DARTS Research Group

This February, 2019, Vanina Hofman publishes Prácticas divergentes de preservación del arte de los medios. Recordar y olvidar en la cultura digital (Editorial Prometeo, Buenos Aires), INVESTIGA CULTURA Award from the Ministry of Culture of the Argentine Republic.

ABSTRACT

In the framework of the debates about memory and materiality in the digital age, this research asks about the possible futures of media art, introducing the ‘ecology of practices’ as a thinking tool through which to recognize and explain a ground of divergences and pluralities. This book suggests an opening in conceptions about the ‘preservation of art’, anchoring them in concrete practices of maintenance, restoration, archiving, transformation and creation. Some of these practices – together with their positions and values ​​- are more easily recognized, others less; however, it is the coexistence in diversity and dispersion that enables the legacy of our cultural productions. This work highlights the multiplicity of knowledge, the soft lines of the forgotten and the forgotten, the tactics of resistance against disappearance, and thinks about permanence, memory and forgetting, from a process perspective and in the present tense.

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Ana Rodríguez-Granell participates with the paper “Modernismo Vernacular y Reflexividad ante Hollywood. Una revisión historiográfica sobre el cine de los años treinta” in L’Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos, sección Puntos de Fuga, nº 27 (english version / versión en castellano)

For some decades the approaches of the New Film History have been concerned with redefining the history of cinema in a non-teleological way. In this way, they have destabilized categories of consecration of certain stylistic models such as the idea of modernity or classicism. In this article we are going to propose a revision of some cinematographies and peripheral films to Hollywood or to the framework of classicism – The great dildo (Velikiy uteshitel, Lev Kulechov, 1933); Pie in the Sky (NYKino, 1935) and The Crime of Mr. Lange (Le crime de M. Lange, Jean Renoir, 1936) – to see how, from practices close to the avant-garde, there are processes of assimilation of certain classical icons to the pair that, precisely for that appropriation, we attend to self-reflexive proposals. These practices of de-location of the classic in some films outside and even within Hollywood during the thirties propose historiographic and conceptual reconsiderations around notions such as modernity that we will explore here.

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Ana-Rodríguez-Granell participates with the paper “Infraestructuras para la Revolución: tensiones entre arte, materialismo y tradición en la nueva política económica de la Unión Soviética” in the book Subversiones artísticas en regímenes totalitarios, a volume that presents an approach from different cultural, political and social contexts to the critical response articulated by different artists who work in neoliberal, dictatorial or socialist disciplinary systems.

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Pau Waelder publishes “Lo familiar siniestro. Tecnologías de vigilancia para una intimidad compartida”, at: Pedro Vicente and José Gómez-Isla (eds.), Álbum de familia y prácticas artísticas. Relecturas sobre autobiografía, intimidad y archivo. Osca: Diputación de Huesca – Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP), 2018, p.99-110.

This publication is the continuation of the book Album de familia. (Re) presentation, (re) creation and (in) materiality of the family photographs coedited in 2013 by La Oficina Ediciones and the Diputación de Huesca. Both publications are born from seminars organized by ViSiONA and UIMP between 2012 and 2016 within a theoretical framework in which the importance of family photography as a source of inspiration and reference for artistic and interdisciplinary research has been studied.

The texts included in this book are based on research on contemporary artistic creations that go beyond the formal and conceptual limits of the family album and that, from a critical and poetic point of view, subvert their dominant narratives to build new stories. In the same way, this publication analyzes the new social significance and current uses of the family album as the backbone of our identity -both individual and collective- and as a step from the private to the public.

Album of family and artistic practices. Re-readings on autobiography, intimacy and archiving are divided into three sections. The first deals with the theme of the album, biography and self-representation. In particular, it is analyzed how many of the stories constructed from the family album now become an aesthetic element that some contemporary creators have appropriated, both to represent themselves and to narrate their own version of the world.

In a second block the rereading of the album and the concept of intimacy in our current context is addressed due to the excess of public exposure to which we submit our domestic photographs and our private discourses. These essays reflect on the gradual dissolution of the differences between public and private. The intimacy, displayed without shame in personal photo albums through social networks, has now become pure extimacy.

A final block studies the inevitable parallelism between family album and archive. Erected both in memory repositories, their discursive logics propose construction methodologies that may differ from each other, but that also reflect the way in which we visualize both the social and the personal (as opposed mirrors), thus establishing concordances, connections and points of encounter between both logics.

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