The new essay by the Argentine writer and critic Graciela Speranza, What we don’t see, what art sees, aspires to provide an informed answer to a pertinent question: can art bring to light what is hidden? The text starts from the yes: both the plastic arts and literature have the ability to bring closer what, due to its magnitude, escapes the senses, in the same way that they can open a peephole into the subsoil to make visible what lies buried.
The unfathomable and the elusive define, in this way, the two measures of ignorance that delimit the dissertation of Speranza, professor of Contemporary Art and author of essays such as Portable Atlas of Latin America. Wandering art and fictions, finalist for the Anagrama Essay Award, and Chronographs. Art and fictions of a time without time. As proof of his hypothesis, he has produced a catalog of contemporary creations in which various international artists address with a far-sighted spirit some of the decisive questions of the present continuum: from climate change to mass surveillance in the internet age, passing through the reconfiguration of an uncertain reality through the reconstruction of the facts.
In the same way that the half sunk dog by Goya prefigured the anguish and solipsism of the present time, the author argues that modern works such as the paintings emptied of human beings by Vija Celmins, where only the oceans, skies and deserts exist outside of our influence; the webs woven by thousands of spiders by Tomás Saraceno, which replicate the reticular configuration of the universe on a human scale; and the novels of the Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, which reproduce through language the underlying structure that interconnects people with the rest of living and inert beings, anticipate a new ontology beyond anthropocentrism.
The author argues that the works of Tomás Saraceno and Olga Tokarczuk anticipate an ontology beyond anthropocentrism.
Faced with what due to our physical limitations we are unable to process (the planet, the cosmos), Speranza proposes another category of invisibility: that of everything that we do not grasp because it is forbidden to us. It refers to the pixelated layer of reality, to the virtual, an intangible but undoubtedly surrounding area, where the control mechanisms are exercised through a technology that, being so ubiquitous, will end up going unnoticed.
Artists like Hito Steyerl manage to sneak into the almost inaccessible corners of cyberspace, who, before the informant Edward Snowden made public the documents that prove the espionage to which citizens are subjected, already proposed strategies to disappear out of reach of scrutinizing digital gazes . Another type of artist, whom Speranza calls “digital misfits” (some are by necessity and others by will), circumvent Big Brother’s censorship by making inefficient use of the Internet, designed precisely to function in a state of permanent improvement .
The reflection on what art “can reveal or reveal” leads Speranza to a final consideration, this one on the nature of reality. In the empire of fake news and fragmentary experience, she claims the possibility of certainty thanks to the reconstruction of events. This is where the work of the Forensic Architecture collective comes into play, made up of architects, filmmakers, artists, journalists and lawyers who generate new visions of violent acts through cross-investigation; as well as the literature of Agustín Fernández Mallo, which ties a knot between the lines of the past and the present. “To give to see, to miss, to look at things again […]that is what the art of at least two centuries ago aspires to”, concludes the author, who warns: “But now it faces the imminence of something invisible […] and tomorrow may be too late, if we do not cross the point of no return”.
Grace Hope
Anagram. 2022
190 pages. €18.90
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