art + objets d'arts + photography

Resilience

Resilience is a term used in psychology to establish the ability of individuals and groups to overcome periods of immense emotional pain and trauma experienced in natural, social and emotional situations of disaster.

The photographs of artist Cristobal Traslaviña are resilient, surviving as missing links that remain even through the fleeting twilight of silence. In Traslaviña’s works, the idea of disappearance is seated in the imaginary construction of another’s pain – that of the sitter. What we see are the reflections experienced in small, intimate, and extreme marginal spaces: motels, brothels and feverish territories. The image intercedes with the sides of the world that may have not survived (the removal of resilience). In reading the untold, private stories of these uprooted stars in public space, we feel a kind of loneliness or fear of exclusion, and as such, are reflected back into the image.

The construction of identity taboos in a neoliberal society, focused towards a shallowing, deafening and commodification of the material body, deny any recognition of a deeper socio-sexual thread that lies beneath the surface. Traslaviña works to represent the failed, dark territories, parallel existences and erotic exercise of postmodern societies. The dual view of hostility/welcome requires us to give up the imagined concept of ‘traditional’ society, framing the representation of a possible counter, beyond the provisions of a conservative world where explorations into the ‘intermediate’ are continually denied.

This controlled, visual resilience proposes a distinct, cotemporary mode of voyeurism, creating a fiction that unravels the concept of the ‘traditional’ portrait. Here, the characters off the taboos of themselves, normalizing an everyday sense of a wild sexuality where the author too is immersed in the moment action. Both Traslaviña and that ‘other’ we observe in the image confront us with their histories and intimacies, and as such provide the final moment of interconnected resiliency: that of the author, the protagonist and observer.

Montserrat Rojas Corradi

Emerging Curator Room Photography

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC

Quinta Normal, Santiago, Chile