Reclaiming the Future, Rewriting the Past: Art Resistance in Latin America

by Nicole Cunha

Latin America has, for years, been striving to overcome the legacies of its colonial past — a history that spread across the region, subordinating it to so-called “developed” countries, primarily in Europe and the United States. This colonial domination laid the foundation for many of the structural problems that persist in Latin American societies today, including deep economic inequality, systemic racism, and political dependence. For centuries, Latin American peoples have been marginalized and frequently erased from dominant historical and global narratives — a reality that continues to shape how the region is seen and how it sees itself.

The art world has not been exempt from this legacy: institutions and curatorial practices have long prioritized the art and artists of First World, colonizer countries, sidelining and devaluing those emerging from formerly colonized countries. This exclusion reinforces the same power dynamics that colonialism put in place. Yet amid this long history of silencing, art has remained a powerful tool for resistance and reimagination. Across the continent, feminist, queer, and Indigenous artists are creating work that not only challenges these inherited systems of oppression but also proposes new ways of remembering, knowing, and being. Through visual, performative, and community-based strategies, these artists are not simply asserting their presence — they are reshaping memory, reclaiming space, and rewriting the narratives that have long excluded them.

In this way, many artists are actively engaging with this colonial legacy through their practices, transforming pain, absence and erasure into art, as a form of reflection and resistance. Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, for instance, creates haunting sculptural installations that confront political violence and collective mourning, giving form to the grief often ignored by dominant narratives. Her work insists on remembrance, her recent project — a fragile house woven from human hair — responds to the phenomenon she calls “domicide”, the systematic destruction of homes as a means of deepening human suffering. Drawing from Colombia’s decades-long civil conflict and connecting it to global war zones like Gaza, Ukraine, and Syria, Salcedo builds from the metaphor of a spider weaving shelter from its own body — a symbol of resilience in the face of erasure. Her work does not offer easy healing; instead, it creates spaces for mourning, urging viewers to face the fractured foundations of our societies, many of which were shaped by colonial violence. As she explains in a interview to The Guardian:

“Most of my work is a response of some kind to war,” she says. “And we have all witnessed — of course for decades in Colombia, but also now in Ukraine and Syria and Sudan and in Gaza — this destruction of houses for the sole purpose of escalating human suffering. In Gaza some people have rebuilt their houses several times and seen them destroyed again. So I was thinking, how does it feel to be somewhere where there are no bricks, no concrete, no wood, absolutely nothing you can build with? And I thought: OK, it’s like a spider, wanting to construct something from inside. So I’m trying to make a gigantic spider web house out of human hair. And on top of being made out of human hair, it’s being ripped apart.” 

Similarly, Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, the first Black Brazilian woman to earn a PhD in the arts, interrogates the lasting scars of slavery and racism in Brazil, particularly the erasure of black women from historical memory. Confronted with old photographs intended to portray Black people — especially Black women — as inferior, Paulino took it upon herself to change that narrative. Through her work, she reveals how, despite centuries of violence and dehumanization, these individuals not only survived but carried the strength to forge culture, memory, and resistance. In works like Bastidores, she reconstructs photographic archives of black women sewing harsh, visible stitches over their mouths, eyes, and throats, transforming each image into a powerful commentary on the historical and ongoing silencing of black voices in Brazil. Paulino’s art operates as a counter-archive — one that exposes the systemic silencing of afro-brazilian identities and reclaims those voices through an intimate, tactile process. Together, artists like Salcedo and Paulino exemplify how feminist and decolonial artistic practices are not only exposing the violence embedded in history, but also proposing new, embodied ways of remembering and resisting.

These acts of artistic resistance are not isolated; they are part of a broader movement in Latin America that seeks to decolonize not only the past but also the future. By reclaiming archives, bodies, and landscapes through their work, artists are contributing to a reimagining of Latin America that centers marginalized voices and knowledge. Their practices resonate with grassroots social movements, Indigenous land struggles, feminist mobilizations, and anti-racist coalitions that all share a refusal to accept inherited systems of oppression as inevitable. In doing so, they remind us that art is not simply a reflection of society — it is a tool to reshape it. The power of these creative acts lies not only in what they recover from history but in how they open space for new imaginaries, new subjectivities, and new ways of being together. Through art, memory becomes a form of resistance. 

After centuries of erasure and silencing imposed on the people and histories of marginalized countries, the act of remembering emerges as a powerful form of resistance. It becomes a way of reclaiming agency, of forcing the world to listen—so that the massacres, the torture, the looting, and the violations that marked this region are not forgotten. In this context, artists are building counter-archives, activating ancestral knowledge, and reclaiming erased identities, often through collective work or digital platforms. In doing so, they question: Who gets remembered? And how can the act of remembering itself become a radical gesture? Through these efforts, memory becomes not only a tool for truth and resistance, but a weapon against ongoing systems of oppression.