MULTISURREALISM · Surrealism as Multicultural Experience: The Transatlantic Bonds of the Surrealist Group and the Self-Reevaluation of Latin-American and European Cultural Identities

By studying a set of surrealist cultural journals edited during the 1930s and 1940s, MULTISURREALISM will examine the intercultural exchange between surrealist Latin American and European artists and writers, to analyze the way their ideas, agreements, tensions, and debates had an impact on the revalorization of the Latin American artistic and symbolic production, as well as on the understanding of European civilization. With an interdisciplinary approach (Literature Studies, Visual Arts Studies, Graphic Design, Discourse Studies, History of Ideas), the research will focus on the literary and artistic production of the surrealist multicultural network, as it has been manifested in magazines such as Minotaure (Paris, 1933-1939); VVV (New York, 1942-1944); Dyn (Coyoacán, 1942-1944); El Uso de la Palabra (Lima, 1939); Las Moradas (Lima, 1947-1949); Mandrágora (Santiago, 1938-1942) and Leitmotiv (Santiago, 1942). The overall hypothesis states that the surrealist multicultural relation promoted a different glance over Latin American culture since the assumption that Latin America is a land where surrealism arises naturally belongs to an ethnocentric perspective constructed by both European and Latin American surrealists. Still, it simultaneously allowed them to question the assumed subordination of Latin American culture, giving a new shape to its identity and influencing its Literature until the rise of the Latin American Boom. The project aims to connect different archive materials to analyze what this movement wanted to express, and also its unintentional effects and underlying meanings, to study its impact as a multicultural group. The final goal is to broaden the perspective about surrealism's role in the Latin-American culture of the XX Century, which promoted transatlantic bonds that have enriched both cultures and opened them to the world. This plan will be developed at Universitat Pompeu Fabra under the supervision of Dr. Domingo Ródenas de Moya.