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Temáticas
Vol 5 No 9 (2022)
“Apparently Meaningless” Images in the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion (lugar de la memoria, la tolerancia y la inclusión social-lum)
- Olga González Castañeda
This article focuses on aesthetic details related to the architecture of the lum, which in my attempt to capture in photographs as a part of my ethnographic work, lead me to an analysis of what I call “apparently meaningless images”. These images have a “haunting” effect, in the sense given by Avery Gordon, by which they do not try to document tangible existence but recognize what could exist. Thus, Roland Barthe’s “obtuse meaning” becomes relevant and crucial in my analysis of the images of the lum. These “apparently meaningless” images respond, on the one hand, to an aesthetic of voidness that seems more in line with the ghostly presence of the disappeared and with the denialism of the “dirty war” during the internal armed conflict in Peru. On the other hand, other “apparently meaningless” images emerge from hypervisibility, sometimes contrasting and as contrapunctums between the concrete and crystal materials predominant in the architecture of the lum, and that produce affective and political resonances that allude to racial and social tensions and exclusions that continue to prevail in the Peruvian society.