Images and Temporality: Photographs for an Archaeology of Absence

NATALIA TACCETTA

Río de Janeiro

Conferencia; 4º Queering Paradigms International Conference; 2012

Queering Paradigms

From Lucila Quieto’s photographic essay, Archaeology of the absence (1999-2001), we will try to think about the constitution of the subjectivity through a work of art that, as we propose in this text, stages what we could call a queer temporality. Based on the (im)possibility of taking an “impossible” picture, Quieto’s essay narrate the artist’s obsession for having a picture with her father –kidnapped and disappeared five months before her birth- as well as the way that she found to deal with the loss. Archaeology of the absence tells a series of stories of daughters and sons of disappeared persons during the Argentinean dictatorship who propose to fight with the horror through a non-existent image. The photographic essay constitutes the narration of this instant of paradoxical identity in which the children can pose together with their relatives in the unexpected performance of a meeting. This "third time", away from the "chrononormativity", turns into an “own temporality” and a fictional time that cannot be explained with the notions of representation or simulacrum. It is rather a phantasmagoria -generated by the montage of times and invented recollections- that manage to synchronize parents and children in the same time. The queer temporality that arises from this experience aspires to appropriate the absence and to constitute subjectivities in a non-normative way, that is to say, in a form not crossed by notions as those of normality and productivity. In order to look into on this non-institutionalized temporality, we will follow the approaches of Elizabeth Freeman and Judith Halberstam and we will try to evaluate the transformative power of this kind of work of art and the temporality described by them, as well as to explore the political and cultural implications of this type of artistic experiences when they have to face events such as state terrorism in Argentina.