Activity

Recurring Images. On the material conditions of their return

Critical Visualities Seminar

Postal de Barcelona. Anys 30-50. Zerkowitz. Imatge proposada per Teresa Lanceta i extreta de Todocolección

Historically, painting, photography and cinema have portrayed the displacement of objects, subjects and scenes caused by a violent colonising tendency of the image to impose its centrality. We need only observe the complex visual economy between background and figure and their dynamics of correspondence to catch a glimpse of the hidden powers that determine what prevails on the surface and what gets relegated to the background; what stays in the frame and what is left out. As a consequence of this displacement, visuality shows a dialectic economy between the visible and the invisible, between ‘that which is present’ and that which is latent but returns in a recurring manner.
With their near-ghostly quality, images travel in time and on occasions become suspended outside temporality. Recurring images overcome the anaesthetic condition imposed on them by the system of capitalist spectacle and, by becoming active again, are capable of surpassing any reality determined to exhaust them. These are active and activating images: they rise, they travel, they move and excite us by altering the commonly accepted narratives. These are images that return again and again.

This seminar focuses on artistic practices that seek the return of objects, subjects, scenes and landscapes that were deprived of visual centrality in the past, but keep returning to the present with a new intentionality. Devices such as cinema, exhibitions, opera or a fall of the tarot cards are used as artistic resources to demonstrate the disappearance and reappearance of images, together with the aesthetic, political and phenomenological consequences of such operations.

Recurring images are witnesses to a destitution in times past and a restitution in the future. As for their effect on the present, we should ask ourselves: what makes them come back? What are the material conditions of their return?