Aesthetics of surrogation is a video essay that is part of a larger research and artistic project-in-progress around the sensorial and material environments of the postdictatorship in the Latin American Southern Cone, specifically Argentina and Chile. Broadly, this project aims to think of the postdictatorship—this is, the period comprehending the end of the dictatorships of Videla in 1983 and Pinochet in 1990, to the present—as constituted by material, atmospheric traces through which the affective structures of the dictatorships—including echoes of horror, torture, disappearance, and death—elusively persist. In this video-essay, I take the opening sequence of Lucrecia Martel's La mujer sin cabeza (2008), and specifically the elusive, sweaty figure of a handprint on a car's window, as a starting point to read the inscription and persistence of dictatorial and colonial violence in the textures of materialities such as noise, metal, and sweat. These materialities, because they hold a particularly ambivalent status, specifically in relation to the body and the ways in which they interact with the environment and are sensed and perceived, enable certain unexpected acts of inscription, remembrance, and surrogation to take place.

 

The video is in fact titled “aesthetics of surrogation,” in a reference to Joseph Roach’s famous conceptualization of the term (1996), to address processes of cultural reproduction and re-creation, particularly taking place at moments of departure, loss, and death. When absences and cavities are forced into the social fabric of a particular society, he suggests, “survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates.” While drawing from Roach’s notion, I appropriate the concept of surrogation rather loosely, offering an experimental, material approach to the term. In doing so, I pay attention to the ways in which certain materials and material structures—such as the largest amusement park in Chile, Fantasilandia—as well as gestures, bodily dispositions, and interactions occurring in the postdictatorship space might be rendering themselves available, albeit unknowingly, for something else to suddenly and elusively emerge.