La performatividad de las imágenes

This book responds to a concern that manifests itself in various forms, the ambivalent power of images, and to the persistent attempt to shift the question of what images are towards what they do, their ways of doing, their performativity. Traditionally, images have been declared unfit to critique reality; at the same time, it is claimed that we are currently immersed in a visual culture that demands us to turn to them. Although most of the images that circulate are oriented towards the consumption objects and not towards the construction of gazes, this does not mean that they are not artefacts of speculative, poetic and political power. This text is an invitation to maintain a critical attitude that allows for the emergence of new types of conflicts and new ways of seeing. From a kind of counter-intuition, it affirms that the problem is not so much the excess of images as their scarcity; those realities that have no images, that lack the capacity to be imagined. An interpellation to compose other forms of power, to relate that which has no relation, exercising in common the power that is shared. Stories have to be told, images have to be made, and these stories have to be believed, as if they were true. For the author, it is in these forms of fragile interruption that the revolt of forms can occur.