Anachronistic Archives. Magdalena Jitrik on Political Deference

Abstract

This article explores the role of anachronistic archives in challenging linear temporality. In order to delve into this issue, I scrutinize the proposal of the Argentine visual artist Magdalena Jitrik. I am interested in focusing on the specific way in which Latin American processes are in tension with those of the global North, particularly with regard to the temporal dimension of the political and aesthetic avant-gardes. It is the imminence, the acceleration of time, but also the unfinished, pending or frustrated dimension of the regional experience that comes into play in her way of exhibiting such temporal tension. The main hypothesis of this paper states that the anachronistic overlapping between present and past must go beyond that mere enunciation to investigate differentiated ways of managing such anachronism.