Reconstructions

Abstract

The reflection on what art can reveal or disclose opens a discussion about the real, always contentious for aesthetics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, social theory, and today rarefied by the crisis of the regimes of truth, the empire of fake news and “alternative facts”. But the real did not disappear as is rumored, assures the art historian Hal Foster, only that the discussion no longer concerns its presence but its position. Some of the most innovative artistic and narrative projects of the last decades are less interested in exposing a given reality behind a representation, than in reconstructing an occluded reality or pointing out an absent reality. And it is perhaps Forensic Architecture, a research group made up of architects, filmmakers, visual artists, journalists and lawyers, the group that has most actively undertaken the reconstruction of acts of violence and human rights violations, with extraordinarily innovative methods of production and visualization of evidence in different formats. But literature can also expand its limits to show what we cannot see with processes of materialization and mediatization analogous to those of Forensic Architecture. La compañía (2019) by Mexican artist and writer Verónica Gerber Bicecci deploys a wide range of media and languages ​​to reconstruct one of the most devastating cases of predatory extractivism in Mexico, starting from the ruins of Nuevo Mercurio, a mining town in the state of Zacatecas. With reconstructive impetus, Gerber Bicecci assembles very diverse materials, brings together languages ​​and hybrid genres to compose a story of Nuevo Mercurio that faces the complexity of its plundering rise and fall, and the sinister spectrum of its aftermath, traumatic, psychological, environmental and social networks that still endure.