Lacunar aesthetics and strategies of visibility

the archive as an aesthetics field of resistance in Voluspa Jarpa

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between lacunar aesthetics and strategies of visibility as conceptual foundations of the Est-ethical System (Barbosa, 2025), a theoretical framework that articulates ethics, aesthetics, and critical listening in the face of violence and historical trauma. The study focuses on three installations by the chilean visual artist Voluspa Jarpa, whose archival poetics transform declassified documents from U.S. intelligence agencies into critical surfaces of enunciation and listening. The research hypothesis argues that, by aestheticizing erasure and censorship, the artist converts the archive into an aesthetic field of resistance, in which absence and opacity become operators of meaning. The analysis adopts a hermeneutic and interdisciplinary approach, integrating aesthetic analysis, institutional critique, and image theory. The results indicate that lacunar aesthetics establishes a politics of perception grounded in vulnerability, listening, and failure, redefining the viewer’s role as an ethical subject of vision. The strategies of visibility employed by the artist reconfigure the archive as a site of dissensus and symbolic reinscription, turning absence not into a deficit but into a form of knowledge. Thus, the article proposes that lacunar aesthetics and strategies of visibility constitute aesthetics methods of resistance, in which silence and fragmentation become critical forms of visibility and memory.