Issue 16

Images Quiver in the Dark

21.10.2019 - 13.01.2020

Co-edited with María Elena Ortiz

We live in a present of eyes irritated by tear gas, by smog in the cities, by the ash of forests consumed by flames, by the excessive brightness of screens. When the neoliberal capitalist system, that oppressive abstract construction, appeals to the gaze, it is to wear it out, disorient it and overwhelm it. Its purpose is to control it in order to limit the possibilities of the imagination—that irrational expression of freedom.

Lowering the guard of the always-vigilant, domesticated eye, which maintains the pulse and flow of accelerated cognitive perception through our consumption, is to allow the oneiric to expand as a potent moment of vulnerability. To walk in the darkness of our eyes is to meet ourselves again, to inaugurate a process of autonomy. What does not encompass the certainty of a full, prefabricated and consumable image?

Finding ourselves in an ocular-centric world, in this issue of Terremoto we will arrest the voracity implicit in the gaze so that it may rest, stopping contemplatively and curiously on cryptic images, those blurred, camouflaged, secret images so difficult to evoke and which awake within us doubts that appeal to our fears and desires. Dreams, premonitions, spiritual manifestations, ancestral links, fantasies, all of these are powerful fugitive images; riddle-images that, when discovered in the reflection of our eyes, force us to rest, to blink, as a pathway to the irrationality that accommodates other possible realities. In a system that continually demands that everything be visible, how important are secrecy, opacity, and the cryptic as narrative possibilities in terms of the imaginative? Could we say that in them lies a power of the image as micro-micro-politics?

16
2019

Hulda Gúzman, "the nightmare" of the series "be kind to your demons", 2018. Acrylic gouache on cedar plywood, 68 x 68 cm. Image courtesy of the artist

16 2019

16 2019

16 2019

16 2019

16 2019

16 2019

16 2019

16 2019

16 2019

16 2019

16 2019

filter by

Category

Geographic Zone

date