On the other hand, Robert J.C. Young explains that postcolonialism, which began in the 1990s, “is a term that represents critical perspectives of resistance to colonialism or colonial attitudes” (Young 2020, p. 3). This explains why postcolonial studies have responded to the decolonial thinking developed in Latin America. With this we can conclude that both, postcolonial studies and decolonial thought, have an important political dimension that makes explicit the need to decolonise; and whose focus of action and analysis is the Global South. This anti/de-colonial impulse is reflected in the discourses on Indianism and negritude developed in Latin America and the Caribbean. First of all, it is important to highlight the work of José Carlos Mariátegui and his avant-garde journal Amauta (fig. 1) – a Quechua and Aymara word that refers to the indigenous worldview of the thinker, creator and conductor of ideas. Secondly, Fausto Reinaga’s work represents the transition from Mariátegui’s Marxist indigenism to an indianism that vindicates “aumátic” thought (Oliva, 2014, p. 126).

In the same way, Cecilia Vicuña’s khipus materialise and make absences and memories visible, connecting Andean culture with contemporaneity. Vicuña’s relationship with khipus had begun around 1966, wherefrom onwards these objects served as a guiding thread for her to develop a body of work that we could understand as Indianist, giving voice and discursive agency to the Andean cosmovision that inspires them. His Quipu Desaparecido (2018) (fig. 2) makes the absences of abysmal thought visible (De Souza Santos, 2014), but also that of thousands of people disappeared by military dictatorships in Latin America.

Furthermore, the discourse on negritude articulated by Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon represents an emancipatory and vindicatory project of African culture and its diaspora. This can be seen reflected in the painting Tercer Mundo by the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam (fig.3), who in fact “understood his painting as ‘an act of decolonisation’” (Barreiro López, 2016, p. 36), and in which it is possible to see the disruptive force of surrealism and negritude.

These case studies highlight the decolonising potential of Indianism and negritude, disrupting the Manichean world of colonialism and the Cold War in order to put at the centre intermediate lines, intersections, confluences and fractures that generated the Third World: the geographical and conceptual space that gave the decolonial discourse enunciating agency, and that is today understood as the Global South.

At the end of the 1990s, in a recently unified Berlin, Gerhard Haupt coined this term to refer to the multiplication of biennials and the ubiquity of certain artists and curators, regardless of the characteristics of the place and the singularity of the mega-exhibition. In 1997, this time in Italy, exponents of the Venice-, São Paulo-, Istanbul-, Dakar-, Perth-, Pittsburg-, Costa Rica-, Havana-, Austin-, Sydney-, Bangkok- and Johannesburg biennials came together in a meeting organised by the Rockefeller Foundation. The purpose was to study and discuss “the rise and proliferation of large-scale international exhibitions“. On that occasion, the dissemination of the model was perceived to such extent as positive that Okwui Enwezor, who participated in the event, underlined that it offered the possibility of carrying out a “paradigm shift”.

Shortly afterwards, in 2001, the Revista de Occidente published a text by Ivo Mesquita that began with a seemingly infinite list of biennials. In a few lines the curator from São Paulo went through the five continents and finished by asking whether biennials are redundant or entropic. In those years a series of congresses that connected Europe, Asia and Australia was taking place within the event framework Biennials in Dialogue (2000-2008). The first was illustrated by the cartoon “What our village now needs is a biennial!”: a man, with a destroyed city behind him, delivers the resounding message to the camera. Olav Westphalen’s drawing captures the sogni e conflitti [dreams and conflicts] of the biennialization. In fact, the backdrop of the sentence uttered by the man is overwhelmingly complex: from the revolutionary dream of the Havana Biennial (1984) to the cascade effect of the Documenta (2002), via the Venetian replicas in São Paulo (1951) and Sydney (1973) and Maurizio Cattelan’s biennial-parody (1999).

What is biennialization? A democratic redistribution of cultural power or a new form of Western colonization? An inert repetition of a model or a challenge to provide new spaces and temporalities? The dichotomy is intrinsic to the concept as the very phenomenon it describes works in two ways. On the one hand, it contributes to the perpetuation of a dominant model, while at the same time questioning it; on the other, it challenges the system, while at the same time repeating and affirming it.