Intermedia Dialogues in Art and Architecture

This session explores intermedia practices in art, where “the life of the (moving) image,” as Ethel-Ruth Tawe (2025) notes, follows the movement of people and communities, forced or otherwise. It draws on postcolonial and decolonial theory to interrogate the displacement of materials, techniques, and affects across a wide range of temporalities and geographies marked by the circulation of colonial artefacts to contemporary interventions in memory. The Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1695–1700) attests to the transoceanic dialogues between Mexico and Asia during the early-modern period, which favoured the extension of lacquering and inlaying, accompanied by the continuation of pre-Hispanic techniques. The builders of the Cathedral of San Cristobal (1748-1777) in Cuba incarnated Francesco Borromini’s designs in local coral stone. Scaling intermedia to curatorial practice today, Khristine Khouri and Rasha Salti’s research project on museums in exile, Past Disquiet, reactivates the history of international solidarity movements through artistic alliances. In different editions of Past Disquiet or the exhibition Otra Orilla (2024), intermedial thinking produces critical responses to how art and life necessarily converge. These examples invite us to think through manifold networks in which the repurposing of materials and motifs encodes differing levels of resistance to colonial powers. What kind of ideological transformations occur when images are spoken and held, matter translated in time? How do intermedia practices engage displacement as a means of registering moments of rupture and anticolonial struggle? We invite papers and practice-based reflections that reveal the longer history of socio-political alignments in the Global South.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Defne Oruç, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA doruc@wisc.edu

Maryluna Santos-Giraldo, Tulane University, USA msantosgiraldo@tulane.edu