Realismo sonoro y fidelidad literaria: Las obras de cinta de Eduardo Costa

This article proposes that the Argentine-born artist Eduardo Costa’s critical and poetical sound works from the late 1960s through the 1980s experiment with magnetic tape and stereo sound to expand the material meanings of poetry off the page. The works join alternative strands of Peircean indeixcality: the physical and even chemical indexicality familiar to photographic theory and the social, non-referential indexicality theorized in linguistic anthropology. Costa points to a materialist and linguistic media theory in works that reflect on the medium of the tape recorder even as they take on institutional violence and eulogize the diasporic art and life of Ana Mendieta.