De óbolos e travessias: luto e ética em representações imagéticas nos contextos migratórios contemporâneos

Abstract

What makes a life worth mourning? As we cross, along with Syrian refugees, from inhospitable lands to safer regions, trajectories registered and narrated through photographs, fundamental questions about a historical period marked by a myriad of exceptions and violations arise: how can these images be read? Are we too close, historically speaking, to those events so that the risk of thinking about them is unsurmountable? What constitutes a family in such circumstances? Using methods derived from Semiology, Semiotics, Philosophy, and Sociology, this research aims at an interdisciplinary approach in order to elaborate on how, by means of aesthetic experiences, ethical consequences and reflections can be attained. From an essayistic style, a literature review was conducted, followed by the analysis of ten photographs, all of them public and available in mainstream international news agencies. The analysis was made using a varied range of tools, such as: componential analysis, application of the barthian studium and punctum model, application of the lacanian metaphor and metonymy model, and the zizekian approach to cultural criticism. Each series of photographs had, also, a particular theme of analysis, such as: color, movement, and composition. From a technical-analytical stance, the methods used were assessed both with respect to their fitness regarding the chosen photographs and with respect to how prone they were to establish fruitful interdisciplinary dialogues. From a critical-synthetic stance, proper articulation between theory and praxis was assessed, as well as how efficiently these tools were able to raise new questions, such as the definition of family itself, and the effects of an Ethics founded on alterity over the interpretation of images. This text’s common thread was to explore interpretative tools capable of achieving, through an aesthetic object, ethical consequences in exceptional familial and social contexts. In the dark room, the quilting points of this crossing are revealed, from photograph to representation, from annotation to meditation.