Carlos Garrido Castellano

I work as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at UCC. I joined UCC in 2018. Before I was FCT Postdoctorate Researcher at the University of Lisbon. I completed my PhD in the University of Granada in 2013.

I am also Senior Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Arts and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg; Review Editor of the MHRA Journal Portuguese Studies; Series Editor of the De Gruyter book series "Towards a Global Understanding of Cultural Work"; coordinator of the BA in Portuguese Studies at UCC; and co-covenor of the CASILAC Memory, Commemoration and Uses of the Past research cluster.

I am currently PI of the IRC Laureate Consolidator Project Assessing the Contemporary Art Novel in Spanish and Portuguese: Cultural Labour, Personal Identification and the Materialisation of Alternative Art Worlds
(ARTFICTIONS) (September 2023-September 2027)

The main goal of ARTFICTIONS is to explain how contemporary societies make sense of themselves by making sense of artistic creativity. ARTFICTIONS explores narratives and stories about creativity produced at a time when artmaking is no longer a specialised field of cultural production, but rather an expanded field of socioeconomic interaction, personal and creative self-definition and collective imagination. The project advances a new global paradigm for the analysis of literary fictions concerned with artistic creativity and cultural production under creative and artistic capitalism.

The first aim of ARTFICTIONS has to do with redefining and repositioning the contemporary art novel as a central platform where radical understandings of the social role of cultural production and alternative modes of self-definition are tested and developed. Literary art worlds are not simple representations of existing art worlds; on the contrary, the art novel invests in imagining how personal, social and economic relationships within creative art worlds could be otherwise. This is a crucial task nowadays, when traditional forms of artistic and literary creativity (such as cultural festivals, art biennials, collaborative art practices, literary festivals, large-scale art exhibitions and online workshops) are being redefined and repurposed.

ARTFICTIONS’s second overarching aim is to offer the first systematic critical analysis of contemporary art novels at a global level. The project intends to decentre and decolonise narratives on artistic creativity by exploring how precariousness, authorship and socially transformative agency are thought and mobilised worldwide.
ARTFICTIONS is mainly concerned with the art novel, but it goes far beyond this literary genre. The project’s scope encompasses a broader spectrum of creative processes that nevertheless remain centred around artmaking, as ARTFICTIONS taps into broader debates on cultural production and artistic creativity’s role as a driving engine where cultural labour and self-identification are critically redressed.
The project positions the contemporary art novel as the most suitable place to understand how the economisation of cultural labour is affecting writers and artists alike. ARTFICTIONS redefines the debates on contemporary fiction and artmaking by conceiving the art novel as a crucial tool to understand processes of subject formation, personal and professional self-investment, precariousness and cultural labour in times of late neoliberalism.

ARTFICTIONS will develop the following initiatives over the next four years:
• A seminar series on artistic/creative capitalism.
• An open-source online database.
• The publication of a monograph, an edited volume and ten research articles.
• The production of two PhD dissertations.
• The creation of an art exhibition.
• The organisation of a final conference on alternative art worlds beyond creative capitalism

My research examines the role of cultural creativity in materialising alternative worlds. My focus on cultural activism and the legacy of colonialism is transforming research on creative practices produced in non-Western contexts at a global level, placing diversity and non-extractive research practices and methodologies at the centre of current debates on cultural production as a tool for social transformation. My research involves ongoing collaboration with creative practitioners from the Global South and the adoption of non-extractive and inclusive research methodologies.

My first monograph in English is Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art  (2019).  A fragment of the book has been translated into French (Critique d’Art Journal.) This monograph often features in the key reading list of modules on Caribbean Studies at a global level. It has been recognised as a key contribution that explores “the imaginative ways in which Caribbean subjects and communities rearrange the sociocultural framework(s) they inhabit and share” and as a text that “challenges us to find different spaces of enunciation that […] allow us to enter through their imaginative freedoms.” Related to this, since 2019 I have contributed to a popular dictionary on Caribbean art (A to Z of Caribbean Art), an initiative that circulates widely in the Caribbean and consolidates the presence of my research in the area.

Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future (2021) has been positively received. The book has been described as a project that “in an elegant and wide-ranging argument, routed through the agonistic temporalities of the global South, […] urges us to recast our conventional understandings of histories of art and activism in such a way as to enable us to recognize those moments and conjunctures in which a creative visual labor disrupts and displaces the regulative norms of our neoliberal age” (David Scott); as “breathtakingly original in its proposal of a historically grounded decolonial lens” (Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, MoMA curator of African art); as “a capacious and nuanced discussion of the power and capacity of socially engaged art to carry forward the still unfinished task of decolonization” (Ania Loomba); as “a fascinating, galvanizing, and important read” (Jane Ann Gordon); and as “essential reading for all those seeking to map-out the transformative potential of  cultural politics now, and in the decades to come” (Gregory Sholette). In 2022, Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future received funding by the Knowledge Unlatched programme to be transformed into a free Open Access publication within Project Muse.

Literary Fictions of the Contemporary Art System (2023), undertakes the first study of contemporary art novels in non-Western contexts. It examines contemporary fiction in Portuguese and Spanish from the Americas, Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The project has been described by Sarah Brouillette as “an unprecedented study of the art novel’s fascination with the convergence of art and life in our times, when to live like an artist can mean to barely scrape by on contingent work in informal economies, but also to devote oneself to fathoming and fabricating a world beyond privation. […] An indispensable book about how literature envisions the unfulfilled promise of artmaking as a model for a flourishing life.” Since its publication, I been invited to present on related topics (Leiden University, University of Amsterdam, University of Granada).

Finally, Chorus: Sonic Politics of the Carnivalesque in Tragic Times (2026) posits the carnivalesque as a fertile laboratory to understand and go past our crisis-driven contemporaneity. The book engages with sound and noise from Cádiz, one of the capital cities of carnival in Spain, to situate carnivalesque mobilisation as a vibrant platform where our capacity to redemocratise our societies and to envisage liveable futures is revitalised. Chorus argues that the connection between freedom and carnival (carnival being a parenthesis that “liberates” individual subjectivity) has to be profoundly rethought, as freedom and spontaneity have become part of neoliberal governability. Chorus demonstrates that carnival music is crucial to understand collective ways of being and acting in common, ways that go beyond the structured and established avenues of “formal”, parliamentary politics. Carnival music is also essential to understand and move beyond a carnivalised politics (laughter being simultaneously used to open and curtail public debate; neo-conservative jester-kings that are ascending to power; and a long etcetera). More importantly, carnival sonics is a public intervention that brings its own situated, practice-based thinking. In Chorus, I argue that participating in carnival groups implies acting and being in public politically.