Fundación César Manrique (FCM) will host, on Thursday 18 June at 7:30 PM, the lecture entitled "The islands as simulacrum: identity aesthetics and the consumption of the past", to be delivered by Carmen Marina Barreto Vargas, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of La Laguna. The event will take place in the Sala José Saramago (La Plazuela, Arrecife) and will be broadcast live on the FCM website and YouTube channel.
Barreto will reflect on the instrumentalisation of Canarian cultural identity through the production of aesthetic imaginaries that allude to idealised pasts. The anthropologist will explain why, in her view, the aestheticisation of the past and its consumption serve as a device for legitimation, where identity is articulated through a palimpsest of strategically selected memories to justify projects of governance or resistance. In this regard, she will analyse how the use of representations of Canarianness no longer seeks historiographic fidelity, but the creation of a spectacle-identity that simplifies social tensions in favour of a symbolic cohesion. According to the speaker, the aestheticisation of the past functions as a tool for social engineering, where culture is reduced to a repertoire of signs available for the validation of hegemonic political discourse in the contemporary society of the simulacrum.
The intervention by Carmen Marina Barreto is included within the "Foro Archipiélago" space of the FCM. This is a space for reflection on culture, science, and the environment of the Canary Islands through researchers, intellectuals, and creators who carry out their work in the Islands, and which has already hosted Juan José Falcón Sanabria, Telesforo Bravo, Joaquín Sabaté Bel, Selena Millares, Juan José Armas Marcelo, Nino Palenzuela, Roque Calero, Alexis Ravelo, among others, and most recently Lidia Romero.
Carmen Marina Barreto Vargas is a tenured Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology and former dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences and the Centre for African Studies at the University of La Laguna (ULL). She directs the Gender Equality Unit of said university and coordinates the Museum of History and Anthropology of Tenerife (MHAT), part of the Autonomous Body of Museums and Centres of the Tenerife Island Council.
Her research moves between references to identities and processes of exoticisation, colonialism and decoloniality, body, senses, gender, heritage, and the ontology of objects. She has participated in numerous national and international conferences, as well as in various research and educational innovation projects. She is also part of the interuniversity research group The Tourist Experience: Image, Body and Death in the Culture of Leisure. She is a member of the University Institute for Women's Studies at ULL and a professor in the Interuniversity Doctoral Programme in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies.
Among her latest publications are: Odiseas patrimoniales y museologías feministas; La isla por venir: espacios en transformación y sentimientos de pertenencia; El museo es el souvenir: nostalgias turísticas y patrimonio cultural; Sacralizando la identidad: objetos rituales y patrimonio emocional en la Bajada de la Virgen de las Nieves de La Palma.