Chronicles of the city: archives of violence and visual epistemology

Abstract

In this article we will examine a series of drawings that make up the artistic production of Darío Ares (Rosario, 1979), whose graphic representations build an epistemology of the visual. The images emerge from photographs taken from news published in local newspapers about the violence perpetrated in specific places in the city, scenes that have been reappropriated and reproduced by the artist to generate his own files. The working hypothesis focuses on examining how Ares' drawings and archives form an iconic fabric that recalls the conceptual articulations of Walter Benjamin's Das Passagen-Werk (1982), and on detecting the links between image and text. To unfold these questions, it includes notions from the field of visual studies. We conclude that they are visual archives that describe the social and political consequences of urban violence, moving away from the hegemonic stories that characterize the journalistic descriptions of the mass media, and where the image is proposed as a means of knowledge, as a critical agency and transformation of reality.