Abstract

The images generated by power use certain visual motifs that conceal the sum of self-interested protocols that give them their true meaning. Given this observation, the forty chapters and two addenda that make up "El poder en escena" respond to the need to track down these icons of the public sphere in order to decipher the nature of these images that seem routine and spontaneous, and which we do not usually question. Just by doing so and stopping at each motif to name it, we take a decisive step towards recognising its ideological bias. These visual motifs are generated from the field of politics, perhaps the most notorious for their propagandistic will; from the economy, always based on the concealment of its real power; from the judiciary, another sphere where opacity is the norm; from the police forces, which construct motifs of apparent objectivity; or from some social rituals that are repeated in an insistent and enigmatic manner. Delving into the iconographic origins of each motif - in film, painting, photography or architecture and their subsequent ramifications - allows us to question the visual forms that the different spheres of power use to represent themselves. And at the same time it serves to question the genesis and evolution of these forms, to bear witness to their false transparency and thus return a critical and ironic gaze to the power that generates them.