This book explores the historical and contemporary connections between art and politics in Colombia. These relations are unique because of the ways in which they are saturated by violence, as the country has passed through conquest, struggles for Independence, fighting between political factions, civil war, paramilitaries, narco-traffickers and state violence. This seemingly unending stream of violence gives art in Colombia one of its main themes. The lavishly illustrated essays, written by Colombian authors, examine Colombian visual arts, music, theatre, literature, cinema, indigenous arts, popular culture, militant publications and recent protest movements, analysing them with tools drawn from contemporary philosophy and theory. Approaches include decolonisation theory, cosmopolitics, anthropology after the ontological turn, Colombian philosophy, feminism, and French theory. The essays all offer powerful understandings of how art has not only been complicit in perpetuating political violence in Colombia, but also how it has been a vital form of analysis and resistance.

Introduction - Stephen Zepke and Nicolás Alvarado Castillo.- 1. One or Several Antigones... - Amalia Boyer.- 2. In-situ Aesthetics as Local Politics: Gilbert Simondon and the 21N Protest Movement - Ana-Isabel Durán.- 3. Minor Music: The Politics of Music and Women's Resistance in Colombia - Sandra N. Sánchez R., Alicia Natali Chamorro, Jorge F. Maldonado S..- 4. The Gestural Dimension of Artistic Practice: Performance, Politics and Responsibility - Gustavo Gómez Pérez.- 5. The Case of the Recumbent Woman; Colombian Art and the Anthropological Machine - Ana Maria Lozano.- 6. "The Life of the People"; Coca, the Forest and Violence - Barbara Santos.- 7. Nature's Spectral Haunting; the Cosmopolitics of Death in Recent Colombian Film and Literature - Carlos A. Manrique.- 8. From Physiological Aesthetics to Anthropological Poetics: Activating the Pictograms of Cerro Azul - Stephen Zepke.- 9. The Violence Over Memory. Archaeology, Heritage, and Indigenous Histories in Andean Colombia - Cristóbal Gnecco.- 10. Symbiosis and Aesthetic Cosmopolitics in the Work of Carolina Caycedo - Gustavo Chirolla.- 11. Revolution and Reaction: Art and Politics in Nicolás Gómez Dávila - Juan Fernando Mejía Mosquera.- 12. Aesthetic Languages and Political Actions: Collaborations, Tensions, and Openings in Colombia Today - Laura Quintana.- 13. The Emergence of the Popular in Colombia - Mónica Zuleta Pardo.- 14. Forcing the Boundaries: Transgression and Political Violence in Colombian Contemporary Theatre - Nicolás Alvarado Castillo.-15. Oscar Leone; Body, Landscape and Territory - Adriana Urrea and Gustavo Chirolla.