Archives of history, archives of memory. Noemí Escandell’s graphic artwork

Abstract

The aim is of this research is to reconstruct the poetic and political discourse of plastic artist Noemí Escandell (1942-2019) by analyzing the formats, use of photographic archives and narrative thickness of her works created by the end of the sixties in articulation with other visual formulations of the nineties. In these productions, called handing works, the presence of montage as an aesthetic and comparative resource can be observed. Based on cultural, political and semantic repercussions, we will reflect on the visual devices generated in some of her works. For this purpose, links will be established with fundamental notions by Walter Benjamin and Peter Bürger on reproduction and montage, an avant-garde procedure later recovered in the neo-avant-gardes, as proposed by Hal Foster. Finally, the chained images resulting from the handing works will be reviewed in the light of Aby Warburg's studies, whose way of looking into documentary records and archives (whether or not included in the history of Western art) created a random approach in relation to traditional historiography.