Abstract

In the latter years of the 20th century, Lucila Quieto, an Argentine photographer and member of the human rights group H.I.J.O.S., invented a mechanism that enabled her to have an image with her father. The device functions as follows: Quieto projected an old portrait of her disappeared father on a wall, positioned herself adjacent to the projection, and permitted the camera to capture the encounter in a new image. In addition to taking several portraits with her father, Quieto repeats the procedure with her fellow activists and incorporates these images into Arqueología de la ausencia (1999-2001).

Utilizing the conceptual framework of the sociology of the image, as conceptualized by Silvia Cusicanqui, and drawing upon the genealogy of ghost photography, this talk examines two pivotal elements of the photographic language: the montage and the performative dimension of visual practice. I will argue that photographic experimentation not only enables trauma-related processing but, more importantly, facilitates community building and enables the symbolic rectification (and rewriting) of personal and collective narratives.

Bio

Paola Cortes Rocca is an essayist, researcher and cultural critic specializing in the intersection between writing and visuality. She received her PhD from Princeton University and did her postdoctoral studies at the University of Southern California with a grant from the Mellon Foundation. She taught at USC and at San Francisco SU where she was Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages. She currently lives in Argentina and is a researcher at CONICET and a professor at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes. Her book El tiempo de la máquina: retratos, paisajes y otras imágenes de la nación explores the impact of photography in the Latin American cultural field at the end of the 19th century. Translator of Boris Groys, Jonathan Crary and Timothy Morton, she is also the author of essays that address photography and literature from issues such as landscape and residuality, ghosts and political imagination, activism and performativity. She is a member of the network “Archives in Transition. Collective memories and subaltern uses” integrated by Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Università Degli Studi Roma Tre, and Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, among others. Since 2016, she has been a member of the feminist activist collective Ni Una Menos