ABSTRACT
The essay offers a close reading of a series of photographs by Alejandra Riera, the subject of which is the traumatic legacy of a revolutionary event: the Parisian Commune (1871). The fundamental problem addressed by Riera's piece is how we can ever have access to historical events that have become repressed or even erased. Her aesthetic proposal is a relational system based on colour and form that engages the viewer's unconscious memories in order to forge affiliations between the known and the unknowable. This ambiguous logic of affiliations is further explored in the essay as a model for anti-humanist exhibition-making.