Poverty as an aestheticexperience: modernity,avant-garde, and thesymbolic orphanhood ofValparaíso.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22370/margenes.2025.18.28.5079Keywords:
art, aesthetics, poverty, Valparaiso, realism, modernityAbstract
This article explores the notion of poverty beyond its material dimension, approaching it as an aesthetic, symbolic, and epistemic category from the perspective of Walter Benjamin and the a20th-century avant-garde movements. Through a theoretical and artistic analysis, it examines how this dimension of poverty, proposed by Benjamin, drives radical creative processes that find echoes in both the European avant-garde movements and postcolonial artistic expressions in Latin America. The essay proposes Valparaíso as a paradigmatic case of poverty and peripheral modernity, a city without a founding document, marked by a symbolic orphanhood that allows it to constantly reinvent itself through the vernacular, the irregular, and the spontaneous. It also reviews the evolution of realism and printmaking in Chile as practices that emerge from and toward marginality, proposing new forms of representation from the periphery. Poverty, in this context, is revealed as an engine of invention and rupture, an aesthetic and political power that subverts the hegemonic narrative from the margins.
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