Power Paola, every day life and tourism

Abstract

In her graphic novels, Colombian painter and comic book artist Paola Gaviria (aka Power Paola) centralizes the representation of the local» places she visits during her travels. With the cities and the jungles, highways and pathways, bodegas and swamps in her crosshairs, Gaviria’s art dismantles the frontiers that separate both the touristy and mundane spaces her characters occupy. What is exposed in her work, is a version of national space in which public interactions (tinged with the preoccupations about private matters) strip away the stereotypes that plagued the Latin American comic strips of the first half of the twentieth century. This essay describes the processes mentioned above (centralizing and dismantling) to demonstrate how graphic novels invested in the representation of everyday life might appear as lacking an interest in the political realities of the world they capture, even though they propose alternative modes of understanding the neoliberal condition from the perspective of the national identities constituting the space-time fabric of Latina American.