dc.description.abstract
This thesis investigates the African Section of the Museo Internacional de la Resistencia Salvador Allende (MIRSA), founded in Algiers in 1983 through an exhibition organized in solidarity with the Chilean resistance against the Pinochet dictatorship. As MIRSA's last collection and the only one formed on African territory, it represents a significant but largely overlooked example of South-South artistic networks during the Cold War and the period of decolonization.
Through interviews with organizers and participating artists, combined with archival research, the study reconstructs the political and cultural relations that made this exhibition possible. It examines how the donated artworks embody a complex mosaic of temporalities, incorporating precolonial, colonial, postcolonial, and anti-colonial eras, and engage with multiple processes, including mutual influence, destruction, adaptation, and appropriation, reflecting, among other aspects, shared anti-imperialist and anti-fascist commitments. Their themes, techniques, and materials reveal the circulation of ideas, influences, and solidarities across continents, tracing their journey from Algiers in 1983 to their current location in Santiago.
By focusing on the connections between Africa and Latin America, the thesis contributes to the decentralization of narratives of art history and the Cold War, emphasizing the Third World not as a peripheral space, but as a producer of political imagination, cultural exchange, and global solidarity.
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