ABSTRACT. This article presents the preliminary findings of research that explores how a sample of secondary school visual arts teachers conceptualise and embody interculturality across distinct public schools and Chilean regions. An increasingly culturally diverse Chile, postcolonial inequalities and Indigenous dispossession, and the tensions this creates in an educational system that privileges Western onto-epistemologies, present some critical challenges to intercultural visual arts education. These challenges open the opportunity to re-imagine the theories and methodologies that inform teachers and educational policies. While teachers are aware that interculturality acquires special relevance in art education since diversities can be explored and expressed, the field has historically struggled to belong in schools. This shows the need for decolonising the onto-epistemology that in education underpins issues of belonging through hierarchical categorisation and erasure of interdependence. To trouble such orientation, the research adopted the Mapuche onto-episteme of azmapu – beautiful and good earth – and posthuman theories of ‘entanglement.’ Both illuminate issues of belonging through relational and sensible ways of responding to difference that emphasise interdependence. Consistently, a/r/tography, an arts-based research methodology, enabled us to theorise about the findings through a relational approach and collage-making as embodied thinking.

Keywords: interculturality; art education; decolonisation; Indigenous onto-epistemologies; posthuman entanglement; arts-based research methodologies.

How to cite: Garcia Lazo, V., & Appelgren, D. (2024). The art of not belonging: Decolonising intercultural visual arts education in Chile. Knowledge Cultures, 12(1), 194-217. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc121202411

Received October 6, 2023 • Received in revised form February 5, 2024
Accepted February 23, 2024 • Available online April 1, 2024