Abstract Artistic research frequently becomes legible through epistemic models consolidated in metropolitan academic centres. In regional universities of the Global South, however, it does not begin with the adoption of a disciplinary framework but with the recognition of artistic creation as knowledge already in practice. In Chile, recent higher-education legislation has formally incorporated artistic creation as a legitimate mode of knowledge production, placing it on an equivalent epistemic plane with scientific research. This juridical shift opens institutional space while simultaneously exposing unresolved tensions around validation, documentation and epistemic authority.

This presentation reflects on the institutional articulation of artistic research at the University of Los Lagos, a public university in southern Chile located on historically Mapuche Williche territory. Here, recognising artistic creation as research requires engaging with conceptual worlds shaped by indigenous memory, territorial attachment and postcolonial continuities. Legal recognition alone does not determine how such knowledge is translated into academic formats within institutions historically structured by colonial epistemologies.

Rather than importing artistic research as a stable paradigm, we approach it as a situated process of institutional translation. The establishment of a university-wide registry of artistic works functioned not simply as an instrument of measurement but as an experimental site where categories such as validation, circulation and exposition were renegotiated in dialogue with practices grounded in orality, community transmission and intergenerational cultural sedimentation. In a context marked by significant numbers of first-generation and indigenous-background students, artistic research emerges as a field of friction between academic infrastructures and lived territorial identities.