This book explores the historical and contemporary connections between art and politics in Colombia. These relations are unique because of the ways in which they are saturated by violence, as the country has passed through conquest, struggles for Independence, fighting between political factions, civil war, paramilitaries, narco-traffickers and state violence. This seemingly unending stream of violence gives art in Colombia one of its main themes. The lavishly illustrated essays, written by Colombian authors, examine Colombian visual arts, music, theatre, literature, cinema, indigenous arts, popular culture, militant publications and recent protest movements, analysing them with tools drawn from contemporary philosophy and theory. Approaches include decolonisation theory, cosmopolitics, anthropology after the ontological turn, Colombian philosophy, feminism, and French theory. The essays all offer powerful understandings of how art has not only been complicit in perpetuating political violence in Colombia, but also how it has been a vital form of analysis and resistance.

Stephen Zepke is an independent researcher living in Vienna, Austria. His recent publications include: Hacia un "nuevo" nuevo brutalismo. Encuentros con los Jardines de Robin Hood (2022), Head in the Stars, Essays on Science Fiction (2020), La Sensación Más Allá de Los Límites, Ensayos sobre arte y política (2019) and Sublime Art, Towards an Aesthetics of the Future (2017).

Nicolás Alvarado Castillo is a Professor of Philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia. He is the faculty’s Publishing Director and co-editor of the peer reviewed journal Universitas Philosophica. He is author of Les variations de la ligne parfaite. Enquête philosophique sur l’idée de vers chez Mallarmé (2022). He currently works at the intersection of Aesthetics and Post-Marxist Theory and has published on contemporary French thought, philosophy and literature, and philosophy and theatre.