While the poets and thinkers of the Enlightenment period claimed that before beauty all humans would be free and equal, this intervention claims, there is an unwritten history of philosophical aesthetics, that is interlinked with 16th century colonialism, the birth of biopolitics, the global circulation of people, information, goods, money, as well as with the implacabiltiy of death. We won’t be able to understand the conflicting histories of aesthetics without understanding the impact that the colonial economy and the racial categories it engendered had on the European conception of beauty and aesthetics. Nor will we be able to assume responsibility before its materiality and historicity, without an understanding of the claims for self-determination, justice and reparations by indigenous and afro-diasporic people in Latin America and the Caribbean at the beginning of the 21st century. The presentation proposes a critical revision of the history of aesthetics from the vantage point of colonialism and ongoing anticolonial struggles. Ultimately, this presentation contends a problem of categorization when thinking about aesthetics.

Max Jorge HINDERER CRUZ is director of the Independent Studies Program (PEI) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona (MACBA). Previously he was director of the National Museum of Art (MNA) in La Paz, and Artistic Director of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (ADKDW) in Cologne. His recent publications include the books La deuda con la belleza. Textos 2019-2021 (PCP-Programa Cultura Política, 2022) and (as editor) Elvira Espejo Ayca, YANAK UYWAÑA. The Mutual Nurturing of the Arts (transversal texts, 2023). In October 2024 his book Before Beauty. Aesthetics and Anticolonialism will be published by Sternberg Press, London.