Thinking Through Images
Andrea Soto Calderón
This research project is part of a broader analysis that has been carried out since 2017 at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. The first part of the research project focused on exploring the performative dimension of images, in which the fundamental focus was affirming the ambivalent power of images—a persistent attempt to shifting the question of what images are towards their ways of doing, their performativity. The next phase of the research was related to the “material imagination”, considering the functions that images occupy in the organization of our daily life and the configuration of public spaces, the ways in which images circulate, and the economics of the visible that operates in their arrangement.
This research led to a careful consideration of the formative processes. If reality takes place performatively, then how can we approach its formative processes? In an active commitment to articulating working methodologies, we published an extended lecture under the title Imágenes que resisten. La genealogía como método crítico (Images That Resist. Genealogy as a Critical Method, 2023).
To enrich the movements of forms, the perspectives facilitated by references to the signifier have long shown their limits. Imaginary formations of course involve the concept, but also song, and dance, and they require other metaphors. It is therefore necessary to consider other categories such as scene, rhythm, gesture and staging. This year we therefore propose to attempt to understand their logics. Historically, images have based a fundamental part of their visual power on resemblance. However, a considerable part of the work of images consists in creating new links. We can say that a thought occurs through images, which is equivalent to saying that there is a type of understanding and relationship that is established with reality only in the material deployment of images—an issue that also presents us with the challenge of expressing the specificity that images provide.
Likewise, any approach to image-forming processes today would require a broad development and a profound analysis of the modes of technical existence, and in particular, critical thinking about the long-held ideas related to the notion of the medium as something that allows transmission: a kind of utensil that we use to produce something. Understanding the relationship between art, technique and technology from the perspective of material culture involves developing a new idea of technique. Of course, such a goal would be too ambitious for the present research project. However, we propose to think of technique as a cultural operation; every technical reality accumulates gestures and ways of life. Therefore, there is an urgent need to consider some of the functions of current images.
Andrea Soto Calderón has a doctorate in Philosophy and is a professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has carried out research in Valparaíso, Barcelona, Lisbon and Paris. Her research focuses on the transformations of the aesthetic experience in contemporary culture, artistic research, the study of images and the media, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics.
She has written several academic articles, book chapters and texts for artists’ catalogues. Her publications include the books Le travail des images (The Work of Images) together with Jacques Rancière (Les presses du réel, 2019), La performatividad de las imágenes (The Performativity of Images, Metales Pesados, 2020), Imaginación material (Material Imagination, Metales Pesados, 2022) and Imágenes que resisten. La genealogía como método crítico (Images That Resist. Genealogy as a Critical Method, La Virreina, 2023).
Image: Pedro Costa, “Casa de lava – Caderno”, 2013
