Third Text

A new co-publication with Discipline (Melbourne/Narrm), Future Souths, 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/Naarm, 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

Future Souths can be purchased from Central Books