The Transregional Academy is organized by the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien and the German Center for Art History in Paris (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, DFK, part of the Max Weber Foundation – German Humanities Institutes Abroad). Its goal is to facilitate an exchange on concepts and variations of modernism across nations and regions among scholars from different countries and various academic environments. The academy will take place from July 17–24, 2016 at the Universidad Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp) and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP) and will conclude with a conference, open to the public, on July 23.

The Transregional Academy will be led by a group of scholars: Thomas Kirchner (DFK, Paris), Lena Bader (DFK, Paris), Margit Kern (Universität Hamburg), Hannah Baader (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz/Max-Planck-Institut/Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices, Berlin), Patrick Flores (University of the Philippines, Manila), Thierry Dufrêne (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense), Anne Lafont (Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, INHA), Jens Baumgarten (Unifesp, São Paulo), Ana Gonçalves Magalhães (MAC-USP, São Paulo, USP), Gabriela Siracusano (Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, UNTREF, Buenos Aires), and Diana Wechsler (Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, UNTREF, Buenos Aires).

Rather than merely describing and contrasting artistic tendencies, our aim is to discuss the various cultural creative processes, strategies of appropriation, modalities of translation and of comparison in transregional and transcultural perspectives. In the process, the following topic areas can be debated: terminology and discourses, history and tradition, art and politics, centrality and peripherality, publicity and popularization, institutions, mobility, media, and myths. The paths of transmission within Latin America as well as those between Latin America and the other regions of the world will also be taken into account. In the spirit of this kind of transregional perspective, the objective is to compare the modernist debates in Latin American countries with those occurring in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America and to locate them within a global context. In doing so, questions arise concerning appropriation and distinction, as well as revisions and translations of developments and processes that manifested themselves in terms such as “colonial art,” “independence,” “originality,” “primitivism,” and “nation building.”