Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos (Oct 2018)

Los Fantasmas: dibujo e invocación de lo existible en la España post-franquista

  • Coco Guzmán

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.72723

Abstract

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On this article, I describe the research and production process of my drawing piece Los Fantasmas / The Ghosts. Using this work as an example, I reflect on the visual strategies and methodologies that I use as an artist of ghosts, focusing specifically on the notion of "lo existible" (that which may exist). "Lo existible" is a mix between fiction, desire, archive an memory that allow me to tell stories that are possible but not necessarity truthful, in the sense of being attached to historical or archival evidence. The goal of "lo existible" is to establish a connection between the viewer and the ghost and to demand a call-for-action from the present. Influenced by the critical and interdisciplinary work of Avery F. Gordon, Saidiya Hartman and Marianne Hirsch, my drawings estate the ghosts as a political figure: ghosts tell silenced stories and visibilize the strategies of sielncing imposed on them by dominant disocurses. In the series Los Fantasmas, my drawings focus on the mass graves where still today lay those killed by the Franco army during the Spanish War and the dictatorship (1936-1975).

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