SUMMARY

In the present doctoral thesis the audiovisual self-expression of women who find themselves in physical “transit” is analyzed from an artistic perspective. This research has an interdisciplinary character, since the analysis is carried out across feminist theories, comparative literature, post-colonial theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetic philosophy, history and, finally, the study of cinema and of the visual arts.

The problem of the representation that we encounter on having reality contrasted with fiction and subjectivity in  audiovisual expression is outlined in the analysis, which is based on the study of several documentaries that enable us to later observe the transition of the topics and the construction of the languages. Furthermore, we think about the meaning of art as a witness of our era, according to the arguments of Walter Benjamin, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, who do a critique of the aesthetics of politics as a point of departure. Likewise, our speech focuses on the subjectivity in the documentary following the reflections of Gilles Deleuze, Bill Nichols and Michael Renov. On the other hand, the path and the history of the Japanese documentary are verified after studying the references of Tadao Sato, Makoto Sato y Tetsuya Mori. 

Our aim when analyzing the selected audiovisual works is to penetrate into the speech of the woman’s autobiography according to different contexts and characteristics. For that purpose, we follow the feminist reflections of Shoshana Felman, Gayatri C. Spivak and Drucilla Cornell, who led us -through their reviews of the theories of Sigmund Freud, Jaques Derrida and Immanuel Kant, respectively- to the search of diverse audiovisual expressions of contemporary artists who are active within the autobiography of the women in traffic from diverse perspectives and vital experiences.

In the artistic area, the works on migrations and other social movements are every time more visible. They question the cultural, family and individual identity based on reflections on multiculturalism and post-colonialism theories. It is obvious that in our contemporary society there is an enormous and fast circulation. It seems inevitable, then, to face this reality and to analyze the new encounters which are happening and whose consequence is a confused mixture between identity and difference. In that sense, all our artists look for their self-expression and question their identity: one, as a travelling artist; another, as the daughter of emigrants, etc. Our exiled, nomadic artists (Mona Hatoum, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Fiona Tan, Kimsooja and others) irreparably approach the topic of the identity when they penetrate a culture that is different from the own one.