Ways of Lying: Parafiction in Contemporary Latin America

Abstract

Ways of Lying: Parafiction in Contemporary Latin America Jeronimo Duarte-Riascos (bio) In 2009, Carrie Lambert-Beatty noted the emergence of fiction as an “important category in recent art.”1 She was, of course, not referring to fiction as is traditionally understood in the humanities but rather to certain “unruly experiments with the untrue.”2 Her article “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility” dissected a number of such experiments,3 a group of interdisciplinary contemporary artistic practices that produced “fictions that [were] experienced, however briefly, as fact.”4 Lambert-Beatty proposed the term “parafictional” to refer to this phenomenon and explained that “with various degrees of success, for various durations, and for various purposes, these fictions are experienced as fact. They achieve truth status—for some of the people some of the time.”5 This truth status can be achieved through a variety of methods; sometimes stylistic mimicry is key, and at other times it is the consequence of a sort of conceptual trompe l’oeil.6 But perhaps most importantly, the truth status that is produced by a parafiction is always dependent on an operation of belief. Plausibility, Lambert-Beatty explains, is the attribute managed and produced by parafictioneers.7 The spectator of a parafiction encounters a work that is designed and structured to accommodate belief but belief about something that the work is not.8 A parafiction invites you to believe in a fiction while, at the same time, obscuring the fictional nature [End Page 65] of what is being presented. In other words, it is presenting art to convince you that what you are being presented is not art. The cases Lambert-Beatty studies vary immensely in format, location, and duration. They include a museum in Istanbul celebrating the life of Safiye Behar, a Turkish Jew, communist, feminist, teacher, and translator who was a close friend (perhaps lover?) of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey; a BBC live interview in which the spokesperson for Dow Chemical accepts full responsibility for what has come to be known as the Bhopal disaster; and a marketing project by Nike Inc. to rename Vienna’s Karlsplatz as the Nikeplatz. All of these examples have an act of deception at their core. The museum existed, but Safiye Behar was a character created by Michael Blum on the occasion of the Istanbul Biennial in 2005. The interview took place on December 2004 and was aired on the BBC World network, but the interviewee was not Dow Chemical’s representative; he was Andy Bichlbaum, a founding member of the artist-activist collective the Yes Men. Karlsplatz was never really going to be renamed Nikeplatz, but the artists behind the work (Eva and Franco Mattes in collaboration with Public Netbase) mimicked and produced a real marketing campaign that successfully convinced many platz goers. All of these works’ fictiveness, however, was disguised even as it was also, most of the time, simultaneously hinted. The majority of the spectators who encountered these and the other projects discussed by Lambert-Beatty were unaware of their fictional origins; that is to say, they experienced art as if it were real life. Lambert-Beatty’s neologism and the cases it encompassed were not only fascinating to me but also sounded utterly familiar. Having been trained in the tradition of Latin American arts and cultures, the parafictional immediately reminded me of several contemporary works that used deception as a medium for creation. The phenomenon, however, at least as it manifests in the region, sounded almost historical, as if there existed a particular Latin American way of lying that predates the present time and influences the ways in which parafictional practices are received today. In this essay, I explore this particularity to argue that in Latin America, fiction is often understood not as the opposite of the real but rather as its condition of possibility. Fictionality, (t)here, has a history of enhancing agency and is not a prerogative of the arts. As a consequence, the region and its cultural and political practices are familiar with coping with truth as a matter of fiction. It is my contention that such familiarity stems, at least partially...