Karen Navarro

El Lado Oculto de la Luna is structured around paradoxes. It refuses the simplistic gratifications of possession—the object, the commodified print, the archival series—and instead enacts a living, fugitive system of images that resists fixation: digital fragmented portraits, ephemeral interventions, and digitally mediated patterns that insist on temporality as an ethical stance. Operating between wholeness and fragmentation, it engages participants in the complex, embodied labor of reconnecting with Indigenous identity, while returning the portraits to public spheres that historically have excluded them. The ephemeral, site-specific installations stage a political ontology in which temporality, rather than permanence, constitutes ethical engagement: these lives cannot be commodified; they endure, resist, and assert themselves according to their own temporalities.

The series draws its title from José Saramago’s El Lado Oculto de la Luna, which reflects on hidden dimensions, unseen forces, and the provisional nature of knowledge. Saramago’s work articulates the paradoxical condition of invisibility as constitutive of presence: the unseen is not absence, but a latent and formative force. Analogously, Indigenous histories, epistemologies, and identities endure despite systemic erasure, yet are rarely recognized within hegemonic narratives that define nationhood. For more than a century, national identity was constructed by simultaneously appropriating and fossilizing Indigenous heritage—transforming living cultures into specimens of antiquity. My work attempts to render these subterranean currents perceptible without collapsing them into complete legibility, confronting erasure while preserving the autonomy and integrity of those represented.

The ethical paradox of the work lies in both its materiality and methodology. Rejecting extractive practices, it avoids producing fixed objects, yet it leaves ephemeral traces in public space. In one iteration, the installation appeared in affluent Buenos Aires neighborhoods, exposed to natural forces or deliberate removal. This temporary occupation of spaces historically closed to Indigenous presence became a gesture of reclamation—asserting visibility while resisting commodification. Impermanence itself functions as an ethical strategy, challenging the museum’s logic of preservation and echoing the long history of Indigenous displacement into archives and objects.

The installation’s material and conceptual tensions deepen through its use of Argentine banknotes, particularly the use of the $100 banknote depicting La Conquista del Desierto. I digitally pixelate these notes until the imagery dissolves into abstract color fields, transforming a symbol of colonial violence into a meditation on memory and resilience. The pixelation fractures national iconography, erasing the image of conquest while preserving its ghost. Aligned with the modular geometry of the Wiphala, these chromatic grids reclaim the logic of classification once used to contain Indigenous identities, turning it into a tool of decolonial critique. Through color, pattern, and fragmentation, the work reconfigures state imagery into a visual counter-archive—an act of resistance where disappearance becomes presence.