2019 we received the – by that stage, rather unexpected – news that the project would be funded.

Wade, Aguiló and Sá then set about hiring three post-doctoral researchers to work in the three countries and, from a very strong field of applicants, emerged three, each of whom happened to be a citizen of the country in which they would work: for Colombia, Carlos Correa Angulo; for Brazil, Jamille Pinheiro Dias; and for Argentina, Ana Vivaldi Pasqua. They all arrived in Manchester at the start of 2020 and the core Manchester team expanded from three to six. With the post-docs taking the lead, we collectively began to scope out possible artists with whom to work in each country, while also embarking together on a process of reading and discussion that would be the beginning of a longer collaborative endeavour, involving all the project’s participants, to map out a conceptual basis for understanding anti-racism and art practice.

Around mid-March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused the UK government to begin a series of lock-downs that massively disrupted our plans. Dias managed to escape home to Belém in Brazil and Vivaldi to Vancouver in Canada before all commercial flights were suspended. Correa was trapped alone in Manchester, which for him added to the existential pain of being locked down, but, in terms of the project, it made little difference, as everyone was working from home using virtual means of communication. As pandemic restrictions relaxed, Dias began to carry out some in-person research in Brazil from autumn 2020, which continued until spring 2022. In the autumn of 2020, too, Correa was able to travel to Colombia and, as restrictions allowed, gradually began in-person research that lasted until spring 2022. Vivaldi was finally able to go to Argentina for a few months in the autumn of 2021 and carry out in-person research. Meanwhile, the project hired several research assistants in each country, who worked closely with the respective post-doc and often also with the co-investigator: in Colombia, Rossana Alarcón (an independent visual artist and graphic designer); in Brazil, Arissana Pataxó and Yacunã Tuxá (both Indigenous artists and activist-academics); and in Argentina, Lorena Cañuqueo (a Mapuche academic, activist and actor) and Pablo Cossio (an independent researcher and activist).Footnote ⁵

As with pandemic-limited research everywhere, online conversations and discussions became a key activity and the project team organised many of these, involving academics and artists together. These can all be viewed on CARLA’s YouTube channel.Footnote ⁶ Coincidentally, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 and the subsequent global Black Lives Matter movement provided a backdrop for these discussions and indeed the project as a whole, as the effects of racism as a system gained centre stage across the world. We also held three online workshops with project researchers and artists, which were spaces to review progress and share ideas about art and anti-racism. At last, in April 2022, pandemic restrictions allowed us to hold a final in-person workshop, with nearly all the project research team, including the research assistants – only Yacunã Tuxá and Alejandro Frigerio were not able to attend – and some twenty artists from Latin America. This was followed by a public Festival of Anti-Racist and Decolonial Art, held in Manchester’s Contact Theatre, which featured the launch of the project’s virtual exhibition and performances by eight of the artists or groups of artists with whom we had been collaborating.Footnote ⁷ The Festival was a vivid demonstration of the multiple partnerships and collaborations CARLA had achieved, bringing together academics, artists, activists and art-world institutions, and bridging distances between Black, Indigenous and mestizo people. The festival was followed by two workshops: in the first, the artists met with UK-based cultural industry people who had been invited to the Festival; in the second, the artists met together to discuss their own priorities and possible ways to continue collaborations with each other, across national boundaries.

After all the frustrations of the pandemic, these events were intense and affectively charged encounters, as well as being intellectually highly rewarding – and providing many elements that have fed into the current book. The events were an expression of something that we all – and our Latin American team members – feel strongly about, which is the need in arts and social science research to foster horizontal relationships, even in contexts in which research projects are funded by and based in institutions located in the Global North. Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic helped us to achieve this: the budget that was destined to support in-person workshops in the three Latin American countries was repurposed so we could invite to the final events the research assistants and more artists than originally planned; and, along with additional funds from the University of Manchester, the money helped to support activities designed by the artists themselves.