Rituals of the unknown:

Performative improvisation in southern collections

Abstract

Improvisation as a performative arts practice responds to contexts and images in real time, being experienced and named in a village-specific way. In the manifestations of the peoples of the South who have been marginalised by the hegemonic discourse of modern art, it is a practice that is both powerful and invisible. We see how countless Latin American performative practices of great vitality develop knowledge and strategies for improvisation. What is the place and how do these devices of knowledge operate? Can they be considered collective devices for the production of social reality? Do these devices of collective creation, of visual, oral and performative narratives have the capacity to question modern and postmodern ideas of art and aesthetics? We conclude that these practices and the broad reflection on them make possible the restoration of collective experiences, in a wider field, as strategies operating in everyday life and the emergence of different registers of reality that popular performances mobilise.