Rehearsing the Mirror: The Gaze as Thought in “Capadocia”, by Mariana Oliver

Abstract

Mariana Oliver’s essay “Capadocia” offers a reflection on vision as a form of thought. Through a poetics of observation, Oliver transforms the image into a cognitive device that links perception and language. This article analyzes how, in Aves migratorias, the author develops a hybrid form of writing that combines narrative, chronicle, and reflective elements to explore the tension between surface and depth, both spatially and epistemologically. Vision, understood not only as a physical act but also as an intellectual process, enables Oliver to contrast past and present ways of seeing, articulating a critique of contemporary superficiality embodied in performative tourism and photography as simulacrum. Within this framework, “Capadocia” emerges as an essay that thinks through the visible, where observation becomes both a mode of knowledge and an ethics of seeing.