Latin American art in diaspora: migration and alternative networks of art in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s

The article examines a network of artists from Latin America in Europe connected by their experience of exile and the set of transnational relations they created through their practices. It focuses on the Netherlands, and Amsterdam in particular, as a critical node and geo-artistic site in a broader diaspora of Latin American artists in Europe as of the 1960s. The essay centers on the work of Raul Marroquin (Colombia), Ulises Carrión (Mexico), Claudio Goulart and Flavio Pons (Brazil) and their production of publications and mail art that formed a significant artistic network in the postwar period. It examines how their work was key in establishing mediums of communication, connection and support among Latin American artists in Europe, as well as a larger international network of artists. In the widespread use of the term marginal and alternative to describe their unconventional art practices, this paper also considers a more capacious understanding of this vocabulary as it relates to these artists’ peripheral position(s) and non-normative identities.