Conference
60 years after Hiroshima
SOAS
Institute –
FROM THE MUSHROOM TO THE NECKLACE
(Body and ruin)
1. Introduction
This
lecture has two main axis that touch the concepts of body and ruin: at first,
there is one that points out a transgression, a rupture or a leap regarding
established limits. The creation of the UN and its antiwar objective once the
World War II was over, as well as all the treaties that have been signed ever
since (under which barriers were built that made impossible the aggressions
proper of mankind), were drafted and signed after the Evil act was commited. As
usual, human beings must touch their own fragility in order to promote
interdicts which in their turn help to frame Good, Evil, the forbidden and the
promotion of laws that limit our acts. The transgression is born “after”, it
becomes true with the previous knowledge of what is being broken, it is done
knowing full well the sin or the crime. Man seeks to protect himself from
himself but with that same urge he seeks the way to trespass limits, to
emancipate his violent spirit.
On
the other hand, there is a second axis, generated from images that in this case
serve as significants. When images seek to document a specific fact, they make
visible a reality, they allow us to think about matters that may be somehow
inscribed within the limits that I mentioned above. This type of images shows
us spaces through which we can give shape to a metaphor of what is real. Its
reading process is interesting because it carries the maximum visibility of a
fact; it does not intend to suggest but, on the contrary, it tries to show the
actual fact at its maximum expression. Through these transgression-related
images the objective is to highlight in them what is shown invisible within
their own visibility. To achieve this objective, I turned up to images that, along with time,
promoted a chilling fact in the human being, and that, in the end became the
main question of this article: the big ontological question about what we are
and where do we come from. Such question lead us to an “explosion”, to a Big
Bang that strongly stresses the imperious need of emptiness in the
creation-destruction process. Up to what point can we affirm that when the
human being kills or ruins he/she is confronting his/her own body and that of
“the other’s”, with the emptiness?
2. The
3. The Necklace Bomb
4. The visible
invisibility of emptiness
5. The Image
Destruction and the Ruin