This 6^th edition of the Epistemologies of the South Summer School will focus on the role the Arts play in broadening the north-south/south-south dialogues, and thus in the expansion of political and epistemological imagination, which does not exhaust itself in the denouncement of hegemonic capitalist, colonialist, and hetero-patriarchal thinking. The Covid-19 pandemic brought to light the deepest existing inequalities in the world, which were often ignored or neglected, producing forgetfulness and absences. After almost two years since the appearance of Covid-19, in these difficult and unfortunate times, something has become clear: the Arts have been presented to express our feelings, allowing us today more than ever to speak through them, in a multitude of artistic forms and languages, such as graffiti, (colonial) photography, cinema, literature or knitting.

As Boaventura de Sousa Santos says, we live in a period in which the most disgusting forms of social inequality and discrimination become politically acceptable. Modern contestation ideologies have been largely captured by neoliberalism. There is resistance, but it is becoming less credible as a realistic alternative. This resistance exists now more than ever outside the institutions and not through the modes of political mobilization prevailing in the previous historical period (political parties and social movements).

We believe that the arts, seen as an emancipatory alternative or simply as a way of contesting power and expressing our disagreement, can perfectly dialogue with science and academic knowledge. Hence, the Epistemologies of the South demand a new aesthetic, a plurality of post-abyssal creative artistic practices that emerged from the struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. This being a call to transgress the boundaries between academic knowledge and knowledge born in social struggles, recognizing the role of emotions in the creation of transformative knowledge.

As in the previous editions, a heterogeneous group is expected in terms of origin, knowledge, age and experience of work and struggle. This summer school will be a space of mutual exchange and co-learnings that will provide the means to imagine and draw real utopias from concrete experiences and knowledges. As the school seeks to explore, Southern aesthetics, in its pluriversity, integrate artistic expressions from numerous cultures and aesthetic theories developed outside the paradigm of Northern epistemologies, offering keys to thinking about and understanding other pasts and new futures.