Abstract
This article seeks to explore the geography of borders and borderlands in the Americas by looking at the photographs of Tatiana Parcero. In her works, Parcero palimpsestically uses a series of anatomical drawings, codices, and maps, chemical constructions, which she projects on the female body, mostly her own. In thinking from the concept of bordertextures, my analysis of the corporeal borderlands of this artist will expose her strategies of counter-mapping. Laying bare the border imaginaries that Parcero’s images design, I will show how her works expose the faultlines that borders create in the dominant cultural imaginary in the Americas.
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Notes
- 1.
Anzaldúa’s figure of the new mestiza, the subject who inhabits mestiza consciousness, is a hybrid figure of the borderlands. She is “neither hispana india negra española/ni gabacha;” rather, she is “mestiza, mulata, half-breed/caught in the crossfire between camps/while carrying all five races on [her] back/not knowing which side to turn to, run from” (2012, p. 216, emphasis in the original). Her multiplicity allows a new kind of consciousness to emerge, which moves beyond binary dichotomies, is able to build bridges and may bring about social and political change.
- 2.
My understanding of the notion of bio-politics goes back to Michel Foucault and refers to the various mechanisms through which processes of human life are managed under regimes of authority, knowledge, and power.
- 3.
For more information on this artist, see: https://www.jdcfineart.com/tatiana-parcero-1 (18/04/2020).
- 4.
The imaginary is a key concept in cultural criticism. In defining the set of values, forms, laws, and symbols which define one society and make it different from another, every society, as Cornelius Castoriadis (2005, p. 147) has it, “defines and develops an image of the natural world, of the universe in which it lives.” The imaginary refers to the forms which define what, for a given society, counts as ‘real.’ Castoriadis argues that every society attempts “in every instance to make of it a signifying whole, made not only for the natural objects and beings important for the life of the collectivity, but also for the collectivity itself, establishing, finally, a certain ‘world-order’” (2005, p. 149).
- 5.
Harris and Hazen (2005, p. 115) define counter-mapping as “any effort that fundamentally questions the assumptions or biases of cartographic conventions, that challenges predominant power effects of mapping, or that engages in mapping in ways that upset power relations.”
- 6.
Tatiana Parcero. “Artist Statement,” Schneider Gallery, Chicago. https://www.schnediergallerychicago.com/new-page-3/. (20/04/20).
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Fellner, A.M. (2020). Counter-Mapping Corporeal Borderlands: Border Imaginaries in the Americas. In: Weber, F., Wille, C., Caesar, B., Hollstegge, J. (eds) Geographien der Grenzen. Räume – Grenzen – Hybriditäten. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30950-3_13
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