Marina Fernanda Suárez
2024-2025
François Chevalier Fellow
Universidad de Buenos Aires
Espacios, “contracultura” y yuxtaposiciones disciplinares en el arte de los años 80. Un análisis del underground porteño a través de la figura de Batato Barea
Biography
Marina Fernanda Suárez holds a PhD in Sociology from the Escuela de Altos Estudios Sociales of the Universidad de San Martín, and is a postdoctoral fellow of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) based at the Centro de investigaciones de Arte y Patrimonio (CIAP). She holds a Master's degree in History of Argentine and Latin American Art from the Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales and is a graduate and professor of sociology from the University of Buenos Aires.
In her doctoral research she approached the underground art movement during the 80's in Buenos Aires, from the trajectory of the clown-travesti-literary artist: Batato Barea. Through Barea's wanderings through the Buenos Aires nightlife, the researcher investigated the crossings between different artistic disciplines -theater, dance, visual arts, music, and performance-, sexuality, and the ways of inhabiting the city during the democratic spring.
Currently, in the framework of her postdoctoral research, she addresses the transnational aesthetic exchanges and overflows between Buenos Aires and Madrid during the post-dictatorship in Argentina and Spain respectively (1975-1990).
Research project
The transitions to democracy in Spain and Argentina had different political, temporal and social characteristics. However, there is something that unites them in their specificity: the cultural movements that young people generated in those years and the transnational aesthetic and political circulations between both countries in that period.
In Spain, the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, after 36 years of military dictatorship, marked a new democratic stage for the country. In Argentina, the transition to democracy began in 1983, when the military regime of the dictatorship lost legitimacy and elections were called.
With its differences and complexities, in both cases, it was a period of liberalization that involved the youth and involved the emergence of a cultural movement of great creative effervescence.
In this research, I will analyze, in a dialogic key, the cultural movements of the transition to democracy between Spain and Argentina. In addition, I will investigate the trips of Argentine artists to Madrid during the transition to democracy (1975-1990) and the aesthetic and poetic circulations that took place between the two countries.
Selected publications
2024. Humor in El palacio de la risa: parody and social criticism in Argentine television in the 1990s. Revista Astrolabio (33) July-December, p. 338-365.
2024. El CCCBA en la última dictadura militar: oficialismo, negociaciones y resistencias culturales, 1979-1983”. Quinto Sol Journal. ISSN: 1851-2879. In press.
2023. A myth, a legend, an era? La construcción social de la excepcionalidad en el caso del artista, clown-travesti-literario, Batato Barea. Revista de la Red de Intercátedras de Historia de América Latina Contemporánea. Year 10, N° 18. Córdoba, June - November 2023. ISSN 2250-7264, pp. 69-92.
2021. Affective funeral rituals in the face of the AIDS crisis in Buenos Aires in the 1980s. Aisthesis Journal. Revista Chilena de Investigaciones Estéticas (70), pp. 81-102.
2021. “Those rare new hairstyles. The liminal experience of the first performative punk group of the 1980s”. In Antonella Cancellier and María Amalia Barchesi (eds.). Theater, practices and performative arts of testimony and memory. Nuevos paradigmas, formas, enfoques en las post-dictaduras del Cono Sur. Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, pp.167-187.
