Feminist affects of folds, death and dirt in the photobook Reconstrucción by Rosana Simonassi.

Abstract

Reconstrucción, 2016, by Rosana Simonassi (b.1974), is a materially complex photobook that critiques the media's fascination with fatal acts of violence against women, while destabilising the relation of photobook, reader and archive. Close analysis of a specific encounter with Reconstrucción in the National Art Library in 2018 foregrounds three aspects of the book - folds, death and dirt - which emphasise realities of its circulation and consumption. While Reconstrucción ostensibly comprises restaged scenes of femicide, its use of obstructing pages, unusual folds and unexpected spills of dirt deploys the material form of the photobook to generate a more reflexive, implicated readerly encounter with the spectacle of death. By situating the photobook in relation to the artist's wider practice, the article argues the photobook offers a new logic for presentation and dissemination that: expands the artwork's conceptual resonance; re-examines photography's relationship with death; disrupts notions of authorship and readership; and speaks broadly to issues of gendered violence. These insights also reveal tensions around how photobooks are accessed and encountered in institutional spaces, virtually through databases, and in reading rooms. The epistemological regime of the museum art library thus makes ontological understandings about this individual photobook and the historiography of the medium more generally.