Fellowship

David Muñoz Alcántara’s research contributes to debates on aesthetic praxis and addresses notions and theorizations of militancy as practical methodology. It engages contemporary analyses of artistic forms in their entanglement within revolutionary processes, self-determination, and liberation struggles, particularly focusing on the self-determination movements that emerged in arts, architecture, philosophy, and anthropology in 1970s Mexico. Accompanying the 1968 uprisings, concrete examples and exercises of non-fascist and non-dominant living took place, at the same time, challenging the solidity of institutional frameworks. Following their internationalist degree and resonances through the first-hand experience of their activists’ involvements, Muñoz Alcántara’s research intersects and learns from trans-geographic, practical contributions. Theoretically, it builds upon the propositions that art and philosophy are forms of class struggle, and engages art as advanced critical practice and future making. Specifically, Muñoz Alcántara addresses poetry—understood as embodied anti-disciplinary and trans-linguistic forms that move non-hegemonic philosophical debates in entanglements of ideas and emotions—as a historical revolutionary position of subversive interpellation; the relation of art to the care for and practice of truth; and the use of aesthetic positions to counteract ideological impositions. At the same time, his research zooms in on the contradictions and instrumentality of subaltern characters and dialectics around the concepts of people and autonomy. This project unfolds through two conceptual frameworks: the “workshop” as a site for encounters and the “exercise” as a site for activation, temporal-spatial manifestations of inquiring and learning.