Semiotic Boundary Spaces: An Exercise in Decolonial Aesthesis

Abstract

The main purpose of this essay is the analysis of the discourses expressed between Jaider Esbell's Brazilian artistic sculptures and the monuments of the urban space. Based on J. Lotman's notion of semiotic boundary space of culture, the analysis focuses on the controversial discursive relationships, such as intelligibility and unintelligibility; translation and untranslatability, and so on, observed from the historical tensioning of cultural languages. This analytical path leads us to intercultural relationships in which artistic languages in semiotic boundary spaces manifest the Aesthesis condition that has given the theoretical foundations for the Decolonial studies and the arising of a new episteme in the understanding of intercultural relationships. Thus, the semiotic concept of boundary space allows us to analyse various discursive relationships in historical-political contexts in the contemporary debate.