Book presentation “Image stasis”
- Circulation area, Central Library, Universidad de la Frontera, Avenida Francisco Salazar #01145, Temuco.
- Wednesday, April 17 – 11:00 am.
- On YouTube HERE.
Alejandra Castillo is one of the most prolific voices of Chilean feminism. She is the author of multiple incidental titles in our critical-cultural panorama.
She has a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Chile, an academic at the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences (UMCE-Chile) and a visiting professor of the UFRO-UACh Doctorate in Communication. Her publications include Dissensos Feministas (2016); Image, body (2015); Ars disjecta. Figures for a corpo-politics (2014); The disorder of democracy. Women’s political parties in Chile (2014); Feminist knots. Politics, philosophy, democracy (2011); Democracy, politics of presence and parity (2011); Juliet Kirkwood. Politics of the proper name (2007), The masculine republic and the egalitarian promise (2005).
Within the framework of the permanent Communication and Creation seminar, the author presents her new book, Imagen stasis (UFRO-Quilmes Coedition, 2024). Here she reminds us that we live in times encumbered by a “scopic regime” where the current temporality of screen-images is an absolute present. This temporality threatens to conquer each of the areas of life. Images make a body visible, they constitute a new order of dominance.
For Alejandra Castillo, the democratic regime does not fight images, they are part of its calculation. Democracy is legitimized in periodic elections between groups that, in general terms, share the same economic orientation. Therefore, within the framework of a visual governmentality, “voters decide between two options with information provided by aggressive media campaigns with few nuances of difference.
“The democracy of the image maintains certain controls to avoid the lasting creation of alternative media. Visual propaganda, on the other hand, is provided without delay by open television and social networks in which false, contradictory and, above all, banal news abounds. Let’s review any newspaper front page today (print or digital) in Latin America and we will realize what it counts for democracies on the continent. To do this, however, they have our gaze. Our voyeuristic image-hunting gaze is not the only one,” he says.
“There is also the invisible gaze that registers us daily in streets and public spaces. Both images (those we desire and those that monitor us) are technical images. Images of capture and surveillance, not mediated by the human eye, which were initially used in times of war and in military strategies, but which very soon intruded into our daily lives.”
This opens up frontier questions: How to resist images? How to alter images? There are images that reproduce the hegemonic order, there are others that divert and interrupt. For Alejandra Castillo, such a detour is the interruption from the Stasis Image.
After Alejandra’s presentation, the comments will be given by Begonya Sáez Tajafuerce, philosopher. Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the director of the doctorate, Carlos del Valle Rojas. Border University.
The activity is moderated by the Doctorate in Communication, Paul Munguía. Academic from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM), Peru.