Exquisite Damage. Photographs by Gabriela Liffschitz

CORTES ROCCA, PAOLA

Princeton

Congreso; The itinerant Languages of Photography; 2010

Institute of International and Regional Studies, Princeton University

Focusing on the work that Gabriela Liffschitz produced in the last four years of her life, my presentation explores the dialogue between photography and other media such as literature, cinema and art. In Liffschitz’s books Recursos humanos (2000) and Efectos colaterales (2003), images turn into poetic prose that imagines new photographs then later become sources for movies. While erasing the boundaries between images and words, books and installations, art and documents, Liffschitz’s work moves the language of photography beyond its traditional links with memory, history, and archivization. By mobilizing genres organized around the writing of the Self (testimony, biography, and autobiography), she not only defines genre as performance but also presents beauty, ugliness, illness, and health as examples of performativity. Before these books, Liffschitz published poetry, a novel and several articles on literature. However, the construction of her public persona relies not only in the adoption of photography as a means of self-representation but also to the disclosure of the sick body. Her sick body is at the center of a constellation that evokes the global photographic tradition focused on femininity and body representation ⎯from Cindy Sherman to Orlan⎯ as well as establishes a dialogue with the local Argentinean visual and cultural production of the new millennium.