Time-Riding: Albertina Carri and the Ironic Affective Presence of the Past

Abstract

Following her work as film director, Argentine artist Albertina Carri presented a series of installations called Operation Failure and the Recovered Sound. This paper analyses the five-screen video installation Research on Cattle-Rustling, the centerpiece of the exhibition put on display at the Buenos Aires’ Memory Park in 2015. It aims to explore the consequences of the notion of “queer temporality” in terms of affect as a way to approach the past. In Carri’s piece, this is done through a “logic of failure” in which the artist intends to revise the category of historic agency attributed to a project inspired by the figure of her disappeared father. Through a juxtaposition of times and spaces, she introduces the collision of ordinary (Stewart) and ugly (Ngai) affects as both a way to represent the impossibility of apprehending the past properly. To what extent do the ways in which Carri gives relevance to the role of affects in the representation of so-called traumatic pasts –conspicuously compatible here with irony- allow for the revision of certain characteristics of futurity? Is this approach to such pasts, permeated by contingent affects doomed to failure due to a somehow naïve vision of its uses in the present?