The Latin America Edition

cucrcentre for urban and community research

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Director’s IntroductionCaroline Knowles: Co-Director, CUCR | Alison Rooke: Co-Director, CUCR

Latin America! How impossible a task it is to even begin to think about its complexities, its intricacies, the opaque (at least to me) surfaces on which its urban stories are written; the uneasy feeling that much of what is important lies beneath a surface of subtle codes that are so difficult to penetrate. How important it is to have the next generation of Latin American scholars write this special issue of Streetsigns and unpack some of its complexities.

Whenever I have returned to London from parts of Brazil, Colombia, Argentina or Peru – my explorations still a work in progress – I bring with me a feeling that I have seen London’s future. As successive UK governments slowly remove the shredded welfare safety nets of subsidies to low wages, unemployment benefits that aren’t fit for purpose and housing subsidies that go nowhere near the actual costs of London housing, I sense the direction in which the city is moving. As poor Londoners are relocated to the periphery and the city’s spatial demarcations harden; as the commons are privatized and public space becomes a residual category in which social mingling will become unbearable; as the gap between rich and poor Londoners widens and the rich take to the air and to the sea, to be rarely found on the ground, or navigating the city on public transport with the masses; when a rising pitch of aggression finds its way into (in)civilities between citizens, I think I see where we are heading. Neoliberalism is taking us all to the same place. It’s taking us to Latin America; where multiple precarities mean people take matters into their own hands and come up with creative solutions to problems we will soon encounter. The osmotic gradients of ‘development theory’ now work in the opposite direction. The Brazilian philosopher and politician, Roberto Mangabeira Unger expresses well the situation in Latin American and European cities alike when he says that we need radical political innovation and the prospect of bigger lives for the individual.

CAROLINE KNOWLES, CO-DIRECTOR, CUCR

This Special Edition of Street Signs is the first of its kind. On Monica Sassatelli’s suggestion we decided to take a thematic approach, focussing on Latin American Cities.

In the past Street Signs has had an inclusive and eclectic editorial policy which has resulted in the engaging mix of artwork and theoretical, poetic and experimental writing. This edition was developed and produced by an editorial board made up of PhD students here at CUCR. Although some of Street Signs’ familiar eccentricity may not be so evident, we are very pleased to share with you the excellent emerging scholarship on Latin American urbanism in this edition.

ALISON ROOKE , CO-DIRECTOR, CUCR

Beyond Exoticism And Romanticism: Latin America In/From GoldsmithsValentina Alvarez: PhD Sociology student, Rosario Fernández: PhD candidate Sociology, Felipe Lagos: PhD candidate Sociology, Angelo Martins Junior: PhD candidate Sociology, Felipe Palma: PhD candidate Visual Sociology, Lieta Vivaldi: PhD Sociology student

The purpose of this edition of Street Signs, dedicated to Latin America, is to make research and debates emerging from Goldsmiths about this region visible. Why Latin America? We think that in the context of global transformations, economic crises and the quests for innovative solutions, Latin America may provide an exceptional space for political, economic and cultural debate which has not always been at the core of academic and political discussions in the UK. The aim is thus not to give monolithic answers on what this territory is or represents, but rather to open up new forms of thinking, interrogating and analysing such a complex and changing space.

Latin America has remained far from being a traditional object of study in the UK. Interest in Latin America was promoted as late as at mid-1960s — that is, after the Cuban Revolution — fostered by the Parry Report. From then on, research centres were created in Cambridge, Glasgow, Liverpool, London, Oxford and Essex with the idea of accumulating knowledge on the region in the form of research, Masters programmes and collections.

However, today it is possible to witness a shift in the places wherein this knowledge is produced, given the increasing importance of academic journals, publications and inter-institutional organizations dedicated to the subcontinent. These include : the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Journal of Latin American Studies and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, as well as the Society of Latin American Studies (SLAS) and the Postgraduates in Latin American Studies (PILAS), all of which regularly organize conferences and events.

Despite this important display of interest, and according to the Report on the State of UK-Based Research on Latin America and the Caribbean from the Institute of Latin American Studies (2015), research on the region is still behind other areas of the world. The ‘weakness’ in this field of study can be explained by the relatively late ‘contact’ between the UK and Latin America. England´s history of imperialism and expansion only hit some parts of the Caribbean. In this sense, Latin America has not played

a central role in the making of UK, something which nonetheless is changing in the recent years of transnational economy and multicultural consumerism.

We argue that Latin America has today become a place of interest due to its ‘newness’ or ‘originality’, even as a ‘promised land’, still not entirely understood but full of possibilities. Located inbetween shifting global powers, Latin America has become largely problematic not just for foreign research but for its own inhabitants as well. Either as romanticized object of desire for the transatlantic imagination or as the regional self-affirmation’s failure, the term ‘Latin America’ seems to have blurred its borders and contents to become an empty category, able to be filled with a variety of significances. Through the dichotomic polarity of particularism and universalism, we think it is possible to sketch the problematic continuum into which interpretations of and approaches to the region are displayed, contrasted and negotiated today. The call for this special issue aimed then to discuss and tension these axes from works coming from different disciplines and perspectives.

On the one hand, particularism has derived from a sort of romanticization of ‘the local’, whereby singular traits and dynamics are brought to the fore, and uniqueness becomes what matters. Even if its initial aim is to counteract colonial dependency of thought, the overestimation of particularities easily leads to suffocate both the subject-matter and the reflection by conflating

Editorial Board: Valentina Alvarez: PhD Sociology student, Rosario Fernández: PhD candidate Sociology, Felipe Lagos: PhD candidate Sociology, Angelo Martins Junior: PhD candidate Sociology, Felipe Palma: PhD candidate Visual Sociology, Lieta Vivaldi: PhD Sociology student | Dr Alex Rhys Taylor: Lecturer CUCR. Copy Editors: Claire Levy: Researcher CUCR & Emily Nicholls: PhD Candidate, Visual Sociology Designer: Caroline Fedash

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Contents

DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTION 2

BEYOND EXOTICISM AND ROMANTICISM: LATIN AMERICA IN/FROM GOLDSMITHS 3

CONTENTS 4

RESEARCHING AS CURATING: A PUBLIC ETHNOGRAPHY OF DIASPORIC HOME-MAKING 5

THE FANTASY ISLAND? EASTER ISLAND AND ITS CURRENT ETHNIC CONFLICTS 8

EATING LATIN AMERICA: CÉSAR MARTÍNEZ “SCULPTOCOOKED” BODIES 11

SEARCHING FOR TEMPORARY GEOMETRIES: A PHOTO-ESSAY ON THE RAT TRAILS OF BRASÍLIA 14

THE CHANGES IN THE PATH OF METHODOLOGY: AN ENCOUNTER WITH SCHIZOANALYTICAL CARTOGRAPHY 18

THE MARGINS OF BRAZILIAN DEVELOPMENT. INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR GABRIEL FELTRAN 21

FROM AMERICA TO LATINO: POPULAR MUSIC AND THE KIDNAPPING OF LATIN AMERICA 24

ARGENTINE FEMINIST STRUGGLE IN PHOTOGRAPHY 26

DICTATORSHIP, EXILE AND CHILEAN LITERATURE: AN INTERVIEW WITH GRÍNOR ROJO 32

LA SIBERIA: AN AUDIOVISUAL EXPLORATION ON MEMORY’S TWILIGHT 34

SPACES, TEMPORALITIES AND ALTIPLANIC COLOURS 38

RADICALISM & REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA 40

THE ART OF POST-DICTATORSHIP. ETHICS AND AESTHETICS IN TRANSITIONAL ARGENTINA. BOOK REVIEW 42

BRIEF REFLECTIONS ABOUT THE VISUAL TURN 44

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 47

geography with knowledge production. On the other hand, universalism seems revitalized by a worldwide consciousness of belonging to a shared world — ‘the global’.

This way of looking at Latin America considers specificities as integral parts of the worldwide continuum, and what matters here are not singularities as such, but commonalities and connections with other latitudes. This standpoint, nevertheless, may easily turn into one-dimensional perspectives on development, leading thus to a renewed colonial understanding of knowledge which reinforces the subaltern condition of this subcontinent.

In this issue, those and other topics are channelled through diverse and creative ways. To begin with we present a series of photo essays combining both text and visuals, such as those by Fernandez and Rodriguez about Altiplanic festivities or Vivaldi and Stutzin, whose work curates three stunning photographic projects on feminism in Argentina. The work of Dias, Almeida & Tonhati`s on the one hand, and Martin´s interview to Gabriel Feltran on the other, make enquiries into the conflicts surrounding Brazilian urban landscapes. Ramirez presents us with a review of an installation conducted last year on Chilean migratory diaspora, at the time that Alvares and Lagos’ interview to Ginor Rojo unfolds literary representations of exile. Saavedra reflects upon the idea of Latin America through popular music; Spencer introduces us into the current racial conflicts on Easter Island; Meneses presents what she calls cannibalist-colonialism referring to the Mexican food market, and Stollbrock presents some key issues regarding memory construction through documentary filmmaking. Palma´s article examines the idea of what ‘the visual turn’ might be while Ribas offers an account of her own process of research under the idea of ‘schizoanalytical cartography’. Finally, a review of Bell´s book The Art of Post-Dictatorship is conducted by Lagos, while a more unified reflection on Latin America as region is presented in the article written by Kate Nash about the 2014 conference of ‘Radicalism and Reform in Latin America’.

We hope you enjoy this special edition!

THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Curatorial practices, through exhibitions and other forms of public display, are increasingly incorporated into social sciences, either in the production, representation or dissemination of research.1 To close my PhD research I mounted an exhibition in the Stuart Hall Building, at Goldsmiths (University of London), in September 2014. My research was entitled “The Chilean Diaspora of London: Diasporic Social Scenes and the Spatial Politics of Home”. This exhibition comprised the practice-based component of an ethnography that explored the experience of home, migration and belonging of an intergenerational group of Chilean exiles that, after the end of Pinochet’s military regime, decided to remain in the UK. Concretely, the show included four forms of display: slide-projection, video projection, photographs, sound/text interface pieces, and a visual object. As part of a multi-media installation, photographs, video, sound, and text offered an alternative narrative and ways of thinking about diaspora space and transnational home-making as multi-sited, multi-dimensional and dynamic processes.

The first section, “Travelling Visual Objects”, displayed the contrast between a slide and a video projection. The slides contained images made by photojournalists who travelled to Chile during the 1970s and 1980s commissioned by the Chilean Committee for Human Rights. The slide-projection invited the visitor to engage with another time and space: the ‘then’ and

1. Latour, B. and Weibel, P. eds. (2005). Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Puwar, N., and Sharma, S. (2012). “Curating Sociology”. The Sociological Review, 60. Pp. 40-63.

‘there’. This sense of temporality was promoted by the content of the images, the visual media’s deterioration and decay and was emphasised by the obsoleteness of the chosen display

(i.e. an old analogue projector).2 The photographs showed demonstrations, clandestine press and scenes of daily life in Chile. Many images showed instances of leftwing political resistance, images that partly comprised the news from home3 that Chilean exiles in the UK were receiving during the dictatorship. Playing with the thin line between reality and fiction, these images allowed me to get closer to the expectations and imagery of Chile that many exiles embraced before their return trips. They also helped me to understand the disenchantment that often followed those movements back ‘home’.

Opposite to the slide projection, a video made by an intergenerational group of activists (Ecomemoria) during a tree-planting ceremony to commemorate two desaparecidos was set.4 In conversation with the slides, this film travelled in the opposite direction: from the UK to Chile. The contrast among the analogue slide images taken during the dictatorship to be sent from Chile to the UK, and the digital video made after the dictatorship by the Chilean diaspora to be sent from the UK to Chile, emphasizes how transnational connections have materialised through the circulations of objects at different times.

The political agenda — to increase ‘awareness’ regarding human rights violations in Chile — permeates both flows. Yet, while the circulation of slides with news from Chile highlights the

2 . Marks, L. (2000). The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press.

3 . Akerman, C. (1977). News from Home. 85 min. France & New York.

4 . The desaparecidos here refers to those people who were disappeared by the Chilean Military Regime for political reasons.

‘Marchando por los cambios’ (marching for the changes) in Chile. London, 2011. By the author.

Researching As Curating: A Public Ethnography Of Diasporic Home-makingCarolina Ramírez: Doctor of Visual Sociology

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But this [picture A, on the left] is sad and this [picture B, on the right] is so hopeful… we know that we have done something really good! You know? And this [A] one is all about “where are they”, and “what

are we going to do?” This [B] is empowering, and this [A] is less so I think. Immediately, looking at this [A] and I feel like argh!! (noises denoting a rejection). Because, I think about the women being on the front line. These have been always kind of women pushing, pushing, pushing the agenda, pushing forward… men would be giving discurso político and kind of trying to rationalize something that was very practical and about direct action… and not giving to women necessarily the recognition and respect… (Alicia, exiled as a child)

Claiming justice for the disappeared. Fidel Cordero, London, 1979 and the author, Wales, 2011.

Finally, the linen wall used by picketers during the annual commemoration of the overthrow of Salvador Allende on September 11th in front of the Chilean embassy in London was displayed. This living (visual) object is a smaller version of a much bigger textile wall that was first used during Pinochet’s detention in London in 1998. It also resembles some concrete commemorative walls that actually stand in different locations of Chile. Along with projecting the relocation of certain meaningful objects and, with this, materializing a diasporic dialogue (i.e. re-appropriating, adapting and relocating a well-known Chilean icon in London), the portrayed faces of the desaparecidos show that the Chilean diaspora not only has dealt with memories of a place left behind; disappearance makes the point that there are other absent presences implicated in the Chilean diaspora’s daily lives.

This ‘living object’ was set in the exhibition space only for a couple of days before it moved again to the demonstration of September 11th in 2014 which, like every year since the exiles’ arrival to London, took place in the Chilean embassy’s frontispiece.

RESEARCHING AS CURATING

My research was made through archives and, concurrently, engaged with the development of another archive. This archive includes a mixture of audio/visual objects encountered, generated, and used during the course of ethnographic fieldwork, as well as the stories I have gathered, the performances and repertoires I have come through and, ultimately, what was documented in my written accounts. This archive tries to incorporate and organise

what was ephemeral and, therefore, resistant to documentation. Creating an archive and conducting ethnographic research is not too different from ‘curating’. Both involve organising, classifying and choosing what is relevant to include, (re)present and make (to different extents) public. Puwar and Sharma use the notion of ‘curating sociology’. They define this as “a methodological commitment to collaborative knowledge production for creative public intervention and engagement”7 (2012, 43). This form of commitment is overall an invitation to think about our role as researchers differently. In line with this, the installation aimed to promote another way of telling about the Chilean diaspora experience of making home in London. Rather than simply illustrate, it allowed me to expand my writing and to incorporate new audiences to my (academic) work.8 Along with Goldsmiths people, visitors from other places, colleagues and friends, also some of my research collaborators and participants came to the show. The exhibition brought together some members of the Chilean diaspora, as many of the gathering places and events I visited during my fieldwork did as well.

This exhibition not only closed the long path that was completing my PhD thesis, but also, by putting together a group of the Chilean diaspora of London again and providing another means to articulate their experience, the exhibition also comprised, not the end, but a different moment of my ethnography.

7. Puwar, N., and Sharma, S. “Curating Sociology”. The Sociological Review 60, p.63.

8. Degarrod, Lydia N. (2013). “Making the Unfamiliar Personal: Arts-Based Ethnographies as Public Engaged Ethnographies.” Qualitative Research 13(4), Pp. 402-413.

exilic imagination and ‘homeland orientations’, the video made by the activists shows the transnational inhabitations of an intergenerational group of the Chilean diaspora that, through commemoration, create multicultural publics. This contrast between both contexts of image-making and forms of circulation says, in visual and material form, something else about the transit from exile to the diaspora.

The main section of the exhibition, “Changing Fields of Belonging”, combined photographs, sound recordings and interview excerpts. The section exposed, in different ways, two key social scenes: one developed around protest and commemoration, and another developed around leisure, especially with regard to football. Both longstanding scenes have been connected through the spatial and biographical trajectories of the Chilean diaspora in London. They have also been important as scenes for trans-local politics, either by openly denouncing and claiming justice regarding human rights violation or through long-distance solidarity funding.

The archival photographs were taken by Fidel Cordero (1961-2013), a serious amateur photographer who came to the UK as a teenager in the mid-1970s. I came across Fidel’s archive when I was conducting participant observation. While revising, scanning, digitally restoring and looking at Fidel’s photographs — which had been taken during the 1970s and 1980s — I identified many spaces, people and performances that I already knew through my on-going fieldwork. Unexpectedly, Fidel’s collection of images offered new lenses for me to see how the social scenes I was actually looking at 2011/3 were set more than thirty years ago.

With Fidel’s photographs and my photographic fieldnotes I went back to the field to conduct the last set of interviews. Both Fidel’s

pictures and my own were made in 35mm and hand-processed with the same technologies, techniques and equipment.5 I counter-posed Fidel’s and my images of the same social scenes in order to prompt memories and reflections from my interviewees, which in turn related to experiences of continuity and change that could be discerned among members of different generations.

In the exhibition I presented five pairs of these photographs; each pair presented an archival photograph of a scene taken by Fidel’s in contrast to one contemporary image of the same scene made by myself during fieldwork. To keep and project the status of the photographs as ‘research tools’, I decided not to frame them but to stick them in the wall so they remained mobile and malleable.

Some of the reflections that emerged during the interviews while looking at the contrast of photographs were presented in the exhibition along with the social scenes’ sonic landscapes. These were two sound/text video pieces which synchronised interview quotes with atmospheric sound. Both sound/text video pieces worked in dialogue with the pictures in the exhibition space because the reflections emerged while the interviewees were actually looking at them. Intergenerational meanings given to particular spaces and the way these spaces have been inhabited were conveyed through image, sound and text.6

5 . See related note in the CUCR blog: https://cucrblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/changing-fields-of-belonging-by-carolina-ramirez/

6. See example of a sound/text video piece in link to new blog entry, https://cucrblog.wordpress.com/

‘Thatcher! No more arms for Pinochet?’, London, 1987. By Fidel Cordero

Banging pots. London, August 2011. By the author.

La cancha from the upper greens, London, 2011. By the author. La cancha from the lower greens, London, 1980s. By Fidel Cordero.

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Detail of the exhibition made by Macarena Oñate in Hanga Roa Hotel during October 2014. Photograph by the artist.

its local population.2 Also, during the last decade, islanders were gradually receiving waves of continental Chileans.3 Preliminary results of the latest census made in 2012 showed that the Indigenous community is no longer the majority on the island. Continentals represent 51% of the population and Rapanui 48%. The same measurement gives evidence that in the last decade the population that dwells on the island increased from 3.765 to 5.761 inhabitants.4

With the evident fear of losing Rapanui culture — reconstructed with effort after the colonization period — and particularly their language, the new social context described above is also a political threat to them. With no majority on the island their representation or voice in any decision or election could damage their interests and rights over what they consider their historic land. Muñoz recognizes that in this new social context, kinship arises with force, for they need to incorporate it within the autochthony rhetoric, which is also a political voice.5 For the author “The definition of autochthony always includes a political component: this corresponds to an identity that is shaped in a political project of sovereignty vis-à-vis other citizens considered non-native”.

At this point we reached the figure of the non-native, but who is that, exactly?

2 . National Service of Tourism calculated that visitors in the island have increased from 15,000 in the year 2000 to almost 91,000 by 2014 in: Servicio Nacional de Turismo, SERNATUR (2014). “Turismo en Rapa Nui y Proyecciones”. Presentation from Primer Cabildo de Turismo de Isla de Pascua. Aldea Educativa ‘Honga’a o te mana’:Isla de Pascua.

3 . The Ley Pascua (Easter Law) led to the island becoming a tax-free zone, promoting and facilitating economical entrepreneurships on this ‘touristic paradise’, Arthur, J. (2012), Now They Say the Land Is Not Ours: On Rapanui Worldviews and Land-Being Relations. Thesis for Master of Arts in Culture and Performance University of California, Los Angeles. Aditionally, this law also promoted the arrival of continentals for the civil administrationAccording to Moreno, C., Zurob, C. (2012), “Los rapanui y sus relaciones interculturales”. In: Missama, S. ed. Pueblos Originarios y sociedad nacional en Chile: La interculturalidad en las prácticas sociales. Santiago: Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo, pp 27-32.

4 . Ibid. P. 27

5 . Munoz, Op. Cit p. 29.

On Easter Island it is not rare to hear from Rapanui inhabitants phrases such as ‘they are continentals’ or ‘you are from the conti’ or ‘tire’; expressions that not only locate a group or individual within a map, but also its belonging to a particular category: the otherness. Understood as a discourse and subjective distinction the opposition between the self or us with them or ‘the rest’ divide the society in two groups: “one that embodies the norm and whose identity is valued and another that is defined by its faults, devalued and susceptible of discrimination”.6

In this sense, and despite the fact Rapanui and what they called continentals share a nationality and are part of the same country — Chile —, historically and for many reasons Rapanui people have articulated an identity and political discourse that articulates the distance that trespasses the ocean that separates them both.7

I suggest here that the continental Chileans embody Rapanui wounds and memories of a complicated relationship of the islanders with the Chilean State, marked by slavery and forced work. Such a relationship was particularly suffered by the Rapanui during the nineteenth century when the Chilean state subordinated the island’s inhabitants to high levels of exploitation by a private company and maintained the island as a navy base.8 This is not to say that the Chilean has become an ‘ethnic category’ as suggested by Muñoz, but more a reference to the discrimination islanders have suffered.9 Moreno and Zurob recognized that Rapanui do not feel interpersonal discrimination but a collective one, as an Indigenous community, by the Chilean State.10

6 . Staszak J.F, (2009). “Other, Otherness”. In Kitchin R. and Thrift N. (eds.), International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, Oxford: Elsevier, vol. 8, pp. 43.

7 . In 1888 the Republic of Chile annexed Easter Island through a document signed by the Rapa Nui king (Rap. ariki), Atamu Tekena, and the Chilean delegate, Policarpo Toro. This document is known as Acuerdo de voluntades (Treaty of Will) although there is a dispute on its regard. The ‘institutional’ version in Spanish speaks about a total cession of sovereignty to Chile, whereas the Rapa Nui version of the text, written in the native language, refers to good will or friendship offered by the indigenous people. “in Arthur, J. Op. cit. p. 20-21.

8 . See Delsing, cited in Arthur, J. Op. Cit, p.:22

9 . Ibid. P. 30

10 . Moreno, C., Zurob, C.

The Fantasy Island? Easter Island And Its Current Ethnic Conflicts Carolina Spencer: MA Social Anthropology

The Chilean artist Macarena Oñate called her most recent exhibition “Mestizo”. The name is not unintended. For her it is a provocation, and it is directed to all the inhabitants of Easter Island. After living on the island for almost fifteen years, she wants to encourage — if not awareness — at least discussions of the discrimination and segregation mestizos and continentals are currently facing. In this sense she asked through her work about the legitimacy of Rapanui people to define themselves as ‘pure’ or ‘pure race’ and from there stressed their hierarchical — if not superior — position.

Through Oñate’s work it is possible to grasp how current social changes on the island are triggering ethnic conflicts, or in other words, how mestizos and continentals are becoming an ‘uncomfortable presence’. One could suppose that this situation will not only remain ‘hidden’ or aside from the touristic gaze, but it will also foster a tension of the immutable image of Rapanui as UNESCO’s archaeological milestone or the ‘mystical’ and ‘magical’ character the island has as a touristic ‘paradise’.

Islanders are feeling the loss of a privileged situation, in which the effects of a tourism-based economy and migration flux have impacted their fragile balance and quiet way of living.1 Moreover Rapanui society deals on a daily basis with massive tourism that only in the last year represents almost fifteen times

1 . The migration of the Chilean working classes is associated with the increase of criminality “construction workers have brought with them what the islanders call malas costumbres (bad demeanors). According to Rapanui people, this behaviour has resulted in a general increase in crime, such as theft, alcohol and hard drug abuse, among other issues” in: Munoz, D. (2014) “Kinship Predicaments in Rapa Nui (Easter Island): Autochthony, Foreign and Substantial Identities”. Rapa Nui Journal, Easter Island Foundation, 2014, 28(2), p.30.

Detail of the exhibition made by Macarena Oñate in Hanga Roa Hotel during October 2014. Photograph by the artist.

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Eating Latin America: César Martínez “Sculptocooked” BodiesMariana Meneses Romero: PhD Candidate Visual Cultures

Everyone eat and drink from him for this body is the debt of blood,

the blood of the cadaver, the one we see every day

that everyday of all Mexicans. The blood of our new and ethereal alliance

that will be runneth over by the free economic transit and by all the governors

for the forgiveness of sins.

César Martínez.1

Mexico is going through a moment of crisis, a ‘moment’ that seems now to be a perpetual status. The ‘Mexican miracle’ came to an end in 1982 when the Mexican economy collapsed, and the then president Miguel de la Madrid declared that Mexico was unable to repay its external debt. As a result, and aided by foreign-trained economists, neoliberal policies were implemented. The Mexican State began its ‘technocratisation’ to satisfy national and international interests by endorsing the idea of modernisation, free trade and welfare for Mexicans.2

The changes in Mexico’s economic system were strongly criticised by artists; among them César Martínez, who created perforMANcenas (‘perforMANdinners’) during the 1990s. These were edible artworks in which he used the metaphor of cannibalism to articulate a socioeconomic critique of globalisation. Specifically, the targets were those neoliberal reforms implemented during the terms of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-94), and Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon (1994-2000) — both of them members of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) which held power for 71 years. Within these performances the public was invited to participate in a metaphorical ritual of cannibalism where human-scale ‘sculptocooked’3 bodies — made out of gelatine or chocolate — represented Mexico’s social body.

Martínez’s performance “The North America Fat Free Trade Agreement” (1996), however, appears to be timeless. The themes and problematics addressed back then correlate with contemporary Mexico.

1 . César Martinez, “PerforMANcena,” in Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, ed. Coco Fusco (Taylor & Francis, 1999), 177.

2 . Sarah L. Babb, Managing Mexico: Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism, Princeton Paperbacks (Princeton University Press, 2004).

3 . Term coined by the artist. See César Martínez, “Comeos Los Unos a Los Otros” (César Martínez), accessed January 10, 2014, http://martinezsilva.com/articulos/FisurasTextoPRINT.pdf

During my fieldwork, carried out on Easter Island and in Chile during the months of June and July 2014, I studied heritage impositions on the island. I was interested in the effects that heritage recognition systems have in Rapanui culture, particularly the recognition of the Living Human Treasure, which is promoted by UNESCO (and implemented by the National Council of the Culture and the Arts (hereafter, NCCA). From this experience I noticed how despite the fact that an authority such as the NCCA has recognized two Rapanui ‘bearers’ of heritage, this was looked at with reservations by the local community.11 At that time an interviewee expressed the alienation that some sections of the community had in relation to this kind of decision:

“In front of everything that came from the continent, Chilean or from that way [east] and not from Polynesian side but rather from the westerner side… let us say, there is always a harsh section that rejected it, that would not accept being rewarded by that place [Chile] and it would not legitimate that recognition; it is not valid at a local level (…) then the idea came up to create a living human treasure but that he or she should be nominated and chosen here, which for me was very appropriate, because despite the fact that they could be anthropologists and sociologists or whatever experts from there [the continent], they do not belong to the community and the community itself should define their own ways to recognise their people” (female, state employee, Chilean).

For Durston et al., the intercultural relationships of Indigenous groups in Chile it is defined by a common factor: the asymmetry of power.12 This means, “the first factor (the self-definition by contrast with the other) has been strongly influenced by the second (the imposition of an inferiority condition)”. This could in part explain why the more tensioned or complicated the relationship with the mainland, the more loud one could hear the emancipatory voices represented on Rapanui Parliament that every now and then, claim for sovereignty from the Chilean Nation state; discussion that today seems if not politically trapped at least blurred by another claim: the immigration control which basically aims to regulate the labour sector — restricting the arrival of people from the working classes — and generating a visa system.13

After explaining the ‘uncomfortable presence’ of continentals it is more understandable the tension mestizos generate, as children of an intercultural union. In this debate, one should ask, if is it possible that an island that received immigrants of different nationalities — Polynesian, Spanish, French, British, Chilean — is not marked by multiculturalism or hybridity in race terms. To Moreno and Zurob, mestizaje tends to be socially approved if the ‘other’ is from Polynesia or European — which only reinforces the segregation with the continentals.14

11 . In March 2014, two years after the latest nomination, the municipality of Easter Island developed a cultural program of recognition called Koro Haka Mana Aito, for bearers – or custodians of knowledge -, practitioners and artists

12 . Durston, J., (2012). “Introduction”. In: Missama, S. ed. Pueblos Originarios y sociedad nacional en Chile: La interculturalidad en las prácticas sociales, Santiago: Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo, p.15.

13 . “This new discriminatory discourse coming from the islanders, states that the island must stay open to the tourist flow, but be closed off to economic immigrants.” Muñoz, Op. Cit, p. 30,

14 . Moreno, C. Zurob, C .Op. Cit. p. 32

They mention:

“The foreigner blood in a Rapanui could be considered as something negative or as an argument for discrimination for a group of ‘purest’ islanders, meanwhile for others islanders (particularly if it is European blood or from other Polynesian islands) it is a reason for being proud. There is a sort of ethnic consciousness that, in one side mean to ‘keep the purity’ and other that mean to ‘improve the race’”.

At this point it is interesting to go back to the artists work, for in Oñate’s work the concept of mestizaje as a matter of race or kinship is questioned. For her, Rapanui is a ‘mestizo culture’ because it has conformed itself by a careful selection of elements from the other cultures they received. Following her thoughts, one should be asking if the imposition of a particular language (Spanish), and the political administration made by the Chilean state does not imply that Rapanui inhabitants are culturally the expression of Rapanui traditions which mingle with innumerable ‘others’.

Whereas if it is referring to a ‘drop of blood’ issue or a cultural phenomena that came with the inherent problems and complexities associated with development and globalization, today mestizaje and the continental figure on Easter Island seem to be as much an unsolved problem as the other political problems with the Chilean State.

Detail of the exhibition made by Macarena Oñate in Hanga Roa Hotel during October 2014. Photograph by the artist.

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EAT THE ART

The use of edibles and its relationship to the human body is a practice which dates back to the early twentieth century Dadaist, Surrealist and Futurist avant-gardes. Later on, in the 1960s and 1970s artists revisited the idea of food as artistic material in response to the need to reunite art and life by criticising the then dominant system in the arts. The Eat Art movement, and especially its key exponent Daniel Spoerri, had great relevance during this time. Spoerri created ephemeral feasts where he addressed to the processes of consumption, destruction and decay of art, as well as the intensification of sensory experiences.4

In the 1980s and 1990s edibles, and the everyday ritual of eating and cooking became a strategy to create moments of encounter where participation was further emphasised. For Martínez using edibles and the metaphor of the body in his perforMANcenas responds to the need of addressing Latin America and Mexico’s social, political and economic reality and problematics.

In his works Martínez includes references to cannibalism as a sexual metaphor of eating the other; and most important in order to address capitalism and globalisation, he uses the gelatine body as a means to denounce the expansionist spirit of developed countries and the cannibalistic interests and practices of multinationals which only seek an economic benefit.5

In addition, Martínez draws inspiration from Mexican culture: the open and humorous attitude towards death, like in the celebrations of the Day of the Dead or the Pre-Hispanic sacrificial rituals; the frequent use of irony and humour for the representation of social and political contexts; and the relevance of food in Mexican everyday life.

4 . Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 1–52; Geraldine Girard-Fassier, “Le Eat Art: La Gastrosophie de Daniel Spoerri,” in Daniel Spoerri Presents Eat Art (Paris: Galerie Fraich´attitude, 2004).

5 . Coco Fusco, Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (Taylor & Francis, 1999), 176.

NORTH AMERICA ‘FAT FREE TRADE AGREEMENT’ OR TRATADO DE LIBRE COMER-SE

The perforMANcena ‘North America Fat Free Trade Agreement’ (1994, 1999) simulated a catholic mass dedicated to Canada, Mexico and the US. Martínez was dressed with a butcher’s apron splattered with blood, a tricolour band reminiscent to the one worn by the Mexican president, long hair and a beard that made him resemble Jesus Christ. He then proceeded to read a text jointly written in Spanish and English that referred to some of the consequences of the NAFTA treaty and to those responsible by mimicking the canonical gospels; he made a humorous and ironic fragmentation of words using Mexican slang, double sense, and polysemy:

“Este tratado de libre comer-ce, free trade all you can eat buffet [...] an alienating consumerism where we all have become aliens [...] consumismo degenerado por los ok boys of modernity, los machines, the machine boys [...] the mas chingón and these ferocious machine gones tienen la ferocidad de un cazador que ha impuesto su ley a huevo [...] y los mexicanos hemos sido carne de cañón de esta neuro-economía política...”6

Following his speech, Martínez invited the public to feed upon the gelatine body, and to carefully select and cut their favourite part.

This perforMANcena was a metaphoric cannibalistic ritual that played with political and state devices merged with elements of the Eucharistic ritual, to question the act of eating the ‘other’. Its purpose was to show how Mexican politicians —specifically Carlos Salinas de Gortari— had set the table for transnational enterprises to feast upon Mexico’s natural resources and human capital. It referred to how the faith of the most vulnerable sector of the population, those who barely had access to education and to healthcare, was handed over to the ones who benefited the most from the free trade agreement: Mexico’s oligarchs, the political class and our northern neighbours, the US and Canada.

The gelatine body was re-signified, it represented the sacrificed body of those who as a consequence of the NAFTA treaty had to emigrate to the North. The public feasted upon Mexico’s more marginalised subjects: the farmers, the factory labourers, the masons, and the indigenous. The gelatine body was eaten, just as the vulnerable social body was attacked and sacrificed for the benefit of neoliberal policies derived from the NAFTA treaty since 1994. The action addressed capitalism’s cannibalistic action against those to whom free trade and modernisation meant losing their job and fleeing their homeland in search for a better future; to whom free migration into our neighbour’s land is not allowed. This body was that of “the last illegal alien”,7 entering the collective imaginary of Americans as well as the body of the public.

6 . Extract from the monologue pronounced by the artist is a wordplay of English and Spanish which alludes to trilateral relationship between Mexico, the USA, and Canada. The performance “La infla-accion o el aumento del desorden” was presented in February 1994 in Mexico City during the III Festival of Performance, at the Centro Cultural Ex-Teresa, Arte Alternativo. Available in Claudia Alvarez Arozqueta, “El Canibalismo Como Metafora: Analisis de Las PerforMANcenas Del Artista César Martinez Silva” (Licenciatura en Historia, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, 2006), 16.

7 . Martínez, “Comeos Los Unos a Los Otros,” 3.

In a similar vein, Martínez used the metaphor of cannibalism for the performance ‘Amé Rica G-Latina’ (1999), which took place in Madrid, Spain. This time, however, he referred to the ambitions of imperialist and colonialist countries in Latin America, and to the role played by countries from this region in the history of capitalism –namely, the relationships of subordination and dependence since the establishment of European colonies to the era of globalisation.

Martínez invited the guests to feast upon the body while only wearing a balaclava, in clear reference to Mexico’s National Zapatista Liberation Army (EZLN) movement in Chiapas which emerged in January

1994, the same year when the NAFTA treaty came to force. Then, appealing to the Aztec sacrificial ritual, Martínez cut the chest of the sculpture, took out the (melon) heart, and offered it to the public. This sacrificial parody was followed by the dismemberment and feasting of the gelatine body; a metaphorical resource to refer to the violent conquest of America; to the exploitation of undocumented immigrants from Latin America while living and working abroad; and to the consequences of globalisation and capitalism:

“Yo amé, Yo América, Yo América-Rica, Yo Amé-Rica Latina, Yo Amé- Rica G-Latina. Fantasía europea, fantasía mestiza [...] Tomad y comed todos de él porque este es el cuerpo, esta es la conquista de Amé-Rica G-Latina, [...] es el cada-ver de los otros, es el cuerpo Rico, es the exquisite body, es el cuerpo Rico de Amé-Rica G-Latina, Amé-Rica Latina.”8

The performance questioned what ‘eating the other’ means, considering the process of ‘Mextizaje’,9 the conflicts with Spain and later with the US. It referred to dominance and submission of the ‘other’ through war to ‘domesticate’ him.10 The body in “Amé Rica G-Latina” represented the indigenous other, the exotic, the savage; the other who was ‘discovered’ by European and forced to insert into Western culture.

8 . The author’s monologue presented during the PerformMANcena “Amé Rica G-Latina,” is based on a highly complex and untranslatable wordplay based on the deconstruction of ‘América Latina’ (Latin America) and ‘gelatina’ (jello) as follows: Amé = I loved; Rica = (female adjective) tasty; and G-latina = (phonetic contraption of gelatina) jello. In English it could be translated as: “I loved. I America. I Tasty America. I loved Latin America. I loved Latin American Jello. European Fantasy, mestizo fantasy [...] Drink and feast ye all of it; for this is the conquest of Latin American Jello, [...] this is the corpse of the others, this is the Rich body, it is the exquisite body, it is the tasty body of Latin American Jello, loved Latin America.” Translation by writer Oliver Davidson Véjar. The original monologue is available in Aurora Alcaide Ramirez, “Creativismo ‘glocal’ Y Antropófago: La Poética Expresiva de César Martínez,” n.d., 97.

9 . Martínez, “Comeos Los Unos a Los Otros.”

10 . Victor Vacas Mora, “Cuerpos, Cadaveres Y Comida: Canibalismo, Comensalidad Y Organizacion Social En La Amazonia,” Antipoda 6, no. Enero-Junio 2008 (2008): 289–290.

THE NEW A-PRI-CALIPSIS11

Martinez’s perforMANcenas took place more than a decade ago; however to revisit them nowadays, and in consideration of the events currently developing in Mexico, it is possible to question how many more commensals will be invited to feast upon the body of a half-eaten, and deeply deteriorated Nation?

Only two years have passed since the PRI and President Enrique Peña Nieto came back to power in 2012. The country is submerged into — yet another — political, economical and social crisis. It is a legacy of the PRI, Salinas, and all the rest of the political actors who are equally responsible in one way or another for negotiating and passing neoliberal policies, scandals of corruption, insecurity, and poverty.

Mexicans will remember 2013 as the year when nationalism was abandoned and an energetic reform was approved without clearly knowing its social impact or benefit for Mexicans. Its approval required changing one of the central chapters of Mexico’s constitution, annulling the State’s exclusive right to exploration, exploitation and sale of energy resources. As a consequence, PEMEX, the State-owned company would enter into a scheme of profit sharing with international companies to exploit oil, natural gas and electricity. This means that now companies such as Exxon, Chevron, Halliburton, and Schlumberger — all owned by the most powerful oil families in the US — will have a bigger slice of Mexico’s resources. This was a convenient deal considering that 2014 was the twentieth anniversary of the coming to force of the NAFTA treaty, and Peña Nieto signalled the need to strengthen the economic relationship with the US and Canada.

In 2014 popular fury and protests across Mexico and in many other countries started after the ignominious state crime committed the 26 September in Iguala came to public attention. Still today, forty-three students from Ayotzinapa’s rural teachers training college remain disappeared after being attacked by corrupt police forces, and in coalition with the ‘Guerreros Unidos’ drug gang. An event which revealed the network of corruption between politicians and drug cartels.

The case of Ayotzinapa; the economic cannibalism of the State with its reforms; the increase in poverty, marginalisation and insecurity; and the innumerable cases of corruption among politicians and oligarchs, all led up to and act as evidence of how fed up Mexicans are. Fed up with the political class serving the interests of foreign markets and oligarchs who keep eating an already half-eaten body; but also fed up of how Mexicans have been taught to assume this cannibalism as normalcy, where the corrupt feed upon those who still resist.

Mexico is a body that keeps being sacrificed, dismembered, bled, and consumed by the capital; just as Martínez’s sculptocooked bodies are eaten by the public. We are a Latin American body that is still pushed towards political, economic and social deterioration for the benefit of those who arrived five centuries ago.

11 . Term coined by the artist. See Martínez, “Comeos Los Unos a Los Otros.”

In the nineteenth century, Brasília’s founders dreamed that it would be the materialization of a unified Brazil, a place that would forge a strong national identity. It would be the concatenation of diverse racial groups dispersed in the immensity of the home territory; in particular, the meeting between the brave sertanejo from the inner lands — immortalized in the book Sertões by Euclides da Cunha, written at the beginning of the twentieth century — with the white urban Brazilians from the large metropolis located on the southern shores, whose Europeanized background defined them as the most civilized side of such a prosperous nation. This new capital city placed in the geodetic centre of Brazil would symbolize the perfect geographical meeting point of all routes connecting this continental country.

Designed by the urban planner Lúcio Costa and the architect Oscar Niemeyer, Brasília was inaugurated in the 1960s not only to be the national capital, but also to awake Brazil to an ideal of modernity, with its own face. The baroque shapes inherited from the colonial churches were seen as an authentic representation of the dramatic style of Brazilian culture, symbolizing vitality, adaptation and, therefore, originality. Inspired by the straight lines of Le Corbusier, these two Brazilian architects infused the foreign influence of our colonial past. The result was a city with minimalist geometric lines able to contrast with the sensual

curved buildings — often recalled in old baroque churches — projected by Niemeyer. Lúcio Costa even affirmed that Niemeyer had achieved a genuinely Brazilian expression comparable with the Brazilian Colonial-born sculptor Aleijadinho.1 This anthropophagic Brazilian modernism consumed the geometrical rigid forms of the European modernism through the rococo curves found in its lands to produce a new style. Soon Brasília became world-renowned for its bold style.

1. See L. Luccas (2013) “Da integração das artes ao desenho integral: interfaces da arquitetura no Brasil moderno”. In: Arquitextos, 2013; 14 (160): 02.

Searching For Temporary Geometries: A Photo-Essay On The Rat Trails Of BrasíliaGustavo Dias: PhD Candidate SociologyTânia Tonhati: PhD Candidate Sociology Emerson Almeida: Lecturer at Mauá College and MSc Social Science at Federal University of São Carlos Designed as an aeroplane where the presidential palace is the

cockpit, downtown Brasília is popularly known as the ‘Pilot Plan’. It is mainly composed of geographical coordinates strategically connecting distant urban spaces in the city: the north and south wings attached to the Monumental Axis that links the east and west areas. While the Monumental Axis accesses many government buildings, monuments and memorials, the two wings permit access to the residential zones arranged into superquadras (‘superblocks’): groups of apartment buildings along with a prescribed number and type of schools, retail stores, and open spaces.

Despite the ideal of a national unification behind Brasília, the practice seemed to be slightly different... The first residents of Brasília were those sertanejos who came from the arid regions of the northeastern hinterland to build it. These refugees from drought saw in the construction of the federal capital the chance to leave behind imminent death, and improve their lives in this Promised Land. Many of them faced a journey of up to 15 days in a precarious form of transport known as the pau-de-arara with their entire family.2 Once in Brasília, the sertanejo was transformed into a candango, an African word to define a bad person.3 However, the original architectural design of this city was from the very beginning not intended to harbour these waves of national migrants. Once completed, the city would be exclusively occupied by civil servants, the vast majority from southern Brazil, put in charge of managing the whole national territory from this utopian city.

For the Candangos — ironically considered as a symbol of the effort to build Brasília, and celebrated in the monument ‘Two Candangos’ in the Square of Three Powers — only one option was left: to colonize the outskirts of the Pilot Plan. After all, in order to protect this master plan, a 20-mile radius zone had been created without any urban settlement. In this context, the first

2. It is a designation given in northeast Brazil to an irregular flatbed truck used to transport migrant workers.

3. After falling into disrepair, the word suddenly resurfaced in 1950. According to Bicalho, one of the manual workers said that Juscelino Kubitschek — the president responsible for building the capital — used the word Candango to refer to the workers as he knew they did not like to be called pawns. See N. H. de S. Bicalho (1983), Construtores de Brasília: estudo de operários e sua participação política. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1983.

Satellite Cities — the name given to the first settlements built in the outskirts — would grow rapidly in the following years. These satellites were notoriously characterized as the opposite of the harmonious Pilot Plan: large and chaotic conurbations lacking an efficient public transport system or other types of public services. Despite having to live on the outskirts, most of these workers still had to travel daily to the Pilot Plan to work. With little schooling these workers found in their manual labour, for instance as butlers, chauffeurs, janitors and other subordinate functions, a way of avoiding the return to the Brazilian northeast. This is how since its very beginnings, Brasília has accommodated different social groups without losing the cruel geographical and political hierarchy of those who historically have become accustomed to govern and those who live to give them sustenance.

However, to journey through the wide and long avenues in the Pilot Plan is not an easy task. Since its foundation, Brasília was designed to be a place made for cars. Following the American dream, the new Brazilian capital saw automotive vehicles as being synonymous with modernity. In this sense, the ‘Brasília utopia’ is not just defined by the architecture that contrasts époques and styles, but also by another peculiar characteristic which probably defines in an even more strong way how people appropriate social space in everyday life: its road dimensions. Such infrastructure was part of a wider national transformation, the accelerated industrialization, supported by the USA — made famous by the motto ‘Fifty years of progress in five’ — which proved so effective and yet so cruel for a premature country that its long-lasting consequences are still visible today.

It seems that this planned capital saw the mobility of people, information and goods on four wheels as the most effective way to achieve the industrial innovation of Brazil. Even today newcomers are still astonished by the modus operandi of life intimately intertwined with the car. In a city with high tropical temperatures and long distances to be covered by foot, motorized vehicles – mostly occupied by one or two passengers – assume the role of main actors. They speed along the roads, surrounded by large open lawns, repetitive apartment buildings and fields, through wastelands which, as Simone de Beauvoir observed, project an elegant monotony.

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Seen from afar, major cities are an accumulation of big buildings, big population and big acreage. For me it is not “real”. The big city as it is seen by its inhabitants is the real thing. The true picture is in the crevices on its floors and around the smaller pieces of its architecture, where daily life swirls.

Will Eisner, 2013.

It is true that Brasília was also designed to enable pedestrians to journey through its areas. Similar to the axes making up the geometrical shape of a plane, Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer also planned linear paths for pedestrians to walk along the residential and commercial blocks. However, those who venture to walk the vast distances on foot soon realize what a challenge it is. This is due to the subterranean passages, a fundamental part of Lúcio Costa’s project, that allow the modern motorways to get to the heart of the capital without traffic lights. It is only through these narrow and inadequate passageways that the walker is able to get across different sections of this planned city, without having to confront the fast and dangerous traffic.

Appearing in the cityscape as entrenched paths, the underground passages silently run beneath the busy road arteries. However, newspaper articles, blogs and everyday life scenes show that the population of Brasília have never liked to journey along these lines — especially at night. The main reason of this dislike is the almost total lack of governmental maintenance. Policing is rarely available, and lamps designed to illuminate the tunnels are normally broken. The authorities’ neglect discourages the public from using these passages; it is not hard to understand why most pedestrians consider it less risky to fight for space between cars, when the traffic speed allows it, than walking through the tunnels. In an attempt to stop this deviation and force pedestrians to use the official paths previously envisaged by the initial project, fences and thorny bushes were used to prevent pedestrians trying to tackle the slopes of the road arteries.

However, these subtle urban borders do not necessarily stop pedestrians seeking alternative ways to get around. When walking through the city it is possible to see how improvised walking paths have appeared on its vast lawns. The grass reveals pathways trodden by anonymous walkers and reaffirmed by others who see in such shortcuts a better way to overcome the rigid geometry of the city and to access their destination more quickly. These paths are popularly known as caminhos de rato (‘rat trails’). What is the reason behind such a zoomorphic word? Why rats? Does it have any relation to the ability of rats to sneak through the cracks of a house without causing damage to its architecture? Do they recall those trails that shorten the journey and enable these little animals to safely move around, leaving behind only traces of their trajectory?

In fact, the rat trails offer the walkers the chance to cross streets and avenues without having to make the long journeys imposed by the sparse pavements, which obediently follow the paths of the cars. The result is countless trails which tactically flee from the geometric lines of the pavement and promote new

but unofficial lines in the cityscape. They open new possibilities of circulation far beyond those previously planned in the beginnings of Brasília.

“[It] is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. […] But he also moves them about and invents others, since crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements”.4

In other words, the rat trails act as an element of creative resistance enacted by ordinary people against the rigid structures that compose the urban layout of Brasília and its cars.

4. M. de Certeau (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life. California: University of California Press, pp. 98.

These improvised trails nonetheless strongly divide the opinion among residents. While a large number of local residents complain about the chaotic and ugly aspect they produce in the Pilot Plan, particularly in the winter period when the grass becomes dry, others observe in these same lines how the corners of Brasília can be experienced without a car. This debate reinforces the still moderate concern of local government over the need to design new policies that are more focused on reducing the environmental impact of this car-based transportation system.

We started this short photo-essay by quoting Will Eisner’s introduction to New York: The Big City.5 In this elegant graphic novel, Eisner not only carefully illustrates the everyday life of New York, but finds the right balance between the uncaring city and its people who invisibly wander among its massive buildings. We believe that after living in Brasília for a time, at some point the dweller will ask him/herself if its designers also thought about such balance. Residents comment that Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer predicted such trails. Some say that Costa proposed to cement the tracks that would prove to be long-lasting. For him, they evidenced the need to redefine the designed space by officially including them in the city´s design. It was an upgrade from arbitrary scribbles to paved paths with purpose.6 Niemeyer, on the other hand, preferred to leave it as it was. Leave the doodle, the temporary geometry. For him, the act of people choosing their best path and, thus, going over the lawn, represented the freedom of the country. Who knows?

5. See W. Eisner (2013), New York: The Big City. New York: W.W Norton & Company.

6. J. B da C. Aguiar (2006), Desenho Gráfico 1980-2006. São Paulo: Ed. Senac.

[It] is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. […] But he also moves them about and invents others, since crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.

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The Changes In The Path Of Methodology: An Encounter With Schizoanalytical CartographyCristina Thorstenberg Ribas: PhD candidate Arts

Methodology is not just a sort of techné for producing knowledge. It is also very much entangled with the ethics of research. In this textual and visual short piece I will present a narrative of an encounter with ‘schizoanalytical cartography’ where a very specific methodology ended up becoming the matter of my research.

I am a Brazilian artist, researcher and mother living in London who is doing an Art PhD. I am sponsored by Capes Foundation, a Brazilian government institution. I am very interested in collective processes that are ‘transversal’ and produce knowledge. By ‘transversal’ I mean processes that engage different social actors and go across roles, disciplines and institutions. Félix Guattari conceptualised ‘transversality’ from his experience in the La Borde clinic in France in the 60’s. Guattari and Jean Oury (the director of the clinic), created a sort of inversion in which the ‘analysand’ was the institution of psychiatry itself, and not a patient isolated. Transversality would require than that each participant of a collective session of analysis (being a professional or a patient) “should be able to revisit its own role”, observing the “expressions of the institutions’s unconscious subjectivity”.1

In my research I have been thinking about how practices of knowledge happen in collective work, more specifically how they are connected to political organising and how they engage with the production of subjectivity. The collective production of knowledge engages with creativity and institutional analysis. Transversality is the key or the methodology, then, to think through the institution of knowledge itself. I propose that it is from this framework that subjective, social and political transformations are made possible.

When I started my first academic year it took me a while to find the productive lines I needed in order to put my research ‘in motion’. Trying to find a way ‘to move’ from this standstill I elaborated two questions:

Which affects constitute the researcher when she/he is producing knowledge?

What are the effects of this knowledge production?

1. Guattari, F. (1987), Revolução Molecular. Pulsações Políticas do Desejo. São Paulo: Brasiliense, pp. 92-4. (my translation)

From my own experience and desire, the production of knowledge is enabled by a series of operations that are themselves subjectively transformative. Before starting my PhD for years I was very moved by the notion of ‘militant investigation’. I perceive that the methodology I decided to put in practice in my PhD research complements the conceptualization of ‘militant research’ as I had learned and practiced from Colectivo Situaciones,2 or the co-research as I have been thinking and practicing through the Brazilian network Universidade Nômade and other self-organised projects.3 In a ‘militant investigation’ the researcher is not disinvested from the field and the social groups he or she ‘investigates’.4

In London I could not produce without being able to connect more directly to my previous experience in Brazil both in the academy and in politics — and also in the arts practice. There was also a strange projection to the future — that my funding obliges that I return to Brazil to ‘give back my knowledge’. The creative standstill was a kind of subjective blockage, and the encounters with a proposition and a methodology were crucial to be able to start. The methodology I have encountered is also developed by a few research groups in Brazil and stems from Felix Guattari’s ‘schizoanalytical cartographies’.

2. See Colectivo Situaciones (2009), Inquietudes en el impasse. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón Ediciones.

3. I have been involved in the network Universidade Nômade (http://uninomade.net) and recently have organised the Political Vocabulary for Aesthetic Processes (http://vocabpol.cristinaribas.org/vroli).

4. Militant research is “a process of re-appropriation of our capacity of creation of worlds driven by a stubborn militant decision that is not comfort with the ‘a priori’, the ‘should be’, or old and new models... but one that interrogates, problematises and pushes the real through a series a concrete procedures.” Precarias a La Deriva (2004), “De preguntas, ilusiones, enjambres y desiertos. Apuntes sobre investigación y militancia desde Precarias a La Deriva [Madrid]”, in Malo, M. (2004) Nociones Comunes, Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, p. 92

I present here a few drawings, schemas, mind maps or cartographies I have been producing in my research process. They work both as a tool to visualise the theory and the processes I am investigating, and as a productive ‘dispositif’ orienting the movements — as I describe below.5

Undertaking academic research that is sponsored by the Government, I perceived a series of major and minor lines that are at stake. These lines are projecting or retracting the work I have to do. I have not made a drawing with these lines, so I invite you the reader to make your own and to complete whatever might be missing in this short list. (If you don’t find space in this publication, I suggest you use a spare sheet of paper.)

(1) The major lines I see are those that we share with other researchers. They are academic obligations, norms, forms, justifications, deadlines, effectiveness, capacity, competition, approval, power relations, supervision relations...

(2) The minor lines are those more connected to my own capacities or conceptions of myself, the previous experiences, the knowledge I identify I ‘have’, my own conception of my own identity as a researcher, my expectations, my desires, my frustrations, my attempts, etc.

But all this might just sound very, very generic. Even if looking at the minor lines. When observing the major and the minor lines I see that a more complex arrangement of elements appears than just dealing with an isolated object — I refer to the (problematic) ‘object of knowledge’ itself. Coming from the arts — a practice in which we are used to being subjectively very close to the ‘objects’ and ‘processes’ we create — for me is quite difficult to be precise about the ‘object’ of knowledge, and I always felt very impotent when isolating the production of knowledge

5. In schizoanalysis a ‘dispositif’ can refer to the new activities, occupation, experiences, one can have in order to work through its blockages and in order to open “processes of autonomisation and auto-poiesis”. (F. Guattari 1992, Caosmose: um novo paradigma estético. São Paulo: Ed. 34., pp. 18, my translation). Guattari exposes that in schizoanalytical therapy one can be “confronted with new matters of expression” (Ibid.,, pp. 17). Those can be mask making, washing dishes, organising a party, moving home, riding a horse, and many others, because there are many levels in the process of therapy, and each practical realisation might mean one stage in it (Ibídem.).

in a theme, discussion, discourse, theory itself, as if it would disconnect it from the life processes, practices, groups, events the object of knowledge might be related to. The question is therefore not the notion of ‘object of knowledge’, but a capacity of analysing the ‘institution of knowledge’ itself, in its complexity.

Trying to find a ‘path’ to continue, moving forward from the subjective blockage or standstill, an attention to the major and minor lines as part of a process was very helpful. The ‘path’ is actually what we can conceptualise as a ‘cartography’. Cartography holds a very singular definition when connected to a life process but can also be extended to a collective process or even a methodology. Guattari, in one of the most complex definitions, conceptualises cartography as a “meta-modelling system of subjectivity”, what can be realized with “cognitive demarcations, but also with mythical, ritualistic or symptomatic ones, from which one can place itself relating to its own affections, torments, trying to manage its inhibitions and drives”.6

So, in the making of my cartography, I ask myself whether the affects of the researcher and the effects of the research are able to dialogue, in other words, how might we be able to mobilise those major and minor lines at stake when doing research? This might bring us the understanding of what makes each research project become a very singular outcome of a process.

The dialogue between the affects and effects and search for the mobilisation of the major and minor lines for me became a “process of reconfiguration of the researcher”, as I learned from Suely Rolnik in her work Cartografia Sentimental.7 The drawing that I called the ‘reconfiguration of the researcher’ is the one with ascendant and descendant lines. Some turbulent lines and ‘stones’ cross through them. They refer to practices and concepts I was more used to mobilising in my previous work and to other concepts and theories that appeared in the process of research. The ‘reconfiguration of the researcher’ means, hence, the reconfiguration of the research as well. The reconfiguration can be thought of as an engagement (a productive engagement) with the forces at play, a capacity of moving, a ‘cartography’...

6. Guattari, op. cit. 1992, p. 22.

7. S. Rolnik, (2011), Cartografia sentimental: Transformações Contemporâneas do Desejo. Porto Alegre, RS: Sulina, Editora da UFRGS.

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The cartography in this sense doesn’t have a pre-traced path nor draw a map to be followed by others. It departs from the minor lines (or conditions) and crosses through the major lines (the forms and structures) or feeds back to the minor lines (a micropolitical movement). In these movements it produces new forms, new ways, new paths. Usually a methodology is established before the research starts, however what I have learned recently erases the conceptualisation of methodology as a one-way practice to a method that is shaped amid the research moves.

In Guattari’s terms, a schizoanalytical cartography is “the analysis of the processes of becoming”, a map making that is part of a process of production of subjectivity.8 Cartography is hence a method of observing, of accompanying, and it is productive in itself. Schizoanalytic cartography can be understood as a particular kind of research process, and it can serve both for academic research and for autonomous and collective research processes. Cartography therefore might configure a micropolitical operation.

For the Brazilian academic research group Núcleo de Pesquisa Cognição e Coletivos (Nucc-UFRJ) and other psychology post-graduate departments such as those in UFF9 and UFRGS10 universities, that continue the conceptualisation and practice of schizoanalytical cartography, knowledge production and research processes are not disengaged from processes of production of subjectivity. It is essential for them to produce an engagement with the life processes that are involved in the act of research, observing three main effects of the research: effects in the object of research, effects in the field, or in the production of knowledge, and effects in the researcher him or herself.11

By approaching directly the Deleuzian-Guattarian rhizome they ask how they can conceive the ‘methodological direction’ in a non-centric system. By operating an inversion in the metá-hódos (previously established rules for research methods) to a hódos-metá (“a ‘bet’ in the experimenting of the thought”), they aim for “defining the research as a path (hódos) predetermined by the rules given when it started”. Such a ‘reversion’ is something not to be ‘applied’, but to be experienced with ‘attitude’, ‘compromise’ and ‘interest’.12 The rigor of the hódos is therefore more connected to processes of subjectivation engaged in the research. Because the notion of research is externalized – from the researcher to its subjects of research –, it becomes an ‘intervention’. The research is, therefore, happening now, already, and it is creating effects.13

8. Rolnik, Op. Cit., pp. 8-9. See also F. Guattari, F., 2013, Schizoanalytic Cartographies. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

9. http://www.slab.uff.br/

10. http://www.ufrgs.br/ppgpsicologia/

11. See R. B. Barros, and E. Passos (2009), “A cartografia como método de pesquisa-intervenção”. In: Escossia, L; Kastrup, V; Passos, E. (org.), Pistas para o método da cartografia, pp. 17-18. My interest in the methodology developed by the Brazilians research groups also stems from looking at how they create a methodology that can be re-appropriated, adapted, and modulated to different group settings and different contexts. In other words, how their knowledge production sets in motion micropolitical processes, bound up with processes of social and political transformation.

12. L. Escossia, L; Kastrup, V; Passos, E. (org) (2009) Pistas para o método da cartografia, pp. 11-12.

13. Barros and Passos, op. cit.

The cartographic method has, as a clinico-political direction, the “increase of the transversality coefficient, guaranteeing a communication that does not exhaust itself in the two hegemonic axes that organise the socius”. The transversal is hence the creation of a third vector, that crosses the vertical which organises difference; and the horizontal which organises the similar in minorities. From this notion, Barros and Passos affirm that “the political nature of the cartographic method makes respect to the way through which we can intervene in the operations of reality organisation, from the vertical and horizontal axes.”14

The production of ‘transversals’ can be the process of opening new possibilities, that create new configurations of the socius and of oneself – a complex conception of the subject, therefore, a production of subjectivity.

Thinking from the creation of transversals in my living in London related to my PhD and the possibility of producing ‘dispositifs’ that engage new encounters between Brazilian researchers — from observing and performing movements as a cartographer — I have created meetings in London to talk about the reconfiguration of the Brazilian researcher in the UK. The meetings are organized around the notion of a ‘Cartography of Exodus’.15 I see the organisation of these meetings as one of the important realizations of doing research that is interested in mobilising practices of knowledge. Recently I have been writing about this experience and the new meanings it brings to my cartographic path.

14. Ibíd., p. 28.

15. We have held five meetings so far, and some records of these encounters are here http://cartografiadoexodo.wordpress.com/.

Brazil is currently undergoing a major transformation largely due to the economic development it has experienced over the last decade. On the one hand, unemployment rates of the “new global player” reached the lowest level in history in 2013, less than 4%. On the other, such a scenario expresses renewed levels of social conflict, increasing criminal violence and incarceration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork which has been conducted since 2005 in the outskirts of São Paulo, the work of Gabriel Feltran has presented a panorama of transformations in poor Brazilian neighbourhoods and favelas from the 1970’s until today. This overview — deeply based on empirical work — reflects on Brazilian development and its margins, focusing on both social conflict and social legitimacy that nowadays emerges from the ‘crime’, or the ‘criminal world’, in urban outskirts.

Gabriel Feltran is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), researcher at the CEM (Centre for Metropolis’ studies) and at the CEBRAP (Brazilian Research Centre of Social sciences Studies). Doctorate in Social Sciences at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP - Brazil), with a collaborative doctorate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS - Paris). He has several books and academic articles on the transformations of social and political dynamics of urban outskirts, focussing on collective action, marginalized groups and ‘the criminal world’ in São Paulo/Brazil. He is coordinator of NaMargem - Center for Urban Research.

The name of your recent book is Sobre Periferias: novos conflitos no Brasil contemporâneo (On Periphery: New Conflicts in Contemporary Brazil), and it brings together many case studies describing several contemporary realities present in Brazilian metropolises. As we know, periferia (periphery) is a term strongly associated, by people and the media in Latin America, to a dichotomist relationship that opposes centre and periphery, inclusion and exclusion, in which this division is primarily constituted by spatial coordinates which creates fixed, homogeneous, and unified spaces subject to the same

processes. Can you explain to us how you work with the term periphery and how can we analyse this subject going beyond the creation of spatial boundaries and dichotomist explanations?

GF : This issue is central and you need to treat it in two dimensions, one analytical and the other empirical. Analytically, I take the dichotomy you cite as an object to be comprehended, not as a category of analysis. As this dichotomy is very present in common sense, and the basis of the cognitive construction on what ‘periphery’ would be, it also produces ‘reality’ (many people act, for instance, imagining that favelas [slums] are very dangerous places). This arbitrary process of production of the real, by discursive practices, is one of the main objects of my reflection. Empirically, however, we need to recognize the internal heterogeneity of these territories: using ‘peripheries’ in the plural, because in the same neighbourhood may live a collector of recyclable material, with an income of US$100 per month, and a taxi driver, making US$ 2000 a month; a transvestite sex worker on the street and a bricklayer with three cars in his garage; one student who just entered in a good public university through the Affirmative Actions — with a promising future — and an ex-convict crack user intended to be admitted

The Margins Of Brazilian Development : Notes On “Crime” In The Outskirts Of São PauloInterview with Professor Gabriel FeltranAngelo Martins Junior: PhD candidate Sociology

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into rehab compulsorily; a Bolivian textile informal worker and a Nigerian street vendor, a policeman, a car mechanic as well as an owner of an illegal chop shop. It is from this context that emerges the term ‘conflict’ in the title of the book, and the empirical efforts that its chapters present. Brazil is changing very quickly and the analytical categories that we have to analyse this new scenario are insufficient to delineate its conflicts.

Your work has a historical perspective when you discuss the urban peripheries in Brazil, demonstrating how places and lives (micro) are being constituted within greater political, economic and social contexts (macro). For instance, you show how the favelas (slums) in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have been through a process of re-signification since the 1980’s. You describe how the image of the area has changed from being associated as a place where migrant workers would live — coming from rural and less industrialised parts of the country in order to work in the city — to now, in which the favela is identified as the place of bandits/criminals, the site of violence. How is this passage constructed from worker to criminal? I believe there was a political, economic and social functionality linked to the constitution of the image of the worker living in the favelas at that time, so, can we say that there is also a functionality present in the creation of the image of the criminal, nowadays — in this process of criminalizing poverty?

GF: Excellent questions. The emergence of the ‘world of crime’ as the dominant image of the peripheries represents a fundamental shift in the representation of Brazilian social and urban conflict. In the 1970s and 1980s the representation of ‘worker’ was connected to the basis of the Brazilian Fordism. There were discourses of integration, inclusion, citizenship rights, and many other basic elements for our re-democratization, but we were also discussing the development and expansion of our capitalism. With the overcoming of Fordism and the whole process of (neoliberal) productive restructuring which happened in the 1980’s, being consolidated in the 1990s, any universalist approach to deal with our social issues was no longer possible. Economic growth with high levels of inequality produces conflict, especially with requests from the elites

to discontinue the ‘right to have rights’ to a significant portion of the population. On the one hand, economic development would generate a ‘new middle class’. On the other, the criminalization of poverty produces ‘internal enemies’ who must be eliminated, because they would threaten the country’s development. Therefore, this idea and representation of the poor as criminal is still functional.

As we discussed before, based on empirical work your studies try to go beyond mere dichotomous explanations, as the one presented in the separation of centre — periphery. Thus, how is it lived — in the everyday of those who live in the peripheries — this relationship between the image of the worker and the criminal, nowadays? Are the boundaries in this case also blurred and porous? How are these images lived and negotiated on the daily basis of these people?

GF: Again, this question also must be addressed on two levels. On the one hand, there is the level of language; everyone recognizes the moral difference, radical one, which opposes the meanings of the words ‘worker’ and ‘criminal/bandit’. When someone is appointed with one of these words, the whole weight of these meanings are attributed to the person. However, in everyday life it works differently: these words do not always need to be used. And so, there are many cases where individuals act in legal and illegal markets simultaneously. I met a lot of people who worked in drug trafficking twice a week, at night, and during the day, they were subway workers in formal employment, for example. At this level, the dichotomy does not exist. This is why I use the term ‘frontier/border’ analytically: it is a space of limit, distinction, which at the same time allows relationships, flows, when properly regulated. The boundary between workers and criminals is a great example of this ambiguity, in which the power is constantly inscribed.

In your book, Fronteiras de Tensão (Frontiers/Border of Tension) — the result of your doctoral thesis — you describe that while doing your master’s research on social movements in a periphery in São Paulo, homicide levels in São Paulo were very high, but when you returned to develop your doctorate, just focusing on high numbers of homicides, interviewees said that people

were no longer being killed. One of the explanations given by you would be the emergence of the crime as a normative source of power, within the São Paulo’s peripheries. Thus, what was, in fact, the role of the crime in decreasing homicide rates? In which way these ‘policies’ coming from the criminal world differed, or complemented, the ones developed by the State? Can we say that the state loses its position as the holder figure of the legitimate force/power in these places?

In São Paulo, the main wing of the ‘crime’, called PCC, played a key role in the reduction of nearly 70% of the homicide rates in the 2000s. This group functionalized the São Paulo’s policy of imprisonment and achieved the hegemony in the regulation of the illegal market. It acted strongly in mediating local conflicts in the suburbs, and it produced the disarmament of small drug trafficking operators and other illicit markets, breaking with the previous revenge chains and establishing itself as a legitimate instance of popular justice. This favoured its expansion and its legitimacy, becoming a very remarkable group in the 2000s in any favela of the state of São Paulo. On the outskirts of São Paulo, for instance, homicides in 2011 are one tenth of the rates found in 2000. At the same time, robberies, burglaries, thefts, trafficking and bank robberies rose significantly. The ‘crime’ pacified the outskirts and increased its social pervasiveness, strongly expanding their market regulation capabilities.

Do you think the anti-immigration discourses and policies in Europe today are similar to those happening in Brazilian peripheries, which criminalize poverty? Would immigrants, especially those who are deemed as illegal, fit into what you call the state creating its own margins? What are the dangers in this movement, for European countries, within a context of austerity policies where these populations are not only being left to their own fate, but also labelled as criminals?

GF: I find your analogy perfect. The terrorist in the US is the illegal immigrant in Europe, and it is the bandit/criminal in Brazil. In all cases, it is around these marginal figures — which do not correspond to what really happens empirically — that the centre of

power of the state is organized. In this representation, the conflict is organized as an opposition between civilized vs. uncivilized, citizens against internal enemies, good versus evil, and it destroys the logic of the universalist rights as a possibility to mediate the conflict. War becomes the paradigm of politics. And the danger is the return of the legitimacy of authoritarianism as a mode of government, which is already proving to be possible to happen in all these countries.

In recent decades, Brazil has undergone to some significant economic and social progress — decreased poverty, was taken off from the UN hunger map and became a world economic power. Have these advances also changed the landscapes of the periphery? Has the economic growth come to the periphery? If so, how?

GF: It absolutely has changed. The popular consumption capacity was greatly enlarged. In the favelas you can find nowadays many 50 inch plasma TVs and iPhones in the pockets of teenagers. However, schools remain of very poor quality, and incarceration rates were multiplied by 5 in some states, and doubled in others. We tried to produce development through the expansion of consumption, but as consumption does not have this intrinsic capacity, you need to associate this process with a lot of repression.

Regarding the process of doing your research, I believe that many people may ask you about the difficulties of developing a fieldwork in areas regarded as dangerous and violent. What’s it like doing ethnography in these places? Have you ever found yourself in a situation that you felt in danger?

GF: My fieldwork was carried out for years in the same territory. So, I became someone who was part of the neighbourhood’s landscape, walking and interacting with people there. I also counted on the intermediation of a very qualified local organization, CEDECA Sapopemba. In addition, I was working at a time of ‘pacification’ of the relationship between drug dealers and the police, mediated by financial arrangements. I lived through very few dangerous situations. It was more dangerous to live in a middle class neighbourhood than in a favela, since you respect the local codes of conduct. But of course there are many dangerous

situations in which ethnographers of the peripheries are exposed to, and, therefore, preparing for fieldwork seems to be fundamental to me. The mediation of legitimate actors is the central point for it. I currently work with a team of 20 ethnographers and finding these mediators is always a very important issue.

You are involved in many projects with other countries in Latin America and Europe. What is the influence of the theories of the Global South in your work and what are the European and North American ones? Do you have any concern in this regard, in thinking about the politics of knowledge production?

For years I have been inspired by the work of Georg Simmel, a European and Jewish man from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. A contemporary French man who I have worked with in France, Daniel Cefaï, is another major influence to me. I also read and work with authors who are originate from the south, as Veena Das or Grace Cho, but I only read their work because they are produced in the US. Other brilliant authors, such as Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva and Michel Misse, or Vera Telles, are also key figures to understanding contemporary Brazil and urban issues, but unfortunately they are not widely read outside Brazil, due to the language barrier. So, a good idea is good whether it comes from a white heterosexual English man, or from a lesbian researcher in Syria. Clearly, however, we all know that we read the work of the white man from the global north, who speaks English a lot more than the work from other researchers, from other places. We all know it is not possible that there are no good ideas coming from other places, especially because the quality of research has developed a lot in the Global South. Therefore, promoting the circulation of these other voices seems to be crucial for fostering plural debates. I do not like, however, any kind of arguments of authority.

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From America To Latino: Popular Music And The Kidnapping Of Latin AmericaJorge Saavedra Utman: PhD candidate Media and Communications

I am afraid that Latin America is a decaying concept. I have had that feeling listening to Latin music for some years, the one that sounds in mainstream radios, the one awarded here and there by the industry. Very often, when I go over contemporary lyrics I wonder: where is Latin America? In this article I provide an answer based on the analysis of lyrics from popular songs composed in the last 60 years, identifying three stages: a first moment when composers talked about America as a continent; a second step when Latin America emerged politically loaded; and a third one when the word America — and the political load — was evicted to create a new identity, just Latin. To put it bluntly, I argue that Latin America (as a concept) has been kidnapped in music (although it sometimes wanders around as a fugitive reminder of an unachieved past).

AMERICA (NOT YET THE COUNTRY): NATURE, VOICE, THEM AND US

In the fifties and sixties popular music broadcast on radio stations, sold on LPs and played at music festivals, talked about America in a broad sense. These songs were about people and nations, united by a narrative attached to nature, including the green forest, rivers, waterfalls, flowers, hills and valleys. All of this existed in a context of harmony confronted to the brutality of the Spanish gun and fire that destroyed everything around. These songs of unity took elements of that nature to say that we were all just one: Americans, and that all singularities made the whole, but the whole was more than the sum of all of singularities.

“Canción con Todos”1 (Song with Everyone, 1969) by the Argentine composers Armando Tejada Gómez and César Isella reflects this feeling, speaking from the position of an imaginary inhabitant walking around the American countries: “I set out to walk across, the cosmic belt of the south/ I step upon the most fertile region, of the wind and the light/ I sense as I walk, all the skin of America in my skin/ And in my blood a river flows, that sets free in my voice its abundance/ Sun from high Peru, the face of Bolivia, tin and solitude/ Green Brazil, kiss my Chile copper and mineral”. This song carries on its naturalistic description a deep political sense rooted in the most basic condition of Latin American situation: voice, presumably as a right of a sovereign land to name its name, to talk by itself, to not be subjugated by any master.

1 . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGcqLQswysM

“Sing with me, sing/ American Brother/ Release your hope/ With a scream in your voice!” continues the song. It is remarkable, however, to observe that the invitation to take out the voice — and the rest of the lyric — is directed to all American brothers. This call occurs because the songs of this era sing about America not as a national territory but as a whole continent — something that today might cause confusion. Here Latin America does not appear yet.

In “Si Somos Americanos”2 (“If we are Americans”, 1965), another pinnacle song from the 1960’s, Chilean singer and composer Rolando Alarcón depicts unity that defines a clear us (and therefore a clear them): “If we are Americans/ we are brothers/ we have got the same flowers/ we have got the same hands/ If we are Americans”. Here, the others (them) are described as those who are not close to dance “marinera, refalosa, zamba and son”, i.e. typical dances from the Andes, from the southern cone of South America, from the Brazilian area and from the Caribbean and Centre American axis. In other words, these songs do not consider the USA, Canada and other nations located on the same continent in their definition of America. Why? The answer is material for another debate, but let’s say that a narrow identity was in the making.

LATIN AMERICA: RESIST, DEFEAT, RESIST, DEFEAT

At a second moment appears Latin America, with an undeniable and clear political component. It shows up as a continent that, after the defeat of its emancipatory projects in the 60’s and 70’s,

2 . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y3P5g0Sp0A

resists against the triumphant empire of 20th century: USA. Here Latin America is again a vegetal, human and mineral territory, inhabited by abused people and exploited resources, popular subjects that must resist if they want to overcome what seems the curse of their destiny. This is traceable from Mercedes Sosa’s song “Las venas abiertas”,3 (“The Open Veins”, 1985) until the most recent “Latinoamérica”,4 (“Latin America”, 2011) by Calle 13, among others. In “Latinoamérica” the Puerto Rican band sings: “I am/ I am what they left behind/ I am the leftovers of what they have stolen” before highlighting the natural spectrum of the continent and its dignity based on communitarian reciprocity: “Here we share, what is mine is yours” they declare.

However, I argue that Calle 13’s song is nothing but a 21st century reminiscence of old days. Not because of the rhetoric or the kind of vindication, but because since the 1970’s and after the neoliberal victory in the area, the notion of Latin America got drained from its former meanings, raising some questions: Did Latin America ever really mean something? If so, what happened in the middle? Two songs might answer these questions from two different perspectives. First, Pablo Milanés’ “Canción por la Unidad Latinoamericana”5 (Song for the Latin American Unity, 1975) and the finding that disunity has always been present in Latin America — therefore the lack of strength and collaboration to act as one force: “As the years passed resentments got accumulated/ loves were forgotten, we seemed strangers”. The disunity mentioned by the Cuban musician contributed, according to this song, to the servant condition of Latin America and to an evident defeat that restrained the continent in the quest for its emancipation. The second song, “Latinoamérica es un pueblo al Sur de Estados Unidos”6 (Latin America is a town south of the United States, 1984), by the Chilean band Los Prisioneros responds to the question of utopia and unity in a brilliant and brutal way. It acknowledges a cultural, political and social utter defeat. Latin America, they tell us, is not only the backyard of the USA, but is a continent living, following and trying to imitate the real and successful ‘Americans’, the distinguished and glamorous Europeans, i.e. Coloniality at large.7

Particularly pungent, Los Prisioneros lyrics describe Latin America as an “exotic place to visit”, prepared for tourists purchasing trips to the Rio Carnival and the Aztecs ruins. A land plenty of natives who will sell themselves for a few dollars and, furthermore, cry if Ronald Reagan (the song was composed in the 1980s) or the Queen (from any European nation, obviously) dies. A loose sentence in the middle of the lyrics — “to divide is to weaken” — comes up as a key and permanent topic with political and historical consequences.

SIMPLY LATIN: HIPS, RHYTHM AND OTHER SPICY THINGS FROM MIAMI

According to Daniel Party, Miami not only “had become the heart of Latin American show business and the preferred production centre for Latin American pop artists wishing to internationalize

3 . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aDMp31qHRA

4 . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkFJE8ZdeG8

5 . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR9grCBssrk

6 . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3Fj-vSKAVs

7 . Grosfoguel, R. (2007) The epistemic decolonial turn. Cultural Studies, 21 (2-3), pp. 211-223; Quijano, A. (2008) “Coloniality of power, eurocentrism, and social classification”. In Moraña et. al. (eds) Coloniality at large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Pp.181-224. Durham: Duke University Press.

their career”,8 but “[Miami] went from capital of Latin America in the United States to capital of Latin America”.9 Party’s assertion is an unavoidable argument on the historical journey proposed by this text as it points to a crucial shift: the capital of ‘us’ settled down in the land of the former ‘them’. ‘Latin America’ became a shorter concept: ‘Latin’. The obliteration of the ‘American’ part of the former compound word became a natural presence in contemporary lyrics recorded and distributed by mainstream music industry. It went so far as to receive coverage from ‘MTV Latino’, awards in the ‘Latin Grammys’ and available in the Latin channel of the music web www.accuradio.com.

In this context, the identity of the ‘Latino’ appears as a US based story, as described in one of the songs by the Mexican band Maná:10 “Warning, this is a call/ Your attention is valuable, they are discriminating Latinos/ I think they are not right/ We are people that never cower/ We are going to show who we are with courage and value”. Even though the song is called ‘Latinoamérica’ (Latin America, 2011), the subject in the lyrics is the Latino who lives his/her Latino experience on US soil. Therefore, the Latino condition is a matter of individuals, subjects; not nations, countries or federations in a context where he or she can be discriminated not by his/her brother — like in the 19th century and part of the 20th — but by those who own the place where the Latino is a foreigner or a significant other.

Nonetheless, in Maná’s song there is a trace of an historical claim, something that in most Miami styles of Latin music is not present. In most of the songs coming from the US, the Latin identity is a broad picture of wild nature, pretty bodies, frantic cadence, mystic secrets and spicy moods. The song “Mujer Latina”,11 (Latin Woman, 1997) by Mexican singer, actress and dancer, Thalia, is an example. The lyrics says she is the blood of her land “from sea to the mountains, hot like the fire”, while other songs just take the meaning of Latino to a whole new level. Like in Don Omar’s track “Reggaeton Latino”12 (Latin Reggaeton, 2005), where the power of Latin music is to make women dance for the pleasure of men. No revolution, no dream of a better world, no history, no heritage, just dance. In this vision of the Latin landscape, men are machos and women are (or must be) hot.

I am afraid — and with some degree of certainty due to the last football World Cup held in Brazil — that the less political, less emancipated Latino image, music and culture rather than a politically-loaded Latin America, will be the one occupying the global marquee in the next few years, especially in the context of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. And this should not cause surprise. The opening ceremony of Brazil 2014 World Cup featured J-Lo, Pitbull and Claudia Leitte (to add the local component), and there is no reason to think that in 2016 the set will be different. Sure there will be frantic hips, vivid colours, ‘Latin words’ like olé or caramba, plastic flavours, good feelings and the best intentions. That will be the global image and lyrics of the ‘Latin’ world emerging on the global stage. The notion of Latin America, on the other hand, with its uncertainties, peculiarities and untold discourses, will be behind that noise in the cracks of that industry, wandering around, trying not to be subsumed by the so called Latin music.

8 . Party, D. (2010) “The miamization of Latin American Pop Music”. In Corona, I. and Madrid, A. (eds.) Postnational musical identities. pp. 65. Lexington: Lanham.

9 . Ibid. pp. 66

10 . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7aQi5kXC5k

11 . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HFctj6bluM

12 . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTjyw7QQKgE

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Argentine Feminist Struggle in PhotographyLieta Vivaldi: PhD Sociology Student; and Valentina Stutzin: Photographer and Anthropology Student, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Photographs by: Cecilia Antón, Guadalupe Gómez Verdi, Lisa Franz, Léa Meurice, Agustina Ciccola, Gisela Orieta and Valentina Stutzin.

Our aim in this short text is to display a photographic slant on issues that, transversally, have covered the feminist agenda in Argentina over the past few years. Since the first feminist groups emerged in Argentina during the late nineteenth century, women’s movements have iteratively experienced expansive and contractive periods. At the present time, feminist groups organise themselves from the neighbourhoods, and from there stand in the streets and make themselves visible, resist and fight. The Argentinian feminist movement has transitioned from initial struggles concerning the feminist vote and political recognition, towards domestic violence, the defence of sexual and reproductive rights, women’s equal inclusion in the labour market and the vindictive struggle of sexual dissidence. With the rise of the feminist movement after the dictatorship, there emerged a strong critique against the notion of ‘woman’ and the so-called subaltern gender categories, framing them through a perspective that includes the intersectionality between gender, race and class.

The Women’s National Meeting has been promoted in Argentina over the last twenty nine years, creating a self-convened space hosted every year by a different province. It is organised by autonomous committees, with no interference from political parties or NGOs. In this way a democratic, horizontal and heterogeneous space is articulated; a space that belongs to every woman, who year after year meet to share their diverse experiences and points of view. The Women’s National Meeting seeks to highlight and unite the female voices, usually silenced by the social oppression it is inscribed within. These meetings are an expression of the meaningful struggles that women conduct in their own territories, and in each of these encounters women occupy the city and the streets, marching and painting its walls.

The first meeting took place in Buenos Aires in 1986, hosting more than a thousand women, and since then it has been

celebrated every year without interruption. The last of them, in 2014, was hosted by the Provincia of Salta, gathering more than forty thousand participants from all over the country.

Beyond this large women’s movement there are some issues that transversely demand the attention of current feminist agendas: legalization of abortion; violence against women,with special concern on the increasing femicide rates in the country; and women’s disappearance in democracy due to sex trafficking and exploitation.

In recent years, young voices have emerged from the photography field capturing images of diverse themes related to the feminist agenda. From a committed documentary view, they have made original proposals to design, visualize and represent, on the one hand, different forms of violence suffered by women

and, on the other, the courage of resistance. We present in this article a brief account of three projects: “11 semanas, 23 horas, 59 minutos. Aborto Clandestino en Argentina” (“11 weeks, 23 hours, 59 minutes. Clandestine Abortion in Argentina”) by Guadalupe Gómez Verdi, Lisa Franz and Léa Meurice; “Esclavas 2.0” (“Slaves 2.0”) by Cecilia Antón, on missing women through trafficking for sexual exploitation; and photographs of a work in progress on femicide in Argentina, made by Agustina Ciccola, Gisela Orieta and Valentina Stutzin.

These works have in common that they address issues which have been widely discussed but not necessarily observed by photography. The authors have addressed them from thoughtful and politically powerful places that refuse to repeat the graphic and re-victimising models that are used by mass media. They seek to bring to the public and political agenda urgent issues focussing on personal stories and social frameworks on which they are held. That is, to show those women that “use their body”. Women who use their bodies through clandestine abortions to reaffirm their autonomy despite everything; women who are not there any more, whose bodies have been disappeared or killed by patriarchal violence; and women who fight for justice, using their bodies for their daughters, organizing themselves and raising orphaned grandchildren. These are works that explore the female body as locus of control and resistance, exposing the faces and names behind statistics.

These works can also be seen as maps of ‘becoming’ (devenires) of women’s bodies in the patriarchal and capitalist Argentine society: maps of the territories of abortion; maps of the disappearance, maps of gender violence taken to the extreme of femicide.

The ‘intimate’ space appears, thus, as reaffirmation of autonomy in a clandestine abortion or the intimate space as the fatal locus on a femicide. However, these territories have nothing intimate, they are public and political. These works also are a map of objects which speak of women who refuse to disappear in the memory of their families and the women’s movement. The woman’s body is a battlefield.

Transversal issues of the feminist agenda: the legalization of abortion — Virgin Mary demands to abort — and the struggle against violence and sexual exploitation. Painted on the walls of San Juan during the National Meeting of 2013. Photograph by: Valentina Stutzin

Women National Meeting, 2013. San Juan de Argentina. During the last demostration some women changed the word ‘Direction’ to ‘Liberation’ Photograph by: Valentina Stutzin.

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LILIANA

1980, 1986. Voluntary termination of pregnancy. 17 and 24 years old. Surgical abortions.

“I had an abortion in 1980, under the military dictatorship government here in Argentina, and another abortion in 1986, just at the beginning of democracy. I highlight my abortions over the years and in different governments just to show that in both dictatorship and democracy, I practiced abortions clandestinely.”

ABORTION

The work “11 semanas, 23 horas, 59 minutos — Aborto Clandestino en Argentina”, by Guadalupe Gómez Verdi, Lisa Franz and Léa Meurice, was completed in 2013 by three young photographers from different countries (Argentina, Germany and France). They joined together to focus and describe how clandestine abortion exists in Argentina. They share the deep conviction that motherhood is a choice rather than an obligation and that “beyond any political, religious and cultural position, we embrace the right to legal abortion, believing deeply in each individual freedom.”1 They sought to avoid victimizing images like ‘abortion is equal to death’, but rather to show women from their courage, associating abortion with a female’s physical rights.

1. Project Statement.

CAMILA

2007. Voluntary termination of pregnancy. 21 years old. Surgical abortion.

“My concern was always that I knew there was no place which could take care of me. Everything was so illegal that I did not want to expose myself to a situation where I could even die”.

MARA C.

2012. Voluntary termination of pregnancy. 23 years old. Abortion with pills. Accompanied by the help of La Revuelta, a feminist organization.

“I want to share my experience to ‘put a face’ to the problem and to show that it’s something, I would not say ‘natural’, but I want people who are around me could realize that: your grandmother had an abortion, your aunt aborted; your sister had an abortion, or that they could realize that the woman that aborted could have been your neighbour, your sister, your cousin, the woman in the store next to you”.

SONIA SÁNCHEZ

Five voluntary terminations of pregnancies. Abortion with pills.

“Do you know why I had the abortions? I never had a pimp, man or woman. The state was the pimp for me; hunger, lack of education, of work. It was not a man, it was hunger. To live five months in Plaza Once was what prostituted me.”

“When I had the abortion it was because I wanted to get that out, I did not want to have a child who I did not know who the father was. I felt it was something imposed [...] It never felt like a child. I had to get rid of such a violence that was getting inside of me. For me, to get pregnant was more violent, it was a stronger form of violence.”

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Beatriz Regal is holding her daughter’s childhood doll. Wanda Taddei, was killed at 29 years old by her husband Eduardo Vasquez, former drummer of the rock band Callejeros, the 21th of January 2010 in Buenos Aires. Eduardo sprinkled her with alcohol and then set her on fire, causing severe burns that killed her eleven days later in the hospital.

Anabela is the daughter of Gabriela Consme. Gabriela was killed at 24 years old by her partner, Walter Santiago Marker, the 25th of November 2013, in Morón, Buenos Aires. Since 2011 there are over 800 orphans from femicide.

In Argentina the number of abortions is estimated at 400,000 per year. 80 women die each year. Currently, most abortions are performed with misoprostol tablets but also by surgical abortion. There are legal abortions in cases of danger to the life or health of women, when the pregnancy is the result of rape and when is the product of indecent assault on a mentally disabled or insane woman.2 However, due to bureaucratic hurdles and institutional and medical violence, the right to abort in these cases is not always guaranteed.

2. Article 86, Argentinian Criminal Law

WOMEN TRAFFICKING AND SEXUAL EXPLOITATION

Cecilia Antón started to work in “Esclavas 2.0” several years ago, documenting the disappearances of women trafficked for sexual exploitation in Argentina. Besides the photos presented in this article, her work includes images of families who tirelessly search for their daughters; of the places where they were kidnapped; of the rooms where the families are still waiting for them; of personal objects, and also of female survivors who have managed to escape and tell their stories. Argentina is a country of origin, transit and destination for men, women and children victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labour. Argentinian women, girls and children, especially from rural areas or northern provinces, are forced into prostitution inside the country. Additionally, a significant number of foreign women and children, mainly from Paraguay and Dominican Republic, are victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation within Argentina. There are no official national statistics on missing women, but some organizations estimate the number of about 400 per year. In December 2012 the National Law 26.842 against trafficking was enacted. In Argentina, 98% of victims of sexual exploitation are women, and of these, 72% are over 18 years old.4 According to the Ministry of Justice since 2008 over 4,600 victims have been released in more than 2,100 raids across the country.

4. Statistics from the Fiscal Assistance Unit for Research in kidnappings and Trafficking (UFASE) and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Criminal and Social Sciences (Inecip).

RAMONA “PELI” MERCADO

From La Rioja, Argentina. She disappeared at 13 years old. There were some clues but she has not been found yet. This happened in 2005. She went to the capital of La Rioja to study at the secondary school. Not long after, she was taken from the door of her house, or near there.

SUSANA BETKER

Susana Betker disappeared when she was 17 years old. Her friends told her mother Margarita, that Susana left with the ‘boy’ who forced her into prostitution. A year later she was found dead in an apartment on Tucumán street (Buenos Aires).

DANA

Dana was born on October 1987, and was killed in November 20 years later. She was kidnapped and prostituted in Olavarria, Province of Buenos Aires. She tried to escape with her daughter but her pimp (father of the girl) killed her. Today the girl is in custody of the pimp’s family. Her maternal grandmother struggles to get her granddaughter back.

Dealing with violence against women in Argentina, these projects capture in a particular way situations and modes which are common to most Latin American countries and elsewhere. These kind of projects are crucial not just for academic analysis but also for its contribution to public denunciation and political action.

FEMICIDE

Agustina Ciccola, Gisela Orieta and Valentina Stutzin are working on a photographic project on cases of femicide in Argentina, where gender violence has increased with fatal consequences. The only official statistic is provided by the NGO La Casa del Encuentro, an observatory that investigates cases of femicide in the country by following the news. In the period from January 31 to December 31, 2013, it was recorded 295 femicides and related femicides of women and girls, as well as 39 related femicides of men and boys.3 Accordingly, every 30 hours a woman was murdered by gender-based violence in Argentina. Since the observatory was formed in 2008, there have been 1236 femicides in five years (2008-2013), 95 related femicides of men and boys. In 2011 they began to record the children who lost their mother. In two years 703 children were collateral victims of femicide.

In a similar way to Cecilia’s work, in this case photography is an exercise of the memory, which speaks of the presence of the victims through the remembrances of their families.

3. “Femicidios vinculados” or related femicides, according to the NGO, are those murders perpetrated while trying to kill a woman (for instance a person that is killed as a result of trying to stop the attack).

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Dictatorship, Exile and Chilean Literature: An Interview With Grínor RojoValentina Alvarez: PhD Sociology Student Felipe Lagos: PhD candidate Sociology

What is the importance of Historia Crítica de la Literatura Chilena for both the academy and the current society in Chile?

Historia Crítica is a project foreseen a long time ago, but which was finally started by Carol Arcos and myself three years ago. We realised that Chile didn’t have an in-depth history of its literature, despite the great importance that literature has in our cultural field — among other things, because of the two Nobel prizes of Gabriela Mistral in 1945 and Pablo Neruda in 1971. There are previous historical accounts, true, with merit but basic, only apt for secondary teaching and not much further.

Our project wanted to go further into that, recognizing for instance the need to give a collective character to the work and thus summoning major scholars, from both within Chile and abroad, to its accomplishment.

Conversely, several countries in Latin America already have works of this nature. I mention just three cases which I know well: a) in the Argentine case, there are several histories of the national literature, the last being the one directed by Noé Jitrik which has now achieved its twelfth volume. b) in the Brazilian case, there exists the history titled A literatura no Brasil in six

Last October, Grínor Rojo was invited to give the talk ‘Literature in Times of Exception: Dictatorship and the Chilean Novel’ at Birkbeck. Rojo is a Chilean scholar of Literature and Latin American Studies in the Universidad de Chile, with a wide trajectory and several publications concerning Latin American culture, authors and processes, but also critical theory and literary criticism. Some of his most important books are: Diez tesis sobre la crítica1 (‘Ten Theses on Critique’), Globalización e identidades nacionales y postnacionales… ¿De qué estamos hablando?2 (‘Globalization and National and Postnational Identities… What Are We Talking About?), Las armas de las letras. Ensayos neoarielistas3 (The Arms of Letters. Neo-Arielist Essays’) and Clásicos latinoamericanos: para una relectura del canon4 (‘Latin American Classics: for a re-Reading of the Canon’). The talk offered at Birkbeck focused on the period and themes related to the Chilean dictatorship. This subject is part of his latter research for the Historia Crítica de la Literatura Chilena (‘Critical History of the Chilean Literature’, forthcoming in 5 volumes), of which Rojo is also the chief coordinator.

1 . Rojo, G. (2006) Diez Tesis sobre la crítica. Santiago: LOM Ediciones.

2 . Rojo. G. (2006). Globalización e identidades nacionales y postnacionales… ¿De qué estamos hablando? Santiago: LOM Ediciones.

3 . Rojo. G. (2008). Las armas de las letras. Ensayos neoarielista. Santiago: LOM Ediciones.

4 . Rojo. G. (2011). Clásicos latinoamericanos: para una relectura del canon. Two volumes. Santiago: LOM Ediciones.

volumes, directed by Afranio Couthino during the fifties and sixties. The latter was complemented more recently by História concisa da literatura brasileira by Alfredo Bosi, whose first date of edition is 1976 and which was translated into Spanish and published by Fondo de Cultura Económica in 1982; and c) Hacia una historia de la literatura centroamericana (2008-2010), a project developed in Costa Rica but for a Guatemalan editorial house for scholars Werner Mackenbach and Valeria Grinberg, with four volumes published and two in preparation. As it is evident, there is nothing particularly new in our project, and rather it attempts to contribute to the cultural development of the country – just as those I mentioned earlier are doing.

The outcome has been a critical history of the Chilean literature in five volumes, in which about 200 scholars collaborated and that embraces the colonial period, the independence and the formation of national state (1810-1870), the first modernity (1870-1920), the second one (1920-1973) and the third (1973 until now). It should be published at the end of this year. We are convinced that literature is part of the Chilean cultural heritage, and therefore know that it remains indispensable for the making of its citizens.

Your last talk at Birbeck was entitled ‘Literature in Times of Exception: Dictatorship in the Chilean Model’. In that conference you acknowledged some topics about novels written during exile. In your opinion, what are the most relevant examples of this field, concerning their thematics, structures of feeling and, overall, what do they contribute to the understanding of dictatorial processes?

The Chilean novel written in exile represents a chapter within the Chilean novel of the dictatorship (1973-1990) and post-dictatorship (since 1990 onwards), being one of its best expressions. First, in accordance with the Catholic Church’s estimations, one and a half million people left the country due to Pinochet’s politics. In those days Chile had a total population of eleven million, hence around ten percent of the Chilean population left the country, either voluntarily or under threat. The Chilean exile was massive and spread along different countries, facing different circumstances. Some exiled within Latin America, in Venezuela, Costa Rica and Mexico; others went to North America, Canada as well as the U.S; Europe, Spain, Germany, France and especially to Sweden and the Socialist countries in the east (in East Germany Chileans where in large number); in Australia and New Zealand; some of them even went to African countries like Ivory Coast.

It is therefore no surprise that given these circumstances a particular culture was produced and, within it, a Chilean Literature of Exile. Although I have only worked with the sub genre of novels, I can say that there are novels of exile in Mexico, Canada, both Germanies, in Russia, Spain, Sweden and Australia. These novels look towards the writer´s birth country as well as to the country now hosting him or her. In this second case, the main topic is the condition of exiled person, as someone who is not a tourist but an immigrant forced to leave his mother country, willing for a political transformation that allows him to return. When this return finally occurs, a new chapter is opened: that of desexilio (literally: undo-exile). It is the chapter of uneasiness and turbulences of reinsertion and re-adaptation into a country that is no longer the same to that of ten or fifteen years ago.

With regards to the actual cultural policies, what is, from your perspective, the current state of Latin American cultural studies?

I believe that an answer to the question of the motivations that led to a rising interest in cultural studies in the field of Latin American humanities should be situated at two different levels. On the one side, I think it responds to a global trend in which intersect at least three different factors. Firstly, the impoverishment of literature (and in general of the arts) from the 1950’s onwards (more exactly, after end of WWII). If in the Soviet bloc the aridity of the socialist realism dominated, the bloc led by the United States imposed an intensification of the process of conversion of arts into commodity). Secondly, we should keep in mind the recent revolution of information and communication technologies, what have led some to claim “the death of the book”, the era of replacement of text by image; and thirdly, and to some extent as a consequence of all the above said, a theorization that insistently advertises a discredit of humanities as a consequence of the discredit of its philosophical basis — the humanism — as well as the end of history, that of the so called ‘grand narratives’. Together, these factors trigger a global phenomenon that erodes the knowledge of art (especially, knowledge of literature) and its replacement by cultural studies. In other words, the specific difference of arts and literature, its relevance as such in the construction of the subjects (indeed, the same notion of subject is into question), has been blurred.

On the other side — and now in our Latin American scenario — dictatorships first and the neoliberal globalizations within or after them, generated a contradiction with the knowledge of art that encourages indiscipline and innovation as principles. It is not surprising that, together with social sciences, humanities languish in our universities. The dictatorships and post-dictatorships (although the post prefix does not mean change but continuity), do not feel any sympathy for them. Even though its study is maintained, it avoids the essential and highlights the accidental. This is the worst version of metropolitan cultural studies. Furthermore, they have very little or indeed no relation to the studies of culture in our own (Latin American) tradition that since the 19th century onwards was inaugurated through unique written words of Sarmiento, Martí, Rodó, Mariátegui, Henríquez Ureña, Alfonso Reyes, Ángel Rama and many others.

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La Siberia: An Audiovisual Exploration On Memory’s TwilightGerrit Stollbrock: MA Critical and Creative Analysis, Sociology

Starting its life as a documentary film, La Siberia is an audiovisual research project that approaches the social memory of an extinct industrial town in Colombia while exploring the paradoxes of its representation. In fact, it would also later involve a theoretical inquest on memory representation in documentary films. Based on its results, the audiovisual dimension has recently mutated into a more complex project that comprises video installation and web platform, both nurtured by a wider participatory process. The interweaving of audiovisual research and theoretical reflection has been a response to experience-based findings related to complexities of past representation, and has therefore played a significant role in the project’s development.

LA SIBERIA AS A DOCUMENTARY FILM

La Siberia is an 86-minute independent documentary film I made along with Ivan Sierra. The filming process started in July 2010, and after three years the final cut is currently being sent to festivals.1

I knew beforehand the role that La Siberia, a small industrial town near Bogotá, has played in the life of La Calera, a town five minutes away and in which 18.000 inhabitants live. Moreover, La Siberia played a key role in the development of urban Colombia: built in Bogotá’s rural surroundings in 1929, its construction involved a titanic effort that yielded the building of new transport infrastructure. Additionally, it was the most important cement supplier during Bogota’s urban explosive growth during the mid-twentieth century.

1 . La Siberia is currently being sent to festival and is, thus, not available on the Internet. However the trailer can be watched at: https://vimeo.com/100561369

La Siberia, the documentary, was born after an unexpected confrontation with the astounding ruins of La Siberia, the town, just 10 years after its abrupt closing. Where did all that ‘magnificent’ past go? Would anybody remember it? How will former inhabitants, if still alive, feel about La Siberia? In discussion with Ivan Sierra, the documentary was born as a response to an urge to explore these questions. Nonetheless, it became clear very soon that the project would comprise important challenges related to memory representation. First, how could we represent 70 years of the history of La Siberia, something that would involve the memories of thousands of former inhabitants and workers?

A second dimension intensified these challenges: given the ‘paternalistic’ corporate model of the town (which is manifest throughout the dialogues in the film) and the prominent role La Siberia had played in La Calera’s development, the town’s demolition and the closure of the cement plant in 1998 came out as a ‘loss’ for former inhabitants.2 The filming involved, thus, a process of mourning that made each character become important and each memory to be significant.

The long filming process — 160 hours of rushes — partially compensated a feeling of ‘failure’ entailed by these challenges. However, they appeared more strongly while editing: as a narrative device with significant duration constraints, the film implied dismissing a huge amount of memories, each of them being equally relevant on its own.

Later on, I would conceptualize the attempt to approach these ‘impossible’ challenges as twilight: since built in between the impossibility to represent the past and the need to narrate it, these challenges might be at the core of past representation. However, beyond our effort to face those challenges, it seems that we refused to renounce representing La Siberia’s existence. Indeed, the film name, at the end, is ‘La Siberia’. The final inscription before credits reads: “In the memory of La Siberia, of those who worked and lived there”.

2 . This is visible in the film, to the extent that some characters refer to La Siberia’s closure as the “death of a mother” (La Siberia, 66’06’’). The story of Don Abelino, an iconic character of La Siberia who died of “grief” short after leaving the cement plant, also makes this manifest (La Siberia, 70’10” to 71’24’”).

TWILIGHT REPRESENTATION: A THEORETICAL EXPLORATION

This filmmaking experience triggered the need to theoretically comprehend the challenges of past representation.3 I will briefly review the findings of my research.4 While doing theoretical research, I first engaged with the poststructuralist critique of history, particularly Lyotard’s ‘paradox of the immemorial’.5 It was indeed the most disturbing formulation of the challenges for representation I was able to find. According to this ‘paradox’, every attempt to represent the past is condemned to fail because “all memory in the traditional sense of representation […] involves and spreads the forgetting of the terror without origin that motivates it”.6 Although Lyotard’s initial formulation seems to be directed towards the representation of trauma, it might be extrapolated to representation of the past in general: in fact, despite the strong selection processes and the material constraints that determine its production, it comprises an ambition towards a “totalising description”.7 Thus, it implies the forgetting of what remains unrepresented.

The logical consequence of this paradox seemed to be what Guerin and Hallas call ‘iconoclasm’:8 to renounce to any form of past representation.

3 .In my dissertation I characterized the epistemological process involved as ‘abduction’ in Pierce’s sense: “You observe a fact […]. In order to explain and understand this, you cast about it in your mind for some general theory, explanation, flash, and so forth. The process of abduction takes place between the result and the rule, and concludes with the positing of a hopefully satisfactory hypothesis” (Harrovitz, N. (1988), ‘The Nature of the detective model’. In: Eco, U. and Sebeok, T.A. (eds.) The sign of tree: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce. Indiana:Indiana University Press, p. 183).

4 . I started this research while doing the MA in Critical and Creative Analysis at Goldsmiths College, Department of Sociology. The complete argument is contained in my dissertation Twilight: an experience-based exploration on memory in documentary film.

5 . Lyotard, J.F. (1990), Heidegger and ‘the jews’. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

6 . Ibid., p. 28, italics added.

7 . Christodoulidis, E. (2001), ‘Law’s immemorial’ in Christodoulidis, E. and Veitch, S. (eds.) Lethe’s Law. Justice, Law and Ethics in Reconciliation. Oxford: Hart Publishing.

8 . Guerin, F. and Hallas, R. (2007), The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

Documentary film seems particularly condemned to be the most extreme manifestation of this ‘paradox of the immemorial’. First, it gains from photography the power of being a physical trace of the past: according to Barthes’ famous formulation, the essence of photography is characterized as a ‘that-has-been’.9 Following Pierce’s categories on signs, photography would be mainly indexical instead of iconic.10 In fact, it implies the need of its referent to be meaningful, as it happens with a

9 . Barthes, R. (1993), Camera Lucida, Vintage Classics, p. 84.

10 . Pierce, C.S. (1894), ‘What is a sign?, available: http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep2/ep2book/ch02/ep2ch2.htm

Still frame from La Siberia 1: the ruins

Sequence from La Siberia 1: the dismantling of an iconic tower

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thermometer: its signs only make sense if they refer to the temperature conditions outside.11 Because ‘indexicality’ lies at the core of documentary film discourse,12 this mode of representation is in itself built upon a past’s trace.

Additionally, if filmic representation is a “synthesis of various modes of representation which closely mimic the modes of mental representation”13 when it comes to ‘realist’ historical films, it occurs that a full battery of signs are enlisted.14 Indeed, the use of archive images that hold the indexical features mentioned above, the ‘objective’ voice over, and the interviewing of ‘experts and eyewitnesses’ attempt to create the illusion of what Barthes calls the ‘absolute presence’:15 The absent past seems to be completely at hand, accessible for the viewer.

Documentary films of the past therefore paradoxically trigger the forgetting of what remains unrepresented, unfilmed.16 On the other hand, the process of ‘working-through’ the past would make a representation of that past urgent.17 Indeed, in psychoanalytical

11 . Pierce, C.S. (1931), ‘Three types of reasoning’ in The Collected Papers Vol. V: Pragmatism and Pramaticism. Available: http://www.textlog.de/peirce_pragmatism.html

12 . Nichols, B. (1991), Representing Reality. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

13 . McDougall, David (1992), ‘Films of Memory’. Visual Anthropology Review, 8 (1), 29-37.

14 . Bruzzi, S. (2000), New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, p. 44.

15 . Cited in Lupton, C. (2005), Chris Marker: Memories of the Future. London: Reaktion Books, London.

16 . This has been one of the main criticisms against realism in historical documentary films. See Bruzzi op.cit.; Hansen (1996) ,‘Schindler´s List is not Shoah’. In Critical Inquiry 22(2), 292-312, University of Chicago Press; ch, J. (2005), After Image: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. Philadelphia Temple University Press; and Walker, J. (2005), Trauma cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press.

17 . LaCapra, D. (1999), ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’ in Critical Inquiry, 25(4), 696-722, University of Chicago Press.

terms, ‘iconoclasm’, the impossibility of representation, could be considered as ‘melancholic’ — how could we filmmakers approach to the past without ‘failing’?

I focussed on searching for theoretical responses to Lyotard’s paradox. First, the broad debates on trauma representation in general18 and on documentary films dealing with trauma in particular,19 provided me with some hints. Namely, a certain level of representational ‘failure’ is necessary in the process; avant-garde or ‘modernist’ cinema explored it in its “attempt to formally reproduce for a spectator the experience of suddenly seeing the unthinkable”.20 Nevertheless, in my opinion the main theoretical lack is that, even if they seem to presuppose it, these authors do not approach explicitly the fact that, at the end of the day, these are representations – nor does Lyotard when introducing the concept of the ‘sublime’ into the discussion. While insisting on the urge to break realist conventions, these authors do not fully describe the risk of renouncing to representation as the opposite force to deal with it, iconoclasm, and ‘melancholia’ as its psychoanalytical mirror. In consequence, I found it necessary to formulate the concept of twilight representation, which could grasp the pendulous movements between iconoclasm and realism that lie at the core of the complexities of past representation. I defined it as a representation of the past that is simultaneously capable of exposing its own failure. Indeed, it involves some level of reflexivity, a second-order statement regarding the fragility of representation, which allows it to hold the equilibrium between iconoclasm and realism. This concept also has a psychoanalytical counterpart, as suggested by Hirsch:21 it would enable the process of mourning in the balance between identification with the lost object (melancholia) and the realist evasion of trauma it pursues.

18 . Gerin and Hallas op.cit.

19 . Hirsh, op.cit. and Walker op.cit.

20 . Hirsh, ibid, p. 19, italics added.

21 . Hirsch, M. (1999), ‘Proyected Memory: Holocaust photographs in personal and public fantasy’ in Bal, M., Crewe, J. and Spitzer, L. (Eds.), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover: University Press of New England.

A further development of the argument focussed on analysing how twilight representation could be applied in documentary film. Various authors have suggested that, even if archival images comprise indexical features, following Barthes, these images tend to lose their indexical referent and become an icon of past representation.22 Their iconic meaning covers the factual absence of what remains unrepresented, reviving thus the threat of the ‘paradox of the immemorial’. Therefore, in the context of documentary film, a twilight representation comprises, first, what I have called the indexical reassurance of archival images. This feature comprises a reflexive statement regarding the filmic device that allows turning the indexical quality visible.23

On the other hand, twilight representation in documentary film involves the deferred action24 as another main feature. It is a narrative device that makes explicit the film’s present, emphasizing thus the unsurmountable ‘difference’ between that present and the past it intends to approach.

22 . Didi-Huberman (2008), Images in spite of all. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Haggith, Toby (2005), Filming the liberation in Bergen-Belsen in Holocaust and the moving image: representations in film and television since 1933. London: Wallflower Press, London; and Winston, Brian (2012), ‘Ca va de soi: The visual representation of the Holocaust’. In Ten Brink, J. and Oppenheimer, J. (eds.) Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory, and the Performance of Violence, New York: Wallflower Press.

23 . The initial sequence of Marker’s San Soleil is an eloquent example: while watching that well-known image of three girls walking in a green landscape, the narrator reminds us that the image is just a very concrete indexical trace: “three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965” and nothing more.

24 . Renov based on Freud’s concept. Renov, M. (2004) The subject of documentary. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Freud, S. (1915), ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV. London: The Hogarth Press, London.

Still frame from La Siberia 2: Archival film from Siberia, Russia, used in the film

Stillframe from La Siberia 3: former workers walking through twilight within the ruins

Accordingly, it avoids any realist attempt to represent the past ‘as it was’.25

Finally, the theoretical research explored this framework in two films I made, analyzing with it various visual and narrative strategies. The final cut of La Siberia, in particular, might seem a twilight representation to a certain extent, because it explores two sides of the act of remembering La Siberia: its success and failure.

On the one hand, the inhabitant’s excitement when encountering a huge ‘trace’ of their past unleashes an elegiac narration built up by a polyphony of voices from the characters. Along with the use of video and photographic archive of former inhabitants, the film intends to become a bridge to explore the collective memory of this town. Since the film supports an elegiac tone, the narrated events and the use of private archives from former inhabitants could be thought to be mainly iconic. There are indeed only a few indexical links between specific factual events and the narration as well as those archive images. Consequently, it may trigger the immemorial, as argued before.

Nonetheless, other filmic strategies may allow us to consider it a twilight representation. Regarding archival images, the use of footage of Russian Siberia intends to be a visual mirror of memory’s exaggerations and its presence in the film is made explicit through the use of a time code.26 On the other hand, the testimony fragments of the former workers reveal memory’s

25 . All Hirsch, Lyotard and Walker concur that an exemplary film in this sense is Lanzmann´s Shoah, which steadily underscores the gap between the past, the Holocaust itself, and film´s present. The visuals’ main strategy is the filming of empty, almost ruined, concentration camps. The interviews, on the other hand, keep on making visible oblivions and silences.

26 . See the Stillframe from La Siberia 2 above.

failures, disclosing thus the impossibility of recalling the past. Furthermore, a large amount of interviews take place inside the ruins, underscoring them as ‘deferred action’. The visual play of the former workers being ‘ghosts’ while they walk the ruins attempts to insinuate their paradoxical presence: not in the past, not in the present either.

“LA SIBERIA: TO REMEMBER WHILE ONE FORGETS”, AN IMMINENT PROJECT

Following the former argument, La Siberia might seem a twilight representation. However, we did not approach some of the initial filmmaking challenges. As a matter of fact, there was a collision between the documentary film’s narrative commitments and the fact that so much footage was left aside, so many former inhabitants did not even participate in it, and so many memories remained buried. La Siberia seemed a still unfinished endeavour.

The theoretical reflections presented above, on the one hand, and the urge to further engage with La Siberia and its audiovisual archive, on the other, came together while formulating a new project: “La Siberia: to remember while one forgets”. It was conceived for the Museo Efímero del Olvido (‘Ephemeral Museum of the Oblivion’), a curatorial project of art exhibition platform Salón Regional de

Artistas Zona Centro in Colombia.27 Still in progress, this project is a device made up by a video-installation and a web platform, aiming to explore the tensions between remembering and forgetting involved in documentary film as metaphor of narrative memory. For La Siberia’s narrative articulation of memories is only made possible by the ‘forgetting’ of hundreds of other bits of memory, which remain buried in our audiovisual archive, as well as of the millions of remembrances of other former inhabitants we never got to include while filming.

Enriched by the participation of a wider group of former inhabitants who will record new memories, both devices that are being explored through this research could be characterized as the twilight representation of La Siberia: a huge and ever-growing archive that lies behind La Siberia, the documentary film, and which is impossible to navigate or grasp, something that at the same time shows its failure as a memory device.

This project’s intertwining of audiovisual exploration and theoretical research might allow the spectators to face a representation that is closer to the twilight experience of approaching La Siberia as outsiders. However, it might also be possible to explore if twilight representation as a concept does grasp the experience of former inhabitants towards La Siberia, as well as the role that La Siberia, the documentary and then the art project, have played so far. If the past’s traces live through their infinite possible transformations, this could be a further mutation of La Siberia in the future.

27 . http://efimero.org/project/gerrit-stollbrock-e-ivan-sierra-la-siberia-recuerda-al-olvidar/

Stillframe from La Siberia 4: Photographic image that accompanies the elegiac narration

Sequence from La Siberia 2: a former worker walking the ruins

Still frame of La Siberia 5: oblivion of a former worker

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Spaces, Temporalities And Altiplanic Colours1

Rosario Fernandez: PhD candidate Sociology, Goldsmiths; andJocelyne Rodríguez Droguett: Photographer, Las Niñas Collective.

The religious festivities the ‘Virgin of Carmen, La Tirana’ and the ‘Virgin of Socavon, Carnaval of Oruro’ become unique cultural practices to understand — through dances, colours and materialities — how different temporalities are enacted in the present, citing a collective memory of a diverse, hybrid and complex Altiplanic territory.2 The first festivity takes place in the north of Chile and the second in Bolivia. Both represent moments of trans-spatial and trans-temporal cultural exchange where pre Incan, colonial and ‘modern’ rhythms are invited, represented and tensioned, allowing the production and reproduction of cultural, ethnic and territorial identities beyond nation-state borders. Therefore, these practices not only create a trans-territorial Altiplanic stage where beliefs and traditions are mobilized from Bolivia to Chile and other parts of Latin American highlands, they also enact a trans-temporal scenario that updates several temporalities through music, dance and colours.

1. Paper inspired on the findings in Roríguez Droguett, J. 2008. Espejismos Danzantes. Estudio iconográfico de la indumentaria presente en las Festividades Altiplánicas de la Fiesta de la Virgen del Carmen de la Tirana y de la Fiesta de la Virgen del Socavón — Carnaval de Oruro en Bolivia. Santiago: Fondo Nacional de la Cultura y Las Artes.2. The feast of La Tirana, like other religious festivities in the Andes Altiplanic region (Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile and Bolivia) have a common aesthetic and religious origin (Carnaval of Oruro) and are related to agricultural cycles. Over time these festivities have mixed with the Catholic religion.

Across these celebrations, an Andean space emerges and challenges the boundaries of nation states, boundaries that were influenced by British economic interests in nitrate production in early 20th century and that left Bolivia with no access to the sea. The festivities create — through dance, costumes and colours — new distinctions, transmit memories and stories and re-articulate local meanings of myths on the origin of the world, the social roles of its inhabitants, as well as the characters (as the ones in the photographs) that are setup in the feats and their indissoluble relation to the cycle of nature.

Photo 1: Oruro Carnival, 2004/2007Photograph by: Jocelyne Rodríguez Droguett

Colour is a distinctive aspect of understanding the spatial/temporal articulation of these festivities. Colours build a bridge between perception and visualization, which becomes the substrate for individuals and groups to arbitrarily draw tensions and metaphors about the world. Thus, colour promotes sensations and temperatures that cause feelings and transmit messages. Colour is a plastic and linguistic language in the Altiplanic zone; a message that through its distribution, tonal intensity, lines and organization, provides different ideas. An ‘Altiplanic colour’ emerges, which is exposed on other elements that constitute a continent of meanings, deployed on costumes and objects within which various temporalities and places, and even differences between ethnic groups, are articulated.

Photo 2: La Tirana Carnival, 2004/2007Photograph by: Jocelyne Rodríguez Droguett

We can think of ‘Altiplanic colours’ as a mixture of pre-Inca, colonial and ‘modern’ traditions, colours that are able to tie, tense and blend these temporalities, which are freed from their ‘purity’ to be combined through costumes and trans-spatial dances. For example, the colours of the costumes become objects of creation that transports cultural meanings and spaces, which in turn serve as means of distinctions. Costumes function as visual and mobile texts that travel between geographical and visual areas of the Altiplano as they link traditional pre — and postcolonial meanings through the use of natural pigments and weaving techniques. The colours used in these celebrations do not have an immutable meaning since different combinations of styles provide us with new forms and information.

For example, colours become relevant when designing the costumes as each colour has a symbolic component. Thus, flat colours (photo 2) and two-tone costumes (photo 3) hold a particular meaning that accounts for traditional symbols found since pre-Columbian times, identifying both colour distribution in the fabric production process up until today.

The tonal contrast, meanwhile, creates meanings connecting the optical aspects with the myths of the creation of the Andean world, combining concepts of the present and the past, where the dark time (no sun) is the representation of the magical and divinity world, and the time of light becomes the world of humanity. Thus, each year colours and costumes gain a key position for the dancers of the festivities, when prior to carnival time they make the costumes for their dances. Every year the fabrics reproduce syncretic mythology that despite the passage of time, market demands and capitalists circuits, remains a fundamental fabric for the normal and ritual operations of the Andean communities. In this sense, these fabrics, the colours used, and the rhythms enact in the present ancestral myths and current forms of communication.

Photo 3: Oruro Carnival, 2004/2007Photograph by: Jocelyne Rodríguez Droguett

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This conference — organised by the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy — took place at Goldsmiths in May 2014. It was an opportunity for people from different disciplines and centres in the UK and abroad to debate a topic well studied in the UK, but not always in dialogue with the Latin American contexts; namely, democracy and political transformations. The conference focused on what has been described as the ‘pink tide’ in Latin America. It is surely a mixed picture. Radical movements run the risk of being co-opted once they begin to work with state officials and politicians, a possibility that has been realised in at least some cases (the Workers’ Party in Brazil for example). But in principle radical movements may also alter how ‘the centre’ is conceived and positioned (the Chilean students’ movement seems to be unfolding in this way).

The idea behind this conference was first and foremost to think about social theory and how we do it from a position that is at least to one side of ‘Eurocentrism’ — even if it could not be outside it altogether. It was also a chance to think a bit differently for those of us who persist in situating ourselves ‘on the Left’ — though of course what that means is always in contention. In Europe and the US in recent years, it is the anarchist grassroots democracy of the ‘Occupy’ that has provided radical inspiration. ‘Occupy’ is appealing in part because its structural form and its content seem to go so well together: nothing is proposed in terms of campaign that is not democratically decided by those who will take action. By extension, it is implied that those who decide and who take action are also those affected by the issues at the heart of their campaigns. In this sense, Occupy is revolutionary.

However, many of the campaigns discussed whilst the City of London and Wall Street in New York were occupied in 2011-2012 focused on taxation and the distribution of revenues, the regulation of banking, the value of public systems of health-care and education, and so on. In other words, they were actually at least as ‘reformist’ as they were ‘revolutionary’ — as concerned with how the state and economy should be

structured along social democratic lines as with the ethics of living a truly democratic way of life. More recently, Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece also seem to combine revolutionary movements and the possibility of moving institutions to the Left through reform. These two parties have provided a space for new voices and projects that challenge not just economic and social policies but also prevailing common sense in Europe.

It is in this context that Latin America is an especially important context. There, ‘reform’ and ‘revolution’ are quite clearly in a continuum. Grassroots movements of workers, peasants, indigenous people, women, students and fellow citizens organise to address the state directly, to change laws and public policies, to make use of the social rights and the protections for cultural diversity that are now part of constitutions in some countries of the continent. Although the context in which people mobilise is often harsh, energy and hope are directed towards changing the way in which people are governed by national and local institutions. This is what has been nowadays called the ‘pink tide’ of social democracy in Latin America. Perhaps the clearest aim of these processes is to realise the Bolivian slogan buen vivir (‘good living’), which has echoed around the world.

Radicalism And Reform In Latin AmericaProfessor Kate Nash: Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media & Democracy Valentina Alvarez: PhD Sociology student; Rosario Fernandez: PhD candidate Sociology; Felipe Lagos: PhD candidate Sociology; and Lieta Vivaldi: PhD Sociology student

The Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy, Goldsmiths

Radicalism and Reform in Latin AmericaMonday 12 May11am-6pm (Reception 6-7) Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building, GoldsmithsThe ‘pink tide’ in Latin America is an opportunity to learn about the relationship between radicalism and reform – which tends to be neglected in debates over anarchism on the one hand, and the technocratic governance of globalisation on the other.

•SueBrandford,LatinAmericanBureau(TBC)

•ParEngstrom,UCL

•JuanPabloFerrero,Bath

•JoeFoweraker,Oxford

•RobertoGargarella,BuenosAires

•OscarGuardiola-Ribera,Birkbeck

•MaxineMolyneux,UCL(TBC)

•CarlaMoscoso,Cambridge

•HilaryWainwright,RedPepper

•AlvaroSanchez,EmbassyofVenezuela

•SilvioWaisbord,GeorgeWashington

Of course, one of the first things that Silvio Waisbord and Joe Foweraker, our opening speakers, questioned as experts on Latin American movements and public policy was the idea of the ‘pink tide’ as such. Waisbord has worked for many years on media and public policy in Latin America, and Foweraker on social movements and citizenship. It was perhaps inevitable that as experts, they would be at least as concerned with differences between countries on the continent as with similarities. Both also wanted to engage with which they see as a rather romantic idea of what is going on, and with the continuing dangers of populism: charismatic individuals like Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales by-pass safeguards on representative democracy using rhetorical appeals to ‘the people’. Waisbord emphasised that regulation of the media is necessary to enable independence from government censorship, not just from monopoly capitalism. Foweraker, along with pointing out the unaccountability of many Latin American states, emphasised the protection of freedoms to protest as vital to making people’s social problems visible to other citizens, not just to governments. It is clear that one important outcome of protests is that media ownership has become a matter of public debate.

Debate over the continuing control, repression, and censorship by governments in Latin America continued throughout the day. In fact, in many respects debates became polarised, especially after the talk by Venezuelan Charge d’Affaires, Alvaro Sanchez. While Sanchez emphasised how his government had ended capitalist monopoly of the media and fostered anti-racism and inclusivity, others challenged its record on political prisoners and censorship. In his talk on Latin American constitutions, Roberto Gargarella stressed that they continue to enable repression in the name of security even as they appear to enshrine social and indigenous rights. He insisted that Latin American constitutional reforms must address the historic concentration of power in the Executive. It is very difficult for protest movements to claim social and collective rights in practice if they regularly meet with state violence.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera discussed another tension in democratic constitution-making in countries such as Bolivia or Ecuador. He pointed to their hybridity: they bring together ‘Ameridian perspectivism’ and notions such as buen vivir with conceptions of human rights. At the same time, the context in which they are made continues to be structured by post-colonial dependency. This means that although some countries have gone so far as to recognize constitutional rights to non-humans (the biosphere, Pacha Mama), at the same time ‘neo-extractivist’ policies destroy land considered sacred by the same indigenous people that governments pretend to defend. In this context, the clash between economic development — with all the teleological and Eurocentric implications of this concept — and indigenous and non-human rights becomes dramatically evident.

Throughout the course of the day, we learnt more from Carla Moscoso, Hilary Wainwright and Juan Pablo Ferrero about changing common-sense in societies with high levels of social mobilization. Movements in Latin America invariably address the state, but they do not only address the state. Carla Moscoso analysed the behaviour of media during the context of 2011 student mobilization in Chile. She concluded that concentration of media ownership and the lack of pluralism in Chile were not key factors in how the media reported on the students’ protests.

It seems rather that they were ‘forced’ to cover the development of the conflict in a rather balanced way. In this sense, the student movement’s success lies in its ability to capture a certain ‘spirit of society’ and to begin to transform the common sense. Hilary Wainwright’s analysis of the protests in Brazil in 2013, which brought together for the first time trade unions, student movements, and the MST (Landless Workers Movement), was more pessimistic. In this case tensions between social movements – which dream of sharing power democratically – clashed with elites in political institutions whose primary goal was ‘social order’.

Juan Pablo Ferrero examined social imaginaries and mobilisation in Argentina and Brazil that during the 1990s developed an anti-establishment inherent component through the notion of ‘anti-neoliberalism’. In doing so, he argued these mobilisations contributed to shift national politics to the left. In contrast, he pointed to the emergence over the past decade of new imaginaries associated more to institutions rather than to social problems that challenge in turn the bases of existing political identities, and building a new limit to democratic struggles today in the region.

Throughout the day we learned much about how the relationship between institutional reformism and revolutionary movements is being worked out in different contexts. It is clear that there is much to learn from studying Latin American politics – something which is now becoming evident with the rise of nationalist-populist political parties in Europe: Podemos in particular has been learning directly from Latin American ideas and experiences.

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In The Art of Post-Dictatorship. Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina, Goldsmiths’ Professor of Sociology Vikki Bell looks into the traumatic Argentine dictatorship and its aftermaths in a so-called transitional period up until today. As the title indicates, the approach to this long process focuses on artistic practices which are nonetheless engaged with ethical and moral questions and inquiries. Bell unfolds the critical contents of a varied series of artworks — such as drawings, sculptures, paintings, photographs, films and montages, but also public speeches and architectural and urban arrangements — by means of stimulating reflections on the interventions those works may contribute within the normative realm. Most of these artworks pertain to the period between the last dictatorship (1976-1983) and today, and all of them relate in some way or another to themes of justice, truth and retrieval by the State’s violation of human rights. In doing so, they join in problematizing the limits and tensions of institutional measures addressed to ‘deal with the past’ by the same State-apparatus which perpetrated illegitimate violations; thus, these artworks enable a broader — that is, not just legally-centered — comprehension of the interplay among the law, the ethical and the aesthetic.

Bell offers a suggestive reading of Foucault’s idea of ‘aesthetics of existence’, which are those “attempt[s] to live meaningfully in the gap between past and future” (3), that is, to live undertaking the fact of belonging to the present as a task, a duty, hence bearing a critical attitude towards the power structures governing our present — time lives. In post-dictatorship societies, this responsibility with a past that spectrally haunts the present — and that, through that present, casts its own shadows on possible futures– gives form to an ethos, understood in terms of the entwining of ethics and aesthetics as a mode of critique. The artistic interventions gathered in the book are thus fully-engaged attempts to disquiet

the realm of nomos, those normative worlds in which people come to understand themselves. Therefore, Bell’s work has “less emphasis on narrative forms, and a broader sense on how and where the nomos is constituted” (6). Inasmuch as it is the knotty intermingling of law and morality, what is at stake in post-dictatorship processes, the artworks selected by Bell allow an exploration of Argentina’s contradictory ‘transitional justice’ from the standpoint of the entanglement between ethics and aesthetics as a mode of living in the present, in the gap between past and future: a gap which is therefore comprehended as a performative space of freedom.

The Art Of Post-Dictatorship. Ethics And Aesthetics In Transitional Argentina; Vikki Bell. Routledge, London & New York (2014). Felipe Lagos: PhD candidate Sociology

Book review One of the most globally well-known instances of political and human-rights demands is the call for aparición con vida!, the claim for appearance with life of the disappeared that the author explains by comparing it to the ‘What do we want?’ of British protest marches as being responded with ‘(for them to) appear alive’ (139-40). This claim is considered in Bell’s account as a form of bio-politics, that is, of the displaying of the ability to ‘make live’, to the extent that the demand for aparición con vida installs the need for its own repetition: the call itself appears as the refusal to remain silent, to forgive or obliterate those absent. In 1983, the organization Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in collaboration with some visual artists used human silhouettes instead of protesters in front of the Casa Rosada (Argentina’s national government headquarter). These silhouettes aimed to perform the impossible: the disappeared protesting against their own disappearance before the State, by-passers, and global opinion (17-19). In a similar vein, Fernando Brodsky’s photograph — an image recorded by his captors and later recovered and exposed by his brother photographer Marcelo — is regarded and analyzed as a piece of evidence of Fernando’s life at that moment. The photo asks therefore to be read from its own conditions of possibility, insofar as he was captured not so much by a camera, but first and foremost by a political regime. Therefore, the photograph itself calls to condemn the State’s activity against its citizens (26-34).

Visual artist León Ferrari’s trajectory is grasped by means of the figure of the parrhesia, the ‘courageous truth speaking’. First, what his Carta a un General (‘Letter to a General’, 1963) displays is the sense of losing the communicative power of writing. The drawing shows a letter in which the meaning of the written is hardly recognizable and what emerges is rather the text in its materiality, a web of interwoven lines and drawings resembling an indecipherable text. Bell considers Ferrari’s work as a manifestation of the material impossibility for rational critique and communication between the military in power and civil society (38-41). Conversely, the series of montages made by Ferrari to accompany the 1995 popular reprint of Nunca Más (‘Never Again’, the report into the disappearances originally submitted in 1984) in the newspaper Página/12 expresses another sense of the parrhesia. The montage is used here as a means to encourage analogy: such as those of hell and the ESMA building, or a humanized Hitler in the background of Argentina’s military junta, in order to ask the public about the nature of evil and the consequences of contemporary conformity within the given order (49-55).

In the following chapters, Bell incorporates into the account two public spaces located in Buenos Aires: the former building of the National Army and Center for Political Detention, Torture and Extermination ESMA, and the 2001 inaugurated Parque de la Memoria at the riverside of the Rio de la Plata –where many prisoners were thrown in the infamous vuelos de la muerte (‘death flights’). Both spaces show the “paradox faced by transitional justice mechanisms that need to assert legal norms as basis for a sustainable future relation between State and people through forums that require a return to the past experience of State violence” (59). In this account, ESMA is not considered a conventional museum, but rather an invitation to construct an affective itinerary through the traces of the past that the building still bears and, by means of such an itinerary, to reevaluate the present status of the past. On the other hand,

the Parque de la Memoria poses the question of the natural landscape’s conciliation with the modes of reflection required to re-evaluate recent history — “Is it possible to reconcile a desire for justice with the mode of reflection invited by a park?” (82), Bell suggestively asks. In this park, the impressive ‘Monument to the Victims of the State Terrorism’ bears the names of those officially disappeared along with several other spaces still in blank, intensifying those absences and also confronting the waters in which they likely were thrown alive. (81-94).

A similar approach is used in the examination of D2, Cordoba’s former Department of Police Intelligence and later a clandestine centre for detention, torture and extermination, today a site of memory. As in Brodsky’s work, photographs of the still ‘disappeared’ are exhibited at this site, capturing something of the machine of power and asking for their own conditions of possibilities. These photographs were not taken ‘for our eyes’ — as they were for police’s operations and records and nonetheless this is precisely the reason to ‘watch’ them today (107). They perform thus the effect of asserting and restoring that part of the population in danger of being overlooked. And as in Ferrari’s letter, the exercise is less to display a certain version of the true past than an approach to the disquieting imbalance between actual facts of violence, on the one hand, and the possibility of narrating them, on the other: an imbalance which thus problematizes the efforts for representing and exhibiting.

This is not a complete survey, but rather an attempt to tempt the reader to explore the book further by highlighting some of its elements. As I mentioned before, one of the guiding threads of the book is the idea of transitional societies applied to countries with violent and traumatic recent histories, countries in which the violence has been perpetrated by the State itself by a variety of illegitimate ways. The idea of transitional justice in those post-traumatic periods precisely points to the need to confront the past’s power as a way to conjure its possible continuing determinations upon the future. And since in this task the State remains conflicted as both the agent of violence and the site where repairing and moving further has to take place, this contradictory status may and one might say should be interrogated at the moral and ethical levels, as the artworks selected here or other samples of the ‘aesthetics of existence’ do.

And still, Bell’s treatment of the episode of the aparición con vida has brought to mind the all too similar contemporary episode of Mexico’s disappearances: the 43 students apprehended by the narcos (drug dealers), with complicity of State officers occurred in September 2014, in an event which still awaits official explanation. In ethical-practical terms, these events encourage us to consider practices of disappearing and intimidating social struggles in present-time — not only as past facts which pertain to a previous context of formal dictatorships, but rather as events still haunting the present of so-called democratic governments. On the other hand, in conceptual terms these recent events should stimulate the enlargement and reinforcement of the idea of ‘transitional societies’ beyond its formal and legal underpinnings, taking into account the dramatic diversity of forms that State-sponsored violence and terror acquire.

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Brief Reflections About The Visual Turn Felipe Palma: PhD candidate Visual Sociology

In this short text I will discuss some key issues concerning the visual turn in social sciences, showing how this turn has many times encouraged a media-determinism, in the sense that the visual is almost exclusively associated with images, as opposed to the written text. The visual turn was born as the attempt to open social researchers’ practices beyond the limits of writing, exploring new materials, such as photography or video which could give a better, more plastic account of the social world. But, as I will show, this openness too easily reduced the visual approach to a predefined set of tools and materials. To say ‘visual’ was almost exclusively associated with two-dimensional images, as if only they could give a proper account of the visible aspects of social life. In this context I propose some general guidelines for a different way to approach the visual turn highlighting that any research final outcome is overall a material exercise of translation.

In the second half of the twentieth century, many social scientists turned their attention towards objects and images of social life, scoping them as carriers of subtle and often hidden meanings of human interaction. In doing so, researchers focused on the visual aspects of things and soon a dispute between the written and the image emerged. The visual features of social life, the visual turn argued, were not acknowledgeable by writing but rather by visuality itself. The visual should therefore be brought upfront, challenging the monopoly of the written text as exclusive tool of research conduction. The point was that the social was composed by many more elements than those graspable by the written.

This turn nevertheless neglected its own desire of variation. The visual was too rapidly associated, in an almost exclusive way, with mechanically reproduced images. If the written text was framed as a logocentric tool, the visual was almost exclusively associated with photography and video. To say visual was to think of mechanical inscriptions of the rebounded light of objects and people.

Despite the controversy, the visual and the written have increasingly been integrated with each other, although the imaginary line drawn between them has not been completely erased. On the one hand stands the alphabetic inscription of the written, and on the other, the mechanic inscription of light. Both might be used as complementary, opposites or simultaneous tools of research but continue to transit through different paths.

The visual turn’s attempt to expand materialities rapidly closed over itself, defining a restricted set of devices and practices to

work with. By this simplification, the original problem was left aside. The question was not about how the social world could be translated but rather about how to legitimise the mechanically reproduced image as a valid source for social research. Two main streams came up from this effort at validation, firstly, a critical reflection around the mechanical images produced by social actors – semiology of the image — and secondly, the active production of images by social researchers, such as photo or video.

Underlying this controversy between the written and the visual rests nevertheless a simpler, but no less relevant question: How is the surrounding world figured? What kinds of inventions, devices or performances are built in order to imagine reality? Or paraphrasing Jameson1, how to stress the gap between isolated experience and a broader totality? Under this scope the visual turn should go beyond any discipline dispute, understanding that both the written text and the mechanical image are two strategies to solve a same problem. There is no real opposition but two ways of stressing the same gap. The visual should go beyond any set of specific tools, neither written nor explicitly visual, towards the general attempt to translate the world into material devices.

In this sense, the visual turn in social sciences refers us directly to the problem of creating new forms or objects to place in the world. On these matters Latour writes: ‘But as soon as you notice that each site has to pay the connection with another site through

1 . Jameson, F. (2007). Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press: USA.

THE TUPAC INKA TUNIC (1550).

Textile belonging to the last INKA (king) of Peru. It is believed that this piece of handicraft was not just a piece of clothing but also a map in a double direction: mapped the user and visualised an image of the Inka Empire. The squared motifs represented the different territorial areas, their local economy and inhabitants. At the centre stands the Inka with his army, as ultimate ruler of the Andes.

This material object is a translation of the Inka world that not only creates an image of the territory but simultaneously establishes a map of power, with the Inka at its centre. Could this aesthetic piece of work, for instance, give us some guidelines to visualise the current territorial organisation of the Andes mountain range settlements?

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some displacement, then the notion of form takes a very concrete and practical sense; a form is simply something which allows something else to be transported from one site to another. From them becomes one of the most important types of translations’.2

If, as Latour proposes, any research is the act of dragging the traces of thing from one site to another, from the observable world to a certain device (a text, an image, a statistical graph, etc.) we can ask: through which procedures, materialities and sign system translations are achieved? Social scientists’ work is that of collecting, organising and stabilising a set of traces in a concrete material device, which opens a new point of view over preexisting phenomena. This new device does not express what the phenomenon actually is (as in an essentialist model) but rather creates a possible image of it. If accepted this step by step handcraft of research outcomes we can wonder about what other kinds of graphs and materials could improve social science practices. The starting point to address these questions is, in my opinion, to conceive research final outcomes as communicative objects. By this I mean that their final goal is linking with many other actants as possible, humans or not, becoming henceforth a relevant actor in a previously set network of forces.

The visual turn is rather a material one and its goal is the construction of communicative objects to find a place in the world. These objects exist in and with the world, and their function is to stress the gap between isolated experience and a broader totality. By opening the scope of the visual, the material construction of objects stands at the heart of any research effort. It is not about creating images to join a text but rather to see research itself as the construction of a communicative final object.

The features of these communicative objects might differ from case to case but they are always constructed by superimposing a set of inscription devices towards the stabilisation of a final figure. This might be a superimposition of images, statistical data, alphabetic text or something else, but always results from a combinatory exercise of inscriptions of the world. If we agree with this constructive feature, it is then possible to ask about what kind of objects can be built. Neither the written text nor the mechanical image should be excluded in advance but neither of which should be taken for granted. Each research question should search for that materiality that better suits its goals, just as an architect does when designing a building in consonance with its surroundings. In some cases the written text will be the appropriate medium, in others the most suitable material will be the movement — image, web-design, tridimensional installation, statistics report, cartography or drawing. In this context Guggenheim3 proposes that any phenomenon should not be explained with something extra, that does not belong to the phenomena itself, imposed categories or predefined theoretical frames, but rather give an account using the elements the phenomena already have. Stay true to your materials!

To understand the visual turn under this new perspective implies a new sort of problem which mainly surrounds the question of how to define the materiality, procedure for construction and sign system that better suits the phenomena being translated. In order to sketch some initial guidelines, I would like to propose

2 . Latour, B. (2005) Resembling the Social. Oxford University Press: UK. Pp.233

3 . Guggenheim, M. (2011). “The Truth is in the Pudding”. STS-Studies Vol. 7, No 1. pp: 65

a double distinction: on the one hand, it’s the material features that define the potential circulation of the communicative object: If the written text’s main circulation is inside academic audiences, the image — movement reaches a much wider public. Or in some other cases a participatory map might circulate among the actors involved in its construction. The associative features of the object are what will give its potential for interaction with the world.

It is with others where the final object reaches its reality, its very thingness.

On the other hand, the phenomenon itself might provide us with a set of key lines and aesthetic parameters to guide the design of the final object, its construction procedures, materiality and sign system. Or as Viveiros de Castro puts it: ‘Couldn´t one shift to a perspective showing that the source of the most interesting concepts, problems, entities and agents introduced into thought by anthropological theory is in the imaginative powers of the societies — or, better, peoples and collectives — that they propose to explain? Doesn´t the originality of anthropology instead reside there — in this always equivocal but often fecund alliance between the conceptions and practices coming from the worlds of the so-called ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of anthropology?’.4

Is it possible for research practitioners to create a dialogue with its objects beyond a discursive dimension? Can the object itself inform the kind of material translation to be done by the practitioner? In my opinion I would say yes, of course, but this demands cautious observation and openness, not just to the contents of what is observed, but also to the aesthetic features through which those contents are expressed.

In the context of Latin American studies this proposal becomes highly relevant. Issues surrounding the postcolonialism of thought usually point out how Latin America has been analysed (or translated) under the frame of foreign models, which don’t necessarily give an adequate account of its specificity. Here I am not arguing in favour of a sort of knowledge closure, in the sense that Latin American studies should not interact with or learn from other knowledge traditions. On the contrary, all sources of knowledge might have something to say but the phenomenon has much to say as well. It is through this dialogue, in as many dimensions as possible, that a new material object can reach its best communicative potential. Research in Latin American issues should be extremely keen to encourage this double directed dialogue where the ‘object’ and the ‘subject’ inform each other, searching for that always equivocal but often fecund alliance.

Summing up, the visual turn needs to be broadened in order to include research outcomes final forms, framing them as active objects to place within the world. From this starting point the range of material outcomes should be opened, always having in mind the associative potentialities and tight translation they might achieve. The visual turn makes claims for a step–by-step translation process towards the construction of a material object, which drags in as many ways as possible the traces of phenomena to a new register of forms. It is this new form that is placed in the world as one more actant of its endless jungle of forces. The visual turn should not inquire about how images help researchers’ practice but rather about which materialities can improve the creation of communicative objects.

4 . Viveros de Castro, E. (2013). “Canibal Metaphysics”. Radical Philosophy 182. pp: 17

List Of Contributors

Emerson Almeida: MSc Social Science (Federal University of São Carlos) and Lecturer at Mauá College

Valentina Alvarez: PhD Sociology student

Professor Vikki Bell: Department of Sociology

Gustavo Dias: PhD candidate Sociology

Professor Gabriel Feltran: Universidade Federal de São Carlos

Rosario Fernández: PhD candidate Sociology

Felipe Lagos: PhD candidate Sociology

Angelo Martins Junior: PhD candidate Sociology

Mariana Meneses: PhD candidate in Visual Cultures

Professor Kate Nash: Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. Her most recent book is: The Political Sociology of Human Rights, Cambridge University Press 2015

Felipe Palma: PhD candidate Visual Sociology

Carolina Ramírez: Doctor of Visual Sociology

Cristina Thorstenberg Ribas: PhD candidate Art, Artist and Researcher

Jocelyne Rodríguez: Photographer, Las Niñas Collective

Professor Grinor Rojo: Senior Lecturer (profesor titular), Universidad de Chile

Jorge Saavedra Utman: PhD candidate Media and Communications

Carolina Spencer: MA Social Anthropology

Gerrit Stollbrock: MA Critical and Creative Analysis, independent consultant and filmaker in Columbia

Valentina Stutzin: Anthropology Student (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and Photographer

Tânia Tonhati: PhD candidate Sociology

Lieta Vivaldi: PhD Sociology student

A Selection Of Recent Publications From The CUCR

Borda-González, A, Kendall, D, Nokhasteh, A, Traoré, M. (2015) ‘Paris 19: Mobility, Memory and Migration’ in Migration Across Boundaries: Linking Research to Practice and Experience, Eds. Tendayi Bloom, Parvati Nair, Farnham: Ashgate.

Cardullo, Paolo. “Sniffing the City: Issues of Sousveillance in Inner City London.” Visual Studies 29, no. 3 (September 2, 2014): 285–93. doi:10.1080/1472586X.2014.941550.

Cardullo, Paolo. “‘Hacking Multitude’ and Big Data: Some Insights from the Turkish ‘Digital Coup’”, Big Data & Society, Forthcoming (2015).

Kendall, D. (2015) ‘From the Corner of an Eye: Visual Journeys along the Highways of Dubai’ in Visual Culture(s) in the Gulf: An Anthology, Ed. Nadia Mounajjed, Cambridge, UK: Gulf Research Centre Cambridge.

Knowles, Caroline. (2014) Flip-Flop: A Journey through Globalisation’s Backroads (Pluto Press, 2014) www.flipfloptrail.com

Knowles, Caroline. (2014) ‘Fragile Globalisation’, Under review at TCS and being translated into Portuguese as accepted in a Brazilian journal

Knowles, Caroline. (2014), Trajetórias de um chinelo: micro-cenas da globalização. Contemporânea — Revista de Sociologia da UFSCar, v. 4, n.2.ISSN: 2236-532X.

Ramírez, Carolina (2014) ‘“It’s not how it was”: the Chilean diaspora’s changing landscape of belonging’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 37, Iss. 4 (July, 2014) DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.808759.

Rooke, A. and Ch. v. Wissel (2015) On Cultural Value(s), Dialogue and the Evaluation of Culture, Arenas of Social Participation, The Role of the Creative Practitioners, Experiments in Sustainability, and Art Practice and Urban Safety in : Horn, Stefan (ed.), Nine Urban Biotopes — Negotiating the future of urban living, Berlin: Urban Dialogues, 2015. ISBN 978-3-00-049053-8

To see expanded articles and images from this Streetsigns edition and other articles by CUCR members go to the CUCR blog : https://cucrblog.wordpress.com

ISSN 2043-0124