Disputed Images

On Tuesday, March 31, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m., coordinated by Cora Gamarnik (UBA, Argentina), CLACSO organized the face-to-face workshop “Images in dispute – Photography, memory and power 50 years after the coup in Argentina”, at its headquarters on Estados Unidos Street 1168, City of Buenos Aires.

This workshop proposed a reflection on images and their aesthetic, narrative, and political power. What place do images occupy in the contemporary world? How can a story be told through a photograph? What should we look at, what should we choose from what we see, what should we replace from what is absent?

We start from the idea that photographs are not closed “works,” but open devices that initiate new paths. Each image activates a process: it enables readings, disputes over meaning, forms of appropriation, circulation, and intervention. Thinking about them involves attending to both what they show and what they silence; to both their materiality and their contexts of production and reception.

We will work with photographs that highlight social conflicts, with family and personal images, with poetic and documentary photographs, and with archival materials. Within the context of the 50th anniversary of the coup d'état in Argentina, we will explore the capacity of images to construct memory, challenge the present, and imagine possible futures—or to point to those that were foreclosed.

Each photograph can be the starting point for narrating survivals, resonances and traces; but also for exploring the tensions between imagination and power that run through all visual production.