Art has the power to move our imaginations and bodies, transforming the emotional and physical spaces we share. It has the power to build and transform social relations and to bring about equity and justice.
The smuggling of illicit cargo and people has played a significant role in shaping the culture as well as the economy of the southernmost american city of Key West since its foundation in 1821.
The protagonism of the body in the dramatization of marginalized groups is also central to Emilio García Wehbi's Proyecto Filoctetes, an urban intervention staged November 15, 2002, on the streets of Buenos Aires. The project consisted in placing twenty-five lifelike latex mannequins in central, highly trafficked locations around the city in varying positions of injury, physical distress, and abandonment.
Boricua artist Castorillo discusses the crisis, diaspora, and the enduring significance of the Young Lords Party for Puerto Rican social movements today using illustrations:
Palas por Pistolas initiated in the city of Culiacán, a city in western Mexico with a high rate of deaths by gunshot. The botanical garden of Culiacán has been comissioning artist to do interventions in the park and my proposal was to work in the larger scale of the city and organize a campaign for voluntary donation of weapons.
"The walls of the streets of downtown Santiago are covered with stickers, art, words and posters.
The messages are varied and range from "Feminist power" to "All cops are bastards". They have taken over the walls of Zona Cero (Ground Zero), the name given to the area around Plaza de la Dignidad, where anti-government protests have been held - and at times brutally repressed by police - since 18 October.
The following is a description of the action that Huffington post published online on 6/25/2011:
"Student demonstrators took to the streets of Santiago dressed as goblins and ghouls from Michael Jackson’s 'Thriller' video in their latest spirited pursuit of higher education reforms."
In 1998 Hacker-Poet-Artist Yucef Mehri breached the security of CANTV at the time the largest telecommunications company in Venezuela. He was able to access the personal data kept by the company which contained the names, addresses, phone numbers, working places, and even checking accounts, credit cards, and expiration dates of it's customers.
Thousands of students have protested in the Colombian capital, Bogota, and other cities against government plans to reform higher education.
The demonstrations were mainly peaceful but Bogota police fired tear gas and used water cannon after some people threw stones, officials said.
Students say the proposed reforms will lead to partial privatisation of the public universities.
The "I'm Not A Joke" campaign from Daniel Arzola is a series of images inscribed with compelling truths about human diversity that encourages individuals to live as their authentic selves. He wants the images to eventually appear on buses and subways, exposing audiences to the realities of queer experiences in an attempt to break down prejudice in a form of activism that he calls "Artivism."
In May of 2009 lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg was murdered in Guatemla City. A video was released of Rosenberg directed to the Guatemalan public. If you are watching this, he said, I have been murdered by the president Alvaro Colom. The video caused an uproar and sparked protests throughout the city.
This project consisted of an articulation between research, public policy and art. Corpovisionarios por Colombia was implementing a social change initiative in one of the poorest and most violents neighborhoods in Cali, Colombia. The demographic information showed that the most implicated population in the violence and murder cases were young men. They informed their masculinity through ideas of territory and its violent protection.
"Beginning in 1910, the Mexican Revolution spawned a cultural renaissance, inspiring artists to look inward in search of a specifically Mexican artistic language. This visual vocabulary was designed to transcend the realm of the arts and give a national identity to this population undergoing transition.
In the 1970s, Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, transformed six blocks of the main downtown shopping street into a pedestrian zone in 1972, despite fierce objections from the merchants. He quickly accomplished this change in just three days by installing paving, lighting, planters, and furniture. The once-resistant merchants were impressed by the increase in their business and soon demanded an expansion of the traffic-free district.
The Haitian Creole word "konbit" denotes the idea of similar talents joining together to work towards a common goal. The founders — a group of photographers, educators, and artists — came up with the idea for Fotokonbit a few years ago to "empower Haitians to tell their own stories and document their community", but it was the 2010 earthquake that gave the group new urgency.
During 2011, students around Colombia decided to create a National Student organization that would organize thousands of them to reject a harmful educational reform (Reforma a la ley 30). Before this year, student organizations were characterized by their segmentarity and old fashion yet violent ways to protest.
In Women Are Heroes, JR introduces women who sometimes look death in the face, who go from laughter to tears, who are generous, have nothing and yet share, who have had a painful past and long to build a happy future.
The work of Marcela Cantuária (b. 1991, Rio de Janeiro; lives in Rio de Janeiro) often portrays female figures who navigate regional, international, and social boundaries. Often highlighting symbols from tarot and astrology as well as themes that reflect political and environmental activism in Latin America, she weaves narratives of social spheres, political associations, and ethereal wishes.
Artists in Rio de Janeiro have staged a pop-up street show to protest against the closure by the new far-right state government of an exhibition because of a performance attacking dictatorship-era torture.
Migratón México es un proyecto satírico que se creó colaborativamente en 2017 a partir de un Laboratorio de Artivismo y Humor que organizó el Hemi en San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, México, con un un grupo de más de 30 artistas y activistas de México, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua y Estados Unidos.
Acción #CronicaDaMorteAnunciada que consistió en la creación de 9 estandartes con informaciones sobre asesinatos a “País do Santo” para denunciar sus muertes por motivos de racismo afroreligioso en la ciudad de Belém, Brasil.
Students from the School of Communication and Art of the University of Sao Paulo perform a skit titled 'Blind Ones' as a protest against consumerism inside a shopping mall of Natal, capital of Rio Grande do Norte state, December 9, 2013.
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Brazil shopping malls: New epicenter for social protest?
Sian Ka’an is an extraordinary UNESCO tropical nature reserve along Mexico’s Carribean coastline, but the currents that pass by this area bring garbage from all over the world to the shores of this paradise. Alejandro Duran, an artist working in Brooklyn, NY, collects this trash and arranges it into works of colorful landscape art to examine “the tension between the natural world and an increasingly overdeveloped one.”
Buenos Aires in Argentina is the only city in the world where streets named Palestine and Israel intersect on the city grid. Taking advantage of this situation, The Errorist Movement decided to protest against the conflict in Gaza in that location in Buenos Aires.