Latin American art opens up to the world from Italy, Italy globalizes from Latin American art.

Abstract

This first issue of Quaderni Culturali IILA seeks to investigate the role that the aspiration to create or define a "Latin American Art" played within the Italian art system. While the impact of Italian cultural production in Latin America has been well studied, the same cannot be said about the "other direction" of this relationship. The influences of certain Italian styles in South America have been well studied, the same could be said about the role played by the Italian academy in the formation of artists, schools or academies in the different countries of Latin America; and about the iconographic migrations, or "wars" of images, throughout the history of the continent. Although there is still much to be done in these fields, it is striking that this relationship between Italian cultural production and the so-called "Latin American" one has been approached in only one direction, that is, "from" Europe "to" Latin America.

This issue proposes that the omission of this other direction is due to the ineffectiveness of the instruments of criticism, such as the idea of "influence" or "style" to observe the other direction. The fact that we do not find an "influence" of Latin American art in Italy does not mean that the works or the very idea of a "Latin American Art" have not played an important role in Italian cultural and artistic life. In order to observe "the other direction" of the flow, we propose then to elucidate the geo-aesthetic character of the idea of a "Latin American Art". That is to say, it is not a question of tracing a history of the "influence" of such a local tradition in another locality, but to study the global dimension of the definition of "latin american art".