Essay on art and testimony: Rodrigo Braga and the invention of experience

Abstract

The essay focuses testimony as a discursive position and explores its role in the symbolization of trauma. Conceiving it as a transmission of sparks of the Real, we argue that one of testimony's modalities can consist in an invention of the experience, as some contemporary visual art works seem to propose. To explore this hypothesis, we discuss some of the works shown in Belgium in 2010 by Brazilian artist Rodrigo Braga in the exhibition More Force than Necessary.

Keywords:
testimony; trauma; contemporary art; psychoanalysis; invention of the experience