Domestic objects, very black skin: between the colonial look and the heresy in Liliana Angulo’s work

Abstract

This article presents a reflection around the relationship between Liliana Angulo’s work and the critique of the colonial gaze as a shaping vector of subjectivity in Latin America. Angulo’s resource of making visible the link between domestic objects and her character “negrita” (“little black girl”) shows the intersection between gender and race in the cultural prejudices of Colombian society and the inherited colonial gaze with which the hierarchy of classification of bodies is established in this society. To explore this relation and its possible resistance, expressed through art, three analisis will be developed. First, the disposition of the afro-descendant female body in correlation with domestic objects which mark a hierarchy of gendered and racial domination finds an echo in the ways in which the colonial subject has been formed both in the circulation of mimicry and in the possibility of inverting the codes of the univocal order of coloniality and its effects on the gradient of gender and race. Second, in the way in which women in Angulo’s images perform their relations with objects articulate forms of expression and how it is possible to propose a heretical power of expression that confronts these codes. Finally, heresy and the heretic subject, expressed in the relationship between body and objects in Angulo’s work, can be projected as an aesthetic line of Colombian art.