In my engagement with Frida Orupabo’s (1986-) collages I work with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and the Martinican theorist and writer Édouard Glissant’s notion of Opacity to challenge modes of relationality shaped by coloniality. I ask: How can we approach these works in a way that does not reproduce colonial hierarchies? An approach to this question can be found in our engagement with artworks as “moments of difference”; resisting hegemonic ways of being in relation by precluding the associated problems of identification and appropriation. In such Opacity functions as a principle of queerness, a troubling and disturbing force that unsettles the colonizing gaze. It is the place from which another mode of seeing might emanate. In search of an ethical approach to these works I will take as my point of departure Levinas’ notion of the “caress” reconceptualized as an embodied form of vision. My assertion is that in Levinas we may find a way toward a nonviolent approach to alterity based on the recognition of a singular and irreducible otherness. I will imagine an ethics of relationality that starts from the sensuous, ambiguous, and vulnerable gesture of the caress and that respects difference through the recognition of the right to opacity.
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Contemporary art, curating, photography, aesthetics
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