Translucency: Memory, Materiality and Loss in the Venezuelan Diaspora

The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is glad to welcome Irina Troconis as the first guest for "¡Pa' Fuera!", a series on the cultural productions of the Venezuelan diaspora in the 21st. century. 

This talk will propose an approach to the cultural production that has recently developed around and from the Venezuelan diaspora that focuses on what I, in my current book project, call “translucency”: a concept that refers to both an aesthetic and a practice of ethics, remembrance, and care. Through an analysis of a selection of installations and poetry volumes by contemporary Venezuelan artists and writers, I will argue that the way translucency is mobilized in their work renders material and urgent a mode of resistance to narratives that privilege transparency, linearity, immediacy, and legibility. As a result, a possibility emerges to see the contemporary migrant condition as a point of departure to explore new and radical ways of being with and for each other that go beyond discourses of empathy, compassion, and indifference.