Escuchar el cuerpo: una aproximación iconográfica a la representación del cuidado, de la tradición pictórica cristiana al cine y la esfera pública contemporáneos

Abstract

This article approaches the iconography of medical healthcare and palliative care in contemporary cinema and the public sphere. While the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic between 2019 and 2022 brought daily visibility to both the healthcare sector and the specific field of care, its praxis has traditionally been underrepresented. As Hannah Arendt defines it, caregiving is considered “labor” rather than tangible “work”, and its praxis —often carried out by women in domestic settings or within religious orders—has had little presence in cinema and the images of the public sphere, where the healthcare realm was sometimes reduced to surgical interventions associated with masculinity. Using an iconological methodology inspired by the work of Aby Warburg, this article articulates an approach to the phenomenology of care, conceived as a reassembly of caregiving gestures in the contemporary public sphere while attending to the survivals of Christian iconography.