The Potosí Principle. How Can We Sing the Song of the Lord in an Alien Land

Colonial Image Production in the Global Economy

Editors: Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer and Andreas Siekmann
304 pages
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2010
ISBN: 978-3-86560-926-7
Price: € 34,00

Available at bookstores and the shop at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Potosí is a Bolivian mining town, whose splendor even eclipsed that of London or Paris in the sixteenth century. The silver extracted there by forced laborers was instrumental in fuelling the development of early European capitalism. The dynamics of this economic colonialism spawned the production of images on a mass scale, not only in Spain, but also in the vice-royalty itself. The works of the “Andean Baroque” unveiled in The Potosí Principle attest to the fact that cultural hegemony is not a symbolic concept, but is, in fact, rooted in violence.

Contemporary artists have responded to these Baroque paintings by fashioning works of their own. The objective of this dialogue is to demonstrate the correlation between the function served by colonial painting and the function now assumed by the modern system of art in conferring legitimacy upon globalization’s new elites.

With texts by
Sonia Abián, Anna Artaker, Bartolomé Arzáns Orsúa y Vela, John Barker, Matthijs de Brujine, Thomas Campbell, Roberto Choque Canqui, Chto delat, Alice Creischer, Anthony Davies, Elvira Espejo, Marcelo Expósito, Harun Farocki, León Ferrari, Tom Flynn, Maria Galindo, Isaías Griñolo, Max Jorge Hinderer, Karl Marx School of the English Language, Peter Linebaugh, Gabriela Massuh, Eduardo Molinari, Fátima Olivarez, Plata de Refléxion sobre Politicas Culturales, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, David Riff, Jorge Sanjinés, Andreas Siekmann, Luis Víctor Alemán Vargas and Dmitry Vorobyev

Available in Spansih at the shop of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt:
Principio Potosí: ¿Cómo podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena?
Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer, Andreas Siekmann (ed.)
ISBN 978-84-8026-426-6 | NIPO 553-10-021-0
Distribution in Spain and Latin America...
All other areas Actar-D: office@actar-d.com

Oct 7, 2010–Jan 2, 2011

The Potosí Principle

Not only commodities, but also images—material and ideological—were transported from colonial Latin America to Europe. On the 200th Anniversary of the independence movements in Latin America, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, together with partners in Spain and Bolivia, will focus on a specific aspect of colonial history: the relationship between trade and image transfer, exchange of economic and thought structures between Latin America and Europe and beyond.