Third Text

Future Souths: Dialogues on Art, Place, and History, initiated and introduced by Verónica Tello, is the culmination of an online dialogical project that began in 2017.

Future Souths features essays and dialogues by/with 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.

Future Souths includes essays by Verónica Tello, Dylan A T Miner, Zoe Butt, Edgar Alejandro Hernández, Rolando López, Carla Macchiavello, Walter D Mignolo, Rachel O’Reilly and Ruth Simbao; and dialogues with the aforementioned and Jennifer Biddle, Katherine Carl, Fernando do Campo, Chandra Frank, Srdjan Jovanović Weiss, Angela Mitropoulos, James Nguyen, Salote Tawale and Jean-Sylvain Tshilumba Mukendi.

Future Souths is co-published by Third Text Publications, London, and Discipline, Melbourne/Narrm, 2023
ISBN 978-0-9945388-6-4

Design:  Zenobia Ahmed and Alexandra Margetic
Language: English
Softcover, 224 pp, 65 colour and spot-colour images, 1 b/w image, 165 x 234 mm

At a moment when dominant conceptual and economic frameworks (capitalism, nationalism, and the prison industrial complex) from the global north are collapsing under their own weight, Future Souths inspires us to discard familiar geographical and temporal vocabularies. Essays and dialogues among artists, scholars, and activists offer alternative models for new conceptual pathways, evaluate the productivity of ‘weak’ histories, offer methods for politically resistant collectives, and insightfully insist that we begin to properly imagine spaces of justice and equality.

Jennifer A González, co-editor of Chicana and Chicano Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019)

Future Souths can be purchased from Central Books