Artistic concepts are both weapons and traps

Abstract

This article investigated the trajectory of two concepts: Contemporary Indigenous Art and the artistic field. Using a bibliographic approach, it employed discursive textual analysis as a data analysis methodology to identify conceptual metaphors in the discourses of artists and researchers. The Theory of Conceptual Metaphor understands metaphor not as a figure of speech, but as a structure of human activity that manifests itself in linguistic processes through mapping between domains: the source domain and the target domain. Establishing art as the target domain, it was found that discourses about the insertion of Indigenous artivists in contemporary artistic institutions have been structured from the source domains of war, struggle, and dispute. Thus, the idea that "artistic concepts are weapons," present in Pierre Bourdieu's research, is updated in the positions of artist-witnesses and researchers with the discourses of "territorial reclamation" and the "arena of disputes." In turn, the source domain of hunting allows us to think of artistic concepts as traps. This idea is indebted to the thinking of Jaider Esbell, when he describes Contemporary Indigenous Art as a trap for traps. This conceptualization seems to be an alternative way of thinking about the social relations that are established in the artistic field today.