Touching the past: touching the past

Abstract

This article is concerned with dissecting and analysing the feminist research methodologies and strategies that I have deployed in my studies on the productions of women artists in the history of contemporary art in Spain. I focus specifically on one case study: my research on artists who worked with the so-called new media (performance, installation, video...) during the last years of the Franco dictatorship and the first years of the Transition (1970s). I analyse my approach to artists such as Olga L. Pijoan, Fina Miralles and Àngels Ribé. I try to explore the silences, the absences, and how to make them appear through the archive and oral history, proposing ways of twisting and deviating the ways of doing art history in our context. The figure of the feminist art historian appears as a desiring being, as a body-space that makes it possible for past and present to touch, in order to glimpse the disconnections, the connections, and the phantasmatic presence of the feminine as a continuum in contemporary Spanish art.