I usually wake up asking myself repeatedly how one lives in uncertainty, and this has become more acute since the COVID-19 virus has been roaming our streets, neighbourhoods, hospitals, news bulletins and homes. We survive in the midst of an unfathomable distance between human beings, non-humans and nature, between the construction of affects and the apathy of a system that regulates, keeps watch and punishes. I should also say that I am writing from a country engaged in a popular uprising which began in October 2019, with a Constitutional Convention currently sitting, where equal representation and quotas are reserved for the indigenous peoples who are part of this land called Chile.1With the exception of the population of African descent, who were unjustifiably excluded by decision of the members of parliament, the Aymara, Mapuche, Rapa Nui, Quechua, Atacama, Diaguita, Colla, Chango, Kawésqar and Yahgan peoples are represented.
On the other hand, for several years now I have been constantly repeating the Aymara aphorism Ghipnayra uñtasis sarnaqapxañani, which according to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui could be translated as “by looking back and forwards we can walk in the future present”,2A comment made at Jornadas 12: Fotografía latinoamericana. Confluencias y derivaciones, 1978–2018 [12th Conference on Latin American Photography: Convergences and Derivations] at the Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo in 2018. See Rivera Cusicanqui’s talk at https://cdf.montevideo.gub.uy/actividad/jornadas-12-fotografia-latinoamericana because indigenous communities do not have a linear conception of history; the past-future is contained in the present, which, among many other things, involves being aware of the networks of interconnection and ancestral wisdom, care and memory, with which the first nations have interwoven their cosmogony and their resistance. Moreover, I am haunted by everyday images and others of the past, for perhaps every image speaks to us in some way of the future, foreshadowing catastrophe and also the possibility of possible new worlds.
If we carefully observe and resignify the images constructed using the methods of anthropological cataloguing of indigenous peoples in Latin America from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, which built up an image-imagery of an uncivilized past of unlikely subjects of modernity, the misfortune of colonial domination and subsequent capitalism emerges as a phantasmagorical construct. Those photographs illustrate what is wrongly called universal history, establishing a visuality of corporealities and physiognomies of a kind that expressed the hegemonic discourse of that extinct past or the past about to become extinct through images, which were in constant circulation, illustrating history and geography books in public schools and filling the national archives; they also appeared in the press, almost always in the crime section or as subjects of cultural marketing of the country’s image. However, the visual constructions are not naive, nor are their systems of cataloguing and circulation.
One of the strategies most commonly used by the capitalist-extractivist system to expand its power is still, precisely, controlling images, repeating visual canons and aesthetic categories ad nauseam as ways of validating single narratives, attributing a degree of veracity to them that they have never had. We could say that the Western gaze is constructed out of a longing for a world to conquer, and I am not only referring to that distant inhabited land, but to the very reflection of the individual as a social structure, where the individual dimension undermined the communal. It would seem that we continue endlessly reproducing those “[…] romanticized images of the past which continue to obscure the present”.3Andrea Soto Calderón, La performatividad de las imágenes (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2020), p. 136.
In the early twentieth century, in Quito, Ecuador, photograph albums produced by José Domingo Laso (1870–1927), among others, were published. In the preface to one of these, the publishers comment that “[…] their works [those of foreign tourists] focus predominantly, not to say exclusively, on the indigenous element, disfiguring everything and giving a very poor impression of our population and culture. […] We thought we would produce a work that asserts our identity, a work of perfect patriotism, by showing, graphically, that the capital of Ecuador is entirely worthy of comparison with other cities on our continent, in both its population and its external appearance.4François Laso, “De la evidencia al ocultamiento”, in Sueño de la razón, II (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2016), pp. 564–75. See also the complete study published by Laso in La huella invertida: antropologías del tiempo, la mirada y la memoria. La fotografía de José Domingo Laso 1870–1927 (Montevideo: CdF, 2017).
The photographers erased the presence of indigenous people from the glass plates, leaving historical wounds on the photographic emulsion, to simulate, through representation, that so-called progress which propagated internal racism and increased our own coloniality: a society based on ocularcentrism with a restricted depth of field, which denigrated and excluded all those who crossed its path on the way to economic development.
Nearly eighty years later, the artist Bernardo Oyarzún produced his work Bajo sospecha [Under Suspicion] (1997–98), whose title is related to an article in the Chilean Code of Criminal Procedure.5Since 1998 it has been called the Preventive Identity Check Law and it has undergone numerous amendments and discussions in parliament, to increase police control over the public. It is currently applied indiscriminately in the arrest of Mapuches in Wallmapu and people linked to the protests that still continue within the framework of the “Chilean social outburst”. On countless occasions the police made arbitrary arrests of young men they considered suspicious, whether because of their physical appearance or the colour of their skin, and also, in Oyarzún’s case, the indigenous features inherited from his maternal grandmother. In one of the elements of the work, El Delincuente I [The Criminal I], we can read the following sentence under the portrait: “He has black skin, like an Atacameño, wiry hair, powerful thick lips, a broad chin, a narrow forehead like a brainless person.” This description recalls the positivist criminological theory of the late nineteenth century, which was determined to demonstrate relationships between certain physical features and a presumed criminal propensity, and this made it possible for certain body types to continue carrying the weight of that image assigned to them as their Real.
However, there are always other representations that do not reflect either contemporary instantaneousness or historical cataloguing; we could call them “event-images”, which, in order to exist, have to have been conceived and inhabited in the collective space. In this connection, one that is happening this year is that of the Zapatista delegation which set sail in May on the sailing ship La Montaña from the Caribbean coast to Europe, with a crew of four women, two men and an LGBTQI+ representative. It was a voyage, and at the same time a poetic, aesthetic and political performative act reflected in hundreds of images which are circulating, expanding their popular reverberations, under the call to “wake up”. Wake up and listen to the harm we have caused to biodiversity and quality of life. Wake up from living badly. Wake up from a nightmare which has lasted for centuries. Wake up from bad governments. Wake up through a gesture that breaks into historical linearity and interweaves shared histories, for as the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) says: “Art, therefore, unlike politics, does not try to readjust or repair the machine. Instead, it does something more subversive and disturbing: it shows the possibility of another world” (Téllez, quoted in Zagato and Arcos, 2020)6Enrique Téllez, ed., Para una estética de la liberación decolonial (Mexico City: Ediciones del Lirio, 2020), p. 282. “Wake up” was also one of the rallying cries heard on streets all over Chile in October 2019.
That voyage and contact with a range of “[…] people, groups, collectives, movements and organizations from various parts of the planet have shown us a diverse, multiple, and complex world which has reinforced our conviction that any proposal of hegemony or homogeneity is not only impossible but is, above all, criminal” (SupGaleano, 2021).7See the complete publication at http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2021/06/27/la-travesia-por-la-vida-a-que-vamos/
Consequently we could say that all homogeneous visuality, such as the aestheticization of violence, the stigmatization of poverty, the idealization of wealth, the standardization of the indigenous, is also criminal and has been very effective for the purposes of accumulating and giving the appearance of power.
Another event-image is the one that occurred on 4 July 2021 when Elisa Loncon Antileo, a Mapuche woman and a teacher,8So she describes herself. In addition, she is professor of English at the University of La Frontera, with postgraduate courses at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague (Netherlands) and at the University of Regina (Canada). She holds a master’s degree in linguistics from the Metropolitan Autonomous University, Iztapalapa (Mexico City), a PhD in Humanities from Leiden University (Netherlands) and a doctorate in Literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. was elected president of the Constitutional Convention in the former National Congress. To see her presiding over the most representative political space we have ever had in Chile is something that would have been unthinkable just two years ago, in a country that called the bloody confrontations of the State against the Mapuche people in the nineteenth century “pacification”. This control and usurpation are still in force today, with a militarized territory that has cost the lives of several young Mapuches in recent years, as well as driving much of the population to extreme poverty, along with spiritual and cultural appropriation, based, among other things, on the subsidized business of monoculture of eucalyptus, which has ravaged the soil, the biodiversity of the industry and the cultivation of the Mapuche people’s medicinal and curative plants. So the presence of Loncon and of Machi Linconao offers us another locus of enunciation, which makes it possible to open a debate on plurinational and intercultural coexistence in order to rethink ourselves, and at the same time lays bare the entrenched classism and racism of certain sectors of society.
In her book Re-enchanting the World (2019), Silvia Federici comments: “Not accidentally, in the face of the most concerted neoliberal drive to privatize the remaining communal and public resources, it has not been the most industrialized but the most cohesive communities that have been able to resist and, in some cases, reverse the privatization tide. […] Indeed, as the prospect of a world revolution fueled by capitalist development recedes, the reconstitution of communities devastated by racist and sexist policies and multiple rounds of enclosure appears not just an objective condition but as a precondition of social change”.9 Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019), pp. 165–66.
The consequences of centuries of abuse and depredation are transformed into collective gestures and political actions which address us as event-images. To name just a few more that have taken place in the past few months, we could mention the churches being burned down in some cities in Canada as a result of the judicial investigations revealing the deaths of thousands of indigenous children forced into internment in order to evangelize them, or the monuments to Christopher Columbus pulled down in several cities on our continent. All these images (and many more) speak to us of an elapsed time, exposing stories that have been silenced and rendered invisible, to allow us to break down the bias underlying the construction of that Western representation which has obscured our ability to look and to heart.10“Corazonar [to “heart”] is the translation based on the Maya notion of ch’ulel, which is equivalent to the Aymara chuyma, the place from which one thinks with the heart and the memory”, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo ch’ixi es posible (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018), p. 72..
Andrea Jösch – Biography
Andrea Jösch is a photographer who graduated with a BA in Communication and an MA in Cultural Management from Universidad de Chile. From 2006 to 2016 she was director of the School of Visual Arts at Universidad de Artes, Ciencias y Comunicación. She is currently research coordinator at the School of Arts at Universidad Finis Terrae, and editor of the academic journal Diagrama. Since 2015 she directs the Master in Photography Investigation/Creation, also at Finis Terrae. Jösch is the editor of the magazine of South American photography Sueño de la Razón since it was founded in 2009, and co-editor of the magazine OjoZurdo: fotografía y política. Over the last fifteen years Jösch has been involved in several activities connected with the image on an academic, curatorial and editorial level. She has benefited on eight occasions from the Chilean government’s Fondart grant for art creation and also the Andes grant for creation (2004).
Her interests impinge on the principles of integration from an editorial approach that embraces a number of photographic formulations in the region, viewed from a historical research perspective but also with the development of contemporary languages in mind. Her projects are notable for their networked structure. Jösch focuses on the possibility of building an identity through an acknowledgement, analysis and research of South American local art, a way to contextualise the production of the image and the problems it poses.
