Ways of re-presenting an archive. Between Bellas artes and Magnetizado

Abstract

The pair Bellas artes and Magnetizado can be considered –because of their treatment of such dissimilar themes– as exemplary of a broad formal tendency in current Latin American literature towards the representational procedures of contemporary art (led by performance and installation), and no longer so much towards the literary rhetoric of the 19th and 20th centuries, as hypothesized by Laddaga in his book Espectáculos de realidad (2007). Along these lines, we will study the way in which both books operate in regard to what Hal Foster has called an "archival art" (2016), insofar as they rescue as source material readymade documents archived in other spaces of culture. Thus, we will seek to review the relationship that these books maintain with History, the narrative forms consolidated in the literature of the last century and the new forms of narration that they propose, which will be read in this work as re-presentations or re-installations of archives lost in the past.