Black dog. The emergence of the image as a symptom of individual and collective memory in Tucumán

Abstract

The silhouette of a black dog appears in 2015 painted on one of the walls of the maternity hospital of San Miguel de Tucumán, a building that formerly housed the municipal dog pound and is located in an area adjacent to the Western Cemetery and a public
bathing tank. Between these places–birth, life, and death unfold with an extraordinary proximity. From its appearance and subsequent erasure in 2021, the black dog–conceived as an image?stone, a category developed in our doctoral thesis that enables
reflection on two complementary phenomena: on the one hand, the evidence of an other time that manifests on the surface; and on the other, the destructive capacity of the image?stone, which strikes and opens history toward the space of interstices, of
unexpected encounters that reconfigure the survivals of the image through tensions and inversions–breaks into history and opens the space of cracks, of intervals that put the familiar nearby in tension with the uncanny. Aby Warburg offers us the possibility,
from this emergence of the image as symptom, to assemble collective memory by bringing the silhouette into relation with other images that represent, record, signal, recover —or survive— the past as document or as fiction. We will therefore first at?
tend to Warburgian thought, the dismantling of Mnemosyne as a photographic device (Atlas) and as a space of all possibilities (Library), in dialogue with his collaborators, and then propose an anachronistic, dialectical, and marginal montage of the memory
of images as symptom of culture.