Estrategias de visibilización o los sentidos de las borraduras: os dispositivos da Histeria e da História na po(ética) de Voluspa Jarpa

Abstract

This research investigates the work of chilean visual artist Voluspa Jarpa, whose creations undertake the (re)reading and (de)construction of the official archives of the US government, produced by its intelligence agencies, about the period of the dictatorships in Chile and Brazil during the 1960s and 1970s. In her creations, Jarpa proposes to analyze and investigate what was erased, censored and erased, drawing attention to the image resulting from the document that underwent such interventions, that is, an image that expresses both the “construction of visibilities” and the po(etic) and political effectiveness of the uses of the archive, which creates “shadows in the present”. This archival documentation is used as artistic material, whose reflection describes the processes and antecedents implicit in its es(etics). It is symptomatic that, before these documents were released to public access, all of them had crossed out and erased passages, which led the artist to question historical representations in various image systems. Jarpa approaches historical representation through visual arts in a more analytical and critical manner, interpreting the historical account as a “cultural symptom” in which what is repressed in the social body “appears” as trauma. Based on official historical accounts, the artist discusses the hysteria of History and staging as an artifice of the language of painting, since what interests her is to problematize the issue of representation, which is why she uses the pictorial simulation of various procedures and visualities. Jarpa conceptually relates two narrative systems coined with antagonistic purposes, namely, on the one hand, the historical account as a discourse of collective traumatic events, and on the other, the discourse that underpins the subjectivity of hysteria, generating the intersection between hysteria and History, which allowed her to make their languages, mechanisms and images visible. The historical account is interpreted by the artist as a “cultural symptom” in which what is repressed in the social body “appears” as trauma, and the archival material is the first trace of this repression. It was therefore necessary to construct “visibility strategies” that would allow him, at the same time, to read the material available and present it to the public in his productions, since trauma is an archived and denied story, and the symptom, an encrypted and blurred file.