Contributions by Paola Cortés Rocca
Paola Cortés Rocca holds a PhD in Romance Languages & Literatures from Princeton University. She has taught at the University of Buenos Aires, the University of Southern California, and San Francisco State University, where she served as Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages. She is currently a Conicent fellow, teaching at UNTREF. Her books include El tiempo de la máquina (Machine Time) and Eva Perón: Imágenes de vida, relatos de muerte (Eva Perón: Images of Life, Stories of Death), which she co-authored with Martín Kohan. She co-edited Políticas del sentimiento (Sentimental Policies) and has published essays on photography and aesthetics in magazines like October, Mosaic, Iberoamericana, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, among others, on the works of such photographers as Andrés Serrano, Alejandro Kuropatwa, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Eduardo Gil, Marcelo Brodsky y Gabriela Liffschitz, among others. (Photo: Sebastian Freire)
Instructions for Navigating in amongst The Dead, followed by a Requiem
Paola Cortés Rocca on Bruno Dubner’s Las Muertas (The Dead)
translated by Jennifer Croft
1. Images are wily: they don’t lay out facts, don’t make any cases. They’re indolent and superficial: they would have us believe that the world is what we see, and that it’s just fine as it is already. They reside as far away as possible from Comprehension, which begins where we resist appearances and first glances.
2. “When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures,” said Susan Sontag. Photographic discourse is elegiac and crepuscular: it not only cherishes the past, but also converts into past everything it touches. Salvaging it, damning it, protecting it, asphyxiating it. Photography is an overprotective mother, sweet and terrifying. A melancholy lady in eternal agony.
3. In the new regime of technology dominated by the digital, certain characteristics … Read More »
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