The Return of the Gaze: The Political Task of Narration

Paloma Polo

“[The telling is] all we have,” said Ursula K. Le Guin through one of her characters in the novel The Telling. Far from understanding history as an immutable, definitive and unambiguous construct that repeats itself ad infinitum—although this is sometimes claimed—the telling inscribes what is told in a political-affective transformation in which the past, present and future constantly intermingle. What are our stories? Where is history when it is not told or when it is ideologically made invisible or suppressed? In what world-system does what is told enclose us or, on the contrary, what worlds does it open for us? These questions underlie and are updated in every operation of telling, transforming in turn the tellings acquired. 

The artist Paloma Polo’s projects are permeated by these questions, as well as by a fundamental contemporary commitment to what is defined as History as part of a constant and nonnegotiable confrontation with it. Through long processes of investigation, the artist approaches very specific historical events, accounts that have formed the colonial-patriarchal foundations of our history, as well as others that have been discarded or silenced. 

The exhibition is organised into four constellations that shape works produced from 2010 until today. The first, The Earth of Revolution, situates us directly in the context of the Philippines, in ways of life and ancestral knowledge that fuel struggles for emancipation and social transformation. The second nucleus, The Path of Totality, addresses the colonial logic that underpins Western scientific expeditions, presented as a matrix of questions and methodologies developed by the artist. The third section, Dulcinea, focuses on two stories of militancy, struggle and political commitment in the context of the Franco regime and Spain’s so-called “Transition”. Finally, the fourth nucleus, Se jeter au fond du lac pour conserver sa vie (1) , constitutes a new field of research for the artist. By intervening in feminist genealogies, she examines the ways in which indigenous thought, particularly the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, may have influenced feminist ideas forged around the French Revolution.

These constellations shape a complex, delicate interweaving that makes palpable the relationships between specific historical contexts and the overarching structural frameworks of sociopolitical and ideological organisation. Nonetheless, these present proposals do not in any way aim to question inherited dominant history in a binary manner, but rather to intervene in it and in the tools with which it is constructed, which implies mobilising the social and political structures that sustain it. This exhibition by Paloma Polo suggests refocusing our gaze and exploring the political nature of storytelling. 

(1) The phrase has been taken from a quote by Kandiaronk, a political thinker and chief of the Wendat Native American people. The artist has taken it from the book Dialogues, ou Entretiens entre un Sauvage et le baron de Lahontan (1704).