Decolonial invention processes on indigenous visualities. Towards a reconfiguration of hegemonic imaginaries in Northeast Argentina

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to discuss the potentiality of contemporary artistic practices that propose decolonial exercises by destabilizing the Eurocentric perceptual matrices on Latin American ethnic groups. From the perspective of visual studies, it addresses the attempt to critically demolish visual culture and the regimes of visibility governed by the logic of hypercommunication and digital technologies. The starting point is the analysis of the Ashipegaxanacxanec video essay started in 2020 based on the control actions implemented in the COVID-19 pandemic. The production is part of the research of the Image Studies and Documentation Center (Nedim), Conicet-UNNE, with the purpose of redefining the photographic collection of German anthropologist Lehmann Nitsche, obtained in the context of the indigenous massacre in the Napalpí reduction in Chaco, in 1924. Methodologically, the proposal explores the experiential configuration of expanded visualities in the contemporary scene, based on an anchoring in the speculative dimension in tune with a contextual approach in the convergence relationships between procedures, materials, formats, devices and disruptive instances of practices and aesthetic trajectories. This supposes the activation of heuristic and poetic processes mediated by essays and writing as montage. Proposals such as the analyzed video essay establish the question about the archive and memory through the montage of contradictory temporalities. Its place of enunciation is positioned as a possibility of aesthetic insurgency that closes any attempts at hegemonic exoticization by contemporary control devices.