Ana Roldan's work disrupts different cultural s to subvert established historical narratives, the construction of what is national, and the identifying order. In this particular work the artist uses archival images, which attest to one of the main Mexican traditions, in order to analyze how history and memory are constructed.
Displacements consists of a set of 14 modified photographs that were taken from a catalog on death in Mexico, published in the 1970s, which collected images of sculptures, vessels, temples, and reliefs associated with this tradition. These images were disaggregated and reconfigured from the juxtaposition of their fragments. The result is a series of pieces that seems to retain an anthropological, historical, and documentary quality, while revealing that, like any image or story, it is an artificial construction.
On the other hand, by deconstructing and fragmenting a paradigmatic cultural tradition, such as the cult of the dead, the artist calls into question the story that unifies a diverse and heterogeneous nation, built nevertheless from a centralist and, to a large extent, auto-exoticist discourse.
In this way, the piece not only emulates procedures typical of archeology, which involves the reconstruction, reading, and articulation of fragments, and highlights some of the mechanisms to shape the national identity; but also it questions the veracity of historical and documentary sources, constructions that, like these images, are susceptible to being manipulated and altered over time.
http://www.anaroldan.ch/
https://kadist.org/work/displacements/
http://www.formatocomodo.com/catalogos/catalogo_1.pdf
Ana Roldan's work disrupts different cultural s to subvert established historical narratives, the construction of what is national, and the identifying order. In this particular work the artist uses archival images, which attest to one of the main Mexican traditions, in order to analyze how history and memory are constructed.
