Hacer saltar el continuum de la historia. Memoria y representación en imaginarios fotográficos contemporáneos

Abstract

The objective of this work is to investigate, in a corpus of contemporary photographs, the relationship between images and historical memory, assuming that it is anachronistic in itself and that it is crossed by the effects of montage, the reconstruction and the concatenation of heterogeneous times. I argue that contemporary photography highlights a conceptual line that explores the anachronism, the confrontation between the past and the present, and that sets tension into the founding narratives and dominant narratives of progress in the Latin American cultural capitals between the end of the 19th century and early twentieth. Starting from the work with photographs that operate as “dialectical images”, that is, as fleeting remains or flashes of historical readability, the photographs I analyze condense indications of the present and record remains of the past, in an alternative proposal to the memorial, the archive and the epic, the most transited forms in the politics of memory and reconstruction of memory. They are works that resituate their images in new historical senses, disobeying not only the chronology but the causalities and reconfiguring, in this way, the established historical sense. I will take as an object of analysis the works of: RES, La ruta de Cortés (1999-2000) y NECAH 1879 (1996-2008); Ananké Asseff, “Ananké es necesidad, lo inexorable” (2004-2010); Leonel Luna, Su opulencia es nuestra exclusión, 2001; y Celeste Rojas Mugica, Ejercicios de aridez (work in process).