Rite, Flesh, and Stone by Antonio Córdoba

Author:Antonio Córdoba [Córdoba, Antonio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826502193
Publisher: Vanderbilt UP
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.5. Javier Codesal, DÍAS de SIDA, 1989. Photograph and poster.

DÍAS de SIDA (1989–1996) is a multi-part, mixed genre body of work consisting of various smaller works created over the course of approximately seven years, including a number of staged photographs of male bodies. Central to DÍAS are, once again, the themes of isolation, solidarity, anonymity, and temporality, in addition to the suspension, arrest, and plurality of the human form. Indeed, one could argue that the images in DÍAS are much more abstract than the portraits we see in Espaliú’s and Guibert’s oeuvres, a detail evidenced across the numerous photographs that Codesal makes of bodies without a face or without a head altogether. From the “quarantined” body in Fábula—segregated and simultaneously brought into face-to-face contact with another body (the “caretaker” who feeds and nourishes)—we now move to the scarred body featured in Figure 6.

The giant roses mark the skin in an overt allusion to Kaposi sarcoma lesions, one of the most recognizable symptoms of AIDS surfacing on the body. The conversion of the lesion, an unmistakable sign of disease, occurs through its transformation into a simulacrum of beauty; the symbol of abjection and disfigurement turned into a positive, powerful stamp of the natural world, the “bloom” that re-signifies the body, in its positive status, as alive, fertile, and productive (flowers are, after all, the reproductive organs of plants).

Overt exposure of corporeal signs of positive status, here enlarged and refashioned, are most striking perhaps in their visual analogy to wounds. But in Codesal’s rewriting of the body as a map that charts the externalization of death’s symptoms, this image is willfully devoid of any associations with shame and fear. Indeed, the attention to wounds stands at the forefront of another image made in relation to DÍAS de SIDA, from 1995, titled Tras la piel. Of the myriad possible translations of the title—literal and metaphoric—are once again another set of temporal allusions, which while not mutually exclusive, are also not necessarily compatible. Like the previous image, it is clear that this photograph is concerned with the skin of the body as surface of inscription and infection. Tras, however, is somewhat more difficult to pinpoint since it could mean “through” (as in through the skin), though more conventionally would be understood either temporally as “after” or relationally as “behind” the skin.

Four photographs in a grid feature a naked man, squatting in a frog-like position, with his back facing the camera. Read left to right, the first image shows only the faint trace of a mark on the man’s back. In the second and third images the mark morphs into a visible gash, the skin torn along a large section of the spinal column. And in the fourth and final frame, the open wound becomes the aperture through which we see the body; it is the centerpiece of both body and image. Wounds are places where the interior and exterior coincide and clash. They are also metaphors for thinking about social and political spaces

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