Future Souths

Future Souths, initiated and introduced by Veronica Tello, is the culmination of an online dialogical project that began in 2017.

Future Souths is written by eighteen authors from the Americas, Australia, Asia, South Africa and Europe, radically reconsidering the geo-spatial bases and biases of contemporary art history and discourse. It proposes a fluid, collective, contingent re-consideration of key art concepts from embodied and geo-located vantage points, perspectives, and experiences of the south. The dialogues explore methods, concepts, and theories grounded in the materialities of archives, histories, borders, and context-specificity. The authors denaturalise the global north-centrism that dominates contemporary art discourse and vocabularies, including its privileging of historical signifiers such as "1989." Future Souths affirms the generative possibilities of southern thinking and methods, specifically communal ones, for manifesting new futures for contemporary art history.

With the rise of globalisation and the end of the Cold War, the centre-periphery dichotomy has collapsed, heralding a supposed end of Eurocentrism and the dawn of the contemporary. Yet, despite all the talk of decentralising discourse and the infrastructures of global art, the West, or the global north, still dominates. Future Souths offers an alternative history and geography of contemporary art discourse, rediscovering its multiple beginnings, initiators and routes.