Metaphor as a political way: about the show and tell - the art surrounding trafficking in women

Abstract

This article is a first approach to the theme of artistic policies in relation to trafficking in women. After a short introduction dedicated to providing a screenshot on the situation of the phenomenon of trafficking in contemporary societies, some possible relations between artistic practice, politics, and the putting into circulation of senses around social conflicts from the history of art will be studied. 

This article seeks, above all, to make from the history of art an aesthetic and philosophical approach to the problem of representation and artistic policy; therefor notions of semiotics and language sciences, literary theory and epistemology are used in order to generate a network of concepts surrounding possible phenomena of significance within the scope of most primary body-emotional experiences. All of this is with respect to the operation of a work of art. An important place is given here to the metaphorical processes operated in the construction of any meaning, processes that become a matter of experimentation in

artistic practice. In what way can the metaphors used in art help to activate, to transform and to produce senses on the world in general and around trafficking of women especially? By means of what routes does art address and touch key aspects of the construction of values and sociocultural imagery? Finally, this article seeks to elucidate something of the ambiguous and contingent games of reality and fiction. How does art manage to make its transforming inventions on the documents of the real things and how does it make real and tangible its fictions? Which are the experiential effects of this permanent tension?