Towards a Material Poetics in South American Colonial visual culture

GABRIELA SIRACUSANO

Austin

Conferencia; Tinker visiting Professor Lecture; 2019

I often deal with cracks and clefts. Tangible, visible clefts that can be traced through a close up gaze. Every crack separates something that must have been previously united, while revealing the interior and the structure of that alliance. Although they are the evidence of a lost condition, there is something of the kind of occult truth and a paradoxical completeness in them. On the one hand, they are the testimony of something lost, or missing within the whole former representation, but on the other, they let us introduce in the very deep side of the presentational dimension of the image. Within that dimension there lie the archaeological steps for the knowledge of its creation, its uses, its fortune and its life; a world of ideas, feelings and practices that could not be discovered by just focusing for instance in its iconography. A whole universe present in a single material detail.