Jerónimo Duarte-Riascos

Informed by a keen interest in the cultural and historical specificities that have conditioned the understanding and use of fiction in Latin America, I investigate larger questions such as:

• What is the role of art, artificiality, and fiction in the (re)construction of the real from both a contemporary and historical perspective?
• How does art envision and materialize epistemological and ontological alternatives to those developed by the Western tradition?
• What is the role of belief in securing the efficacy of art?
• How can an interdisciplinary approach to these questions further discussions concerning the arguably trite art/life binary?
• How do artistic practices contribute to the translation, alteration, conditioning, deciphering, and modification of our knowledge of the world?

My current book project, Prosthetic Fictions – Imagining the Self, (Re)constructing the Other in Contemporary Latin American Art, examines fictional artists who, for finite periods of time and for various reasons, were believed to be real human beings. Its central argument is that these fictions are best understood as “prosthetic”—artificial creations that overcome limitations, replace absences, and offer alternatives to natural and historical constraints. Inhabiting a liminal space between reality and fiction, prosthetic fictions are designed to enhance the life of their “users,” much as medical prostheses do.

Unlike traditional literary characters or conceptual personae in the visual arts, prosthetic fictions are received as if they were real—embraced as “true” as a result of acts of voluntary belief, complicity, or parafictional deception. Through close analysis of six case studies—from the ambitious New York Graphic Workshop in the late 1960s to the puzzling practice of writer Mario Bellatin in the 21st century—the book demonstrates how such fictions operate as figures of alterity, enabling artists to construct versions of the Self otherwise inhibited by social, historical, or self-imposed constraints. These Others, in their prostheticity, successfully alter the lived experience of their creators and, often, that of their immediate communities.

By situating these works within broader cultural and political contexts, the book makes three key contributions. First, it traces a shift from the revolutionary faith in art’s transformative power to a more skeptical assessment of its efficacy as a vehicle for social change. Second, it demonstrates how these works anticipate and problematize contemporary modes of constructing the Self and the Other as malleable, virtual, and disembodied entities. Third, it introduces the concept of prosthetic fiction as a shorthand that extends beyond “fictional artists” to other entities with similar mechanisms of production and effect.

Concurrently, I am also working on two additional research projects. The first, Ways of Living: Alternative Communities in Modern and Contemporary Latin America, studies efforts spearheaded by artists that aspired to create physical and virtual spaces for dwelling where art, literature, architecture, philosophy, and politics could overlap and coalesce. The second, The Unintelligibility of the Real, concentrates on contemporary artists who use fiction to question our ability to understand the world and reintroduce doubt as the guiding principle of relationality and sense-making.

* “A Contemporary Cabinet of Curiosities: Play, Improbability, and the Reinvention of the World in Liliana Porter’s El hombre con el hacha y otras situaciones breves” in Nicolás Campisi and Lucas Mertehikian, eds, Imagining a New Natural History - Latin American Cultural Production in the Anthropocene, University Press of Florida (Forthcoming 2026)

* “Towards a Definition of The Prosthetic Condition: Mario Bellatin, Simón Hosie and Other Ways of Inhabiting Contemporaneity” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 1-21, 2024. 

* “Ways of Lying: Parafiction in Contemporary Latin American Art” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Vol. 45, Iss. 1, Article 3, 2023.

* “La estrategia del pájaro carpintero: consideraciones sobre la vigencia y singularidad de las Yeguas del Apocalipsis,” in Sergio Delgado, María José Delpiano and José Falconi, eds., Conceptual Stumblings: Arte en Chile, 1960s – 2000s, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 2022.

* “La Violeta: Making the Transparent Opaque in Violeta Parra’s Work,” in Patricia Vilches, ed., Mapping Violeta Parra’s Cultural Landscapes, Palgrave MacMillan, 2017

* “Aureliano Babilonia es un abaporú. Iteración y lenguaje en la construcción de identidades.” Revista de Estudios de Literatura Colombiana. Número 36, Universidad de Antioquia, 2015.

* “Andrés Di Tella y yo.” Tiresias. Journal of Culture, Politics, and Critical Theory. Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Issue 6 – Elements of Matter, University of Michigan, 2014.

* “Reading Through Art for the Worlds to Come. A Pedagogical Take on the Ever-Present (and Ever-Pressing) Question What Can Art Do?,” Revista Letral, Número 10, 2013.

* “También la interpretación es un collage: conjeturas en torno a Pedro Manrique Figueroa,” Revista Perífrasis, Número 1, Universidad de los Andes, 2010.

Exhibition Catalogues

* Prosthetic Realities: Fake Truths and True Lies in Colombian Contemporary Art, co-authored with Catalina Acosta-Carrizosa. David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 2016.

* Este: coordenadas itinerantes, co-authored with Catalina Acosta-Carrizosa, 15 Salones Regionales de Artistas, Ministerio de Cultura, 2015.

Book Reviews

* Review of Non-Literary Fiction: Art of the Americas Under Neoliberalism by Esther Gabara (University of Chicago Press, 2022) in Hispanic Review, vol. 91, n.4, 2023, p. 657-660.

* Review of In Search of The Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), D. Graham Burnett, Catherine L. Hansen, and Justin E.H. Smith, eds., Strange Attractor Press, 2021 in The Brooklyn Rail, November 2022.