SESSION: 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 the ways in which 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.

Session Convenors:

Defne Oruç, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Maryluna Santos-Giraldo, Tulane University, USA

Session Speakers:

Juliana Fagua Arias, Cornell University

Lids, Drawers, and Folds: Cartographies of Asia in Spanish American Furniture

Domestic furnishings in 18th-century Spanish America, particularly folding screens, writing desks and cabinets from what is currently Mexico and Colombia, have been notably studied for their imitation of East Asian lacquerware. In response to the changing tastes of the Spanish American elites, Indigenous craftspeople deployed pre-Hispanic materials and techniques to summon the lustrous effects of Urushi lacquer. This paper proposes a new perspective: these objects were not merely imitative but also devices for mapping both Asian and Spanish American landscapes. I argue that the lids, drawers, and foldable surfaces of these cabinets reflect a negotiation of global and local conceptions of space. On the one hand, they depict evolving territorial conceptions of East Asia, ranging from medieval, Iberian notions of a mythical “China” to more contemporary understandings shaped by transpacific trade. Simultaneously, these objects provide insight into the Spanish American household as evidence of their owners’ lived experiences.

Focusing on a writing cabinet from Pátzcuaro by José Manuel de la Cerda, a Mexican biombo, and a tabletop from Pasto, Colombia, I examine how their structure, materiality, and iconography articulated visions of faraway Asian territories while anchoring the Spanish American elites in the daily lives of urban viceroyalties. Through the convergence of multiple elements in its creation, including Iberian mythical narratives about Asia, mimicry of East Asian lacquerware, and European costume prints, Spanish American furniture became an active participant in the creation and negotiation of global imaginaries and local, domestic landscapes.

Nicola Kanmany John, Independent

Luna’s Cleopatra: from Egypt to the Philippines via Rome, Madrid and More

Tracing the ancient and modern sources which informed Juan Luna’s La Muerte de Cleopatra (1881) through archaeological sites, contemporary exhibitions and even theatrical sets, this paper will show how the study and exhibition of ancient Egyptian art and architecture in Western Europe and beyond provided a setting for a young Filipino artist’s first foray into anti-imperialism in art.

Combining a close visual study of the work with a detailed analysis of its sources, the paper will show how Luna used ancient history to engage with the question of Filipino independence from Spain without alienating audiences in Rome and Madrid. Focusing on the built environment in Luna’s work, it will demonstrate how ideas about ancient Egypt were still evolving through sources largely shaped by ancient and modern colonial perspectives. Exploring the extent to which Luna was aware of this dislocation in his interpretation of a Spanish translation of a Roman account of Cleopatra’s death, the paper will also investigate how the artist understood, exploited and subverted Orientalist traits in his depiction of ancient Egypt.

Finally, the paper will demonstrate how geographical limitations in the study of Filipino art since the twentieth century have dislocated the painting from its original context, making its key details hard to parse. Studying Luna’s Cleopatra alongside the sites and sources that informed it restores essential nuances to the work, revealing the importance of both historical setting and physical space to perhaps the most overtly anti-colonial message in any of the artist’s works.

Estefanía Vallejo Santiago, Florida State University

Another Shore: Art and the Networks Between Latin America and the Arab World (Online)

This paper situates Brazilian artist Lua Barbosa’s Between Ghosts and Monuments (2024–25) within contemporary debates on monumentality, displacement, and decolonial aesthetics in global art history. Engaging the broader history of monuments as instruments of empire and collective memory, Barbosa reimagines the form through intimate scale and recycled materials. Her sculpture—cast from discarded aluminium in the likeness of a small bird found dead outside her studio—subverts the heroic monument by monumentalizing the overlooked and the ephemeral. My research asks: How can intermedia practices transform the ideological and material legacies of the colonial monument? Drawing from visual analysis, material culture studies, and decolonial theory (Mignolo, Glissant, Tawe), I examine how Barbosa’s combination of sculptural form and digital study constitutes a translation between grief and matter. I argue that Barbosa’s work exposes the monument as a mutable, intermedial site where mourning and resistance converge. Through the reuse of industrial waste and the commemoration of “small deaths,” Between Ghosts and Monuments challenges dominant aesthetics of permanence and power. The study contributes to ongoing art-historical discourse on decolonial monumentality and the movement of materials and affects across time and geography. Ultimately, Barbosa’s practice reveals how contemporary artists reanimate the monument—not as static commemoration, but as a living archive of displacement, ecology, and care.This paper situates Brazilian artist Lua Barbosa’s Between Ghosts and Monuments (2024–25) within contemporary debates on monumentality, displacement, and decolonial aesthetics in global art history. Engaging the broader history of monuments as instruments of empire and collective memory, Barbosa reimagines the form through intimate scale and recycled materials. Her sculpture—cast from discarded aluminium in the likeness of a small bird found dead outside her studio—subverts the heroic monument by monumentalizing the overlooked and the ephemeral. My research asks: How can intermedia practices transform the ideological and material legacies?

Nesrin Karavar, National University of Cuyo, Argentina

Bibi Zogbé: art and identity. Women of the Ottoman immigration in Argentina

This paper explores the artistic and cultural legacy of Bibi Zogbé (1890–1973), an influential Lebanese Argentinian painter whose migration story reflects the complex dynamics of early twentieth-century Argentine society. After arriving from Lebanon in 1907, Zogbé became a prominent figure in Buenos Aires’s cultural circles, presenting herself as an Arab painter and challenging conventional gender roles within the Lebanese immigrant community. Despite her brief recognition, she was largely forgotten after her death until recent exhibitions—such as at the Museum Franklin Rawson and the Venice Biennale 2024—revived interest in her work and identity. This paper analyzes Zogbé’s visual and poetic output, positioning her as a pioneering female artist who navigated multiple cultural identities in exile. Drawing on her paintings, unpublished poems, and contemporary testimonies, the study highlights how Zogbé’s story exemplifies the transformative power of art in reconstructing women’s voices and the memory of migration in Latin America. By illuminating the intersections of Arab, Argentine, and female identity in Zogbé’s work, the paper contributes to the overlooked history of Ottoman women immigrants and expands our understanding of transnational artistic networks.