“El arte (visual) de la fuga”: Pedro Lemebel por Verónica Qüense

Abstract

I examine in this work the critical potentialities that a documentary filmed in 2009 enables with regard to the life and work of the Chilean performer, chronicler, and narrator Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015). The flight as a movement of displacement –between frontiers, between genders and genres, between performativities– establishes an epistemology of difficulty recontextualized in Pedro Lemebel, corazón en fuga, Verónica Qüense’s documentary. My proposal for reading this documentary decidedly circulates throughout questions of images, signs, and historicization, or memorialization. Not only does it purport the refiguration of flight as an identitary slippage, both generic and sexual, but it also understands it as a productive epistemological difficulty. What is more, it assesses discussions on the performative act of disidentification and both its aesthetic and political implications.