Last June 2025 we interviewed José Luis Barrios (Ibero Santa Fe), who gave the Annual Update Seminar:1 “Deconstruction and critique of inclusive discourse, thinking from paradox and acting from uncertainty”, and offered the keynote lecture “Aesthetics of Mexican naturalist cinema as a critique of representation”. After a week of work, we conclude with this interview that we publish today at Encartes.

José Luis Barrios is a philosopher, art critic and independent curator. His work is distinguished by the articulation of theoretical research and curatorial practice in projects that interrogate the relationships between aesthetics, politics and memory. Throughout his career he has promoted exhibitions and seminars that question representation as a conflictive field, in which the image is not limited to reflecting realities, but rather produces and destabilizes them, proposing other modes of perception.

In her curatorial practice, Barrios has explored the relationships between space, archive and visuality. He conceives curatorship as a critical exercise that transcends the organization of objects to situate it as a strategy capable of activating relations between thought, bodies and collective writings. This perspective places him in dialogue with contemporary practices that seek to transform exhibition spaces into places of political and aesthetic enunciation. His work is configured in a transdisciplinary way: philosophy, aesthetics, contemporary art and cinema converge, with an emphasis on the capacity of the image to intervene in the regimes of visibility.

As a philosopher, his written work has focused on the analysis of cinema. In his most recent book, Constellation from Buñuel (Universidad Iberoamericana, 2025), investigates film production in Mexico from the visual operations that Luis Buñuel developed throughout his career. Barrios shows how the Spanish director's filmography allows us to think the image as desire, crack and critical possibility, articulating relationships between the genealogy of the philosophical concept of naturalistic aesthetics and various artistic processes in history. In dialogue with Gilles Deleuze and his essay The crack, opens a reflection on naturalism and the fracture of representation in poetics ranging from Arturo Ripstein to Everardo González and Tatiana Huezo.

The interview is articulated in three moments. In the first, we explore the relationship between image and desire to approach representation as an aesthetic problem. In the second, we analyze curatorial work not only as mediation or montage, but as thought situated in a laboratory of relations between objects, bodies, writings and gazes, attending to the political and ethical implications of exhibition devices. In the third, we talked about her latest book, which proposes a suggestive look to problematize the image in relation to violence, desire and the visibilization of the excluded in the dominant grammars.

First moment: the image as event and crisis of representation.

Barrios starts from a central concern: the image as a space of desire and not as a mere referential representation. He takes up the reading of The phenomenology of perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to emphasize that seeing is not a neutral or merely optical act, but a way of being in the world. Perception, he says, is embodied; therefore, every image implies an affective, temporal and desiring relationship with what appears.

From this point of view, the image does not copy reality: it summons it. The desiring gaze disrupts the regime of truth of representation and introduces a logic of affect, drive and displacement. Recovering Lacanian psychoanalysis, Barrios proposes that what is decisive is not what the image shows, but the operation of desire that constitutes it: the tension between the visible and that which remains in shadow.

The image becomes an event: an irruption of desire into the field of the visible that produces meaning, pleasure or discomfort. This aspect is particularly clear in contemporary cinema, where the spectator may no longer recognize himself in the image, but let himself be affected by its appearance.

From this derives his critique of representation. For Barrios, contemporary aesthetics should not be understood as mimesis, since it is rather a space of conflict between the visible, the enunciable and its remainder. All representation involves a remainder that cannot be fully shown -the body, affection, desire-, and it is this remainder that keeps the image alive. Aesthetics, then, does not translate reality: it interrogates it by exposing its fissures.

This approach has political implications: dismantling the illusion of transparency means assuming that all representation implies taking a position on who can look and who can be looked at. Aesthetics thus participates in the critique of the production of regimes of visibility and processes of exclusion. Its critique does not seek to abolish representation, but to “repoliticize” it: to understand it as a field where desire, the body and the subject dispute meaning and power.

Second moment: curatorship as situated thinking

Barrios affirms that curatorship is a way of thinking with images, documents and spaces, not after them. His projects show that the exhibition space can function as a material rehearsal in which the same questions that run through his philosophy come into play: what is made visible and what is kept in shadow, how do desire and memory intervene in the reading of an image, what kind of relationship does the montage produce between spectators, objects and discourses, what kind of relationship does the montage produce between spectators, objects and discourses?

One of the examples that stands out is the exhibition Mexican Constitution 1917-2017: images and voices. (National Palace, 2017). The challenge, Barrios tells us, was to “spatialize” a legal document to generate new relationships between archives, images and viewers. The exhibition did not seek to illustrate articles or ephemeris, rather it focused on showing how that text organizes bodies, rights and exclusions. Curatorship thus became a practice that translates and dismantles discourses of power in an aesthetic key.

For Barrios, the exhibition space must materialize the tensions between the letter of the law and its real effects: who is in and who is out, who can be a subject of law and who cannot. Once again, what is at stake is a critique of representation: the Constitution ceases to appear as a neutral social pact and reveals itself as a device for the distribution of the sensible and the political.

This approach also guides her reflection on curatorship in contexts of violence. The question goes beyond the question of what images to show, as it seeks what relationship there is with pain -and with the gaze of the other- that is produced in the exhibition space. The curatorship cannot reproduce the spectacularization of the damage or fall into a humanitarianism that neutralizes the conflict. It must function as a framework of problematization, in which the responsibility does not lie in showing more or less violence, but in how the scene of appearance of the images is constructed and what relationship is possible between spectator and event.

Another relevant example is the exhibition The collapse of the ruin (muac, 2015). On this occasion, Barrios proposes that the ruin is not a remnant of the past, he conceives it as a critical figure of the present. In his reading, the ruin functions as a crack in the linear narrative of modernity: it signals what collapses and what persists. The montage, the voids and the relationships between works construct an experience that does not offer a closed message, but a landscape of remains that challenges the gaze.

Third moment: cinema, rift and naturalism

Barrios takes up Gilles Deleuze's brief text, The crack, to explain why certain images -especially in cinema- no longer function as faithful representations, but rather as interruptions within reality. The crack describes those moments in which the image lets us see that something does not fit: a gesture or a silence that does not correspond, a dead time that stops the scene, a look that deviates. It is not realism in the classic sense, it is a way of showing what is normally left out.

This idea is particularly relevant to understand contemporary visual production in Mexico. In a context marked by violence and inequality, the image cannot be presented as a stable mirror. What appears is a country full of fissures, of stories that do not close, of suspended scenes.

Barrios observes that in recent Mexican cinema there are three dimensions: suspended times that show wear and tear and uncertainty. Bodies and untamed spaces -empty streets, improvised interiors and peripheries- that reveal the outdoors and vulnerability; as well as documentaries that, on the other hand, doubt, because they do not seek to “tell the truth”, but to record what manages to appear and admit what escapes.

For him, these gestures have a clear antecedent in Buñuel: objects out of place, situations that break without explanation, contradictory desires, characters moved by invisible impulses. Buñuel teaches us to read Mexican cinema as a set of images that do not seek to close the meaning, but to show it in its contradiction.

By way of closing

José Luis Barrios' contributions are especially valuable because they offer tools for thinking images beyond representation. By articulating desire, perception and experience of space, he shows that aesthetic criticism is a way of understanding how our ways of seeing and inhabiting the world are configured. Her reading of Mexican cinema and documentaries reveals that the contemporary image does not seek to reflect reality, but is interested in showing its fractures, that which remains open and demands attention. Her curatorial work deepens this perspective by turning the exhibition space into a place where the conflicts of the visible are directly experienced. As a whole, her thinking conceives the image as a field in dispute, where meanings, affections and memories are negotiated, and where aesthetics becomes a means to critically interrogate the present.

Alina Peña Iguarán is a research professor at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (iteso), Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara, and a member of the National System of Researchers, level i. D. from Boston University, she specialized in war, memory and subjectivity in the narrative of the Mexican Revolution. She did her postdoctoral research on art and border at El Colef, in Tijuana, titled “Poéticas de las excedencias”. She is currently working on the tensions at the crossroads between aesthetic practices, politics and social action in contexts of violence, disappearance and migration. She is a member of the Hemispheric Encounters network and the International Network for the Study of the Gaze. Member of the working group Intemperie. She has recently published “Las políticas de la interpretación: pautas para abordar la relación entre estética, política y comunicación”, in Mauricio Andión Gamboa and Dana Arrieta Barraza (coords.) (2024). The image and time. Looks at the thought of Diego Lizarazo; with Patricio Azócar Donoso (2023). “Intemperie: políticas de la voluntad y poéticas del cobijo”, Etcetera. Journal of the Social Sciences Areas del ciffyh (12); and also with Patricio Azócar Donoso (2024). “Inclemencia, cobijo y agenciamiento”, ArteFactos. Mexico City: unam/cisan, pp. 297-320.

Anaeli Ibarra Cáceres is a PhD candidate in Humanities. Professor of the Department of Sociocultural Studies at iteso, Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara, where she is a member of the Laboratorio Transmedia Moira: Narrativas en Tránsito (Moira Transmedia Lab: Narratives in Transit). Co-director of Extopia: Foro Muestra de Cine lgbtq+. Co-creator of Generando Media. She worked as coordinator of the Gender and Technologies work axis at the Media and Technologies Laboratory of El Rule, Secretary of Culture of Mexico City. Coordinator of the Diploma in Audiovisual Production with a Gender Perspective. She has taught at the University of Havana, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México (uacm), Universidad Iberoamericana and iteso. She is a member of the women filmmakers' collective Mujeres Lab. She is a member of the Cuban Association of Cinematographic Press. She has obtained funds from the Programa de Fomento al Cine Mexicano (focine) and the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Fonca) for the development of exhibition projects. She has worked as editor and editorial manager of publications on art, film and literature. She received the Dr. Guy Pérez Cisneros Criticism Award, granted by the Ministry of Culture of Cuba. She has received several awards in literary contests in poetry.

José Luis Barrios is a philosopher and art historian, full time research professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City. His areas of research and teaching are aesthetics, politics and critical theory of culture. He is associate curator of the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (muac). He has curated exhibitions at the Museo Nacional de Arte (munal), the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda and the Mexican Pavilion in Venice (49 ed.). He was director of the influential magazine Curare (2000-2008). He is coordinator of the interdisciplinary research chair “Body, diaspora and exclusion: aesthetics, politics and violence in globalized modernity”.

He has published several books, among them, Symbol, ghost and affection. Six variations of the gaze on contemporary art in Mexico. (Ediciones de la Meseta, Mexico, 2007); he was editor of the book Instituted memory, instituting memory; author of The dissolved body: between the colossal and the monstrous and The colossus. Cartography of terror in the imaginary regime of contemporaneity. (all three published by the Universidad Iberoamericana). Among his latest art essays are “Stand-aloneA Platonism against the grain. A propósito de una pieza de Thomas Hirschhorn”; and “Jordi Colomer en el país de Gulliver. Scale, dream and nature”. He recently published Constelación Buñuel: naturalistic aesthetics in Mexican cinema (1950-2021).