María Iñigo Clavo
Research Officer
Department of Art History & Theory University of Essex
María Iñigo Clavo is a Research Officer for the Meeting Margins research project. She finished her PhD at Complutense University of Madrid, where she began to take an interest in Latin American Art, especially Brazilian Art, during the sixties and seventies. She has studied the dialogue between Post/Decolonial proposals and art works by Brazilian artists in the seventies. Her research into art and politics, especially Brazilian art, led her to co-curate with Intermaediae (Spain) a meeting between Brazilian and Spanish art groups in 2007, resulting in interchanges between Brazilian and Spanish artists. She presented with Yayo Aznar the first Post-Graduate Specialization Course in Art History and Aesthetics in Benemérita Autonomous University of Puebla in México. In 2008 she taught MA courses at the European University of Madrid in Latin American Art and Postcolonial issues. Currently, she is a researcher in the project Arte y Pensamiento en la Edad Moderna y Contemporánea at UNED (Spain's Official Open University) in the Art History Department, and is also a member of the Conceptualismos del Sur network.
Mara Iigos research for the Meeting Margins project is focused on the presence of Africa in Cuban cinema in the seventies and its connections with Brazil through the director Glauber Rocha. The Brazilian filmmaker travelled to the Caribbean island in 1972 and spent nearly a year there. During this time, Cuba was beginning to enact Soviet models of political, social and cultural reorganisation and control, and the regime was demanding a pedagogical and didactic art. This period was known as the "grey five-years", when strict and oppressive censorship resulted in the mass migration of numerous intellectuals. Many filmmakers made productions based on the history and foundation myths of the nation, and so frequently looked to Cuba's African heritage and the history of slavery, which was also a vehicle for exploring the contemporaneous problematics of the island's power relations. Rocha worked on his film "History of Brazil" during 1972, at the ICAIC studios, but would only finish it in Italy, where he travelled as a result of certain reservations and disagreements he held concerning the Cuban experience.
Read María Iñigo Clavo's departmental profile including full publication list
