During the early phase of the Cold War, the cultural policy deployed by the Pan-American Union channelled the 19th century Latin Americanism under a hemispheric perspective that abandoned the folklorist gaze towards Latin American artistic practices and highlighted their articulations with the processes of Western modernity. However, the Cuban revolution, the missile crisis and the policy of the Alliance for Progress in the region reactivated inter-American political-cultural tensions and the Latin Americanism assumed in the mid-1960s took an anti-imperialist turn, which resisted the North American presence and favoured a new continental revolutionary utopia that materialised via transatlantic artistic-intellectual networks. The economic and political instability and the weakening of public institutions that characterised the 1970s allowed for the advance of market dynamics in the art scene, and soon the logics of capital took root, operating also in the redefinitions of the Latin American.

The international art auction market introduced a special section for Latin American art, and more private galleries emerged specifically dedicated to marketing it. Alongside the multiplication of Latin American exhibitions one could clearly note an intensification of the critical debate on cultural identity that expressed in a multiplication of gatherings, articles in specialised regional as well as foreign magazines, books and special issues devoted to the question. They gave rise to new theoretical approaches that analysed the regional artistic production in relation with its socio-economic and political realities, in several cases adapting proposals by Third World authors. The Havana Biennial in the 1980s consolidated the innovative proposal of a new non-European biennial model, centred on the cultural production of Latin American, African and Asian countries. This dynamic of exchanges led to the redefinition of Latin Americanism with an important aspect becoming its links with developing countries. US interventions in Central America revitalised Cold War tensions and added to the multiplication of street protests by the Latin American community, which had become by then the largest minority in the US. Museum institutions gradually accommodated the new social agendas and began to collect and exhibit Latino art in the United States with the help of multinational capital. The prevailing Latin Americanism of the late 1980s translated into the instrumentalisation of Latin American art and culture for electoral proselytising and the global art market.

Multinational corporations, banks and other private capital left their mark on visual arts policies. The models of representation of the Latin American disseminated through blockbuster exhibitions, which were financed by institutions and multinationals from the global North, generated in the early 1990s critical responses from the curatorial field and the art-historic practice in Latin America. Consequently, they exposed the geopolitical and economic uses that Latin Americanism had served and inaugurated the contemporary stage, in which the colonial legacies implicit in the totalising identitarian impulse are reviewed and criticised from a more open, dynamic and fluid conception of the Latin American in the arts.

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.

Transnational solidarity movements were fundamental vehicles for global circulation, fraternity and struggle during the Cold War, and determining factors in the shaping of the multicultural and global society, in which we live today. This concept designates a territory that is at the origin of key movements and important platforms for coordinating structural changes regarding organisation and governance as well as the geography of the Cold War. Reactivated in this context, it articulated a new imaginary of the world and of the cooperation between nations and continents. This was reinforced through the decolonising processes that multiplied after the Second World War and that were to form part of what was to become a position(ing) that challenged the Cold War bipolarity.

Hence, under the sign of solidarity, struggles were interconnected and internationalised, while at the same time creating a common imaginary and horizon. The configuration of the league of non-aligned countries made great use of the concept of solidarity between states to articulate a common policy (clearly visible in the foreign policy of the former Yugoslavia); the Tricontinental configured a model of solidarity that integrated the struggle for independence and the emancipation of peoples via defence with attack (through the armed and revolutionary struggle). The coordination of this front for emancipation and social justice prefigured and built at the same time what we call today the Global South.

This model of transnational cooperation and action not only meant effective collaboration between national liberation struggles, revolutionary forces and groups that fought for minorities (such as the Black Panther Party) (and with training, sending of militias, technical support), but also generated a horizon of imagination shared by multiple individuals from all over the planet, in which the visual and the performative acquired a determining role. The visual production (visual arts, graphic production, posters, film and photography, video) was a founding element for coordinating causes, objectives, fuelling the struggle, creating collective imaginations, hopes and desires, dissident genealogies, as well as for transmitting revolutionary memories

While this concept is still in use (though not as Third Worldism, or Tricontinentalism), it has since long been stripped of its revolutionary and emancipatory connotations, being re-appropriated in the name of the human rights and based on concepts closely linked to charity and fraternity (associated with the counter-insurgency movements developed to deactivate the revolutionary movements of the 60s and 70s). In this framework, in which artistic practices participated in the struggles, the solidarity of the past now seems to gain a prefigurative role in the light of the anti-racist struggles that have shaken the pandemic world. Hence, the neoconservative turn of today’s turbo-capitalism, coupled with the radicalisation of violence, has generated models of anti-racist struggle(s) that reactivate the model of tricontinental solidarity.