Image and Death
Visual culture of absence
The line of research ‘Post Mortem. Visual culture of absence’ aims to study those images created after death. Life is presence, but it does not disappear after death: it moves on to inhabit other media. Death urges us, from the earliest times, to construct a whole visual culture of absence
There are moments in which images display their power more intensely and, perhaps, the moment of death is one of those peak moments. With death, the images that represent the deceased in life are charged with a presence that they did not have before; on the other hand, the images that are created after death aspire to contain the presence of the deceased with the most varied formulas. We call this whole network of images that are reactivated after a death the visual culture of absence. However, we will not focus our attention exclusively on objects, but rather we will look at the relationships that they establish with the living. Between life and death there is an abyss, a rupture that challenges us; the images of this visual culture of absence, for their part, seek to build bridges, dialogues, links to make death a natural part of life
Part of this line of research is developed within the framework of the homonymous blog located on the “hypotheses” platform. We firmly believe that a blog can be a fantastic tool to accompany research or to organize the countless contents that are often stored (and forgotten) in the infinite folders of the computer. It is not a tool designed to offer closed or conclusive results; in any case, it is a resource with which to experiment and test ideas that have not yet matured enough but that deserve to be exposed. Sharing, perhaps this is the key word, makes the process take on a different dimension
Publications
Lopez de Munain, Gorka. Máscaras Mortuorias. Historia del rostro ante la muerte, Sans Soleil Ediciones, España, 2018.
Bruno, Paula “Transformación medial de la lápida al muro de Facebook: supervivencia y dinamización del micro archivo de memoria”. XVIII Jornadas sobre Alternativas Religiosas en América Latina. 16 al 19 de noviembre de 2015. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina
Bruno, Paula “Retratos postmortem de Prilidiano Pueyrredón y Benjamín Franklin Rawson. Una aproximación antropológica a la relación con la muerte a través de las imágenes”. XI Jornadas Arte e Investigación. Instituto Payró. 26, 27 y 28 de noviembre de 2014. Auditorio del Archivo y Museo Históricos del Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires “Dr. Arturo Jauretche”, CABA.
