Abstract
This article offers a theoretical reading of Pepe López’s Crisálida, an installation that has become one of the most emblematic artistic works to emerge from and about the Venezuelan diaspora. Focusing on the material, temporal, and affective dimensions of the installation and drawing from an interdisciplinary corpus that conceptualizes slowness, thingness, visuality, and liminality, the article develops a framework that theorizes translucency, protection, and intimacy, and that situates diaspora’s spatiotemporality in a moment rarely explored in diasporic art, which is the moment before departure, when everything—the migrant condition, the transformation of “home” into “house”—is still undetermined. The article thus departs from academic works on diasporic art that rely on discourses of nostalgia, ruins, precarity, and violence, and focuses instead on the emergence of new subjectivities and forms of care that ground themselves on the multidimensional intimacy Crisálida stages. As such, it contributes to the scholarship on the relationship between art and migration in the Latin American context, and to the conceptual debates currently defining the fields of new materialism, memory studies, and affect theory.
Published Version
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