EL SIMULACRO COMO ENSAYO

Today’s visual culture—our understanding of our surroundings—faces the most challenging chapter in audiovisual history, in which the narrative is rife with dichotomies surrounding simulation: truth or falsehood, real or fictional, human being or automaton, an image free from manipulation or propaganda-driven fabrication.

If we follow the regretful statement by Joseph Goebbels, who served as Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in the Third Reich—“a lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth”—how much truth are we actually experiencing right now, from the moment we wake up until we drink our coffee? How much of a simulacrum is there in the reflection I’m engaging in as I write this text? How much of a simulacrum is there in the way I view the world? For Nietzsche, it is a matter of perspective; therefore, all these questions are relative, and the answer depends on each individual. Thus, for him, there is no single truth.

This video essay aims to prompt the viewer to reflect on this debate through the concepts of simulacrum and identity. The “liquidity” of the contemporary world that Bauman warned about leads us to question the transience of images in the face of new ones that replace them—the possibility of existing in a continuous process of change, of seeing ourselves as beings expanded into virtuality, into the multiplicity of identities, into hybridization, and into an infinite search for reference points.