Artistic representation as a possible critical reflection on historical catastrophe

Abstract

This article aims to establish some of the possible dialogues between representation and catastrophe. It intends to understand how the artistic representation of a historical tragedy helps us reconfigure the meanings of history itself as well as human relations. At first, it addresses how much a catastrophe imposes limits and difficulties on representation. Then, it discusses how an artwork, an historical event and its reception may articulate, creating an intersection between them, in which the autonomy and the specificities of each one of these factors remains ­– and it necessarily depends on how they relate to the other elements in order to accomplish the artistic production. The present text is divided into five sections: 1) Introduction; 2) Limits and possibilities of representing the catastrophe; 3) Literary narrative as a power of life in the face of a catastrophic referential; 4) The cinematic representation of the catastrophe; and 5) Representation: a possibility of understanding and of new significances human practice.