By Soledad Pinto

This article explores how three contemporary artworks – the installation Diana by Mark Wallinger, the film Redoubt by Matthew Barney, and the film The Bonding by Michelle-Marie Letelier – deploy optical devices to support or disrupt the cycle of discovery, vision, and appropriation, an articulation that historically shaped the relationship between seeing, knowledge, and domination in European colonial and imperial projects from the fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.

Far from having disappeared, this configuration continues to shape how we approach forms of life that diverge from the patriarchal normative script that structures the present.

In this context, the article examines the strategies by which these works mobilize optical mechanisms to produce different regimes of visibility and to unsettle the positions occupied by bodies involved in the aesthetic experience. Understood as tools in the formation of the perceptible, these devices reinforce or interrupt the dominant regime of the distribution of the sensible.

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