The end-times narrative has become ubiquitous in contemporary media and critical discourse in the Humanities. Ecological devastation, authoritarian politics, economic precarity, and social violence increasingly shape how we imagine the present and anticipate the future. Yet the saturation of our cultural imaginary with catastrophe also risks producing political and affective paralysis: when crisis becomes the horizon against which everything is understood, what possibilities remain for imagining life beyond anxiety?

This seminar addresses this question by examining how artistic practices in the Spanish-speaking world stand against necropolitical regimes that, as Achille Mbembe has noted, render certain lives disposable. We propose using “against” as a methodology to explore the political and aesthetic possibilities of artistic practice amid generalized turmoil. 

As both poetics and methodology, against asks not only what art opposes, but also what it encounters and withstands. To create against may mean to resist, counter, defy, or remain at odds with a dominant order; but it may also mean to anticipate and prepare against an attack or a threat, to enact protection against violence, to place one thing against another to produce contrast, or to press against a limit until it gives way.

“Against” thus names not a fixed position outside power, but a dynamic and physical relation to it. To be against something is “to respond to” but also “to come into contact with”, to touch. On the one hand, this means that artistic practices may confront necropolitical regimes while simultaneously inhabiting their conditions, anticipating their effects, exposing their contradictions. On the other hand, the relational and material dimension of against allows us to approach artistic practices beyond a simple opposition between domination and resistance and through the frictions, proximities, vulnerabilities, and productive contrasts in which alternative possibilities emerge.

The seminar welcomes proposals addressing any of the following questions: What formal, material, and aesthetic strategies interrupt angst? What themes, genres, and artistic forms enable alternative imaginaries? What affective modes of artistic production might counteract the paralysis caused by catastrophic thinking? How do transnational and interartistic dialogues expand these possibilities? How do collaborative and collective artistic practices reshape our horizons of possibility?

Bringing together literature, film, visual art, performance, music, digital media, and other forms of cultural production, this seminar invites contributions that explore the limits and possibilities of artistic responses to modern and contemporary regimes of violence and extraction, asking not only how the arts represent necropolitical realities but also how they make other realities imaginable against the backdrop of collapse.