ART AND TRAUMA

Abstract

Presentation of articles from issue 33 of Revista Cena, a publication on the interrelationships between art and trauma. Trauma is understood as a wound, violence, defeat, disaster, psychological shock, emotional shock, suffering, agony. These and other derived concepts are of interest to a cultural arc that spans concerns from psychoanalysis to sociology, including manifestations of all the arts and the theory that is made about or from them. It also implies the response that can be given to anxiety. The year 2020 brought medical, socioeconomic and emotional confrontation to the world against the sanitary constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic, from social isolation to losses of any kind and their contingencies. On all continents, anxiety continued its course, accompanied by the necessary symbolic support – to which the arts, communication and creativity programmatically contributed – but not finding it fully when interdicted by the ethical and moral shock caused by denial and the behaviors considered diversionary or antisocial. From the Plague of Athens to the fratricidal conflicts of the present, from the sacred texts to the post-apocalyptic imagery in cultural products, from the self to the other, art was made and is present, spontaneous or induced, building worlds.