Fantasmatic and mediums in the Rodriguez’s workshop. Approaches to the survival of technical gestures in cultural devices of Colombian craftsmanship

The present study investigates, from an aesthetic and media archaeology perspective, the cultural configuration and transmission of various technical gestures during the transition from the 19th to the 20th century in the workshop of the Rodríguez family, an emblematic location in shaping the cultural landscape of Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia. Additionally, it examines the variations achieved by its practitioners and how the artisans’ workshop became a device for the agency of an influential aesthetic public sphere that propelled the transition towards modernity, in the context of Antioquian culture and its role in constructing specific forms of national identity. For this purpose, two categories will be employed: firstly, the concept of “medium”, which will facilitate the exploration of connections with different materialities oriented towards forms, traces, and mnemonic imprints with varied inscription contexts, associated with the various types of memory operationalized in the practices of the Rodríguez family; secondly, the concept of “phantasmatics” will be used to designate the diversity of ways to make visible the invisible observed in the aesthetic-artistic configurations that took place in the workshop.apital, Bogotá.