(Des)hysterical body and hysterical executioner: politics of seeing and erasure in the aesthetic critique of the archive in Voluspa Jarpa

Abstract

This article analyzes how chilean visual artist Voluspa Jarpa mobilizes censored archives to symbolically elaborate historical violence in Latin America. It begins with the hypothesis that her work activates a singular form of subjectivation in the spectator, reinscribing trauma as a visual symptom. The analysis articulates two complementary concepts: the des(hysterical) body, an ethical subject interpellated by the failures of the document, and the hysterical executioner, a symbolic figure of power that seeks to erase its own repressive acts. The main objective is to understand how contemporary art can operate as a counter-archive and counter-memory, transforming censorship into an aesthetic device for listening to what has been silenced. A qualitative, theoretical-interpretative, and interdisciplinary methodology is adopted, articulating psychoanalysis, contemporary art criticism, and memory studies in the analysis of three of Jarpa’s installations. The results indicate that by aestheticizing documentary opacity, the artist shifts the archive from an informative source to a poetics of the symptom. It is concluded that her work reinscribes trauma as a symbolic dispute between those who listen and those who erase, asserting art as a space of resistance to official memory and as an activator of ethical and critical subjectivities.