The Intermediality of Memorialisation: Inflections and Reflections in Mexican Visual Culture - Part I

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The visual medium has become an increasingly engaged forum through which to materially process the past, past events and imagined historical encounters. This panel takes as its investigative premise an analysis of the role of memory and its fluidity within the trajectory of cognitive meaning to visual articulation. How are memories and events processed through the visual medium? What is the effect of their readings? How does the transfiguration of the image from sensory, transient matter to palpable object, affect its consumption? And what role do the national media maintain in the distribution of images and in the possible distortion of their narratives? This panel seeks to question the dialectic relationship between context, image-making and consumption in modern day Mexican visual culture, framed within the discourses of political, social and economic instabilities and sensibilities.

Sub Track

• Mass Media and Popular Culture

Chair

• Anna Kingsley, Royal Holloway, University of London

Individual Presentations

• Nothing to See at the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Political Sensibility of Drug Trafficking in Julián Cardona’s Imagetexts - Oswaldo Zavala, College of Staten Island & The Graduate Center, CUNY

• Portraits of Absence: Representing Mexico’s Drug War Victims - Jessica Wax-Edwards, Royal Holloway University of London

• Violence and the Victim: Narco Conflict in Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013) - Miriam Haddu, Royal Holloway, University of London

• The Spectacle of Violence under the PRI - Peter M Watt, University of Sheffield