The image as a method in the “Latin American” question. Sketches and dispersions from the poetics of Emma Villazón

Abstract

This paper explores the possibilities and implications of a baroque critique within the poetics of Emma Villazón and the movie The great movement by Kiro Russo. The baroque as an unfinished device allows us to make connections with the possibilities of the essay as form. If the Lezamian image unfolds as a method, this implies giving way to the torrent of anachrony and contingency and to the heterogeneous and fragmentary as the vital core of the works of art. Sarduy's notion of a hypertelic art, —art that goes beyond its limits—, complicates the debate on the relationship between image, writing and the (fictitious) border that delimits them both. At the same time, baroque decentralization, hand in hand with notions such as Latinamericanism (Rodríguez Freire, 2020), Raúl Antelo's archiphilogical proposal (2013), the baroque as critical survival and reading machine (Díaz 2015, 2021) and the development of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's sociology of the image (2015) and her Ch'ixi approach (2010), allow us to rethink some categories of the Lezamian essayistic such as "syncretism" or indiátide or even to deepen the debate on the notions of frontier or nation-state. This becomes especially possible as the baroque resurfaces symptomatically throughout different moments of "Latin American" art as a symptom or malaise of modernity. The question of method and its political implications lead us to try to follow —rather than slow down or delimit— the associative progression of the image in the works. In this way, the figure of Jaime Saenz's aparapita or expressions of the Andean baroque appear throughout the work as survivals and forms of insurrection or counter-conquest.