Killjoy and conflictive Virgin?s as anti-mothers in the work of Julia Rossetti and Blas Aparecido

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Atmosphere’s of religiousness and representations of Mary, mother of Jesus, has been adorned with diverse attributes and characteristics by national and international visual arts political imagination. The figure of Mary has also operated as the centre of fundamental theological debates and was strengthened within Catholicism and its cult strongly expanded in colonial territories (Fogelman 2010). The figure of Virgin Mary as nation-mother has been constitutive in history and culture, having a specific use during imperial expansion and independence movements, more often to serve colonial aims.It is not strange that a region like Corrientes, crossed by a strong religious and colonial heritage, has a cultural production full of allusions to religious figures like Virgin Mary as a mother, as well as scenes linked to her apparition on earth, the miraculous, the devotional and evocations of celestial landscapes. This includes the works of María Julia Rossetti (1986) and Blas Aparecido (1976), both artists from Corrientes. The aesthetic insight that these artists bring up new horizons of meaning that put in conflict the representations of the Virgin as mother. In this scenario, the witch as anti-mother assumes special relevance in Rossetti’s work, while Blas Aparecido builds altars that hybridise Marian representations intertwining two critical strategies. He links these representations to objects that highlight the conflictive relationship of homosexuals with the Catholic Church, while proposing singular forms of worship that give value to the Virgin in the circuits of sexual dissidence. The witch and the queer can be aligned with monsters as identity figurations that escape from normative standards of being and behaving and resist biopower.The singular trajectory of these artists allows us to follow the traces of counter-normative cultural formations that, in the field of visual arts, have produced variegated languages that undermine the hegemonic catholic symbology of Virgins, while incorporating disenchanted and killjoy feelings. Far from promising happiness (Ahmed 2020), those feelings give rise to conflicting discursivities around Virgin’s maternity and around enclosing forms of being.From different formal, aesthetic and conceptual exercises, Rossetti and Aparecido offer singular practices of reinterpretation and reappropiation that deconstruct colonised epistemologies around the Virgin, reinventing her figure from critical imaginations linked to queer, popular and ch´ixi ways. These artists offer notions of the Virgin-mother that are not chaste and authentic, but rather hybrid versions of the national imaginary that parodies cultural constructions of motherhood frequently used to create and reinforce concepts regarding Nation. These Virgin-mothers document a sort of reconstitution of the mother as a national threat, as a failed or monstrous figure based on aesthetics that resist the typical national allegories assigned by the Catholic Church. In this scenario, some elements used by these artists gain special relevance, going from typical iconographies of witchcraft, psychomagic and fantasy they build semiotic instances and epistemological experimentations that open critical discursivities towards normativity and motherhood. Their artistic practices mix ecclesiastical and plebeian iconographies, building narratives that parody, reinforce and resignify the anti-mother as an image that challenges traditional normative roles, proposing renewed ways of social identity for sexual dissidence and feminised bodies. Información suministrada por el agente en SIGEVA