¬¬¬¬ GVC | Foci and Aims
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By promoting a horizontal decolonial dialogue between different visual cultures, gvc aims to strengthen extradisciplinary-led debates, while enhancing collaborative networks devoted to the analysis of topics such as the visual construction of identity, the inter-subjective negotiation of cultural differences, non-Eurocenteric understandings of art history, or the canonization of Western aesthetic models when institutions come to represent cultural diversity and to endorse intercultural dialogue through art. gvc is mainly focused on stimulating new approaches to these issues as well as on exceeding mono-disciplinary understandings of global intercultural aesthetic phenomena.

GLOBALIZATION
There is an evident and unavoidable intensity of global relations and cultural exchanges on a wide geographical scale, which deeply transform the imaginaries of the local, the national, and the transnational. Migratory currents of people and information, new international structures of the labor market, economic and symbolic image displacements, and the circulation of cultural assets and immaterial resources worldwide have become part of our global intercultural landscape. These global processes could be perceived negatively as cultural homogenization or rather as an opportunity to reevaluate intercultural negotiations and transnational social agencies. In a period of enhanced globalism activity and national realignments, monolithic views on modernity, cross-cultural art, or postcoloniality need to be questioned constantly. We need to construct, as Arjun Appadurai has pointed out, various accounts and various histories of the multiple globalizations.

INTERCULTURALITY
More often than not, interplays between anthropology and visuality are perceived as an arena full of epistemic ambiguities. For instance, in his response to Octobers’ questionnaire on visual culture, Martin Jay recognized the permanence and importance of the anthropological approaches but, at the same time, he considered some anthropologic concepts as “imprecise and inadequate” points of departure for visual studies. Considering the aftermaths of the ‘pictorial turn’ (W.T.J. Mitchell) and the ‘iconic turn’ (Boehm), suspicions that have risen as a consequence of what has been described (in part because of the influence of Hal Foster’s perspective) as the ethnographic turn need to be reconsidered. Because of the fact that transcultural and intercultural dilemmas of visuality have been systematically disregarded, the anthropological inquiry of current global visual cultures seems to be a plausible terrain for extra-disciplinary research. In its complexity, however, this unexplored field demands a more accurate understanding of issues such as the representability of Otherness, the stereotypification of cultural differences, or the translatability of an image between different cultures or different temporalities. A critical view on cultural exchanges, visual veracity, alterity, and hybridity is part of the intercultural agenda of a new sort of global visual studies.