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Immaterial Traces: Objects, Archives, Dust (1980-2020)

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Abstract

Immaterial Traces: Objects, Archives, Dust (1980-2020), considers the poetics of ephemerality, fragility, and precariousness as forms of disruption and resistance in Latin American contemporary culture. Here I create a corpus of works that use unstable and residual materialities, like anonymous photographs, discarded objects, pieces of words, prosthesis, among others, to create archives that challenge hegemonic forms of understanding. My readings of Graciela Iturbide, Mario Bellatín, Oscar Muñoz, Cecilia Vicuña, Valeria Luiselli and Guillermo Galindo show how their works depart from a context of sociocultural fractures in which memory arises as a privileged cultural site occupied by hegemonic forces. Their work reconceptualizes this memory through an acute attention to materiality. Immaterial Traces perceives in these artists a drive to move away from fixed representations of the past and to make memory a site of political struggle. They do so by highlighting the imperfection and impermanence of their works and their open reformulation of aesthetic conventions. In developing the critique proffered by these works—of, for example, the speed of information, the monumentalization of collective memory, and the flattening of experience—this dissertation attends to the remains of what would otherwise be simply imperceptible. Thus, I show how, by recomposing what has been dispossessed, these artists and writers give way to life forces that refigure immediate pasts and potential futures.

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