ARTMargins : Vol. 12.1

Several of the texts and projects in this new issue of ARTMargins underscore the role of photography and performance in rendering visible our “ways of seeing” and what they occlude: forms of imagining and inhabiting urban space that are suppressed by official discourse, clandestine archives that simultaneously register and obfuscate the humanitarian crimes of the last Brazilian dictatorship, and deaths forgotten or naturalized as part of the AIDS epidemic, among others. The insistence of that which is alternately invisible and reified—illegible and overcoded— runs like a thread through this issue, raising questions about the nature and stakes of the interpretations the articles call forth. In this sense, it is perhaps pertinent to consider how our approach might change if we were to view such torsions of appearance and meaning in terms of not only a labor of restoration but also an interpretation of a desire. Stated slightly differently, what if our work were not simply to document the crimes—which is to say, the suppressions, exclusions, and fetishizations—of the past but to sustain a desire in the present?

ARTMargins, Volume 12, Issue 1, pp. 3-7.