The Latin American Network Art for social transformation
Making political action being art and making art being a political action
Preliminary statement:
The Latin American Network of Art for Social Transformation (RLATS) was founded in 2005 by
24 artistic, cultural and social organizations. It currently brings together 62 organizations from
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras
and El Salvador. These organizations offer an innovative and multidisciplinary spectrum of
artistic proposals responding to contexts of poverty and social exclusion that express
themselves through concrete artistic practices sustained by an organizational structure that
allows them to act as a collective platform for the mobilization of different social players towards
public causes such as social integration, effective citizenship, human rights, multicultural
dialogue and social equity.
In a region where half of the people is living in poverty contexts, the common dream of the
artists of RLATS has made possible the following achievements: communities reactivated
through cultural centers, young people from marginal neighborhoods becomimg the stars of
music festivals around the world and social/cultural leaders of their communities, choirs and
orchestras performing in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, acrobats and jugglers transferring
their know-how to their European peers, street performances in rural zones that had never
attended a theatre or dance function, delighting different audiences, aboriginal communities
recovering the memory of their ancestors through their tapestries and other artistic expressions,
youth and professionals traveling throughout Latin America and Europe, sharing their
experience.
We are now moving towards the generation of cross border artistic-cultural collective projects in
the region that are being developed by the platform of the Latin American Network of Art for
Social Transformation to offer possible solutions to global causes in Latin America.
Ten lines of action:
1. Development of creativity applied to symbolical break up and social innovation.
2. New ways of production, circulation and consumption of cultural goods, involving excluded
and non-excluded communities.
3. New pedagogies for transformation: action creativity, game, alignment, innovation,
otherness, conflict, diversity, improvisation, intuition, synchronization, flow, identifying
what’s new among us.
4. Empowering the people in contexts of vulnerability: construction of subjectivity. intangible
goods and social representations.
5. Global perspective and effective enforcement of rights.
6. Complexity: interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to artistic production and artistic
education. Alliances with other sectors in order to meet development requirements.
7. Social organization: artistic productions and artistic education supported by community
mobilization and organization.
8. Art as a good for itself, not merely as a tool.
9. Intellect broadening practices: new conceptual developments as new forms of knowledge
production trough the practice of arts.
10. New institutional models and development of new contexts of sociability: public-private
scenarios.