Out of place

 Martín Guerra Muente

2015

There is something in this new exhibition by Claudia Coca that, if I’m allowed the idea, is out of place. The first hint of this affirmation is, perhaps, the space where we are. It is not usual for Claudia's work to be presented outside of a certain artistic institutionality. This decision has something of a symptom. 

The second hint would be that of the disappearance of a pictorial strategy that has accompanied her throughout her entire career as an artist: that of the figuration of the image. Well, in this last installment, the representation of the bodies has been replaced by a choreography, rather, of words. A shift from a certain recognizable territory to a much less legible one.

This movement reveals a distrust, not only of the figurative form of painting, or of the predominant uses of certain Lima art of some time, but also of the “institutions” that make the circulation of these same practices possible. One could not do without the other, because although representation condemns the image to a certain peremptory nature, its circulation places are also spaces of institutional and cultural overcoding.

Aware of these strategies, Claudia Coca opts for disorientation. A poetic and evocative formula of a certain colonial memory but also of her own decolonial strategies. And the historical and metaphysical of fictions and cultural appearances. In the specific case of this work: the erasure of the body as an ethnographic certainty and the deterritorialization of the place of the word itself. Transfiguration of image into word and word into image, both working on the denial of her own alienating condition. If, indeed, the literate city was the paradigm of the political and legal power of the colonial world, the contemporary world demands its own apparatus of power: the image and the visual culture.

It is in this sense that the challenge to the political machinery of representation is the suppression of these two cultural systems: the image and the word. An economy of presence that appears in the midst of the flashy machinery of the colonial merchandise –National Geographic in between - visual and bureaucratic of the Other. A displacement of the presumed empirical evidence of the Other and of a certain iconographic readability.

All the more so when the words that appear are less verbal testimony than a gesture of survival, or remnants of framing politics that a certain positivism still demands. The barbarous tales that the artist tells us about are the traces of civilizing and colonial policies that have denied certain groups the right of self-representation. Traces that, in these paintings, generate strange appearances and produce unexpected relationships and violent disappearances; image falls in the middle of words, verbal flashes that imitate the unfolding of the image and make it blow into pieces.

Now, here language functions neither as a comment nor as an allegory, only as a presence. That is, it operates beyond its own significance. Words that are not comments but that show the myths of the colonial conscience. Or emancipatory projects. Those are words that suggest an appearance but, at the same time, is a dialectical staging, they disappear.

There is a double game in this calligraphic dance, that of a certain stability of the word, as something that means, and as a simple signifier, a trace that refers to many things and nothing at the same time. Words that in a sort of paradox are images denied, latent images that never appear. Delegating meaning to the drawn word, to the word as a calligram, is to propose a hybrid device in which the eye and the body participate in a movement full of tension: we do not know whether to read or look; if translating those shocked landscapes or deciphering that enigmatic vocabulary that appears before our eyes.

These landscapes offer us a game of transfers between presence and absence, affirmation and negation, the signifier and the a-signifier. A suspense of the bodies, the enigma of the text as a critical device of appearance. What Canclini calls an "aesthetics of imminence": to show what cannot or should not be, to make you uncomfortable, even if this seems impossible. Scattered words that destabilize the place of language as a form of power but also as a form of representation; words as thresholds of meaning, as interstices of appearance and flight.

Here, finally, there is no excess of the figure-image or excess of the word-language, but rather a surprising appearance of an image-word that shines at the moment of its appearance. And that is, probably, the function of the symptom: to superimpose in the space of a word a social and historical reverberation, in the world of appearances a critical and untimely intervention.