Rosana Paulino and Marcelo Brodsky: Images as a way to refound history

Abstract

My presentation will focus on the works of two important Latin American artists who had their work recognized from the 1990s onwards: Rosana Paulino (Brazil) and Marcelo Brodsky (Argentina). Both artists appropriate photographic images to recontextualize the history of violence that marked modernity, as well as the parallel history of coloniality. His works “reinvent”, today, a past that needs to be reinstated as a means of resistance to the new fascisms. Paulino appropriates 19th century colonial photographic images to reframe them; Marcelo Brodsky does the same with photographs of the German colonies in Africa and with images of struggles against dictatorships from the second half of the 20th century to the present day. Both artists are representative of a new and essential art of critical memory. They are agents in a new “war of images”, in the terms of filmmaker Harun Farocki. They build a new “Bildraum” (image space), which opens up new spaces for playful action (“Spiel­räume”, in Walter Benjamin's expression).