Silvia Spitta – författare

"When things move, things change." Starting from this deceptively simple premise, Silvia Spitta opens a fascinating window onto the profound displacements and transformations that have occurred over the six centuries since material objects and human subjects began circulating between Europe and the Americas.This extended reflection on the dynamics of misplacement starts with the European practice of collecting objects from the Americas into Wunderkammern, literally "cabinets of wonders." Stripped of all identifying contexts, these exuberant collections, including the famous Real Gabinete de Historia Natural de Madrid, upset European certainties, forcing a reorganization of knowledge that gave rise to scientific inquiry and to the epistemological shift we call modernity. In contrast, cults such as that of the Virgin of Guadalupe arose out of the reverse migration from Europe to the Americas. The ultimate marker of mestizo identity in Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe is now fast crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and miracles are increasingly being reported. Misplaced Objects then concludes with the more intimate and familial collections and recollections of Cuban and Mexican American artists and writers that are contributing to the Latinization of the United States.Beautifully illustrated and radically interdisciplinary, Misplaced Objects clearly demonstrates that it is not the awed viewer, but rather the misplaced object itself that unsettles our certainties, allowing new meanings to emerge.

Siguiendo el análisis de Foucault, el tiempo se percibe como algo rico, fecundo, la vida, la dialéctica, mientras que el espacio es tratado como algo muerto, fijo, estático e inmobil. En ese marco, la identidad occidental se ha constituido en Europa y Estados Unidos, donde prima el tiempo y la historia por delante del espacio. En contraste, América Latina ha seguido un proceso diametralmente opuesto. La ciudad, lo urbano, la división campo/ciudad, ha dominado el pensamiento latinoamericano desde la Conquista hasta nuestros días. Las grandes civilizaciones prehispánicas, conjugadas alrededor de lo urbano, tanto o más que en la Europa medieval, forzaron a los conquistadores a entender la conquista y la evangelización como un enorme proceso de urbanización.Hacia finales del siglo XVII ya se habían fundado casi todos los centros urbanos latinoamericanos en existencia hoy. Los conquistadores entendieron desde el principio que su conquista sería ante todo una conquista del espacio y una urbanización de la historia. El énfasis en el dominio del espacio tuvo como consecuencia la concepción de las culturas prehispánicas como culturas sin historia. El imperio se constituye a sí mismo como sujeto y transforma al colonizado en el espacio. La conquista de América coincidió con descubrimientos científicos en el momento que dieron forma a la colonización. Con la creación de las líneas de latitud, el Atlas y la nueva navegabilidad de los mares, Europa sigue un impulso de codificar y darle un orden matemático a la urbe, darle nuevos nombres erradicando los indígenas y controla el espacio desde un punto de vista superior y exterior a él.~Following Foucault's analysis, time is perceived as something rich, fruitful, full of life, dialectic, while space is treated as something dead, fixed, static and immobile. Within this framework, Western identity has been established in Europe and the United States with time and history taking precedence over space. In contrast, Latin America has followed a diametrically opposed process. The city, the urban space, the country/city division, have dominated Latin American thought from the Conquest to the present day. The great pre-Hispanic civilizations, conjugated around the urban, just as much, if not more than medieval Europe. They forced the conquistadors to understand the conquest and evangelization as a huge urbanization process.Almost all of the Latin American urban centers in existence today, had already been founded by the end of the 17th century. The conquistadors understood from the beginning that theirs would be above all a conquest of space and an urbanization of history. The emphasis on the domination of space resulted in the conception of pre-Hispanic cultures as cultures without history. The empire constitutes itself as a subject and transforms the colonized in space. The conquest of America coincided with scientific discoveries at the time that shaped colonization. With the creation of the lines of latitude, the Atlas and the new navigability of the seas, Europe follows an impulse to codify and give a mathematical order to the city, give it new names by eradicating the native ones and controls space from a superior and external point of view.