The images from below

Conversations on image, sexuality and work

Abstract

This article proposes a critical space from which to think about pornographic images from the perspective of their workers. The interrogation is posed as an open question approached from a polyphony of voices of different researchers, and is structured in the form of an undisciplined montage between various dialogues, images and gestures, around the statutes and modes of production of pornographic imaginaries, while questioning how these forms of representation open a questioning of the very notion of work when it meets sexual practices.

The development of the conversations took place during the month of March 2021 in the context of an artistic residency of the researcher Andrea Corrales Devesa at Casa Planas (Mallorca) around the pornographic image. Dialogue that had begun in 2019, in a previous project entitled "The material dimension of the pornographic image" and from the discussions held in the research group "Visual culture and pornographic image" led by the same researcher at the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània in Valencia that same year. The problematic in her research process requested a critical revision of her methodology as an individual practice in order to open up to a friction in the dialogue with thinkers, workers, organizations and groups that would allow her to maintain a horizontal and situated gaze in this research process.

The fragments of dialogues collected in this writing summon three researchers, Lucía Egaña, Linda Porn and Andrea Soto Calderón, who converse with Andrea Corrales Devesa and orbit around a broader analysis that is interested in materials, infrastructures and their corpo-realities in relation to online pornography, and aim to stimulate reflections, but above all, open up questions about the issues of the performative dimension of seeing, the status of truth with respect to the image and the economies of verification of the pornographic image, as well as the historical suspicions towards the supposedly manipulative condition of images - especially those more feminized, as is the case of pornographic or pornodefinite images. Likewise, we are interested in how these articulations define very specific labor realities of work in the cultural and pornographic industry, and how both intervene in a definitive way in the imaginative production and the universes of possibility of such images. The proposal is that of a fragmentary and interdisciplinary presentation, seeking to activate a nodal and evocative thought rather than transmitting a knowledge that is probably impossible to inhabit outside its material contexts.