Abstract This artistic research project investigates how performative rewriting can operate as an epistemic intervention within colonial visual archives. It takes as its point of departure the 1859 painting El naufragio del Bergatin joven Daniel by Raymond Monvoisin, a work that stages the encounter between a white female survivor of a shipwreck and indigenous inhabitants in southern Chile. Rather than approaching the painting as a historical object to be interpreted, the project treats it as an active visual structure that continues to organize perception, affect, and subject positions in the present.

Through a documented artistic laboratory, the image is activated using methods of slow collective observation, dialogical unfolding, spatial reconfiguration, and performative re – enactment. The body becomes an analytical instrument. By redistributing positions, gestures, and proximities within the original composition, the performance displaces the colonial narrative embedded in the painting and exposes its regime of visibility.

The resulting performative act does not illustrate critique but produces knowledge through embodied experimentation. Rewriting emerges here as a research operation a way of interrogating how images distribute vulnerability, silence certain bodies, and naturalize hierarchies. The project argues that artistic practice can function as a mode of visual thinking capable of revealing and interrupting inherited structures of seeing.

By articulating performance as a method of archival inquiry, this research contributes to the field of artistic research through an embodied, relational, and process-based epistemology. It proposes that intervening in images is not only an aesthetic gesture but also a way of transforming how knowledge about history, representation, and alterity is produced.

Monvoisin, R. (1859). El naufragio del Bergantín joven Daniel. Museo O´higginiano y de Bellas Artes, Talca, Chile. https://www.surdoc.cl/registro/7-180