CONVENERS
César Barros is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures and the Latin American & Caribbean Studies Program at SUNY New Paltz. His current research focuses on the political economy of the image. He has been published in Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana and Revista Hispánica Moderna, among others. He is the author of Escenas y obscenas del consumo.
Ángeles Donoso Macaya is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY. Her research interests include Latinx American photography theory/history and documentary film theory. She is co-editor of Latinas/os on the East Coast: A Critical Reader and is currently writing Depth of Field: Photography between the Artwork and the Document.
Kaitlin M. Murphy is Assistant Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona. She received her PhD in Performance Studies and her MA in Visual Culture Theory from New York University. She researches visual culture, performance, place, and memory in human rights advocacy and activism. Her writing appears in Human Rights Review and emisférica, among others.
Alejandra Prieto lives and works in Santiago, Chile. She attended PUC University for her BFA and Chile University for her MFA. She has shown internationally at XI Imaginarios Sociales y Prácticas Artísticas, XI La Habana Biennale and Projetaveis VII Biennale Mercosur, Brasil. She has participated in numerous group shows such as Junkies Promises, Proyecto LARA and Contaminaciones Urbanas, among others.
LOCATIONS
7/18 – 7/20: H304, Tecnoaulas FEN
7/22: E15 FAU
DESCRIPTION
There is a tendency to identify (ideological and repressive) apparatuses of the State and the market as spaces of endless repetition/reproduction. Conversely, political and artistic practices surface as sites of difference in that they affirm an existence not previously considered as such in the space of the visible or the thinkable, thus transforming that space. Yet in order to establish this difference, political and artistic practices constantly resort to repetition– they “insist” through acts, gestures, discourses, sounds, and images (as an example, consider the use of enlarged photographic portraits of disappeared people in public spaces, a practice that has had successive iterations in the Americas over the last 40 years).
This work group aims to bring together artists, activists, and scholars to discuss the diverse range of political, theoretical, and artistic practices that engage with the following questions: How can the repetition of an image, a gesture, or a discourse mobilize its position within larger structures of meaning? How do hegemonic cultures reproduce certain spaces and absorb difference? How is the dichotomy between center/periphery determined by the dialectics between repetition and difference? What is the relationship between the reproducibility inherent in visual culture and the singularity of specific interventions? What is the relationship between legibility, visibility, and repetition? How do specters and ruins become both implicated and invigorated by reproduction and repetition?