The glass stranger: Modernity and social aesthetics

Abstract

One is one's biography, one's circumstances. My life, my interests, my body, my perception, as far as I know, have been touched by Cali, by its climate and its people. In this sense, a foreigner is shaped by the place where they reside, refracting the surroundings to a greater or lesser degree, and that's why I say "the glass foreigner": they are exposed to the contagion of the local way of seeing, feeling, and living, and constitute a surface where the locals or "natives" can see themselves, read themselves in what they have made of them. (Of course, I don't want to make them responsible for everything they see in me.) The foreigner is a pane of glass, a mirror, a page; and as such, they are an occasion for refraction and reflection: a mirror that reflects and a pane of glass that refracts.