Amerasian Materialities: Affect and the Sensory Lives of “Asia” in Northern South America, by Juliana Fagua Arias
April 24, 2026, 15:00 Central European Time. Online via MS Teams
With a primary focus on objects from present‑day Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, this talk examines the role of “Asia” as a territorial and imaginative category in the self‑definition of colonial denizens. Beyond tracing the circulation of iconographies and styles between Asian and Latin American artworks, I argue that artistic dialogues across the Pacific often manifest in less immediately visible ways, such as material and technique. Furthermore, the affective associations of materials themselves encode understandings of Asia as an evocative zone of excess: a site of cartographic fantasy, exuberant luxury, divine materiality, and ecological abundance. To this end, I analyze distinct material practices that emerged in the Andean-Amazonian piedmont—the interpretation of East Asian lacquerware in Neogranadine furniture; the combination of silk and camelid fibers in Indigenous garments; the devotional use of blue‑and‑white ceramics, both from China and from Mexico, in architectural settings; and the adaptation of Amazonian featherwork in response to incoming textile designs, particularly from India—to explore what each reveals about the integration of “Asia” into colonial Latin American identity.
Juliana FAGUA ARIAS is an art historian, curator of Latin American art and material culture, and PhD Candidate at Cornell University. Her research explores artistic exchange between Asia and the Spanish Americas during the colonial period, with particular attention to the visual and material impact of the Manila Galleon trade. She is especially interested in materiality as a driver of cultural connectivity in the early modern trans-pacific milieu, focusing on the physical, affective, and historical aspects of materials and the ways they interact with their makers, consumers, and environments over time.
Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Juliana holds an MA from the Bard Graduate Center in Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture. She has curated exhibitions and installations at the Franz Mayer Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Syracuse University. Most recently, Juliana collaborated in the exhibition “Colonial Crossings: Art, Belief, and Identity in the Spanish Americas” at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, the first exhibition of colonial Latin American art at Cornell University.
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