Poetics of Absence

How to talk about the past when that same gesture is being co-opted and deactivated by power? This essay follows a red thread in contemporary visual culture to discover certain works that subvert the rules imposed by the so-called Transition culture to refer to the past. The “Poetics of Absence” is encrypted in them: These are subjective, unfinished, open and hybrid works between photography and documentary cinema, which use radical editing and re-appropriation techniques to destabilise the idea that the past can be recovered in a harmless way. By questioning the conception of the present as a smooth and problematic space, these works open cracks, as Walter Benjamin wanted, in the homogeneity of history. And in the writing of this essay.

Author: Isabel Cadenas Cañón

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