His glance voids the places he looks at, it deserts them. To blink, to photograph. It’s the same: it prompts a wipe out. Luis Molina-Pantin (Geneva, Switzerland,1969) does not portray objects; he listens through them. He speaks in their own language. He captures the silence, the instant in which you wonder if his images are sneering at us or if they are just there, quietly, about to burst.

Kitsch lamps have crossed his lense, soap opera scenarios; oil towers have exploded and he has captured –like a Chinese box the image of an old Elite magazine with the illustration of a still imaginary earthquake that would devastate Caracas. Apocalyptic? A fit of Blade Runner syndrome? It’s not only this. Luis Molina-Pantin’s work is archaeological, beyond photography. He accumulates through it apparently devalued public spaces and captures them, staring intensely until they break.

From the beginning of his work, Luis Molina-Pantin has exploited the poetry of the generic place or of the non-place. He sees what no one looks at. He finds, digs, captures. He seizes the reverse of things, without the slightest intention of contributing anything to it.

From the I Salón Pirelli de Jóvenes Artistas (1993), where he showed a series of portraitsin black and white which could have been the work of an amateur, Luis Molina-Pantin left aside the anecdote, the tacky shadow or the expected gesture. He simply looked at his models – a supermarket cashier, a bus driver through a camera with which he decodes the emptiness surrounding things. His language, always portrayed as sober and direct, traps images in the limit of their own frame. It is he who decides when the objects will silence.

From the wandering glance, always transient, of Present, Past, Future (1995), to the weight of exaggeration and hyper reality as a satire in Apocalyptic post-cards (1996), to a finer and more complex elaboration in Inmobilia (1997) and, finally, in New landscapes (1999-2000) and Best-sellers (2001), Luis Molina-Pantin transforms objects into a cultural landscapes.

The deliberate play of images within images – as in a readymade- that Molina-Pantin achieves in his souvenirs photographic series –lighters, lamps, ash trays- turn the landscape into a “common place” sterilized by use. This trait also prevails in projects such as Confort 1996- 2000 (2000), a photographic mise en scene with the aesthetics of the Lufthansa airline.

Artificiality is not the physical place that embodies the images but the progressive mechanism by which they loose content as the artist detaches himself –and us- from them. Detachment is a language that Luis Molina- Pantin again resorts to in his photographic series St. Moritz (2006), a collection of ironic landscapes as perfect as they are artificial.

Captured by the impersonal aesthetic of a tourist brochure, Luis Molina-Pantin records the town of St. Moritz, a favorite winter holiday resort among celebrities. It is a sort of collection of vanities; strange patches; privileged non-places, impersonal, laughable.

The series is infused with ever-greater strength by the paradox of joining, in a same visual spectrum, the immaculate white mountain landscape with another completely delirious one, populated by shops and streets, which aesthetically turns luxury into a theme park. Snowy peaks and Cartier and Hermés stores fitted into the bucolic facades of houses with the air of a Swiss village, all in the guise of a holiday perversion, an exclusive Walt Disney.

Taken in Switzerland, Molina-Pantin’s birth place, the St. Moritz photographs complete the satire on the idea of well being. Created in a way that captures the aesthetic of Ansel Adams, St. Moritz spills out with laughter within and beyond its own context. A graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute, whose photography department was founded by Adams, Luis Molina-Pantin collects –and reinterprets- a way of looking which creates even more absurd places as the work is exposed in an exotic tropical context, completely alien to an artificial order that acquires and sheds new layers of sense depending on who looks at it.

Abandoned in an exhibition room, the St. Moritz images summarize that embarrassing moment in which you wonder if the images of Luis Molina-Pantin are outwitting us or if they are just there, quiet, about to burst.

My photographs are nudes of the sets that I see as still lives.
Luis Molina-Pantin

But is the popular nothing more than the effect of certain acts of Enunciation and staging?
Nestor García-Canclini. Hybrid Cultures

With his images of depopulated man-made spaces, Luis Molina-Pantin unhinges photography’s promise to present us with a view of the real disentangled from what we imagine. The starkness of such a message was for me tempered by having had the good fortune to encounter Molina-Pantin’s images in his home in Caracas, which I first visited in 1998. There, I was able to look at his photographs arranged for his own pleasure and contemplation, and to see how they related to his own domestic and urban environment. The windows of the apartment in the 1960s building where the artist lives open onto bird’s eye views of Caracas that resemble his fractured panoramic cityscapes. A wall length mural of a tropical beach in the dining room blends the reality of such scenery’s proximity with its symbolic status as an image of idyllic leisure. A carefully chosen collection of conceptual artworks and 60’s material culture, from figurines to furniture, adorns the rooms.

Altogether, these elements recall a period when people in many parts of the world surrounded themselves with artifacts that symbolized their optimistic embrace of the future and their faith in the inevitability of progress. What does such an embrace mean, however, in a place where modernity’s grasp is palpably uneven? What do the rationalist bent and geometric style of modernist aesthetics signify when they are juxtaposed against the ebullience of a tropical landscape, the chronic economic instability of underdevelopment or the social and political turmoil that accompanies it? And why is it that since the early 1960s several notable artists from Latin America have been simultaneously drawn to and skeptical of the promise of a more perfect world implied by hard-edged modernism? From the answers to these questions emanate the specters that haunt Molina-Pantin’s deceptively cool images. While he eschews the photographic genres most commonly associated with Latin American image-makers –- humanistic documentary and vernacular surrealism – he does not refrain from making incisive social commentaries.

Molina-Pantin is one of several contemporary Venezuelan artists whose works are decidedly unromantic and post-nationalist. Among them the best known are Meyer Vaisman, Sammy Cucher, and José Antonio Hernandez-Diez. These artists came of age during and after their country’s oil boom, living through its subsequent financial decline and political upheaval. They have witnessed the decay of utopian nationalism throughout the region and the backlash against anthropological approaches to Latin American art. They endure the legacy of Venezuela’s kineticists, whose sculptures have acquired monumental status in their homeland as markers of Venezuela’s having a foothold in the history of postwar modernism. They create their works at a time when neoliberalism is sweeping through the hemisphere, engendering a seismic economic shift that has dovetailed with a surge in interest in modernist practices from the so-called periphery.

Many of these artists study abroad, in the case of Molina-Pantin, in Montreal and San Francisco, and they live outside Venezuela for extended periods. As post-modern polyglots, they comfortably adjudicate among a variety of international art vocabularies. In what is now at least a three generation tradition of radical détournement among Latin American artists, they often infuse the formalist idioms of postwar modernism with socio-political content, imparting a more contextually based significance to the intercultural exchange of forms than most of their European and North American counterparts. Molina-Pantin’s decision to operate within the postmodern discourse of appropriation enables him to make incisive comments about the iconic popular cultural imagery as the distorted mirror through which we view ourselves. And in the work he has produced about Venezuela, he reframes the language of new objectivism to underscore its political viability in a place where the project of describing and measuring has been historically associated with conquest and control.

The year before I came in contact with Molina-Pantin’s work I had traveled to Caracas for the first time on a journalistic mission to reveal the secret of Venezuela’s success as an exporter of beauty queens – the country holds the world’s record of international beauty contest titles. In the process I came to understand the centrality of the TV station Venevision to both to the Miss Venezuela phenomenon and to the national culture and economy. In addition to sponsoring the Miss Venezuela beauty pageant, the most expensive and widely exported program in Latin America, Venevision is one of the continent’s most important television conglomerates and soap opera producers. No other television station in Venezuela can match its grip on the national consciousness, or its control of media images that project Venezuelan cultural identity. Venevision is also owned by the Cisneros family, who is also patrons of their country’s most influential arts foundation, and owners of a substantial contemporary art collection.

All these details rushed into my mind when I entered Molina-Pantin’s apartment and noticed small-scale versions of his series Inmobila (1997) scattered around the entrance and hallway. His deadpan renderings of sets from popular television programs are devoid of people but cropped so as to show the edges, that is to say, visually speaking, where the fictions end.

Depicted are a variety of sets, from the living room of a landed bourgeois family to a newsroom, from a dormitory unit in a women’s prison to the backdrop of a prime time talk show. Not only the absence of actors, but also the lack of any clutter that might be generated by human beings gives these images an eerily unreal quality. And then there are the small but bizarre errors that thrust the fictitiousness of these environments into the foreground, such as the roll of toilet paper in stuck in the middle of a wall of a one-room shanty without anything resembling a toilet.
Undistracted by human dramas, my mind wrapped itself around the garish colors, the bright, flat lighting’s enhancement of the scenes’ artificiality, and the calculatedly tidy renderings of poverty and hardship. Molina-Pantin’s style and scale may resemble that of new objectivist photographers such as Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, but his particular choice of subject and title Inmobilia, with its allusion to real estate agencies, evoke references other than the grandiosity of classical painting. An equally relevant antecedent to Inmobilia would be Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971, in which the artist Hans Haacke underscored the relationship between objectively seeming photographic documents of property used as city records and the political and economic interests governing New York City. Molina-Pantin transfers this brand of institutional critique to the domain of the televisual, commenting on a corporate conglomerate’s control of a collective imagination through his metaphorical deployment of property. By presenting the works as if they were part a portfolio of properties for sale, Molina-Pantin undercuts the apparent objectivity of his view and implicates himself as a purveyor of sites that exist as cultural imaginaries but that cannot actually be bought. In doing so he hints at a far from disinterested relationship not only between artist and viewer but between artist and patron, the irony of which is doubled by the fact that Inmobilia is now part of the Cisneros collection. One might then ask what he is selling? If it is the sets themselves, is this a message about the bankruptcy of the fictions staged therein? Or do these images form an allegory about peddling fictions as realities and about television as a virtual reality that audiences want to buy into and view as real? By teasing out these possibilities for our contemplation, Molina-Pantin captures and reflects the construction of a social reality without illustrating it in a literal sense.

Another series that the artist produced just before Inmobilia also plays upon the iconicity of the photographic image, which is to say the ways in which images become disentangled from their pro-filmic referents. It is only then that those images evoke ideas of place and impart the fantasy of ownership to the subject who consumes them. Apocalyptic Postcards (1996) consists of a set of scrupulously exact enlargements of postcards representing eight cities. Each image conveys an overly familiar view: for example London’s Thames, Venice’s Piazza San Marco and Paris’ Notre Dame. The postcards’ lurid palette of red, orange, yellow, purple and black accentuates their liminal representational status as both document and icon. As visualizations of clichés symbols of the experience of tourism, the recall the postmodern subject’s relationship to time and space as images and commodities that can be exchanged and consumed.

Only one of the images in Apocalyptic Postcards is of Venezuela. It is a view of a flaming oil tower in the lake of Maracaibo, the seat of the country’s top industry. In that picture, the colors that in the other images appears garishly expressionistic suddenly seem almost hyperreal: the sky’s golden hue reflects the flames around the tower, the steel blue clouds look more like smoke from the fire. And whereas it might seem typical and harmless for a tourist to identify Paris with Notre Dame, the reduction of Venezuela to an burning oil tower suggests a somewhat bleaker situation. Venezuela’s dependency on its oil industry is precisely what made the country structurally underdeveloped even at the height of its affluence. Molina-Pantin appears here to be presenting an image of his country being devoured by its primary source of wealth.

While Maracaibo may be known for its oil towers, Caracas is more readily identified with its hi-rise apartment complexes, an architectural sign of its embrace of the modern. The ubiquitousness of buildings under construction in the present day however, Molina-Pantin suggests in his recently produced exhibition Falsas Pistas (1998) (False Trails or False Clues) might not necessarily represent economic growth. Though many artists throughout the world have used buildings as a metaphor for modernity, and for the capacity of human beings to create and recreate their world, Molina-Pantin resurrects that familiar trope in order to turn it on its head. The buildings in his pictures are incomplete, but no one works on them. It is not clear where they are located, but many seem to be sprouting in uninhabited areas, at the end of unmarked dirt roads. The stillness they convey suggests stagnation, a process interrupted, or even cancelled, as if these half unbuilt buildings were ruins of a social project gone awry, symbols of a recession or evidence of money laundering. It is as if the artist asks us to consider them as failures or as facades.

I would not want to suggest by these comments that one can reduce Molina-Pantin to a chronicler of the Venezuelan condition. In fact, a good deal of his work has been shot outside his country, in Europe, North America and Cuba. Nonetheless, many of those works, also unveil the strange intercultural ties that bind people from one world to power structures in another through the display of the oddly unreal places where those exchanges often take place. I am thinking here of his 1995 series from the ANA Hotel
which is composed of images of the halls and rooms of a hotel in San Francisco that is actually part of a Japanese chain the which are designed to look generically western. In the same way that the sets of the television shows in Inmobilia represent Venezuelan-ness as artifice, the western-ness of the hotel interiors is just odd enough to be noticeably fake.

Molina-Pantin’s most recent series of photographs of the German airline Lufthansa’s planes and other signature products might seem to be a departure from the works I have thus far concentrated on. They’re framing and focus on geometric perfectionism and morphological uniformity stress the function of these modernist principles as the visual metaphors in the age of global communication for technology’s transcendence of nature, mortality and organic complexity. Indeed, with these images, Molina-Pantin joins a host of young artists in a variety of countries who are currently turning their lenses on airplanes and airports as representations of classical ideal forms with palpable social functions. In several conversations that I have had with the artist, he has stressed his own fascination with what he calls Lufthansa’s aesthetics as his conscious motive. I cannot help but ponder, however, the significance of the metaphor of flight for a society in which the majority voting population recently ejected an established political class and whose new president advocates dispensing with the political system that enabled his own rise to power. Could it be once again that flight could be as much about waiting to depart as it is about having arrived? Can images that serve as a representation of an already achieve cultural shift for some, could signify unfulfilled wishes for others?

Despite the apparent fluidity of exchange of signs in the age of globalization, one’s view of the phenomenon is still marked by one’s place in the world. It thus remains strategically beneficial for cultural production and interpretation to know what things mean where they come and how they resonate differently when they arrive from elsewhere. Molina-Pantin takes on many familiar photographic subjects of postindustrial corporate culture, such as futuristic architecture and images of mobility and transit as paradigmatic of nomadic sensibility. He does so using an apparently rationalist style of presentation. Nonetheless, his photographs are not celebrations of the end of a sense of place, nor do they unequivocally champion the power of the lens to capture the world for an observer. In each case, he presents us with symbolically charged social spaces that exceed and even subvert their frame.

To collect photographs is to collect the world… Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag, On Photography1

Inventories seem to have a significant place in the work of Luis Molina-Pantin, whose oeuvre is featured as a sort of atlas containing an array of elements that range from postcards and photographs of airplanes to soap opera sets, common objects, books, and bizarre and everyday architectures, among others. It denotes an interest in the “construction” of genres such as landscape and still life painting, but also in ideas linked to archaeology, archives, and collecting.

The work of Luis Molina-Pantin does not only involve photography, and through the different topics it examines, it points towards meanings that are not actually contained in the images represented, articulating on the basis of these images a reflection on subjects as diverse as photography and the tradition of modern art in Venezuela, among others. The presentation in series of his works lends strength to this type of “allegorical” operation, for it is in the group or the “collection” of these images that their ulterior meaning consolidates.

We may distinguish different perspectives in his work: one is intimately linked to certain aspects of Venezuela´s local reality, which we may appreciate in series such as Inmobilia (1997), Best- Sellers (2001-2004) or The apartment of Osmel Sousa, President of the Miss Venezuela Organization (2000); another relates, rather, to a questioning of representation, which despite its more universal nature, evidences the artist´s interest in an ethnographic gaze, implying at the same time an interpretation of the conflicting traditions of landscape and geometric abstraction in Venezuelan art, in series such as New Landscapes (1999-2000), Confort 1996-2000 (2000), Chelsea Galleries(2001-2006) and An informal study of the mestizo architecture Vol.1 , -The narcoarchitecture and its attributes to the community-, Cali- Bogotá, Colombia, (2004-2005).

In his Inmobilia series, Molina-Pantin features an inventory of soap opera sets, articulating a commentary on the symbolic constructions of media such as cinema and television, and in particular, the genre of soap opera, which has become the reflection and exportation mark of the country´s “culture”, together with the “misses”, the “Bolivarian Revolution”, violence and extreme poverty. Although it is clear that these “interiors” do not belong to actual constructions but are television sets, there is an allusion to the architectural stereotypes corresponding to the different social classes, which are in a high state of tension in present-day Venezuela. On the other hand, by making their status as TV sets evident, they allude to the ideological and media apparatus that produces these discourses. In an essay on the work of Molina-Pantin2, Coco Fusco compares this series with works such as Shapolsky et al, Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971, by Hans Haacke, establishing a parallel between the institutional criticism carried out by Haacke and the criticism of “control over collective imagination by a corporate conglomerate (in this case, Venevisión, belonging to the Cisneros Group) through the metaphorical display of real estate”. In a similar tone, although the subject is no longer a television set but a real dwelling, the trio of photographs of Osmel Sousa´s house in Caracas confuses the viewer, reflecting once again certain intrinsic aspect in the “culture” of the Venezuelan national and his cult for ostentation, artifice, and superficiality, which far from disappearing in these “times of revolution”, takes on even more exaggerated and parodic dimensions.

The questioning of representation and the “Borgesian” game with the “different versions of reality”, are the most salient aspects of the New Landscapes series, which shows an inventory of everyday objects decorated with landscapes. It is important to highlight that the ideal conditions to view this series of photographs are those offered not by a publication format but by the space of a museum or gallery, for the exaggerated scale of the photographs, where the object acquires a monumental dimension that does not correspond to it, practically makes it disappear from the viewer´s perception, and what remains as the main image is the landscape contained within the object in the foreground.

Series like Confort 1996-2000 and Chelsea Galleries reflect the artist´s fascination with an austere, well-designed, effective and corporate modernity, very different from the tropical modernism of Latin America, the basis for fantasies of “order and progress” transformed, rather, into “disorder and regression”. There is no doubt as to the ethnographic character of the Confort 1996-2000 series –comprised of photographs associated to the German airline Lufthansa (for years, the artist, who is an avid collector, gathered together all sorts of paraphernalia belonging to this airline –brochures, blankets, bags, cases, advertisements, etc. – which he showed alongside the photographs, video and objects at the exhibition of the same name). It might be perceived as a sort of Humboldt´s journey, but in the opposite direction. Molina-Pantin, however, travels towards a cold and aseptic modernity; towards a world where “time is money” and comfort has a price. The world of the Chelsea Galleries is not too far from the world of Confort 1996-2000; the rigorous lines, the serialization and repetition of the shelves and archives of these galleries, many of them among the most influential in the world, seem to allude to the Puritan work ethic of the American people, which resulted in a modernity that is very different from ours. His most recent series, entitled An informal study of the mestizo architecture Vol.1 , -The narcoarchitecture and its attributes to the community-, Cali- Bogota, Colombia, also shares this ethnographic character, but this time the journey is not headed towards European or American modernity, but once again towards a reality more akin to ours. Some photos of this series have been shot in a bizarre funfair (Parque Jaime Duque, near Bogotá) that sets itself up as a reduced and somewhat schizophrenic version of the history of the “civilized world”, and hosts attractions ranging from a gigantic Brontosaurus, through a 1:1 scale replica of the Taj Mahal (1:1 only in scale, not in facture), to an aquatic diorama representing Dante´s Divine Comedy, and a museum of “dresses” that includes a collection of Barbie dolls wearing traditional Colombian costumes. It is perhaps in this series – in which the “monuments” in papier maché, dismal under the grey Bogotá sky, reveal to us the pathos of our current social, economic, political and historical reality –, that we may grasp the true nature of Molina-Pantin´s allegories.

1 Translated by the author.
2 Modernity Deferred: The work of Luis Molina-Pantin en catálogo Confort 1996-2000 Luis Molina-Pantin, Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas, 2000.

Luis Pérez Oramas

The repertoire of landscapes is apparently no less heterogeneous: Niagara falls viewed from above on a collectable lighter, a Nineteenth-century military epic against a sloping landscape on a damaged sulfur match box, the tropical scene of some Florida estuary atop a lampshade, a Provencal landscape on an air freshener emanating wafts of lavender, ancient ruins on history books, the Wall of Avila, imposing and faded, on a mouse pad.

These photographs are neutral. They are indifferent. They reveal the imperfection of things, the marks that neglect has left on them, the patina of use, as when the eye falls on a poorly-sewn seam. One might think that these objects exist so that we will see nothing in them, or so as to not be seen: they are objects that silently furnish our existence and no less silently accompany the most automatic gestures of our lives: lighting a cigarette and knocking the ash off of it; moving the mouse; turning on the light; spraying artificial aromas over the nasty odors of the kitchen or bathroom effluvia. In this repertoire of indifference, the presence of books, however, is surprising. It is sufficient to note that they are “school books,” the reading of which is justified only on evenings wrenched from the idleness of childhood on the eve of exams, and to which applies the excellent definition Roland Barthes once offered regarding a painting by Cy Twombly: that in them the essence of those books is revealed, just as the essence of a pair of trousers is not “that carefully prepared and rectilinear object found hanging on the rack, but rather the pile of cloth tossed carelessly on the floor by the hand of an adolescent after he had undressed, shapeless, floppy, indifferent.”

“The essence of an object – Barthes continues – surely has something to do with the way it turns into trash. Itís not necessarily what remains after the object has been used, itís rather what is thrown away in use.”.”1

Molina-Pantin photographs, with a force of clinical eloquence, establish a parallelism between these objects “projected outside of their use”1 and the landscapes which, in order to remain within them, are also stripped of any frequentation or use.

So what do these photos – entitled, precisely, New landscapes – intend to assert about the landscape? What sort of general enunciation about the landscape can be drawn from them?

First and foremost, without a doubt, these are “found landscapes.” Thus in these works there is a double economy of meaning: on the one hand, Molina- Pantin establishes a connection with the landscape through his “object encapsulation,” with a landscape that has become a cliché superimposed on the cliché of the objects that support it. The landscapes that these photos record indirectly by recording objects have been completely neutralized by their inscription in these artifacts, marked by an exclusive “use-value.” It all happens as if the photograph were saying “there is no landscape here”; as if the landscape had been subjected to the effects of a dead memory in the somnolent epidermis of objects that our perception forgets. On the other hand, though, rendering evident that the landscape depends on a profound “formatting” effort; making it clear that the landscape is – as in these photos – the framing of a framing; the figurative inscription of something already previously figured and subjected to representation; inscribed and converted into a conventional gaze by an artificializing visual impulse, it all happens as if these photographs were also saying “this is and has always been the landscape”.2

In reality the landscape has never stopped being a “found landscape.” Which it is in the Cristoforo Sorte’s amazed narration when he contemplates a nighttime fire in Verona and discovers that the same scene had taken place in a Flemish panel inadvertently seen in the Duke of Mantua’s collection;3or in the habitual peregrinations of certain English knights who visited the Roman countryside during the XVIII century equipped with devices that allowed them to stop at various points and see in the landscape the views depicted in the paintings of Claudio di Lorena.

Clearly no real effect can be brought to bear on the landscape. In light of this evidence that the landscape is the unending coda of an “artificialization” of nature, and in light of the history of the landscape as a history of a representations, Plato’s arguments founder. It would not be worthwhile to stigmatize the representation as mendacious, nor to insist that they mislead us, clouding our minds like drugs and making take for true what is false. The landscape is always at a distance, and this truth ends up becoming photographic ostentation in Molina-Pantin’s images.

And undoubtedly, these photos, which juxtapose the landscape with its own commercial depiction, display realistic effects to reveal the precarious, ordinary, discarded, used generic truth of the objects in which it represents itself. The photo “was there,” in this neutral scene where nothing extraordinary demanded it, while it was impossible to insist that it had been there before the landscape that is stigmatized in these objects like a frozen fabrication.

Plato called representation pharmakon, comparing it to a potion that deceives and inebriates us.4 Painting has always been pharmakon, due to its effects on the viewer.5 When around 1830 the deputy Aragó announced Monsieur Daguerre’s extraordinary invention, and terrified painters saw themselves dispossessed of the magic of mimesis due to photography’s unmistakable veracity, the pharmakon – the drug of representation – seemed to have reached its peak.6

In January of 1914, Marcel Duchamp hurried to the Saint Lazare station to catch the train to Rouen for New Year, in the dense mist of that winter. Duchamp recalled, “I also bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape which I called Pharmacie after adding two little dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon. There were two little lights in the background of the landscape. If I had made one red and one green, it would have resembled a pharmacy.”7

A pharmacy of the landscape is a landscape found to deconstruct – as Luis Molina-Pantin does – the pharmakon of representation.