The Contingency of the Whale

Abstract

Chapter 3 recapitulates on the most obvious strategies through which El Techo remained rooted in the past in order to define its contemporary visual identity: the perpetuation of medieval symbolism; the adscription to old European literary models such as the kennings of ancient Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Old German literatures; and the repeated use of sources from Latin American colonial print culture. I also explore the rationale behind the name itself, el techo de la ballena (the roof of the whale). Drawing from the group’s extant documentary record, I argue that both of the elements in the double construct of “the roof” and “the whale” functioned as allegories for an accumulative practice characterized by the juxtaposition of disarticulated elements. While reminiscent of the Surrealist assemblage, El Techo carried this fundamental strategy—which Dámaso Ogaz aptly summarized as lo majamámico—to its unparalleled edge.