On Thursday, September 16, 2021, Sur Gallery hosted a special lecture with invited curator Julieta González. 

González spoke about the research behind her exhibition Memories of Underdevelopment: early instances of decolonial aesthetics in Latin America 1960-1980s. For this show, she sought to extricate the production of Latin American artists during the 60s and 70s from the conceptualist framework in which they had been typecast by art historical revisions carried out since the late nineties, and delve into the specificities of their production, specifically in relation to the rhetoric of development and the strategies of resistance to what many perceived was a renovation of the colonialist enterprise in the guise of modernization. The exhibition analyzed these practices through the conceptual and aesthetic operations these artists used to counter the imposition of a modernist agenda in the arts and culture during the period, such as critiques of the colonial legacy and institutions such as the church, support of peasant movements and their causes, critique of extractivism by transnational corporations, use of information and its circulation networks, a denunciation of structural racism and poverty in Latin America, a reconfiguration of the constructive paradigm from the coordinates of the sensorium, radical pedagogies, and the incorporation of the vocabularies of the popular into their practices.