Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

This is the last of three volumes the author has written on the polarized memories about Augusto Pinochet's Chile. The first two volumes carried the issues and narrative from the coup of 1973 to th...

Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006. Book Three, The Memory Box of Pinochet's Chile – By Steve J. Stern

Two recent productions of Vicuna and Tijoux are analyzed in this article: the Quipu Mapocho installation (2017) and the song “Rio abajo” (2014), respectively. The junctions of art and activism are examined through these works, particularly how both artists create rhetorics of resistance that render porous the boundaries between art and politics and also introduce critical positions against the modern-colonial-patriarchal-capitalist rationality that still governs Latin American societies. From this standpoint, I propose that Vicuna and Tijoux promote the decolonization of nature based on the decolonization of knowledge, articulating an ecological discourse in which rivers and seas are defended from the perspective of an indigenous “water culture” but without lapsing into purist or archaic visions. Resumen En este articulo se analizan dos producciones recientes de Cecilia Vicuna y Ana Tijoux: la instalacion Quipu Mapocho (2017) y la cancion “Rio abajo” (2014), respectivamente. A partir de estos trabajos, se examinan los cruces entre arte y activismo y como ambas artistas elaboran retoricas de la resistencia que vuelven porosos los limites entre el arte y lo politico e instalan posiciones criticas frente a la racionalidad moderna-colonial-patriarcal-capitalista que aun rige a las sociedades latinoamericanas. Desde esta perspectiva, se propone que Vicuna y Tijoux promueven la descolonizacion de la naturaleza a partir de la descolonizacion de los saberes, articulando un discurso ecologico en que los rios y mares son defendidos desde una “cultura del agua” de raiz indigena, pero sin caer en visiones puristas o arcaizantes.

/pdf/aguas-y-rios-activismo-descolonizacion-y-naturaleza-en-190h5o0tto.pdf

Aguas y ríos: Activismo, descolonización y naturaleza en Cecilia Vicuña y Ana Tijoux

This essay studies the relationship between anxiety, form, and history in African documentary film. It asks broadly how these three categories combine and imply each other in documentary narratives of economic and political precarity. Taking up several examples from Francophone Africa, I examine how anxiety is both a thematics and a formal matter of perception in documentary film, one that is always in touch with varied cinematic mediations of historical time. Anxiety thus comes to the fore in formalizations of ideology and its afterlives (La Sir ene de Faso Fani, Burkina Faso); in visualizations of cinematic “time-traveling” between past and present (Pr esident Dia, Senegal); and in everyday negotiations of economic precarity and emerging musical economies (Ç a vibre dans nos têtes, Mali). These films investigate present-making as a historical and affective enterprise, and I argue that documentary film renders this enterprise by converting anxiety into a mode of formal expression. The essay began to take shape during a reading of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) with an eye toward understanding what her analyses of affect and histories of the present have to tell us about the genres of visual culture. For Berlant (2011), the present sees the “waning” of older generic forms that once neatly mapped hopes and plans for “the good life” on any manner of textual and real-world experiences (p. 6). From this perspective, genre codes, configures, and transcribes a range of affective possibilities that both emerge from and respond to social and aesthetic forms. We might consider genre here as a translational exercise that, on the one hand, makes affect legible within a given social or artistic context and, on the other hand, brings these contexts into alignment with the set of possibilities that we have already made meaningful to ourselves. The shift that Berlant traced in the book, however, is related to the short-circuiting of these processes of affective transcription and to the mistranslations that result when generic mapping can no longer adequately account for the “crises” (as she put it) of the present. “In the present from which I am writing about the present,” she argued, “conventions of reciprocity that ground how to live and how to imagine life are becoming undone in ways that force the gestures of ordinary improvisation within daily life into a greater explicitness affectively and aesthetically” (Berlant, 2011, p. 7). In the fraught present that Berlant described, genres morph or otherwise realign themselves as they respond to the new ways individuals devise for coping with and living in uncertain contemporary moments. But how does documentary film—and, specifically, documentary film in Africa—engage with emergent understandings of the present as a moment of “crisis” and reorganize its formal attributes in new recordings of affective possibilities? And how do these filmed presents, along with the affects they register, make legible the historical mediations that undergird their senses of narrative? These questions guide both my intersection with Berlant’s work as well as the perspective on history, politics, and form in African documentary that I develop in this essay. For one

Anxiety As Cinematic Sensation: History and Form in African Documentary Film

Migration, precariousness, and the linked lives of newcomers in Hong Kong

This essay situates Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s 2010 film Kon Kon within its postdictatorship context in order to explore the relationship between performance, cultural memory, and neoliberal erasure. Returning to the coastal landscape of Concón, where she created her first precarios, or fragile installations, Vicuña documents how the privatization and deregulation of Chile’s natural resources—as a result of policies initiated under the Pinochet dictatorship but pursued into the present—has negatively impacted “the way of feeling for the land that is a memory of place.” Vicuña’s formally innovative film refigures precarity, as the fragility of life and culture under conditions of neoliberal globalization, into planetarity. Composed of both ritualized re-enactments of the artist’s oeuvre and documentary footage of the disappearing culture of the dunes, the film presents the dissonant flute-playing orchestras of the local indigenous fishermen as both threatened by, and performing an alternative to, the destructive forces of globalization. In turning to the bailes chinos of the fisherman, Vicuña—like Gayatri Spivak, whose theorization of planetarity is mobilized to elucidate this conjuncture—looks to precapitalist cultures to imagine a planetary future that collapses the distinction between nature and culture. At stake in both the bailes chinos and site-specific installations the film documents is the transmission of planetary forms of cultural memory that predate the neoliberal turn.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_global_south/v007/7.2.amich.pdf

From Precarity to Planetarity: Cecilia Vicuña's Kon Kon

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From Precarity to Planetarity: Cecilia Vicuña's Kon Kon