# Feminist affects of folds, death and dirt in the photobook Reconstrucción by Rosana Simonassi

## TL;DR

The photobook Reconstrucción by Rosana Simonassi uses material elements to critique violence against women and challenge traditional art consumption.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a feminist analysis of the photobook's material form as a means to rethink authorship, readership, and gendered violence.

## Key findings

- Reconstrucción uses folds, death, and dirt to create a reflexive reader experience.
- The photobook disrupts traditional notions of authorship and readership in art.
- It highlights tensions in how photobooks are accessed in institutional and virtual spaces.

## Abstract

Reconstrucción, 2016, by Rosana Simonassi (b.1974), is a materially complex photobook that critiques the media’s fascination with fatal acts of violence against women, while destabilising the relation of photobook, reader and archive. Close analysis of a specific encounter with Reconstrucción in the National Art Library in 2018 foregrounds three aspects of the book — folds, death and dirt — which emphasise realities of its circulation and consumption. While Reconstrucción ostensibly comprises restaged scenes of femicide, its use of obstructing pages, unusual folds and unexpected spills of dirt deploys the material form of the photobook to generate a more reflexive, implicated readerly encounter with the spectacle of death. By situating the photobook in relation to the artist’s wider practice, the article argues the photobook offers a new logic for presentation and dissemination that: expands the artwork’s conceptual resonance; re-examines photography’s relationship with death; disrupts notions of authorship and readership; and speaks broadly to issues of gendered violence. These insights also reveal tensions around how photobooks are accessed and encountered in institutional spaces, virtually through databases, and in reading rooms. The epistemological regime of the museum art library thus makes ontological understandings about this individual photobook and the historiography of the medium more generally.