In this presentation, Javier Guerrero examines the relationship between archive and plasticity through an exploration of the archive of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, housed at the Firestone Library. The archive contains the successive rewritings of Arenas, a tendency that he shared with the literary and political generation that he led, as well as a proliferation of photographs and visual records of the writer’s body. Together, these items not only question the possibility and legitimacy of textual and sexual originals, but also allow a collectively written body that is recognizable and intelligible sexual matter to materialize. This complex intersection between archive and plasticity influences that matter directly, unleashing the sedimentation of the body as a destabilizing political project. Guerrero explores the body’s complicated transformations as sexual and textual matter, tangible in the configuration of the visual archive of the writer, in order to examine the effect of the relationship between archive and plasticity on the intelligibility of dissident sensibilities in Latin America.
Free and open to the public. Lecture in Spanish.
