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Title
Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape

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ISBN
978-0-8101-4592

Author
Andermann, Jens

Publication Date
2023-05-17

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Entranced Earth
The FlashPoints series is devoted, to books that consider literature, beyond strictly
national and disciplinary frameworks and that are distinguished both by their
historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books
engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without
falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the
humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence
and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how liter-
ature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how
such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are
available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints.
series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Edi-
tor Emeritus; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley),
Editor Emerita; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature,
Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies,
and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Founding Editor; Catherine
Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Nouri Gana (Comparative Lit-
erature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Lit-
erature, UC Santa Cruz), Coordinator; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz);
Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz), Founding Editor
A complete list of titles begins on page 317.
Entranced Earth
Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape

Jens Andermann

northwestern university press | evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu

English translation copyright © 2023 by Northwestern University. Published 2023 by

Northwestern University Press. A previous version was published in Spanish in 2018
under the title Tierras en trance: Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Copyright ©
2018 by Ediciones Metales Pesados. All rights reserved.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Andermann, Jens, author.
Title: Entranced earth : art, extractivism, and the end of landscape / Jens Andermann.
Other titles: Tierras en trance. English | FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.)
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2023. | Series:
Flashpoints | Translation of: Tierras en trance. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023000543 | ISBN 9780810145924 (paperback) | ISBN
9780810145931 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810145948 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Environment (Aesthetics) | Aesthetics, Latin American. | Art and
philosophy. | Mineral industries—Environmental aspects—Latin America.
Classification: LCC BH301.E58 A5313 2023 | DDC 111.85—dc23/eng/20230313
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000543
Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 3
Chapter 1. Insurgent Natures 25
Chapter 2. The Country and the City 73
Chapter 3. The Matter with Images 135
Chapter 4. The Afterlives of Landscape 191
Coda 239

Notes 251
Bibliography 277
Index 293
Illustrations

Fig. 1. Vinícius Mendonça, Brumadinho, Minas Gerais,

February 27, 2019. 4
Fig. 2. Júlia Pontés, Ó Minas Gerais / My Land Our
Landscape #6, 2019. 5
Fig. 3. Adriana Varejão, Paisagens (Landscapes), 1995. 11
Fig. 4. Orlando Senna, Xana: Violência Internacional na
Ocupação da Amazônia, cover, 1979. 26
Fig. 5. Film still from Orlando Senna and Jorge Bodanzky,
Iracema, uma transa amazônica (Iracema), 1974. 27
Fig. 6: Antonio Berni, Sin título (Untitled), undated, 1950s. 60
Fig. 7. Lumberjacks at a logging station in northwestern
Argentina, ca. 1900. 64
Fig. 8. Le Corbusier, La loi du méandre (The law of the
meander), 1930. 74
Fig. 9. “Vivir en los contornos de una figura” (Living on the
outline of a figure), 1967. 76
Fig. 10. Marcel Gautherot, Ministry of Education and Health,
south facade, Rio de Janeiro, ca. 1945. 78

vii
viii ❘ Illustrations

Fig. 11. Erich Hess, Ouro Preto, 1939. 83

Fig. 12. Roger Courteville, photo page on the crossing of
Matto Grosso, 1930. 86
Fig. 13. Roger Courteville, photo page on disassembling the
vehicle, 1930. 86
Fig. 14. Roger Courteville, “En route to Cuiabá, the Indians
show an interest in mechanics,” 1930. 87
Fig. 15. Mário de Andrade, Rio Madeira. Portrait of my shadow
while standing on the tent of the Vitória. July 1927. Where’s
the poet? 89
Fig. 16. Mário de Andrade, Great Western—R. G. do Norte, 14-
XII- 28. People from the train at a stop where there is water,
getting off to drink some. 91
Fig. 17. Gustav Thorlichen, Villa Ocampo, 1941. 102
Fig. 18. Roberto Burle Marx, garden design for the Grande
Hotel, Pampulha (Minas Gerais, Brazil), 1959. 110
Fig. 19. Parque del Este, Caracas, 2009. 113
Fig. 20. Travesía de Amereida, Alberto Alba’s house, Santiago
del Estero, September 5, 1965. 116
Fig. 21. Alberto Cruz Covarrubias, chalk drawing showing the
site of Ciudad Abierta at Ritoque, 1972. 119
Fig. 22. “Phalène de la electricidad. Pozos de luz” (Electric
phalène. Wells of light). Action at Ciudad Abierta, 1977. 120
Fig. 23. “América invertida y retornada” (America inverted
and turned), 1967. 127
Fig. 24. “Construcción de la Hospedería del Pan” (Construction
of the Hospedería del Pan), Ciudad Abierta, ca. 1972. 131
Fig. 25. Digging a fjord at the seashore. Poetic act (phalène),
ca. 1972–73. 132
Fig. 26. Eugenio Dittborn, stills from Historia de la física
(History of physics), 1982. 136
 Illustrations ❘ ix

Fig. 27. Inauguration of Tucumán Arde, regional headquarters of

the CGT de los Argentinos, Rosario, November 3, 1968. 141
Fig. 28. CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte), Inversión de
escena (Scene inversión), 1979. 152
Fig. 29. E. P. S. Huayco, installation of Sarita Colonia, October
1980. 155
Fig. 30. Artur Barrio, register of Situação T/T1, April 20, 1970. 159
Fig. 31. Hélio Oiticica, Ready Constructible no. 1, 1978–79. 167
Fig. 32. Ana Mendieta, Isla (Silueta Series), black-and-white
photographic print (1994) from negative (1981). 170
Fig. 33. Luis Fernando Benedit, Prototipo: Habitat-laberinto
para cucarachas (Prototype: Habitat-Labyrinth for
Cockroaches), 1971. 176
Figs. 34 and 35. Eduardo Kac, Oblivion, from the series
Specimen of Secrecy about Marvelous Discoveries, 2006. 181
Fig. 36. Gilberto Esparza, Planta nómada (Nomadic Plant),
2008–13. 186
Fig. 37. Iván Henriques, Jurema Action Plant, 2011–12. 188
Fig. 38. Film still from Andrea Tonacci, Serras da desordem
(The hills of disorder), 2006. 210
Fig. 39. Film still from Gabriel Mascaro, Boi Neón (Neon Bull)
2015. 218
Fig. 40. Film still from Laura Citarella/Verónica Llinás,
La mujer de los perros (Dog Lady) 2015. 220
Acknowledgments

When I set out, more than a decade ago, to research the transformations
of the landscape form in Latin American aesthetic modernity, ideas and
concepts such as extractivism, extinction event, or Anthropocene were
only just beginning to emerge on the outer fringes of the humanities. At
the University of London and subsequently at the University of Zurich,
where my research led me to approach colleagues in geography or in
evolutionary biology, these conversations would frequently be the first
time any of us had been involved in such exchanges across disciplinary
barriers, and we would initially struggle to find common vocabularies
and frameworks of reference. Much the same happened at the Univer-
sity of Buenos Aires, where, on several occasions, I taught a graduate
seminar in the geography program on new configurations of territory
and place, attended also by students from literature, film studies, and
anthropology, which regularly provoked a generalized sense of unsettle-
ment when we tried (and failed) to pinpoint key concepts—such as the
landscape and what lies beyond it—within the confines of aesthetics,
ecology, or the social sciences.
This book, then, is my second attempt at giving an account of where
this journey has taken me—both intellectually and literally, as it also
reflects my encounters with some of the sites the visual or poetic rep-
resentations or architectural interventions of which will be the subject
of these pages, as well as those where I was able to conduct archival
research or discuss ideas. The first iteration, published in 2018 in Chile,

xi
xii ❘ Acknowledgments

was Tierras en trance: Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje, readers of

which will recognize in this volume several of the objects and key ideas
(such as the notion of “trance”) at the same time as a host of new ones
and a certain shift in critical angle and vocabulary. The latter is as much
an effect of space as of time. Rather than to translate my work from
Spanish into English, in Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism and the End
of Landscape I have instead opted to reimagine and reconstellate it for
a different kind of audience, with the aim of interesting scholars and
activists from emerging fields such as plant studies, energy humanities,
new materialisms, or critical climate change theory, in a host of epis-
temological contributions and departures from the South. Because of
the very different relation between cultural and academic production
with respect to the Anglosphere, in Latin America these have frequently
emerged, as I hope to show, within aesthetic forms of expression—in
the widest possible sense of the term, comprising not just works of lit-
erature, architecture, or performative arts but also, moreover, modes of
imaginative worldmaking proper to Indigenous healing practices or to
the transspecies negotiations implied in gardening.
As a result, the theoretical conversations into which I would like to
bring these epistemologies implicit in the aesthetic form itself are much
more at the forefront here than they had been in Tierras en trance. At
the same time, and as a way of facilitating such dialogues and exchanges
across hemispheres and disciplines, I have opted here to quote my Span-
ish and Portuguese sources in English rather than in the original, with
the exception of poetry or of such kinds of writings that rely crucially
on their typographic or phonetic substance (which I quote in the orig-
inal followed by English translations displayed in parenthesis). Unless
indicated otherwise, I have used the most recent published translations
in English or, where none had been available, I have offered my own
working translations. In the bibliography, I have indicated both the
original Spanish and Portuguese editions and the English translations
I have worked with.
Parts of chapters and sections from this book have appeared in print
in previous versions. I thank the Journal of Latin American Cultural
Studies for letting me reproduce sections from my article “Memories of
Extractivism: Slow Violence, Terror, and Matter,” 29, no. 4 (2019), as
well as Michael Heitz of Diaphanes, Zurich and Berlin, for permission
to reproduce parts of a chapter published in Natura: Environmental
Aesthetics after Landscape (2019), which I coedited with Lisa Black-
more and Dayron Carrillo Morell. Thanks are due as well to Joanna
 Acknowledgments ❘ xiii

Page and María del Pilar Blanco for allowing me to reuse material
from my chapter in Geopolitics, Culture and the Scientific Imaginary
in Latin America (University of Florida Press, 2020) and to Guillermina
De Ferrari and Mariano Siskind for my contribution to the Routledge
Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American
Literary and Cultural Forms (2022). To my editors at Metales Pesados,
Chile, Paula Barría and Sergio Parra, I am grateful yet again for the
generosity with which they have shared visual and logistical resources,
and my thanks also go to all the artists who have generously allowed
me to reproduce their work. The friends, colleagues, and graduate stu-
dents whose suggestions, criticisms, and indications of references and
materials have helped me craft this book are too numerous to name,
yet a few deserve special mention. Gabriel Giorgi, with whom I co-
hosted the seminar series Postnatural South at New York University, has
been a constant and generous interlocutor and source of inspiration, as
have Jill H. Casid, Victoria Saramago, and Mary Louise Pratt. Jennifer
French and Adriana Campos Johnson have also provided invaluable
feedback on sections of the manuscript. In Argentina, Florencia Garra-
muño and Álvaro Fernández Bravo generously invited me to join their
research network at the University of Buenos Aires, and I also bene-
fited (yet again) from the stimulating readings and feedback of Paola
Cortés Rocca, Edgardo Dieleke, Perla Zusman, and Fermín Rodríguez.
In Chile, I thank Catalina Valdés, Constanza Vergara, Betina Keizman,
Irene Depetris Chauvín, Matías Ayala Munita, Ana Pizarro, Constanza
Ceresa, Valeria de los Ríos, and Carolina Pizarro Cortés, as well as Vic-
toria Jolly, Gonzalo Pedraza, and Javier Correa for their hospitality and
feedback. Thanks are due as well to Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira, An-
gela Prysthon, Denilson Lopes, and the late Maurício Lissovsky, and to
my colleagues on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American
Cultural Studies, Ben Bollig, Rory O’Brien, Lorraine Leu, Rachel Price,
Freya Schiwy, Zeb Tortorici, and David Wood, for their intellectual
companionship and support. Isis Sadek did a marvelous job assisting
me with the copyediting of the manuscript; at Northwestern, my thanks
go to Michelle Clayton and the series editors for their enthusiasm and
faith in this project, and to Faith Wilson Stein and Maia Rigas for steer-
ing this book through production. Words cannot express my love and
gratitude to Ana Alvarez, who has accompanied me along this journey
for so many years, and encouraged me to keep going even when the
obstacles seemed unsurmountable.
Entranced Earth
Introduction

On January 25, 2019, just after 12:00 p.m., the collapse of Dam 1 at the
Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine near the town of Brumadinho in Minas
Gerais, Brazil, released a tidal wave of twelve million cubic meters of
toxic mud into the Paraopeba River, the source of about a third of the
provincial capital Belo Horizonte’s water supply (fig. 1). At least 250
people were buried alive, among them most of the miners on their lunch
break in the company cafeteria just underneath the dam.1 Dam 1, iden-
tical to another that had collapsed only three years prior at the nearby
mining town of Mariana, killing nineteen people, was being operated by
Vale S. A. (formerly Vale do Rio Doce), the world’s third-largest mining
company with operations all over Brazil as well as in Angola, Peru, and
Mozambique. In 2018, the year before the Brumadinho dam collapse,
the company posted a market share of around US$80 billion, outstrip-
ping even Brazilian banking and oil giants Itaú and Petrobrás.2 In fact,
to call Dam 1 a dam already requires a stretch of the imagination. The
structure was a so-called tailings dam, essentially a hardened cake of
solid by-products from strip mining, which are channeled into an ar-
tificial basin. This semiliquid mass, loaded with high levels of mercury
and other extremely toxic elements, is in turn contained merely by dirt
mounds or by dikes built directly on top of the already hardened res-
idues underneath. Tailings dams are highly vulnerable to liquefaction
caused by chemical reactions beneath the surface or by the seepage of
rainwater into the lower sediments through cracks in the structure.3

3
4 ❘ Introduction

Fig. 1. Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, February 27, 2019. Photograph by Vinícius

Mendonça/Ibama. Wikimedia Commons.

According to the BBC, Brazil currently has 790 such mining dams, 198
of which are classified as at the same or higher levels of risk of collapse
than Brumadinho. But since almost half the dams operating in the coun-
try have not yet undergone any kind of risk assessment, this number in
fact amounts to more than 40 percent of all dams inspected.4
Brazilian artist-activist Júlia Pontés, herself a native of Minas Gerais,
has used aerial photography, shot from remotely operated drones, to
document the environmental impact of strip mining and tailings dams,
including images of the disaster sites of Brumadinho and Mariana.
Over several years, Pontés has researched and photographed over a
hundred tailings dams and open-pit mining sites all over Brazil, pro-
ducing eerily beautiful images that recall the post–WWII “biomorphic
abstraction” of the Cobra group or the chromatic fields of North Amer-
ican abstract expressionism in the 1950s and 1960s (fig. 2). What kind
of poetics of form, or perhaps even the collapse of form altogether,
Pontés’s images prompt us to ask, is at work when a central element
of nonfigurative Western art makes its uncanny return in the afterlife
of landscapes destroyed by extractive capitalism? If abstraction had
wagered on the free play of color and volume as expressing the vital
impulses of living matter in ways more immediate than mimetic figu-
ration had ever been able to achieve, are the wastelands left behind by
 Introduction ❘ 5

extractivism therefore also the cemetery of aesthetic modernity? How

to make sense, indeed, of the cruel irony of mining corporations tak-
ing to heart the passage from figure to abstraction in the Western art
history of the nineteenth and twentieth century—the very same period,
of course, that also saw the rise of fossil capitalism—only to force
abstraction to become itself the very expression of an earth that can
no longer be taken in as landscape? Are the Cézanne-like hues of blue,
green, and brown on Pontés’s aerial picture of the strip-mined moun-
tains near Brumadinho yet further proof of, as Bruno Latour puts it,
“the great universal law of history according to which the figurative
tends to become literal”?5
This book asks what comes at the end of landscape. I mean this in
both a historical sense—in terms of the expressive modes and strategies
that emerge at a moment when the landscape form in its pictorial, po-
etic, or architectural iterations fails to account for the ways in which
the environment confronts and responds to human action—and a very
literal sense: what kinds of agents, substances, and forces come into
play once the ground has, quite literally, slipped from under our feet?
What Pontés’s images get hold of are, in fact, the very assemblages that
living—and dying—things as well as the stuff around them enter into

Fig. 2. Júlia Pontés, Ó Minas Gerais / My Land Our Landscape #6 (2019),

showing Serra Três Irmãos near Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Photograph
courtesy of the artist.
6 ❘ Introduction

once the heavy machinery of capital has abandoned the scene of ex-
traction. The physiochemical reactions we see on the photographs as
fields of color are, at ground level, the work in progress of bacterial
agents, lichens, chemicals, mud, rock, and fungi that manifest what an-
thropologist Anna Tsing calls the “emergent effects of encounters” in the
aftermath of ruination. In the abandoned asset fields of extractivism—
the spaces that Steve Lerner calls “sacrifice zones”6—new “patterns of
unintentional coordination develop in assemblages,” as Tsing suggests.
“To notice such patterns means watching the interplay of temporal
rhythms and scales in the divergent lifeways that gather.”7
Then again, the mode in which Pontés’s photographs catch a glimpse
of these emergent assemblages of survival in the afterlife of capitalist
ruins is not so much that of abstraction as it is, rather, the shift of the
point of view away from that of the landscape form. The latter, in fact,
had been no less an effect of artifice than Pontés’s drone-based, disem-
bodied camera-eye: its enabling fiction—its “founding perception,” in
art historian Norman Bryson’s elegant expression8—had been the evac-
uation of time and movement and the disavowal of the painted surface
as a site of production, as well as the abstraction of the observer’s body
into a monocular lens mirroring the point of flight of the diamond-
shaped visual field thus laid out by the image. The landscape view, in
other words, actively erases the “patterns” and “temporal rhythms” in
which assemblages express themselves, replacing these with finite, mo-
nadic, and mutually separate objects. To unmake this object effect, a
change of scale is required, one that unmoors vision from the monoc-
ular beholder of landscape and instead “zooms out” (or in) toward the
planetary or the fleshly and material, as in Pontés’s images, where we
never can be completely sure if we are actually too close or too far away
to see things as objects. Yet in the place of objects, what surges before
us in these pictures, blurring the boundaries between fields of color that
bleed into one another, is none other than what ecological historian
Jason Moore calls the “Capitalocene”: that is, the “double internal-
ity” represented, on the one hand, by “capitalism’s internalization of
planetary life” and, on the other, by “the biosphere’s internalization of
capitalism.”9 The spillages, blurrings, and juxtapositions between fields
of color on Pontés’s photographs are the chronicle of this making and
unmaking of a “historical nature” fueled by the extraction of matter to
produce surplus value, as a result of which existents of various kinds
(including deadly toxins) enter into constellations of life and nonlife, of
“hyperobjects” that exceed the orderly frame of landscape.
 Introduction ❘ 7

“Hyperobjects,” as eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has pointed

out, break down the very idea of an “environment” that surrounds “us”
in much the same way as landscape’s founding perception had arranged
the world object around the all-commanding gaze of the subject: “In an
age of global warming, there is no background, and thus there is no fore-
ground. It is the end of the world, since worlds depend on backgrounds
and foregrounds.”10 We could call this no longer passive but actively and
unpredictably responsive constellation of organic and nonorganic beings
and materialities acting in concert the “irruption of Gaia”—a name first
suggested in chemist James Lovelock’s and biologist Lynn Margulis’s
coevolutionary hypothesis from the early 1970s. Gaia’s irruption is a
radically materialistic response to the malignant idealism of capital,
which, Isabelle Stengers argues, is “a power that captures, segments, and
redefines always more and more dimensions of what makes up our real-
ity, our lives, our practices in its service” at the same time as it remains
“radically irresponsible, incapable of answering for anything” (italics in
original). As we face Gaia, Stengers concludes—or the hyperobject that
such a name, just as those of Capitalocene, Anthropocene (or indeed
hyperobject) struggle to call out—we are no longer “only dealing with
a nature to be ‘protected’ from the damage caused by humans, but also
with a nature capable of threatening our modes of thinking and of liv-
ing for good.”11
In this book, rather than discuss these questions in the abstract, I want
to follow Pontés’s lead and turn to the sites of extraction—the violent,
messy encounters and overspills that take place between human and
more-than-human histories on the commodity frontiers of the Global
South—from a vantage point that is both wider and narrower than
the landscape view. Let us, then, return briefly to Brumadinho’s toxic
ground to elaborate on what I mean by the “end of landscape.” If you
were wondering “what to do in Brumadinho,” topping TripAdvisor’s
list of local attractions (with 8,407 reviews to a mere 79 for the runner-
up, the Ostra waterfall) is the Inhotim Contemporary Art Institute and
Botanic Garden, billed by TripAdvisor as “one of Brazil’s most import-
ant contemporary art collections and the largest of its kind in Latin
America.” Founded in 2004 by mining magnate Bernardo de Mello Paz
and spreading out over nearly two thousand acres, about half of which
are marked as preservation areas, Inhotim is home to one of the most
spectacular contemporary art collections worldwide, featuring pieces
by, among others, Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Thomas Hirschhorn,
Doris Salcedo, and Cildo Meireles, many of them site specific and dis-
8 ❘ Introduction

played in more than two dozen free-standing pavilions designed by in-

ternational star architects. Set in lushly gardened grounds created by
Pedro Nehring and Luiz Carlos Orsini after an original blueprint from
Roberto Burle Marx, Brazil’s premier landscape architect (including his
signature monochromatic flowerbeds shaped in “biometric curves”),
some of the collection’s most spectacular works echo the garden’s own
interest in the relations between organic forms and the aesthetic lega-
cies of modernist art. Cristina Iglesias’s Vegetation Room (2012), for
instance, a kind of inverted white cube whose stainless-steel walls reflect
the surrounding forest, invites visitors into a maze of sculpted artificial
foliage at the heart of which they encounter a plumbing-powered water-
fall: a reference, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to Hélio Oiticica’s semi-
nal ambient installation Tropicália (1967) replacing the latter’s concern
for mass culture in a globalized mediascape with a witty reflection on
the artifice of nature in a thoroughly technified planetary interior. Per-
haps the most iconic of the site-specific pieces, Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pa-
vilion (2009), subtly acknowledges the extractive historical geography
of the location, centering as it does on a seven hundred–feet-deep hole
drilled into the ground and spiked with microphones that transmit and
amplify the sonic emissions from the subsoil into the glass-sheeted, cir-
cular chamber on top.12
Inhotim, we might say, pressing our point only slightly, places itself
quite explicitly at the end of landscape, the legacy of which it both
celebrates and claims to bring to its culmination and apogee. Land-
scape, in cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove’s authoritative account,
emerged contemporary to, and in close interrelation with, the twin pro-
cesses of capitalist primitive accumulation—the expropriation and en-
closure of rural commons all over Europe and the violent establishment
of overseas colonies tasked with supplying the “raw materials” (food-
stuffs, minerals, human work-energy) fueling industrial modernity in
the North. As a “way of seeing” that also “represents a historically spe-
cific way of experiencing the world,”13 landscape was both fundamental
to the emergence of the autonomy of art—as relieved from its liturgic
or courtly functions of conveying founding narratives for Church and
Crown—and closely interwoven with innovations in engineering, agro-
nomics, and even double-entry bookkeeping (not for nothing, landscape
painting first blossomed in overseas trading hotspots such as Venice and
the Netherlands that were also pioneering drainage and flood protec-
tion technology). Landscape rendered the land (and those inhabiting
it) the object of an outside beholder’s aesthetic experience or technical
 Introduction ❘ 9

expertise. The viewer’s visual pleasure in front of the landscape image

mirrors the absentee landlord’s enjoyment of rent or surplus from har-
vested produce: both depend on (and, as in the case of the colonial
monocrop plantation, often literally lead to) a moment of unsettlement,
which also makes landscape—in Jean-Luc Nancy’s expression—“the
space of strangeness, of estrangement . . . the opening of the space in
which this absenting takes place.”14
Landscape, in short, represents a key ideological apparatus of cap-
italism and colonialism that naturalizes what are in fact violent and
uneven social and political (as well as, we should add, ecological) re-
lations, and it does so through what art theorist Alain Roger calls the
“double artialization” of land—the “mobile” and the “adherent” mode
of aestheticizing the earth, either rendering land as a visual prospect
that can be transported from rural margin to urban site of exhibition
or “relandscaping” a parcel of ground in the image of orderly nature
devised by the gardener or the landscape architect: “The land, in some
sense, is the point zero of landscape, it is what comes before artializa-
tion, be it directly (in situ) or indirectly (in visu).”15 But this interplay
between landscapes in visu and in situ, between journeying painters and
sedentary gardeners, also corresponds to a modern-colonial dialectic of
“grafting and drafting,” in art theorist Jill Casid’s expression, in which
“the material practices of transplantation and grafting were part of the
ordering and articulation of the Plantation as discourse,” at the same
time as “the colonial landscape was planted and replanted not only
through successive eras of colonial plantation but through forms of re-
productive print, visual and textual, that were to serve as prototypical
models of colonial relandscaping.”16 By making its own projective (that
is, presentational rather than representational) dimension appear as al-
ready found in, and emanating from, vegetable-material objects and en-
sembles deemed natural and orderly, landscape did its ideological work
of making us enjoy the space of our own alienation. Yet this very dis-
avowal of the unsettlement that is fundamental to the landscape form
also opened up lines of flight, as in Raymond Williams’s working-class
“counter-pastoral” forms of reclaiming, in a vein of utopian, future-
oriented nostalgia, the working earth from which we have been dis-
placed,17 or in the “countercolonial landscapes” of slave orchards and
queer gardenings “contesting the terrain of imperial landscaping” that
Casid has analyzed.18 By taking landscape at its word where it denies
the expropriating violence that is at the very origin of the form, these
subversive, oppositional deployments of the landscape in situ and in
10 ❘ Introduction

visu insist on the possibility of returning to a reciprocal mode of relating

to the land, based on use rather than exchange.
Inhotim, to return to our place of departure, calls on the landscape
in situ and in visu in an openly self-reflexive, critical fashion—first and
foremost by bringing the beautified, gardenesque “nature” of the park
back from the urban space of accumulation to the rural one of ex-
traction that the latter both invokes and disavows. By choosing a high-
modernist garden aesthetic, moreover, which finds “natural expression”
in the elementary geometries of cells and organisms rather than in the
image of a lost Eden preexisting the onset of the mining economy in
the region, Inhotim complicates the mimetic illusion of the Western
landscape tradition, instead drawing our attention to the complex af-
filiations and rifts between abstraction and extraction, modernism and
modernity. This exercise of self-reflexivity, moreover, also continues
to interpellate as we move from the gardens into the artists’ pavilions
laid out along our path, perhaps most forcefully in the one dedicated
to the work of Brazilian painter-sculptor Adriana Varejão (married to
Inhotim’s owner Mello Paz at the time of the park’s creation), which
references the region’s colonial-baroque tradition as well as the latter’s
bloody foundations through the use of Portuguese azulejos (painted
tiles) as its main material, the interstices of which appear to reveal not
drywall, brick, and mortar but the crushed, compact mass of guts and
flesh that literally supports cultural expression in the extractive zone.
In Varejão’s painting Paisagens (Landscapes, 1995) a similar simulta-
neous engagement with the modernist critique of representation and the
baroque tradition (the greatest manifestations of which, in Brazil, are
found in the eighteenth-century mining towns of Minas Gerais), explic-
itly singles out the landscape form as a colonial apparatus of extraction
(fig. 3). Here, inside an oval (painterly rather than real) wooden frame,
a tropical forest landscape is suddenly interrupted by a second, irregu-
lar frame of clotted blood surrounding a scar that is visible where the
canvas appears to have been ripped open, allowing us a glimpse into the
viscous entrails beneath. In the center, a second landscape, different from
that of the outer ring, features a coastal scene reminiscent of nineteenth-
century watercolors by traveling artists such as Jean-Baptiste Debret or
Johann Moritz Rugendas. Again, the illusion of natural beauty available
to the viewer is brutally sliced open by a vertical cut running across the
center of the image, turning the wounded skins of canvas and landscape
into a vaginal opening into the depths of a feminized earth-body. This
association, implied here as well as in the sequel painting, Mapa de Lopo
 Introduction ❘ 11

Homem (Lopo Homem’s Map, 1992)—a ripped-open sixteenth-century

Portuguese world map—is instead made brutally explicit in two of the
most haunting images of the same series, Filho bastardo (Bastard Child,
1992) and Filho bastardo II: Cena de interior (Bastard Child II: Indoor
Scene, 1995), likewise featuring a bloody, vertical cut at the center, and
depicting, in the style of eighteenth-century picturesque travelogues,
the torture and rape of Indigenous and Afro-descendant women at the
hands of white landowners, military officers, and priests. Paisagens, in
a canny, erudite game of visual quotations, reveals rape to be the inner
truth and foundational moment of beholding earth as image.
Varejão’s painting constantly forces our gaze to reverse course as the
visual immersion-penetration, fostered by the landscape’s own rheto-
ric of foreground and horizon, is being counteracted by the bursting
forth of bodily matter. It is the beach, in fact, the site of colonialism’s
“first encounter,” that is crossed out by the vaginal scar puncturing the
image’s visible skin and exposing the gutted bodyscape underneath, as
if transforming the sonic pit in Doug Aitken’s nearby pavilion into a
gory, and phallic, intrusion. But can art still get away with gestures like

Fig. 3. Adriana Varejão, Paisagens (Landscapes), 1995. Oil on wood. Collection

of R. and A. Setúbal. Courtesy of the artist.
12 ❘ Introduction

these that subtly point us—as does, indeed, the Inhotim Institute as a
whole—to the artworks’ own conditions of enunciation? How, I won-
der, can we even begin to reflect on the irruption of an irate, destructive
Gaia at a place such as Brumadinho, which calls on nature in the name
of art while also continuing to be sustained by a centuries-long cycle of
destruction and ruination, by the unsavory convergence, as Moore puts
it, “of nature-as-tap and nature-as-sink”?19 Would visitors of Aitken’s
pavilion unwittingly have listened to earthly forebodings of the geolog-
ical movements and chemical reactions in the subsoil long before these
led to the collapse of Dam 1? But how do we deal, then, with the way
these subterranean rumors could only be heard—or rather, missed—in
the mode of indeterminacy associated with the artwork? And, last not
least, what to make of the sudden appearance of a bold new landscape
architect on, or rather, underneath Inhotim’s curated grounds, one that
is made of the very assemblages of mudslides and of toxic seepage into
soil and ground water that will no doubt permanently alter the park’s
artified landscape? Is Gaia, in fact, Inhotim’s ultimate star artist, the
one who at last reveals to us the true face of the collection and botanic
garden: material embodiments of the surplus capital generated from
the iron ore that these same deadly chemicals had previously separated
from its earthly overburden?
Perhaps the critique of landscape is now no longer in art’s hands
alone. Just compare Varejão’s scarred and bruised bodyscape in Paisa-
gens with Vinícius Mendonça’s press photograph of the Brumadinho
disaster site a month after the collapse of Dam 1, featured at the be-
ginning of this introduction (fig. 1). The echo of Varejão’s scar cutting
through the land-body of the painting, in the reddish-brown tracks of
mud cutting through the lush green of the forest, is hard to miss. It is
almost as if, in retrospect, Gaia had forced on us a different reading of
the image, not so much as a critique of the landscape tradition of past
centuries but rather as a foreboding of what is yet to come. The end of
landscape, it seems, is also a moment of “return of the repressed”: of
overspill onto the visible scene of what landscape had banished to the
other side of the horizon. What had always been lurking at the “ground
of the image,” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s expression, was an excess of pres-
ence of the more-than-human (that is, of the gathering of divergent life-
ways and forces) that the landscape form had only been able to contain
only by making this ground the founding limit of its time and space of
representation—in much the same way as the “extractive eye” of trans-
national mining companies such as Vale S. A. peers through the layers of
 Introduction ❘ 13

overburden (the sand, rock, water, and clay separating the surface from
the mineral veins) to get to the commodity underneath. Overburden—
what is between the extractive eye and what it sees as value in and of
the land—energy humanities scholar Jennifer Wenzel has argued, also
offers a way of

understanding the cost of a resource logic taken to its fur-

thest conclusion . . . If neoliberalism is understood as having
largely dispensed with the promise of social good . . . then we
might say that the very things that the logic of improvement
and enclosure once promised as ends—civilization, civil soci-
ety, the state, the commonwealth as a social compact to pro-
tect citizens and their property—now appear as intolerable
commons, as unproductive waste . . . in need of privatization,
resource capture, and profit-stripping. It’s all overburden.20

Late capitalism’s throwing overboard of the modern welfare state’s

arrangements of social reproduction as themselves mere overburden
might also be telling an alternative, parallel story of the development
from figurative landscape to “abstraction” that differs from the one we
are being told by canonical art history or even the one I have been
following here through the works of Pontés, Aitken, and Varejão and
through the landscaping action of toxic mud in the vicinity of the Inho-
tim Art Institute. Indeed, what increasingly overburdens landscape’s ca-
pacity to capture and offer up the earth object, putting it at the disposal
of the beholder, is the incremental, physical and undeniable, presence
of what representation needs to cast “beyond the horizon.” The prolif-
eration of biochemical and nuclear accidents under what Naomi Klein
coined “disaster capitalism” is only the flipside of what our imagination
of world as landscape can no longer hold together in the face of an en-
croaching “unclean non-world (l’immonde)”—the term Jean-François
Lyotard coined to name the earthly matter that landscape must keep
in suspension, which it must ab-ject, to render world as object, as pic-
ture.21 But thus, this nonworld—l’immonde, inmundo, imundo, which,
in Spanish and Portuguese as well as in French, also means the filthy,
obscene, reckless—is also what comes at the end of landscape. It is what
landscape is itself a threshold toward, what it will usher in once every-
thing has become overburden.
Yet this overburdening of landscape’s capacity, as a colonial-extractive
apparatus, to produce subjects and objects for capitalist surplus gener-
14 ❘ Introduction

ation, might also offer a moment of possibility, of breaking through

the cocoon of landscape and of the world it has built on the back of an
incremental inmundo. In thrusting human and nonhuman bodies, and
even nonliving forms of matter such as rock formations and aquifers,
into a shared state of precarity, uprootedness, and enmeshment, the end
of landscape also puts us face-to-face with matterings that (as the giant
mud wave at Brumadinho) can no longer be witnessed and inhabited as
“world.” Inmundo is my term for calling out the end of the world, the
“process of becoming extinction,” according to Justin McBrien, already
under way with the disappearance of planetary biodiversity and of hu-
man linguistic, cultural, and spiritual patrimonies alike.22 But it is also a
way of calling for an art of survival, in which, according to Tsing, “stay-
ing alive—for every species—requires liveable collaborations.”23 Earth-
wide precarity, as Tsing argues, also urges us to embrace contamination,
intermingling, assemblage, as the very conditions of our survival: “The
problem of precarious survival helps us see what is wrong. Precarity
is a state of acknowledgement of our vulnerability to others. In order
to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another . . .
If survival always involves others, it is also necessarily subject to inde-
terminacy of self-and-other transformations . . . Contamination makes
diversity.”24 In this book I will explore through the concept of “trance”
some of these self-and-other transformations into which humans and
nonhumans enter at the end of landscape, at a moment when they (or
“we”) have similarly become subject to precariousness and indetermi-
nacy. Entranced Earth, the title of the book, also names the framework
I propose for reflecting on the “intrusion of Gaia” in her enigmatic and
unpredictable responses “to the brutality of what has provoked her.”25
Yet it will also provide us with a conceptual toolkit for understanding
some of the emergent forms in which the arts, at the end of landscape,
have responded to and embraced the challenge of recasting nonhuman
lives and earthly matter as coagents rather than merely as objects or as
source material of aesthetic experience.
The end of landscape, I contend, is a radically contemporary moment
of the arts responding to the all but undeniable “postnatural condition”
of our time,26 and it has been a hallmark of aesthetic modernity in Latin
America for at least a century. As one of the earliest extractive fron-
tiers of the colonial-capitalist world system, the region also produced, in
Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s expression, a host
of “veritable end-of-the-world experts,” faced time and again with “a
world invaded, wrecked, and razed by barbarian foreigners”27—a world
 Introduction ❘ 15

plunged into unworld, into inmundo. Similar to the ways in which, over
centuries, trance had provided an alternative space and time of gather-
ing for the communities suffering the unworlding violence of extractiv-
ism, for some of Latin America’s most daring writers, architects, visual
artists, and filmmakers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I ar-
gue, the dimension of trance became a condition for reimagining earth
as dwelling, as the journeying poets and artists of Amereida (a radical
aesthetic event we will study in chapter 2) put it. Only by embracing
the abysmal dimension of a continent ravaged by five hundred years of
colonialism, they claimed, could the poetic event once more carve out a
gathering ground on which to forge community.
Trance, as Roger Bastide suggests in his classic ethnography of the
Afro-Brazilian spirit religion of Candomblé, is the ecstatic state of di-
vine possession in which the community’s founding myths are relived,
reincarnated, in the bodies of the novices undergoing initiation. The mo-
ment of ecstasy—of trance—is the one that separates and connects the
first part of the ceremony, in which the heroes and events from the time
of foundation are recalled by means of invocatory chanting and drum-
ming, from the second one in which, if the session has been success-
ful, these have yet again turned into companions and contemporaries
who accompany and share the daily lives of the faithful. “What we un-
derstand as a phenomenon of possession—Bastide concludes—should
therefore rather be defined as a phenomenon of transformation.”28 The
trance of Candomblé is, for Bastide, a worldmaking practice in the in-
mundo that unfolds in the aftermath of the world-destroying, genocidal
violence of the Middle Passage and the Plantation. It turns the survivors’
bodies into bodies of resonance that bring back to life what colonial-
ism’s necropolitical machine had sought to erase: in the time of trance,
the ghosts of history become flesh once again, and this embodiment
opens up a threshold of transformation, of reworlding in the inmundo.
Gilles Deleuze, in his reflections on postcolonial cinema, returns to
this notion of trance to describe how the films of Glauber Rocha—the
guiding spirit of Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement and director of Terra
em Transe (Entranced Earth, 1968)—trigger the emergence of collective
speech acts not by having recourse to myth but, says Deleuze, to “a
living present beneath the myth.”29 Similar to, yet also different from,
the Candomblé priest in the terreiro (whose incantatory song and dance
Rocha made the centerpiece of his filmic debut Barravento [The turn-
ing wind, 1962]), the filmmaker seizes “from the unliving a speech-act
which could not be silenced, an act of storytelling which could not be
16 ❘ Introduction

a return to myth but a production of collective utterances capable of

raising misery to a strange positivity: the invention of a people.” “Third-
world cinema,” for Deleuze, does not represent the history of the col-
onized but, rather, actively contributes to their transformation into a
people—into a historical agent endowed with speech—by way of en-
trancement (that is, by mobilizing the living present inside, or beneath,
myth): “The trance, the putting into trances, are a transition, a passage,
or a becoming . . . which brings real parties together, in order to make
them produce collective utterances as the prefiguration of the people
who are missing.”30 Trance is the assemblage, in the in between time of
ecstasy, of a future language forged from the shards and fragments of
what colonial violence has suppressed and erased; a language in which
new worldings can be imagined even from the depths of inmundo.
Today, at the height of what has been called a moment of neoex-
tractivism in Latin America—one that is characterized, according to
Maristella Svampa, by “the over-exploitation of natural goods, largely
unrenewable . . . as well as the vertiginous expansion of the borders of
exploitation to new territories, which were previously considered un-
productive or not valued by capital”31—I contend that trance can no
longer be considered, as it could for Deleuze at the height of national
liberation struggles after World War II, exclusively as the realm of a be-
coming people. Rather, as the Argentine poet Juan L. Ortiz claims, “the
people is nature,” or rather, “not nature but natural things.”32 Poetic la-
bor, for Ortiz (whose work we will return to at the end of this book), is
“to make man participate in natural things”—that is, to force language
itself to reveal how much we are always spoken by the nonhuman: “Any
plant whatsoever suggests to me the relations it maintains around it . . .
We think that rhythm and voice are totally ours when, in fact, they are
also outside ourselves. And our very safety depends on this rhythm.”33
At heart, then, the question this book pursues is about the work of
the aesthetic in keeping us safe—that is, about the ways in which the
imagination partakes in “reknitting . . . multispecies stories and prac-
tices of becoming-with.”34 In the face of planetary necrosis that ex-
tractive capitalism leaves in its wake, including “the disappearance of
species, languages, cultures and peoples,”35 the dimension of pleasur-
able but also overwhelming and painful opening to the world and the
otherworldly we call art (and which, in nonwestern Indigenous cultures,
is delegated in different fashion to multiple forms of play, festivity, and
healing) acquires a new urgency. Capitalism is anesthetic—it actively
induces the proliferation of “unimagined communities” of human and
 Introduction ❘ 17

nonhuman lives “viewed as irrational impediments to ‘progress’ [that]

have been statistically—and sometimes fatally—disappeared,” as Rob
Nixon has forcefully argued.36 Extractive capitalism relies on unimag-
ination, on “the invention of emptiness—emptiness being the wrong
kind of presence,” by means of which “‘underdeveloped’ people on
‘underdeveloped’ land can be rendered spectral uninhabitants whose
territory may be cleared to stage the national theatrics of megadams
and nuclear explosions . . . Emptiness is an industry that needs constant
replenishment.”37
But is it enough, then, to think of the aesthetic merely in instrumental
terms, as a way of “bring[ing] emotionally to life” the long-term environ-
mental and socioeconomic destruction wrought on the extractive zones
of the planet, which the short-termism of the media cycle is both unable
and unwilling to convey?38 I do not dispute, of course, that literature,
film, and visual arts can and must offer counterrepresentations to the
ones advanced by extractivism’s “liberal fortune-telling,”39 its incessant
presaging of future bounty thanks to present destruction of lifeworlds.
Yet I wonder if, by making the affective powers of the aesthetic or its
unique capacity for self-reflexivity subservient to a political action, the
purpose and content of which is already known beforehand, ecocritical
approaches don’t risk relapsing into worn-out notions of art as a moral
instance or as elevating the audience’s critical consciousness? Put differ-
ently, by thinking about environmental damage—or, in a deconstructive
twist, by assessing its discursive figurations—as the “subject” of art, are
we not still caught in an idea of “external nature” as experienced by a
human subject—that is, in what Philippe Descola has referred to as the
“great partition” in Western thought, which posited “nature as an on-
tologically autonomous domain, as a field of inquiry and scientific ex-
perimentation” and, we might add, as a source of aesthetic pleasure?40
At the end of landscape, I contend, might we not need to attempt a
different route for thinking about extractivism and aesthetics, which
the concept of trance might help us figure out? In trance, there are no
longer any subjects and objects: on the contrary, trance is the time and
space of the one being possessed by, and becoming coextensive with,
the other. Rather than on representation (and thus, on a relationship
between “matter” and “form” that is itself predicated on extraction),
trance draws on invocation and incarnation, that is, on “a yielding rela-
tion to the world, a mastery of non-mastery,” as Michael Taussig has so
aptly put it.41 How, I ask, can we join, as readers and viewers of texts,
films, sculptures, gardens, and performances, in such yieldings, and how
18 ❘ Introduction

can these help us reengage with, according to Tsing, the “many world-
making projects, human and not human” in which we find ourselves
enmeshed even—or especially—at a time of encroachment of inmundo,
of unworlding?42
To yield to the world, I shall argue, also means to let go of the dis-
tance landscape had opened between the multiplicity of living and ma-
terial things and the subject. It means assuming the risk of immersion
in the multiple entanglements—the “throwntogetherness” of the “event
of place [as] a constellation of processes rather than a thing,” in Doreen
Massey’s powerful expression43—to the point of shedding the auton-
omy and finitude that had been associated with the Western idea of art.
In responding to the entranced earth, I claim, art itself becomes increas-
ingly unspecific; it seeps out beyond the institutional circuits of galleries,
publishers, and screening venues and instead begins to make common
cause with community activisms, lab research, gardening, and therapy.
Thus, the process of art’s becoming unspecific, which I will be sketching
out in this book, also goes beyond the combination of narrative, au-
diovisual, and performative elements and even beyond “a strategic re-
lationship to political collectives currently in formation,”44 radicalizing
Florencia Garramuño’s call for an “ignorant art” that deliberately re-
nounces the knowledge associated with medium-specific styles, genres,
and techniques.45 Unspecificity, as I deploy it here, represents both a crit-
ical break with the colonial legacies of specific languages and genres and
an opening toward the damaged materialities of world as remainder, in
search of novel forms of community beyond the human.
In truth, then, the following chapters are but a diary or transcript
of the exercises of yielding to the world in which the works and events
I analyze have allowed me to participate: an exercise, as we shall see,
at once of despaisamiento—of “unlandscaping,” of exhaustion of the
landscape form—and of transformative crisis, of trance, in listening to
the yieldings to the world ushered in by this very exhaustion. Entranced
Earth is divided into four chapters covering a century of aesthetic pro-
duction in Latin America in roughly chronological order. Chapter 1
establishes the extractive frontier as a focal point of Latin American
cultural production in the twentieth century, focusing on a body of lit-
erary narratives classified in textbooks as regionalismo. In these sto-
ries and reflections, I trace the trope of an “insurgent nature” on the
extractive frontier—assemblages of organic and inorganic matter, and
of human and nonhuman lives, thrown into turmoil. In the work of
writers such as Horacio Quiroga and Graciliano Ramos, this insurgent
 Introduction ❘ 19

assemblage speaks back in strange tongues, ushering in a novel kind

of interspecies free indirect speech that gives voice to a (bio)politics of
communitas resisting the immunitary projects of the human colonizers.
Here, I compare this “politics of nature” to the one manifesting itself
in the narratives of armed struggle produced in the aftermath of the
Cuban Revolution. In their different modulations of the spatial scripts
of guerrilla warfare in Cuba, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, I argue, these
revolutionary testimonios also recombine elements from an earlier
mode of literary rainforest writing. Subsequently, I trace regionalism’s
early critique of extractive modernization through a little-studied body
of work: the reflections of provincial historians, scientists, and medical
scholars on the impact of deforestation, soil erosion, and climate change
on musical, linguistic, and material culture in the Argentine Northwest.
Produced during a devastating drought, the works of these “minor in-
tellectuals” were mourning a local milieu, the destruction of which they
were witnessing firsthand, at the same time as they tried to sketch out
the uncertain horizons of life after abandonment.
Chapter 2 turns from the extractive frontiers of rainforest and rural
interior to the metropolitan centers of cultural production and to the
manifestations of modernist aesthetics in literature, architecture, and
gardening. I begin by discussing the ways in which new technologies of
locomotion, especially automobility, reconfigured spatial relations and
their perception as landscape in the early decades of the twentieth cen-
tury. Yet, contrary to European futurism’s ecstasy of speed, the partial
and uneven introduction of transport and communications technology
into Latin America was reflected in narrative and poetic accounts of
“accidented” movement, where acceleration was always prone to re-
lapse into stillness. This syncopated space-time experience provoked
clashes and juxtapositions reflecting the violence of the region’s entry
into global economic circuits by way of resource extraction. Having an-
alyzed the journey form and its transformations, the chapter moves to
the key manifestation of the landscape in situ, the garden. Latin Amer-
ican architecture, I argue, reimagined the garden as a contact zone be-
tween the postcolonial city and its ecological milieu, which urbanists
no longer aimed to contain or banish from the built environment but
rather to reclaim as a ground for conviviality. Starting with Le Corbu-
sier’s influential South American journey in 1929, I zoom in, first, on the
latter’s impact on Argentina’s cosmopolitan avant-garde, in particular
the work of Victoria Ocampo, where I trace a novel idea of the garden
as an interface between self and world, first, in the correspondences be-
20 ❘ Introduction

tween the gardens of her residences at Buenos Aires and on the Atlantic
coast, and then in her writings that oscillate between autobiography
and translation. Next, I compare Ocampo’s gardening aesthetics to the
work of Roberto Burle Marx, Latin America’s premier landscape ar-
chitect whose designs are characterized, I argue, by a problematic yet
also productive contradiction between his interest in the geobotanical
assemblages of a given habitat and the way organic, living forms could
enter into dialogue with modern architecture’s International Style. The
chapter closes with an analysis of the Ciudad Abierta (Open City) of
Amereida, a little-known Chilean architectural and poetic collective
that, since the mid-twentieth century, has experimented with an idiosyn-
cratic combination of landscape’s founding tension between place and
movement. In particular, I analyze the ephemeral site interventions and
poetic writings created during and after the 1965 travesía de Amereida,
the Amereida crossing, a transcontinental road trip that aimed to un-
veil the “enigma of America” through collective navigation of the “Sea
Within”: a performative inversion, I argue, of the colonial trope of dis-
covery that sought to reassert the radical indeterminacy of continental
time and space.
Chapter 3 discusses what, taking a cue from Brazilian art critic Mário
Pedrosa, I call “the environmental turn” in late twentieth- and early
twenty-first-century Latin American art. In the first section, I analyze a
series of individual and collective interventions that share an active in-
terest in the materialities and durations of social and ecological milieus,
turning these from objects of representation into material supports
that determine the aesthetic event’s formal script. At the same time, the
works and happenings studied here also share an unspecificity of ex-
pressive forms, freely mixing elements from the visual arts and film with
those of architecture, music, and poetry, often aligned with constella-
tions of political struggle and resistance. These include the interventions
of the Argentine Tucumán Arde, the Chilean CADA, and the Peruvian
E. P. S. Huayco collectives between the late 1960s and early1980s, as
well as site-specific works by Artur Barrio in Brazil. Whereas the former
turn the material chronotope of the city and the virtual one of mass
media networks into performative conducts, thereby blurring distinc-
tions between the self-reflexivity of art and the transformative action
of political struggle, Barrio’s distribution of abject materialities (excre-
ment, blood, waste) in the public arena resorts to “guerrilla” strategies
of clandestinity and shock as a way of forcing out the obscene that is
latent in social life under dictatorship. In the following section, I analyze
 Introduction ❘ 21

some of Hélio Oiticica’s work during the decade he spent in exile in

London and New York City, as well as performances realized after his
return to Brazil just before his untimely death. I compare these with the
work of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, in particular her Silueta
Series of earth-body works. Despite their differences, I argue, in both
artists the personal experience of displacement is channeled into an ex-
ilic, migrant ethos of reembodiment that invites the more-than-human
into its queer and precarious placemaking assemblages. The final sec-
tion of the chapter focuses on the shift in current bioart and ecoart from
landscape toward the living organism and toward the habitat-building
assemblages into which it enters, as constitutive of aesthetic experience.
Having traced the beginnings of this shift to Luis Fernando Benedit’s
ecological sculptures of the 1960s and 1970s, I fast-forward to recent
work by Maria Thereza Alves, Eduardo Kac, Iván Henriques, and Gil-
berto Esparza where the idea of life and death as the source of form,
which Benedit had been among the first to advance, is reevaluated under
conditions of genetic engineering and anthropogenic climate change.
The fourth and final chapter explores “new regionalisms” in the af-
termath of destruction, that is, in the inmundo unleashed on vast ar-
eas of Latin America by extractivism and neoextractivism. I begin with
a reflection on soundscape as an alternative sensory response to the
nonhuman environment, contrasting with landscape’s visual capture of
the land object. Taking my cues from Alexander von Humboldt’s short
essay “The Nocturnal Life of Animals in the Jungle” (1849), I discuss
contemporary bioacoustic production, in particular Spanish sound art-
ist Francisco López’s piece La Selva (The Forest, 1998), whose proposi-
tion of a nonreferential, “blind listening” I contrast with the acousmatic
presence of more-than-human sounds in Tatiana Huezo’s documentary
film on the aftermath of civil war in El Salvador, El lugar más pequeño
(The smallest place, 2011). Here, as well as in films by Brazilians An-
drea Tonacci and Gabriel Mascaro, Chileans Bettina Perut and Iván Os-
novicoff, and Argentinians Verónica Llinás and Laura Citarella, which
I study in the following section, “new regionalism” comes about as the
stringing together of place after catastrophe, via a multisensory assem-
blage of human and nonhuman agents that the filmic sound image can
gather thanks to its already sympoietic nature. In the final section, I
bring Yanomami shaman-activist Davi Kopenawa’s testimonial account
The Falling Sky—coproduced with French anthropologist Bruce Albert
and first published in French in 2010—into dialogue with the politi-
cal memories of disappearance in the aftermath of military dictator-
22 ❘ Introduction

ship and civil war in the Southern Cone and Central America. How,
I ask, can Kopenawa’s “memories of extractivism”—of mining, viral
and bacteriological ethnocide, and agro-industrial land grab but, also,
of the turmoil unleashed on the forest’s fragile equilibrium of bodily
and spiritual lives—be heard in a political field constellated around the
idea of human rights? Kopenawa’s shamanic forest memory, I suggest,
might offer us a way forward toward articulating new forms of kin-
ship between the biopolitical struggles of the postdictatorship and the
challenge of “geontology” (Elizabeth Povinelli’s expression), which the
present cycle of neoextractivism dares us to face up to.
Entranced Earth is a distant cousin of the homonymous book I pub-
lished in Spanish some years ago, with which it still shares several sub-
chapters and objects of inquiry. Others have disappeared or have made
way for new ones, as have several of the key questions guiding my in-
quiry. This has come as somewhat of a surprise to me, as I had originally
envisaged this book to be an only slightly reworked version of my ear-
lier study, Tierras en trance, for an English-speaking audience. Yet in the
interim between one book and the next, several things happened that
forced me to consider a more comprehensive rewriting. One of these is
the publication, in recent years, of several major, book-length studies
on the interplay between aesthetics and catastrophic advances of an-
thropogenic climate change and environmental devastation—including,
in the field of Latin American studies, a number of ambitious attempts
to extend political critiques of extractivism and the ethics of buen vivir
(or “the good life”) toward the field of cultural production and to bring
these into dialogue with an emergent constellation of “environmental
humanities” in the English-speaking world. To address, and to make
explicit, my own position vis-à-vis this quickly expanding corpus, I have
also had to reconsider and update both my primary objects of analysis
and the corresponding field of critical references. But at the same time,
and perhaps more importantly, the years since I completed an earlier
iteration of this work also saw the emergence of climate change denial-
ism as a founding pillar, along with racism, religious fundamentalism,
misogyny, and homophobia, of a new globalized fascism that has
started to dispute the hegemony of neoliberalism, with the rise of Don-
ald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in the US and Brazil, respectively, and the
proliferation of military-parliamentary coups throughout Latin Amer-
ica as the opening shots of a new round of accumulation, the violence of
which will no doubt dwarf even the one unleashed by neoextractivism
since the millennium. In response, this is also a more openly political
 Introduction ❘ 23

book than its prequel, or at least one in which the question of politics
never looms far from the surface, even as I have attempted to honor
my commitment to the aesthetic as a harbinger of alternative modes
of becoming with. But perhaps this distinction between aesthetics and
politics is no longer sustainable in the first place and we have, yet again,
reached a point where fascism’s “self-alienation has reached such a de-
gree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure
of the first order,” as Walter Benjamin presciently put it in the postscript
to his 1935 essay “The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion.”46 If that is indeed the case, as Benjamin already knew only too
well, then only the politicizing of art can save us.
Chapter 1

Insurgent Natures

It is a stark image, the photograph of burned-down rainforest on the

cover of Orlando Senna’s Xana (1979), a compilation of reportage-style
dispatches from the boomtowns sprawling along the Trans-Amazonian
highway, the megaproject launched nine years earlier by the Brazilian
military dictatorship (fig. 4). Its visual rhetoric is that of war photog-
raphy, only the mutilated victims here are not humans but trees. In
similar fashion as in the two-minute tracking shot of giant forest fires
in Iracema, uma transa amazônica, the movie Senna made with Jorge
Bodanzky in 1974 (which was prohibited until 1980 in Brazil), the
photo inverts the relation between foreground and background as the
forest comes center stage. Instead of a setting, we come to see it here
as the main actor, the scarred and bruised remains of living matter. In
the book as in the movie—the title of which, wordplay on Brazilian
popular slang, could be loosely translated as “Iracema, an Amazonian
fuck”—the forest has been violated by the same forces that also prey
on Iracema, the Indigenous teenager picked up by loud-mouthed white
trucker Tião “Brasil-Grande” (Paulo César Pereio), only to be ditched
again when they reach the next roadside brothel. The mutual allegoriz-
ing of tropical nature and the female body, there for the taking by the
white, male invader (not by accident, Tião’s truck also carries, apart
from Iracema, illegally logged timbers) is anything but new: it merely
redeploys as a tale of sexual exploitation, indeed of earth rape, the foun-

25
26 ❘ Chapter 1

Fig. 4. Cover of Orlando Senna, Xana: Violência

Internacional na Ocupação da Amazônia (Rio
de Janeiro: Editora Codecri, 1979).

dational love story of the first Iracema, Brazilian Romantic writer José
de Alencar’s lyrical novella of 1865.
Yet the almost hypnotic frame composition of the sequence, starting
a few minutes earlier with Iracema’s profile looking into the rearview
mirror as the camera dollies past a seemingly limitless plain of dead
stumps (fig. 5), does more than just invert the foundational allegory
narrating ethnocidal violence as sacrificial love—the theme of Alencar’s
tearful eulogy for the Indian maiden birthing the white colonizer’s child
at the price of her own death. Instead, in what is perhaps the film’s most
extreme instance of collapsing the real and the staged, the forest fire
sequence is emblematic of the Capitalocene as a (permanent yet discon-
tinuous) intersection between human and more-than-human histories
that defy any conventional narrative chronotope, including the film’s
own. We cannot possibly know what Iracema—played in a mesmer-
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 27

izing performance by vocational actor Edna de Cássia—is looking at,

only that she is looking past what we are seeing on screen. In fact, she
might already be peering into a future beyond the inferno of flames she
and Tião are about to cross, one that is our own present and vantage
point: a time of incremental depletion of an Amazon crisscrossed by
vast networks of roads, holed in like a tropical West Bank between soy
and African palm plantations, pastures, and oil- and gas-prospecting
sites. The 2019 slash-and-burn season alone saw a 77 percent increase
in forest fires across Brazil (and almost as much in Bolivia, Paraguay,
Colombia, and Peru), incurring an estimated annual loss of almost a
million hectares within the Amazon biome.1 Most of the fires had been
deliberately set by an agro-industry still euphemistically referred to by
the mainstream media as “farmers.”
Keeping Iracema/Edna’s face in the frame, literally mirroring the de-
struction of the forest’s assemblage of more-than-human lives, Senna
and Bodanzky’s film also reminds us of what, in Macarena Gómez-
Barris’s expression, “the extractive view rendered invisible”: the way
“colonial visual regimes . . . rupture Indigenous cosmological rela-
tionships to land [and] facilitate capitalist expansion, especially upon
resource-rich Indigenous territories.”2 In 2017, the bloodiest year on re-
cord till then, almost four environmental activists were murdered each
week in Latin America, many of them from Indigenous communities,
according to estimates from NGO Global Witness.3 More than 60 per-

Fig. 5. Film still from Orlando Senna and Jorge Bodanzky,

Iracema, uma transa amazônica (Iracema), 1974). 90 min.
28 ❘ Chapter 1

cent of murders worldwide with a link to agribusiness and mining oc-

curred in Latin America, with Brazil registering as the most dangerous
country on earth for environmental defenders, with fifty-seven reported
killings—numbers that, unfortunately, have only continued to increase
since the election of far-right federal and state governments in thrall to
transnational agro- and petrocapital.
But simultaneously, the rearview mirror of Tião’s truck also main-
tains, within the forward-moving image, the presence of those spaces
and times now thrust into the past. Not unlike Walter Benjamin’s angel
of history, Iracema/Edna’s gaze looks out toward a quickly receding
history that “keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”4—the past of her
own childhood in the forest, perhaps, a last glimpse of which we caught
at the film’s outset, but also that of centuries of advancing extractivism
and ethnocide that ended up driving her away from a home that may
already have ceased to exist. The tracking shot sequence from Iracema
revealing the scale and violence of deforestation—among the very first
images, in fact, to bring into a global audience’s view the destruction
of the Amazon by industrial logging and roadbuilding5—is so stunning
for being at once allegorical and literal, at once emblematic of the vi-
olence exerted by extractive capitalism and a documentary register of
real lives, human and nonhuman, destroyed by the road on which the
camera itself travels forward. By means of cinematic composition, the
sequence makes the forest speak its own history—not just that of its hu-
man inhabitants but also, crucially, the more-than-human assemblage
of the living forest.
Similar kinds of oscillation between allegory and the documentary
register were already present in a literary movement emerging in Latin
America in the 1920s and 1930s, known as regionalismo. In regionalist
writing, as in the movie, foregrounds and backgrounds are prone to
suddenly switch roles, as human diegetic action—what we think of as
“history”—vacates the stage or indeed becomes the stage on which a
conflict of shifting alliances between living forms is being played out:
“the ambiented becomes the ambient (or ‘ambienting’), and the con-
verse is equally the case,”6 as Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro put it. Even more radically than in the “New Latin Amer-
ican Cinema” of the 1970s, in this earlier, literary iteration the “nat-
ural world” appears before us as a cosmopoliteia, “a multiplicity of
intricately connected multiplicities [where] animal and other species are
conceived as so many kinds of ‘people’ or ‘societies,’ that is, as political
entities.”7 As situated in what Ángel Rama, in his groundbreaking 1982
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 29

study of narrative transculturation in Latin America, already called the

“zona extractiva”8—the extractive zone—regionalist fiction was un-
precedentedly permeable to the multiple voicings of this cosmopolitics,
which the modern-colonial frame of painterly or verbal landscape had
silenced and contained. Indeed, it was in the “earth-writing” genres of
this literary movement, such as the novela de la tierra (soil novel) or the
novela de la selva (jungle novel), that the multiple, lived temporalities
of the extractive zone and its racialized biopolitics, as condensed so
memorably in Senna and Bodanzky’s tracking sequence, first came into
view. At the same time, these narratives sketched out a countermove-
ment that rallied human and nonhuman forces to combat extractivism’s
advance: a biopolitics not of extraction but of contagion, mutation, and
community.
Amitav Ghosh, in a fascinating reflection on literary realism’s blind-
ness to climate change, claims that the modern novel has been predi-
cated on the “concealment of those exceptional moments that serve as
the motor of the narrative,” thus ushering in “a way of thinking that
deliberately excludes things and forces (‘externalities’) that lie beyond
the horizon of the matter at hand [and] renders the interconnectedness
of Gaia unthinkable.”9 Challenging Ghosh’s argument, I contend, Latin
American regionalist fiction produced a realism of the extractive zone
where “external things and forces” are suddenly endowed with a voice
and agency of their own in the face of catastrophe. The natural habitats
that, in many of these texts, acquire an active agency of their own also
map out an ecological history of extractivism in Latin America. The
“jungle stories” and “desert stories” that delineate the environmental
geography of literary regionalism reflect quite strikingly the “sequence
of extraction and depopulation”—deforestation, soil erosion, rural
exodus—common to vast areas of Central and South America between
the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century.10 The destruction of for-
ests through rubber tapping, industrial logging, oil prospecting, and
monocrop plantations is the subject of a narrative series stretching from
Spanish anarchist Rafael Barrett’s El dolor paraguayo (The suffering
of Paraguay, 1910) to his Portuguese comrade Ferreira de Castro’s A
selva (The Jungle, 1930)—a key if somewhat extraterritorial text of
Brazilian literature’s “rubber cycle”—or from Mexican Gregorio López
y Fuentes’s Huasteca (1930) to Brazilian Jorge Amado’s Cacau (Co-
coa, 1933) and Argentinian Crisanto Domínguez’s Tanino (Tannine,
1952). Droughts and desertification—in addition to the better known
Brazilian “drought cycle,” which includes José Américo de Almeida’s A
30 ❘ Chapter 1

bagaceira (Trash, 1928), Rachel de Queiroz’s O quinze (The Year 1915,

1930), and Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas secas (Barren Lives, 1938)—are
also the subject of Argentinian Eduardo Mallea’s Todo verdor perecerá
(All greenery will perish, 1941), Costa Rican Carlos Salazar Herrera’s
“La sequía” (The drought, 1947), or Colombian Manuel Mejía Vallejo’s
“Tiempo de sequía” (Times of drought, 1957).
Frequently, the narrative dynamic this literature shares is that of a
journey: the metropolitan subject’s trek to the jungle or desert frontier
as in Castro’s A selva or the native’s exodus to the city as in Ramos’s
Vidas secas. Together, these variations also offer an alternative (eco)his-
tory of modernity. They confront reading audiences with the reverse of
urban “progress,” taking stock of extractivism’s boom-and-bust dynam-
ics that were responsible for the arrival in coastal cities, at the same time
as the literature narrating their fate, of impoverished migrants from the
interior taking up residence in the fast-expanding belts of favelas, cha-
bolas, barriadas, and villas miseria surrounding the urban core. Literary
regionalism gave voice to this radical form of alienation, which forced
inhabitants into becoming agents of the destruction of their own life-
worlds. The lumberjacks in the logging stations of Domínguez’s Gran
Chaco just as the rubber tappers of Ferreira de Castro’s Amazon, tasked
with reducing the forest to exportable “primary material,” are also
themselves reduced to a dehumanized, indeed “vegetative” existence.
As Clemente Silva, the old rubber tapper who guides the protagonist
through the infernal forest of Colombian José Eustasio Rivera’s classic
jungle novel La vorágine (The Vortex, 1924), exclaims:

Around the great trunk, I tie a length of caraná vine to col-

lect the latex tears and channel them to the bucket. A cloud
of mosquitoes rises into my face to take my blood while my
hands are occupied, and a rising vapor blurs my vision. This
is a death struggle. I torture the tree and the tree tortures me,
until one of us succumbs.11

Effectively, as Giorgio Agamben has observed, “the division of life

into vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human . . .
passes first of all as a mobile border within living man,”12 and on this
mobile border literary regionalism zeroes in with its stories of an in-
surgent nature. For “nature,” on this limit that, in geographical terms,
also coincides with the frontiers of capitalist expansion, rebels, first
and foremost, against its own “naturalization.” What is most terrify-
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 31

ing about it, in fact, are not the forces it hurls against the intruder—
climate events, parasites, animal attacks—but how these forces begin
to acquire a language of their own. “Nature,” as it were, mobilizes the
multiple elements of its cosmopoliteia as a way of making a point, of
entering an argument with the objectifying discourse of extractivism.
Whereas extractivism divides nature from (human) society because of
its assumed objectness and thus its incapacity to talk back, in regionalist
narratives the setting comes alive to speak in insurgent tongues. And
it does so because the very same “anthropological machine” that sets
human life apart from all others also thrusts outward, toward the mo-
bile border of capitalist expansion, a zone of alliances where emergent
modes of interspecies communication and solidarity become possible.
This speech of things and nonhuman beings in regionalism’s stories of
insurgent nature, however, is different from animal and vegetal speech
in fables. It does not merely anthropomorphize the more-than-human,
figuring human values and qualities in emblematic animal and plant
bodies. Rather, in listening to the multiple talking back of a more-than-
human universe that is urging to express itself and to become a political
agent in its own right, regionalist fictions were already taking up the
great narrative challenge facing us today, according to Chakrabarty, of
“put[ting] global histories of capital in conversation with the species
history of humans”13—as well as, we might add, with other species and
interspecies histories, making us realize that we are in fact “surrounded
by many world-making projects, human and nonhuman.”14 But before
returning to this early, literary iteration of more-than-human commu-
nity that, I argue, emerges in a minor, oppositional strand of regionalist
fiction and essayism, we must first consider the predominant aesthetic
and political form of engaging with the extractive zone in Latin Amer-
ican modernity, especially with the rainforest: an attitude that, follow-
ing Roberto Esposito’s reflections on modern biopolitics, I shall analyze
as an immunitary, or pharmaceutical, stance toward the powers of the
nonhuman.

The For est as P ha r ma ko n

In one of the tensest moments of La montaña es algo más que una in-
mensa estepa verde (The mountain is more than just a vast green ex-
panse, 1982), his testimonial account of the Nicaraguan revolution,
Omar Cabezas recalls the small platoon’s narrow escape from a National
32 ❘ Chapter 1

Guard offensive after the soldiers had killed Tello, the veteran guerri-
llero who had taught the youngsters how to fight and survive in the
jungle.15 The experience is recounted as spurring an intense crisis of
faith. If Tello had been the best among the guerrillas and even so, had
died without even putting up a fight, then perhaps even “Che had [been]
a Quixote like Tello, or like us—the whole Frente Sandinista was prob-
ably a Quixote.”16 But in this moment of doubt, the hike itself becomes
a rite of passage, in which the hero, imposing his will over the obstacles
of the terrain and the pain caused by acute leishmaniasis—the fearsome
“lepra of the jungle”—finally triumphs over the treacherous environ-
ment. Tello, says Cabezas, was a symbol not just to his comrades but
also to the forest itself because

I’m sure that he lived with her, that he had relations with
her; she bore him sons . . . And when Tello died she felt
that all was over, that her commitment was gone . . . But
when she saw the readiness to fight of the group of men
there marching over her, through her heart, she realized that
Tello was not the beginning and end of the world . . . She
had to realize that Tello was the beginning of the world,
because after him came all of us . . . As if she knew she
had in fact screwed up, that she ought never to have fallen
silent that afternoon when Tello died; she ought to have
continued rocking, if only as a show of neutrality. But we
bent her over; we shattered the neutrality of the rivers and
gigantic trees; we brought her back to herself; the sound of
the river changed as we passed, for we possessed the river,
had impressed our own sound upon it . . . So, when she had
screwed up, there was nothing else to do—we brought her
around by force.17

The episode recalls another initiation scene, this time involving Mar-
cos Vargas, the modernizing hero of Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos’s re-
gionalist jungle novel Canaima (1935): the moment when, at long last,
Vargas, having become the station master of a remote rubber camp,
ceases to be a stranger and embraces his own savage essence. Stripping
down as he runs through the storm-struck forest, the very same that had
previously put him in a state of constant anxiety and irritation, Vargas
experiences a moment of liberation as he suddenly “realized that the
jungle was afraid”:
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 33

“Qué hubo! ¿Se es o no se es?—What’s happening here! Are

you or aren’t you?”

Marcos Vargas, the defiant shout in the face of danger, the

heart inflamed in the confrontation with such a sovereign
power, again as before, joyful and confident . . . The deepest
roots of his being were buried in stormy soil, the surging
streams of blood in his veins still howled through him, in the
depths of his spirit he was one with the nature of the furi-
ous elements, and before the overpowering spectacle offered
by the satanic earth he found his essential self, cosmic man,
stripped of his story, reintegrated into the very first footstep
at the edge of the abyss of creation.18

One scene mirrors the other: the liberal hero faces down the storm,
while the socialist hero stirs it up. Both triumph over the “natural ele-
ments” by mimicking, indeed by becoming one with them. Cabezas and
his platoon become the children of the mountain, and Vargas imbibes
the powers of Canaima, the forest spirit, and “talks to the trees in the
jungle and has even turned into one a time or two.”19
What to make of these continuities and echoes between the two texts
and between the series to which they belong: the liberal dystopia of
the novela de la selva—the jungle novel—and the revolutionary epic
of guerrilla testimonio, or eyewitness narrative? As critic Ana Pizarro
shows in her richly documented study on imaginaries of the Amazon,
from the earliest days of colonization, the area of the New World that
would become known as the tropical zone was perceived as “a universe
of turbulence,” a “terrain of mixings and of violent juxtapositions” that
resisted and confounded the ordering gaze of colonial power.20 In fact,
colonial historian Serge Gruzinski has argued that this notion of the
jungle as a chaotic abyss, a remainder from the earliest days of cre-
ation, only reflected back to the Western eye the catastrophic impact
of colonization itself, insofar as, by way of direct violence or of dev-
astating epidemics, it caused “a rift in local societies and an acceler-
ated metamorphosis of the social body.”21 Yet whatever its causes, the
perceived formlessness of this primal universe also implied, in turn, a
sense of unfettered availability of all things imaginable: the continental
interior as a “satanic” yet also prelapsarian universe where fabulous
riches awaited their discovery on behalf of civilizing agents capable of
separating valuable from useless matter. The extractivist utopia of El
34 ❘ Chapter 1

Dorado—the golden city at the heart of the forest—which abounds in

accounts of the Amazon dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
century,22 is only the most striking expression of this essentially phar-
maceutical discourse, which dreams of harnessing the forest’s savage
essence to conquer and transform the world of civilization.
In twentieth-century Latin American literature and politics, this for-
est pharmakon resurfaces in two novel kinds of iterations, both of which
call on the jungle as a remedy while also attempting to circumscribe its
venomous effects of contagion: the jungle novel, associated with the
liberal project of national modernization, and the narratives of guer-
rilla warfare that proliferate after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.
Each in their own fashion, these series generated narrative mappings
of nation and continent that also reconfigured the colonial “immuno-
logic” of the forest as pharmakon. The heroes of the jungle novel strug-
gle to save the project of liberal modernization by subjecting it to the
immunitary trials of a liminal environment. The men and women taking
up arms across Central and South America following Fidel Castro’s tri-
umphant campaign in the Sierra Maestra, devise a two-fronted strug-
gle: against the “alienated” city, the stronghold of neocolonial power,
but also, crucially, against the forest, which the guerrilla fighters must
learn to subject to their own will power. For liberal explorer and rev-
olutionary combatant alike, the forest represents a theater of mutual
transformation of self and environment. The testimonies of guerrilla
struggle update the liberal immuno-logic as they draw alternately on
the curative and destructive powers of city and forest. As we shall see,
it is precisely their “testimonial” nature as expressed in the close yet
also tense translational pact between voice and writing (and thus also
between the “voice of the people” and the “letter of the law”) where this
immuno-logic manifests in the textual form itself.
In his study Forests, literary critic Robert Pogue Harrison traces an
archaeology of the forest in the Western literary tradition, as the abys-
mal limit where civilization defines itself in the confrontation with a
radical other. He suggests “forests represent an opaque mirror of the
civilization that exists in relation to them”:23 from Ovid’s Metamorpho-
ses to the American Gothic, the shadowy forest is where differences be-
tween creaturely forms become blurred and collapse into an indifferent
continuity of the living. The cycle from germination to putrefaction and
back is the living expression of this unraveling of a differential, quali-
fied life into the formless indifference of the merely living: “The decay
of the fallen giant and light from the newly opened canopy combine
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 35

to encourage germination and sprouting. Pollen swirls in the miasmas

of decomposing organic matter. The smell of ferment is the breath of
both purification and procreation,”24 the disgusted hero Arturo Cova
exclaims in The Vortex. The forest is where bios, or qualified, individu-
alized life, is forced to recognize itself as zoé, or bare life: it is their own
image that the forest’s opaque mirror reflects back to the heroes of the
jungle novel, leaving them horrified and confused.
The guerrilla testimonio, I shall argue, revisits this jungle frontier of
literary regionalism, which had figured there as a zone of transspecies
communitas, of emergent biopotentiality in the “bio-contact zone,”25
in the form of a translational pact between the voice and writing. Yet
this translational pact will also draw the insurgent communitas of the
forest firmly back into the immunitary fold of humanism. Immunitary
alliance, to use Roberto Esposito’s terminology, is established here by
tracing a limit, a dividing line, inside the community of the living: im-
munization is achieved by renouncing community. “If communitas—
suggests Esposito—is that relation, which in binding its members to an
obligation of reciprocal donation, jeopardizes individual identity, im-
munitas is the condition of dispensation from such an obligation and
therefore the defense against the expropriating features of communi-
tas.”26 Paradoxically, indeed, the lines of flight from immunitary alliance
opened up by literary regionalism’s species boundary–defying voicings
of the insurgent forest will be closed more firmly than ever by the revo-
lutionary narratives that claim to succeed them.
In a classic study of the jungle novel’s literary cartography, Uruguayan
critic Fernando Aínsa argues that the protagonists’ itinerary maps
out a “system of places,” a form of spatial emplotment of the nation
as composed by lines of tension and conflict.27 The jungle, Aínsa sug-
gests, represents the constitutive limit of this system of places since, as
a foundational void, it is also where scenes of origin—of naming and
inscription—can be staged that ground writing’s representational sover-
eignty over the ensemble of national life. Indeed, the text that fully real-
izes this aporetic drawing out of a map of the nation traced from its own
innermost confines is Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (The
Lost Steps, 1953), a novel that—just as Rivera’s The Vortex, its most
important predecessor—is also the fiction of an impossible voice, a kind
of immaterial écriture sustaining narrative discourse from a space that is
beyond both speech and writing. The forest’s biopotentiality as the abys-
mal limit where qualified life makes way for an undifferentiated life is
36 ❘ Chapter 1

being mobilized here by a narrative discourse that aims to collapse onto

one and the same plane the voice and writing, “myth and archive.”28
This mythopoetic kernel of a writing that strives toward its own or-
igin scene, Aínsa shows, results in a number of principal traits shared,
with surprisingly little variation, by all the great texts of the jungle novel
series. There are at least three such traits: first and foremost, a clash of
temporalities between the hero’s advance, which inscribes into space a
vector of modernization, and the environmental surroundings where
instead what prevails is a gradual regression. The hero’s journey across
different space-time units until he joins the primitive tribe among which
Marcos Vargas takes refuge or until coming face-to-face, as does the
traveling musicologist in The Lost Steps, with petroglyphs so ancient
they rise from “the diabolic vegetation that surrounded the Garden of
Eden before the Fall,”29 also allows the plot to revisit in reverse the
subsequent ages of evolution and of the history of conquest and colo-
nization. Therefore—the second shared characteristic—these novels are
also hybrid textualities insofar as each space-time capsule constitutes
a separate narrative unit with its own stylistic peculiarities, sometimes
also implying a change of narrative voice as in the Russian-doll struc-
ture of “stories in the story” in The Vortex. Third and finally, transitions
between one act and the next are generally triggered by sexual encoun-
ters between the protagonist and native women who, in this way, act as
guardians of a threshold in addition to allegorizing a natural environ-
ment, which resists, gives in to, or seduces the hero into its fold. As Car-
pentier’s narrator puts it: “I had traveled through the ages; I had passed
through the bodies and the times of the bodies, without realizing that I
had come upon the hidden straitness of the widest door.”30 This double
movement of the jungle novel—spatial advance, temporal regression—
also inscribes into the genre a tension between history and ecology, as
manifest in the constant oscillation in heroes and narrators alike, be-
tween denouncing primitive accumulation on the extractive frontier
and attributing its violent excesses to the “savage” environment itself.
Frequently, passages of acute critique of the hyperexploitative labor re-
gime and its close ties with clientelistic local and national politics give
way almost without transition to fatalistic musings about “the jungle,
both virgin and sadist” and its insatiable thirst for vengeance against the
human aggressors.31
Literary critic Lesley Wylie has called our attention to the intertex-
tual as well as metaliterary facets of the jungle novel, as a postcolonial
rewriting of the colonial travelogues of discovery. Elements of pastiche,
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 37

irony, and mimicry, she argues, constantly undercut the attempt to rein-
scribe an itinerant point of view invested with epistemological author-
ity. The postcolonial heroes of the jungle novel—hybrid subjects that
neither fully belong to cosmopolitan modernity nor to the continent’s
sylvan interior, which they initially see with the eyes of a foreigner—
cannot but overact the role of discoverer assigned to them by the ge-
neric tradition. At the same time, they are plainly conscious of merely
reenacting an already conventional routine: a repertoire of secondhand
gestures and actions stripped of any powers of revelation and discovery
they might once have held. Their narratives being haunted by inauthen-
ticity and repetition, Wylie contends, the protagonists can no longer
face the forest as a silent realm beyond writing’s reach but rather enter
it as a space of intertextuality. The traveling protagonists of the jungle
novel set off toward the “jungle not only as a physical space but also as
a symbol of the limits of European writing on the tropics.”32 Yet as Lú-
cia Sá reminds us, modern Latin American narratives of the rainforest
also challenge and counteract their own entanglement with the intertext
of the colonial journey by calling on a different citational system, a
counterarchive of Amazonian native myths (to which these narratives
gain access, ironically, only by way of the European archive of colonial
travel).33 The forest, at this crossroads of archival inscriptions, turns
into what Raúl Antelo calls an “obtuse arabesque”:34 a zone within
writing itself where both archives—colonial travelogue and Amazonian
myth—become juxtaposed and confused, but also where the violence
the one exerts on the other becomes a destabilizing force within the
narrative discourse. The forest, in consequence, also turns into the or-
igin of a future language of the nation: a language emerging from the
confluence of the two archives that, not unlike Marcos Vargas’s mestizo
son and namesake returning, at the end of Canaima, from the innermost
heart of the continent, will one day name to the world what the text can
only anticipate as its own silent core.
The jungle novel, in short, ironically reinscribes a previous narra-
tive regime at the same time as it denounces the untimeliness of this
reinscription, to instead dream up a future voice it can only invoke
as a foundational silence. In political terms, this ambivalent stance is
closely aligned with the project of liberal modernity itself. On taking
hold of the reins of the narrative, the heroes of the jungle novel also
dispute sovereignty over the space and time of their journey. Just as the
texts themselves usurp a previous narrative regime, their heroes aim to
wrest control of the forest’s relations of production from the coloniz-
38 ❘ Chapter 1

ers and their descendants, the “foreign capitalists.” National modernity,

in the jungle novel, is equivalent to the “good,” Creole entrepreneur’s
taking charge of the extractive regime put in place by colonial primi-
tive accumulation: “The considerable increase in the production of the
Guarampín works—compared with that of preceding years—was un-
doubtedly due to his good treatment of the peons,”35 the narrator of
Canaima approvingly refers to Marcos Vargas’s tenure at the head of a
rubber station in the Guyanas. Yet the property titles underwriting this
passage of “liberal fortune-telling” are, in the end, a dud check, relying
as they do on a future language that is pushed beyond the text’s own
limit:36 a zone of pure presence that will come into being thanks to a
convergence of archives that the narrative itself has to postpone the
very moment it is announced. Liberal nation making, in fact, revali-
dates extractivism (including the land’s reification as primary resource,
as “Cheap Nature,” and that of its inhabitants as “cheap labor” to be
appropriated or as female bodies invariably at the male protagonists’
disposal) even as it offers up the—eternally deferred—promise of its
unmaking.
If, indeed, Carpentier’s The Lost Steps sought to proffer the last word
in the narrative series of the jungle—the definite version that would
write out, once and for all, the genre’s repertoire of tropes, including the
foundational silence sustaining it—another text published in Cuba a
mere ten years later would make a very different claim to that title. Pa-
sajes de la guerra revolucionaria (Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary
War, 1963), Ernesto Che Guevara’s account of the Cuban Revolution,
replaces the foundational silence projected into the heart of forest by the
liberal hero’s journey with the epic of wresting power from neocolonial
oppression in an inverse movement back from jungle frontier to capital
city. The forests of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra, for Guevara’s account and for
the theory of revolutionary action it advances, are a “nonplace”—yet
not in the sense of a utopian, imaginary site of “good life” but rather
because, as places, they remain entirely absent from the text. The jungle
is a site of action but never an object of description. This is because it
provides the guerrillas with precisely the opposite of a place: an im-
possibility of locating the foco (the guerrilla platoon), which remains
perpetually in motion. In the action as much as in its narrative retelling,
this focus in motion has the effect of transforming the enemy’s system
of places into smooth space, into a surface allowing for the construction
of a war machine.
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 39

The forest is a nonplace not only because the narrator never pauses to
describe it as the stage of the action but also, moreover, because it sup-
plies the liminal zone in time and space where, on an individual as well
as collective level, the hombre nuevo—the revolutionary new man—is
being forged. Jungles, bush, and mountains are out of place not only
because they offer almost infinite opportunities for tactical retreat but
also, just as importantly, because they are located “between two times”:
between the exploitative past of neocolonialism, with which the guer-
rillas have cut relations, and the revolutionary society they are about
to usher in. The forest shelters this in-between time of expectation, or
as critic Juan Duchesne Winter puts it: “the not-yet-here becomes, in
Che’s narrative, the out-of-place, the dialectical ectopia through which
a new kind of subjectivity is preparing to jump across the place of the
established order . . . The foco represents a hiatus, a void, that sepa-
rates the destruction of one institutional sphere from the construction
of another.”37
Despite the fundamental importance assigned in Guevara’s manual
of guerrilla warfare, published after Pasajes, to “the countryside” (el
campo), as “the terrain of armed struggle . . . in the underdeveloped
parts of America,” since “the locations offering ideal conditions for the
struggle are rural ones,”38 there is no room in either text for anything
but the most succinct, cartographic description of these locations. De-
spite the key role attributed to the Sierra Maestra in the Cuban Revo-
lution, lengthy descriptions of its environment would have undermined
the text’s pragmatic objective. Right from its title, Passages aims to be
not just an eyewitness account of events for the benefit of readers who
had not been present at the time of struggle. Rather, writing itself strives
to become but another mode of action, “passing on” a series of mili-
tary and political lessons to future combatants. Therefore, the vector of
transmission between past and future actors must never be cut off by
descriptions that might detain the flow. Description, Guevara seems to
suggest, is the opposite of action; it is a striation of the smooth space
the guerrilla has carved out: “Hit and run, wait, lie in ambush, again
hit and run, repeatedly, giving the enemy no rest . . . The fundamen-
tal characteristic of a guerrilla band is mobility. Within a few minutes
it can move away from a specific theatre and in a few hours, farther
still from the region, if that becomes necessary; this mobility allows the
guerrillas to constantly change fronts and avoid any kind of encircle-
ment.”39 Therefore, to narrate guerrilla struggle in a form that is true to
its essence, one must suspend landscape for continuous action. Remark-
40 ❘ Chapter 1

ably, however, following Che’s own disastrous defeat in Bolivia and

the frustrated attempts at implementing revolutionary focos in Central
America, it would be as suspended action—a pause in motion—that
the environment was to make a comeback. In two testimonies of armed
struggle written two decades after Che’s—Guatemalan Mario Payeras’s
Los días de la selva (Days of the Jungle, 1981) and Nicaraguan Omar
Cabezas’s La montaña es algo más de una inmensa estepa verde (Fire
from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista, 1982)—it is the forest
that resurges as a protagonist in its own right.
In both texts, those aspects that the narrative structure of Guevara’s
Pasajes had relegated to the margins, focusing instead on the combat as
the moment that reveals individual fighters’ merits and failures, effec-
tively take center stage. Quite literally, the two Central American testi-
monies take the time to dwell on the landscapes of forest and mountain
as not only narrative settings but also places in their own right. Land-
scape descriptions, in Payeras and in Cabezas, are the textual correlates
of a new temporality of struggle, associated with a shift in guerrilla
tactics toward what was known at the time as the “prolonged people’s
war” (guerra popular prolongada). In this revised strategy of guerrilla
warfare, a deep, rooted entrenchment in the forest and the forging of
close ties with its native inhabitants took precedence over the Gue-
varian foco’s speed and nomadic displacements. Despite these shared
traits, the accounts of the Nicaraguan and the Guatemalan revolution-
ary could hardly be more different from one another. For Cabezas, the
mountainous woodlands are first and foremost the space where a new
sociability can emerge—the zone, in Duchesne Winter’s expression, “of
development of an alternative form of power, where the individual and
the collective reconstitute on new foundations . . . the framework of hu-
man relations.”40 In Payeras’s narrative, meanwhile, the pharmaceutic
powers of the forest are called on within a framework of immunitary
alliances and within a mode of writerly expression that make explicit
the text’s affiliation with the literary tradition of the jungle novel.
Days of the Jungle recounts the attempt between 1972 and 1976, on
the part of the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP—the “Guerrilla
Army of the Poor”), to plant a “revolutionary seed” in the Guatemalan
border district of El Quiché, in a strategic shift that claimed to have
learned the lessons from the previous, still orthodoxly Guevarian guer-
rillas’ defeat a decade earlier.41 Its narrative temporality could not be
more different from the frenetic pace of Pasajes: until well into chapter
6, there is not a single instance of combat; and instead of the rapid
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 41

movement of the Guevarian foco, here the narrative’s main interest

is with the excruciatingly slow process of the small platoon’s “taking
root” in the forest. The guerrilla, in Payeras, must first and foremost
become one with the jungle, it must learn how to move through the
forest and live off its resources. Only then can it begin establishing re-
lationships with other, Indigenous and peasant, inhabitants until finally,
once the two initial cycles have been completed, it can leap into armed
action. The testimonial account, written and published at a time when
the vulnerability of this strategy of entrenchment against the govern-
ment’s scorched-earth tactics had already become apparent, also antic-
ipates the ecoessayism and poetry Payeras would write toward the end
of his life, when he revisited the settings of his adventures as a guerrilla
commander with the eye of the traveling naturalist.42 Yet already in
Days of the Jungle, instead of the unwavering pace of Guevara’s Pasajes,
narrated in an almost monotonous simple past, the predominant verbal
tense is the imperfect, invoking lengthy and indefinite durations and
associated with a semantics of learning and growth, in which the time
of nature becomes synchronous with the gradual blossoming of the first,
fragile revolutionary seedling:

We spent those first days learning the basic truths of the jun-
gle. We found ourselves in a new world, and only time would
teach us its points of reference . . . Those who knew the jun-
gle taught the rest of us to differentiate between the various
species of snakes. They explained the habits of the deadly
coral snake, with its band of red and black rings, and de-
scribed the velvety appearance of the lethal barbamarilla . . .
Although we found tapir tracks every day, it was months
before some of us saw one.43

This “implantation” stage of the guerrilla platoon, lasting several

years, represents, in Ricardo Roque-Baldovinos’s expression, “a lesson
in the experience of time.” In Payeras’s jungle, “one learns to wait, to
live in consonance with other rhythms, yet paradoxically, this asphyxi-
ating slowness, the unnerving exercise of expectation, is also what will
enable the unleashing of that great vortex of time, Revolution.”44 Unlike
in Guevara, here the acceleration of temporalities requires first and fore-
most a patient exercise of learning, which eventually allows the guerrilla
fighters to articulate the multiple temporal layers inhabited by them and
their Indigenous and peasant allies. For Payeras, the different regions of
42 ❘ Chapter 1

national space are also, and more importantly, sedimentations of mul-

tiple temporalities, which only armed struggle will finally collapse into
one single, national time and space. The revolution is the great foundry
that will melt into one all the singularities so that the Guatemalan na-
tion can finally and truly emerge. Not by chance, then, Days of the Jun-
gle is also the most consciously and deliberately “literary” of guerrilla
testimonies: its project of national refoundation is directly indebted to
the modern-liberal jungle narratives from which the text openly quotes.
Payeras likes to allude to the origin narratives of Carpentier and Gabriel
García Márquez, literary referents that also feature prominently in the
“splendid library” the group insists on carrying into its forest refuge,
only to abandon it almost immediately—one could hardly think of a
more “marvelously real” gesture—to the ants and the rain:

From our jungle refuge we patiently cultivated the friend-

ship of the villagers, and hopefully watched the passage of
time. The season arrived for building huts in the forest and
storing grain, which we did to provide for the winter and for
eventual enemy offensives . . . This was a period of great in-
vention and of learning sedentary ways. We invented bread,
discovered rubber boots, and learned to sail a raft . . . We
bore all this patiently, for by then we understood that the
task we had undertaken was a matter of years, and that it
was right that it should be so.45

The agent capable of fusing the times and spaces of the nation, for
Payeras, can thus only be the one who has traveled through them all: the
guerrilla. The EGP platoon’s itinerary as narrated by Payeras reinscribes
yet again the plot of the colonial journey and its taking possession of
the very space it learns to navigate. In adjusting its jungle environment
to the generic pattern, however, for it to provide “the out-of-place from
which . . . the guerrilla utopia is being written,” as Duchesne Winter
puts it, the narrator of Days of the Jungle also has to actively omit
the fact that “the dispersed communities of the Ixcán’s green desert, in
sometimes indifferent, sometimes hostile and sometimes solidary con-
tact with the guerrilla, actually belong to a broad social movement of
land occupation and self-organization.”46 The jungle novel’s conven-
tional tropes such as the pristine environment and its “primitive” in-
habitants, in fact, can make their appearance in Payeras’s narrative only
thanks to the deliberate omission of processes of colonization and land
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 43

occupation that had been underway since the 1970s in response to the
advancing agro-frontier and to forced displacements of communities in
the context of the Guatemalan state’s violent counterinsurgency war. In
Days of the Jungle, this history dissolves yet again into nature, so that
it can give birth to the savior-hero, the guerrilla—the one who, having
mastered the trials of a liminal space of foundation, will finally lead the
community in its great leap toward the future.
In reproducing the tropes and gestures of the colonial discovery nar-
rative, Payeras’s text also returns to the forest its immunological role
as pharmakon, insofar as the guerrilla army, in order to transform into
a deadly war machine, first needs to build up defenses against the jun-
gle by immersing itself in it. Yet this immuno-logic of self-fortification
conspired against the EGP’s proclaimed aim of reaching out toward
Indigenous and campesino communities, since the need to preserve the
group’s immunitary shield also limited opportunities for community
building. In Payeras’s account, community only comes about by ac-
cident, once colonists and Indigenous villagers, on the run from the
armed forces’ counterinsurgency war, arrive at the guerrilla’s encamp-
ment asking for protection—which, Payeras explains, puts the entire
dispositive at risk: “A constant stream of peasants sought out our local
cells, bringing with them their ancient burden of grievances . . . This
rapid growth in a sense hurt us qualitatively.”47 To open the organiza-
tion to its peasant allies is to endanger the efficiency of its immunitary
shield—a dilemma to which Payeras’s narrator responds by shutting
out whatever forms of dialogue these encounters might have yielded,
and insistently referring to the guerrilla’s unexpected new neighbors
with the same folkloric and deindividualizing gaze as the modern nar-
rators of the jungle novel had done before: “One week the camp took
on the appearance of a carnival, with men who arrived wrapped in
woolen blankets and carrying little harmonicas, coming to hear about
the revolution.”48
The flipside of this increasing literariness of the text, invariably
choosing exoticizing imagery over listening to, and incorporating of,
other testimonies, is the guerrilla’s own “narcissistic self-enclosure,”49
with the integrity of their immunitary shield becoming more and more
an obsession for Payeras and his group. The guerrilla’s “learning pro-
cess” increasingly displays a form of retentive perfectionism that before
long takes a murderous turn. For, to “mature” the guerrilla must first
get rid of the putrefied seeds in its own midst. To this end, while the
season of “inventions and harvests” is in full swing, the group decides
44 ❘ Chapter 1

to execute a “resentful” fellow combatant who had “cast doubt over

the people’s support” and had become “a source of demoralization.”50
Payeras’s narrator almost relishes the contrast between the surrounding
forest idyll and the terrible sacrifice the group has to make to eliminate
the contagious element in its midst:

We shot him one April morning when many birds were

singing. This was one of the world’s lovely sounds that he
would no longer hear . . . He refused the blindfold, then
turned his face away from the firing squad. We returned to
our posts. A profound silence reigned. The unit had reached
maturity. Perhaps from that moment on each of us was a
better person.51

Here, the jungle novel’s traditional association between violence and

the forest—which had left unresolved its own founding contradiction
between the violence against the forest perpetrated by resource ex-
tractivism and the violence of the forest against the human intruder—is
both reinscribed and turned on its head. The guerrilla’s homicidal self-
purging initially appears to be at odds with the pleasant, birdsong-filled
world of the forest, yet—as confirmed by the “profound silence” that
envelops the camp after the shooting—it is in fact proof of the platoon’s
successful “assimilation” into its environment, accomplished through
the ultimate act of immunization: the amputation of the collective’s own
“infested” limb.
The notion of the forest as a liminal space also features heavily in
Omar Cabezas’s account of the Nicaraguan revolution, where it pro-
vides the stage for the young student activist’s initiation into the armed
struggle. Once again, it is in the jungle that, through a series of physical
and emotional ups and downs that are disclosed with refreshing candor
and self-irony, the—once again, exclusively male—group of youngsters
of diverse social and ethnic origins turns into a collective body of action.
But in Fire from the Mountain, the forest is not, as in Days of the Jungle,
a “state of nature” into which the guerrilla must assimilate through a
prolonged process of seeding, germination, and fruit-bearing. Although,
as in Payeras’s account, the jungle is a catalyst of transformations, both
individual and collective, this is far from the whole story here: “Your
legs are getting stronger. You learn how to swing a machete. And as time
passes your hair starts to get long . . . Washing so little roughens your
skin. Over long periods of time your cuts and scratches heal and new
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 45

ones come to take their place, until your hands and your arms are a
different color.”52 Yet for Cabezas these physical transmutations are but
external marks of what is primarily a political rather than military, and
an affective rather than physical, experience. They herald the emergence
of the hombre nuevo, the new man, who rediscovers and intensifies his
own selfhood upon giving himself over to the collective. “To say that
the FSLN vanguard was solid was not an idle word,” Cabezas claims:

The Frente Sandinista was developing, through action—in

city, country, and mountain—a spirit of iron, a spirit of steel,
a contingent of men bound with a granite solidity . . . Be-
cause, as the Christians say, we denied our very selves . . .
We transformed our loneliness into a brotherhood among
us; we treated each other gruffly, but actually we loved
each other with a deep love, with a male tenderness . . .
The new man began to be born with fungus infections and
with his feet oozing worms; the new man began to be born
with loneliness and eaten alive by mosquitos; he began to
be born stinking. That’s the outer part, because inside, by
dint of violent shocks day after day, the new man was being
born with the freshness of the mountains. A man—it might
seem incredible—but an open, unegotistical man, no longer
petty.53

In Cabezas just as in Payeras, the jungle provides the chronotope for a

particular kind of bildungsroman: the transformation of urban student
leader into guerrilla fighter, steeled by life in the wilderness. In Cabezas’s
account, however, this process, that is also one of bodily metamorpho-
sis, has its textual correlate in a form of writing that constantly turns
into an oral and, more importantly, into a “common voice.” Cabezas’s
is a language that—as one of the book’s first readers, the Argentine
novelist Julio Cortázar, was quick to pick up—emerges in dialogue, by
interpellating and thus creating in its reader, as Cortázar told his Nic-
araguan comrade, “an immediate relation of closeness towards you as
author and protagonist of the story. There are no barriers nor any dis-
tance, from the outset you’re my friend and I’m yours, because what
you’re telling me isn’t just a deep and authentic experience, but you’re
also telling it on a level of total contact and participation.”54 Thanks
to Cabezas’s own explanations, we know that this interpellation of the
reader as listener and confidant (and, thus, also implicitly as male: as yet
46 ❘ Chapter 1

another member of the homosocial community that was born in the for-
est) was in fact the deliberate effect of a complex performance of writing.
The text is an edited version of oral narratives Cabezas had previously
recorded in a series of sessions in which, over food and drinks, he would
share his memories with friends. The reader, in other words, is assigned
the place previously occupied by a listener, and by one who partakes in
a ritual of friendship, just as writing reproduces the oral voice previ-
ously recorded on tape. The text, quite literally, recreates the colloquial
situation in which it had initially been produced and thus also invites
a shared kind of reading, being read out loud, and commented on, in
a gathering of friends. What Cabezas aims for is, indeed, a language of
friendship, which—as Nicaraguan poet José Coronel Urtecho claimed
on occasion of the book’s publication in 1982—“ushers in the birth,
not of the Spanish language but of the language of the Nicaraguan
revolution.”55
In fact, this language of revolution also resembles the ecstatic fu-
sion of languages the heroes and narrators of the jungle novel had been
dreaming of. Here, finally, was a writing that never stopped becoming
voice. Voice and writing can finally become one, Cabezas suggests, once
they are articulated into a single chain of collective action, once authors
and readers, listeners and storytellers, partake in one and the same rev-
olutionary becoming. The text, in fact, is but a performative enactment
of this militant temporality. Voice and writing in equal parts, it takes
charge of the production of shared historical experience: therefore, it
also does not end with the rebels’ triumphant entry into the capital
Managua but, rather, with the scene of encounter between Cabezas and
an old peasant, Don Leandro, who had already fought US occupation
alongside General Sandino. In Don Leandro’s narrative, Cabezas recog-
nizes the historical meaning of his own actions. There, he says,

when I met that man, when he told me all of that, I felt I

really was his son, the son of Sandino, the son of history.
I understood my own past; I knew where I stood; I had a
country, a historical identity, with everything that Don Lean-
dro was telling me . . . I embraced Don Leandro with a shud-
der of joy and of emotion. I felt that my feet were solidly
planted on the ground; I wasn’t in the air. Not only was I
the child of an elaborate theory, but also I was walking on
something concrete; I was rooted in the earth, attached to
the soil, to history. I felt invincible.56
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 47

The text ends once it has encountered its own image, once it can
finally narrate what, right from the outset, had underwritten its testi-
monial aesthetics and politics: the move from addressing a listener to
embracing a comrade, from stories being shared to an identity being
confirmed. It was as he listened to Don Leandro’s stories, says Cabe-
zas, that he “wished I had a tape recorder.”57 This is the point when,
as an experience of struggle is being passed on, the text marks the end
of combat action and the beginning of an act of witnessing. With this
final moment of lived histories merging into one, Cabezas’s account
can deem its mission as accomplished: the establishment of historical
community, which even before the final triumph has already ushered
in the time of revolution. Cabezas’s encounter with Don Leandro—just
as, previously, the encounter with an old revolutionary at the end of
Guevara’s juvenile Motorcycle Diaries, or as the Zapatistas’ Subcoman-
dante Marcos’s encounter with Old Antonio in the Lacandon jungle a
decade or two after Cabezas’s text—represents an origin story for the
very narrative we are reading. From here, the transcribed voice of the
narrator can be confident of its own anchoring in a chain of experiences
of struggle being passed on from one storyteller to the next, with each
act of transmission reconfirming the historical, experiential space and
time of a shared becoming.
In what we might call, then, the “biopolitical mapping” of country
and continent, first by the literary genre of the jungle novel and subse-
quently by the accounts of armed struggle, the jungle represents, as Fer-
nando Aínsa succinctly puts it, “the most remote point toward which
to retreat, amplifying the distance toward the circumference constituted
by the big cities. The heart of the continent represents the maximum
distance one can move toward, as, from here, one is already starting to
‘exit’ in the other direction.”58 The jungle is a zone of inversion, of era-
sure and of transformation, as it is also where the living turns indifferent,
where the limits of species, races, and genders collapse: where immuni-
tary alliance is confronted by the communitas of the forest. But thus, as
the liberal explorers of the jungle novel had already suspected, and as
the guerrilla’s narrators would confirm years later, it is also “more than
just a vast green expanse”: it is the point of origin of a revolutionary
language. Yet this story of initiation of a new subject—of “el hombre
nuevo”—also implies in many guerrilla testimonies an equally radical
act of erasure: that of the multiple struggles of workers and peasants,
women, students, and Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities,
whose contributions to revolutionary change remain almost entirely
48 ❘ Chapter 1

absent from Guevara’s and Payeras’s (and even, though to a lesser de-
gree, from Cabezas’s) accounts. On the sylvan borders of the nation,
the guerrilla sought to immunize itself, above all, against history, to be
able to usher in a new beginning, a point zero of time itself. Whereas
the previous narrative series of jungle novels, with their ironies, bifur-
cations, and citations—their manifestations of “narrative contagion,”
in Sylvia Molloy’s apt expression59—had been staging the failure of the
very project of immunization they had set out to chronicle, the guerrilla
was, in the end, less receptive to such nuances. While it claimed to usher
in national community, the armed struggle in the jungle also strove,
more than ever, to finally accomplish modernity’s most ambitious proj-
ect of immunization. This, I would argue, is the tension the narratives of
armed struggle never managed to resolve, aiming as they did to “stand
on solid ground”—as when Cabezas met Don Leandro—and yet to also
keep “hanging in the air”: to remain immune against the constraints of
human and more-than-human entanglements alike. Perhaps the “hom-
bre nuevo”—the new man—was, after all, the ultimate humanist.

The A n ima l A l l i a nc e

In a story written in the early 1920s, just after returning to Buenos

Aires from his first, ten-year spell as a farmer-settler in the subtropical
rainforest of Misiones, on the border between Argentina, Brazil, and
Paraguay, Horacio Quiroga—one of Latin America’s most gifted sto-
rytellers, born in Uruguay in 1873 but living and working mostly in
Argentina until his suicide in 1937—stages a narrative duel between
two environments that compete with one another in their hostility to-
ward the metropolitan traveler. In “El Simún” (the story’s title and one
of many names, we later find out, for an African desert storm), the
struggle between the jungle and the desert manifests itself through a
rift inside the narrative voice. The narrator-protagonist is being chal-
lenged, at the remotest point of his itinerary, by another voice that
wrests narrative authority from him, never to return it again. The first
narrator, a young urbanite working, much to his distaste, as an in-
spector of weather stations for the Argentine Ministry of Agriculture,
describes his journey up the Paraná River until he reaches the border
with Brazil. There, he meets the Frenchman Briand, the local station-
master and foreman of a logging company, and is forced by torrential
rains to stay with him an extended period. Eventually, monotony and
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 49

alcohol provoke a nervous outburst in the young inspector, to which

Briand responds by telling him of his own trials as a military official in
the French Sahara: a calvary of light, heat, and sand that destroyed a
long-standing friendship with a fellow officer.
Both stories are really one and the same, then, different only in the in-
tensity of environmental aggression and in the way each narrator trans-
lates it into language. The desert, in this narrative duel, triumphs over
the jungle not least due to the skillfulness of its narrator who, unlike his
sylvan rival working in a more conventional brand of realism, unleashes
a firework of devices including ellipsis, discontinuity, and metonymy.
Rather than merely asserting the indescribable nature of his experience
of desert storms, Briand recreates it in a language that is itself elusive
and discontinuous: “I stayed seven months . . . There was just a hor-
rendous light out there, and a horrendous heat, day and night . . . And
constant heart palpitations, because one can’t take it . . . And that’s just
when there is no sirocco . . . And then there’s the cafard.”60 But there
are, in fact, no winners or losers in “El Simún.” Briand and the desert
are themselves the ellipsis at the heart of the inspector’s narrative jour-
ney upriver. Both, jungle and desert, remain entangled with one another
through the struggle between their narrators, as do the colonial fron-
tiers they map out and give voice to.
But then, the story could also be read as a forerunner to a more rad-
ical strand within literary regionalism where the encounter with an “in-
surgent nature” forges a novel constellation between body, voice, and
environment that goes beyond the stories of collapse and reconstruction
of civilization’s immunitary shield as told by the jungle novel and the
guerrilla testimony. “El Simún,” in the way it stages the takeover of one
narrative voice by another is also a kind of narrative threshold—a text
setting the scene for a literature yet to be written, of which Quiroga,
and particularly his Misiones stories, represent no small part: stories of
environmental insurgency, the violent eruptions of which respond to a
rift within narrative discourse itself.
“El regreso de Anaconda” (The return of Anaconda, 1926) is perhaps
the most extraordinary of Quiroga’s stories in the way it orchestrates
the multiple voicings of nature’s insurgency. In the story, the rainforest
“rose up, ardently, in a single voice” (“enardecida, se alzó en una sola
voz”) to protest the way it has been turned over, as “nature,” to an
extractive eye that only sees it as so many primary resources or as the
overburden that must be cleared away. As a matrix of transspecies com-
munitas, the entire jungle rises in rebellion, activating its cosmopoliteia
50 ❘ Chapter 1

and rallying the natural elements to join forces against their shared ex-
clusion from the sphere of politics. In the words of the great serpent:

We’re all the same, but only together. Each of us, on their
own, isn’t worth a great deal. But as allies, we are the entire
tropical zone. Let us hurl it against the humans, brothers!
. . . Let’s throw our entire zone downriver, with its rains, its
fauna, its fevers and its snakes! Let’s throw the forest down-
river, until the stream is blocked altogether!61

This is not an Orwellian fable of workers’ politics in animal guises.

As we shall see, the community the story imagines goes far beyond this,
precisely because it also includes human proletarians in its horizontal
assemblage of living forms, alongside molecular reactions and climate
cycles. What is at stake, to return to Roberto Esposito’s terminology
referred to earlier in this chapter, is nothing less than an alternative
biopolitics, a “biopotentiality” that, from a “communitarian” exterior,
mobilizes the counterforces assembled through their shared exclusion
by the immunitary apparatuses of biopower.62
The “returns of Anaconda”—the multiple rewritings, in Quiroga’s
work, of one and the same narrative core that run from “Un drama en
la selva” (A jungle drama), published in 1918, to “The Return of An-
aconda,” first published in 1926—evince the gradual consolidation of
an idea of “animal alliance”: the emergence outside human society (but
not necessarily excluding humans) of an oppositional, resistant biopol-
itics based on the community of the living. The story’s earliest version
had nevertheless made exactly the opposite point. Here the struggle of
adders and serpents against the establishment of an Institute of Sero-
therapy in the jungle had been frustrated by a rift inside the “natural
universe” itself. In “Un drama en la selva,” the animals’ united front
collapses once Hamadrías, the giant Asian adder brought along by the
scientists, and the native queen of snakes (which is not yet called An-
aconda but Musurana) lock heads. Having vanquished her rival and
survived the massacre of the snakes, Musurana is adopted by the scien-
tists as “an ally of Mankind, exterminator of pests,” in turn receiving “a
certain freedom to roam her forest.”63
The change in ophidic species from one story to the next is of no
small importance: the green anaconda (Eunectes murinus) is the largest
of American boas, a family of nonvenomous serpents whose diet in-
cludes fish, mammals, reptiles, and birds; musurana (Clelia clelia) is the
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 51

largest of ophiophagic snakes—snakes that eat other snakes. Although

its fangs contain venom, it is largely harmless to humans; by contrast,
it can be lethal for its reptile victims. At the same time, the musurana
is immune to the venom of the adders on which it feeds. It is, indeed, a
“natural ally” of the scientists seeking to immunize humans and domes-
tic animals against the venomous snakes of the forest.
In his genetic study of “Anaconda”—the story’s second, intermediate
iteration that opens the homonymous volume published in 1921—literary
historian Napoléon Baccino Ponce de León shows how Quiroga, while
maintaining the ambiguity between the previous version’s two conflict-
ing pairs (humans versus serpents and snakes versus adders), also intro-
duces some key elements of the final sequel, “El regreso de Anaconda,”
to be published five years later. In fact, the very ending of “Anaconda”
already announces the sequel yet to be written, while also recognizing
its radical departure, quite literally, from the narrative we are reading:
“But the story of the long months of this voyage up the Paraná . . . this
story of rebellion and assault of the water plants belongs to another
story.”64 Yet already in “Anaconda,” at the vipers’ assembly where the
response to the human intruders is being discussed, what motivates the
snakes’ “struggle to the death” is no longer, as previously in “Un drama
en la selva,” the defense of “the entire Family” but rather the salvation
of “the entire Jungle.” Where, before, what was at stake had been the
survival of the species family, the latter’s destiny is now subsumed under
that of the forest. This shift, Baccino Ponce de León argues, “signals an
evolution toward a new objective, which is the constitution of myth.
The narrator seems to return to the initial dilemma and to suggest . . .
that the conflict is of a different order; that the action of Man compro-
mises nature as a whole as it threatens her complex and therefore also
delicate balance.”65
In tracing a line of division within the natural world itself, the sto-
ry’s earlier versions had also continued to advance an idea of “benign
colonization,” unblemished by the destructive extractivism associated
with capitalist greed. As Jennifer French has argued in a pathbreaking
study of Quiroga, in the stories set on Argentina’s subtropical frontier,
the author “vituperates the large-scale industries that rapid economic
expansion brought to Misiones . . . but he continues to valorize col-
onization as a spiritually transformative experience uniquely capable
of forming bonds of community among humans and the nonhuman
environment.”66 This Robinsonian utopia, based on the rational, nonex-
ploitative use of natural resources, is still predicated on the immunitary
52 ❘ Chapter 1

alliance emerging at the end of “Un drama en la selva” and “Anaconda”

associating the benign colonizers—the ophidiologists—with their “nat-
ural ally,” the nonvenomous serpent, in their common struggle against
“pests.” As Anaconda/Musurana regrets at the end of the first two ver-
sions, this alliance should also have included her cousin, the serpent
Ñacaniná, since—as one of the scientists says—“she’ll keep the rats out
of the house.”67
Quiroga’s work, then, gradually advances from exposing the fissures
in this immunitary apparatus to its outright negation by insurgent com-
munitas. The contradictions between these two positions, which, Bac-
cino Ponce de León suggests, weigh down most heavily on “Anaconda,”
the transitional version of the story, point to the same limitations of the
immunitary shield that, in many of the jungle novels we studied in the
previous section, drive the protagonists to their death. Yet in Quiro-
ga’s stories, what is at stake is not some innate hostility of “nature” to-
ward the human, as existentialist readings of his oeuvre have frequently
maintained. Rather, what they expose is the incapacity of the immuni-
tary apparatus (the one constructed by the human protagonists as well
as by the narrative voice) to clearly distinguish productive lives from
harmful ones, lives to protect from lives to destroy. As the narrator of
“Anaconda” reminds us, such distinctions need to be constantly reas-
sessed on the mobile border separating immunitas from communitas,
since a venomous substance can become under certain circumstances a
life-saving remedy (a pharmakon): “It is known that for a horse that is
being immunized, venom is as indispensable for its daily life as water
itself, and it dies if it fails to receive it.”68
“El regreso de Anaconda” tells a radically different story from these
narratives of construction and crisis of the immunitary shield. From its
very first lines—“When Anaconda, in alliance with the native elements
of the tropics, mused and made plans for reconquering the river”69—the
story enters a time and space outside the historical chronotope intro-
duced by “Los desterrados” (The exiles), the 1926 volume’s eponymous
story that follows it.70 This temporality, nevertheless, is not a “prehis-
torical” or “foundational” time nor does it precede the historical time
of the collection’s other stories. In fact, it is rigorously contemporary in
that both in “El regreso de Anaconda” and in the other stories included
in Los desterrados what is being narrated are the conflicts stirred up by
capitalist frontier expansion into the subtropical rainforest. The differ-
ence is, rather, one of exteriority: the narrative time of “El regreso de
Anaconda” is a temporality that has not separated from space as an
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 53

autonomous dimension. Although the “plot” of frontier expansion is

overall the same as in the subsequent stories, it is narrated here from a
multiplicity of living space-time experiences—animal as well as vegetal
and atmospheric—all of which converge on the great river. Time in “El
regreso de Anaconda” is first and foremost the movement of the waters
in their abundance or their scarcity; it is the meteorological and hydro-
graphic time of heat, rains, and currents of the Paranahyba and Paraná
rivers through which Anaconda and her comrades travel. This is also
why Anaconda, the river serpent, leads the insurrection, because it is to
her, floating at the pace of the flood, that the voicings of different animal
species, of floating islets and of the waters descending from the zone of
the great rains, are addressed.
This mythical community that surges in response to Anaconda’s call
for all-out attack against the immunitary shield established in the story’s
preceding versions nevertheless retains the ecumenic vocation the latter
had attributed to the great serpent. Despite having convinced beasts,
plants, and rains to hurl themselves against “Man who has been, who
is and who will always be the cruelest enemy of the forest,”71 Anaconda
still takes under her wing, to the anger of adders and tigers, a human be-
ing: the agonizing mensú (the lumberjack identified by his monthly pay-
out, his “mensual”) she finds on an islet floating downriver. Anaconda,
in other words, reasserts the communitarian bond even when faced with
the very element in opposition to which it had been forged—although
with a crucial difference regarding the immunitary shields assembled at
the end of the story’s previous versions. Instead of the biologists in “Un
drama en la selva”—the benign colonizers—the human element here is
a native man reduced to a condition of extreme abandonment and in his
final death throes. Yet Anaconda’s protective attitude does not seem to
be motivated, as French suggests, by the difference “between the local
peoples’ use of natural resources and the newcomers,” since the dying
mensú is found “in a poor shack, organically constructed and so light-
weight that it is pulled along by the current upon a raft of camalotes
(floating islands)” and thus “seems to have integrated his own activities
into the natural biological order.”72 In fact, I would argue, the mensú’s
destitute state does not so much represent his “organic” integration into
the local ecosystem as it does, rather, the ultimate consequence of his
sequestration into the extractive machine of frontier capitalism, which
is organized to violently appropriate “Cheap Nature” in the form of
unpaid labor and primary resources alike.73
54 ❘ Chapter 1

But precisely this condition of radical abandonment also allows the

dying mensú to reenter the communitarian assemblage in its shared, ag-
onizing adriftness in the face of an advancing extractive frontier: “He’s
a poor fellow, just like all the others,”74 as Anaconda says, just before
she herself perishes as she lays her eggs on the islet next to the mensú’s
still-warm body. In this community of “poor lives”—lives at the edge
of death, torn from their alliances of origin—a “minor biopolitics” also
makes its emergence, as Gabriel Giorgi argues: “an alternative commu-
nity, in which these bodies crossed by lines of variation trace alterna-
tive modes of commonality, different logics of alliance and of filiation,
another demarcation of the space between bodies where there are no
‘individuals’ nor ‘society’ but bonds, relational, mobile, and strategic
constellations between bodies and species.”75 This opposition between
the immunitary alliance and the forest communitas, which Esposito
associates with the antagonism between biopower and biopotentiality,
does not actually run as a border between humans and nature, as Ana-
conda’s returns so eloquently show. Rather, it represents a mobile bor-
der within the human itself, resulting either in a division of the living
between “bichos malos y buenos”—between pests and pets—or in its
con-fusion in the forest’s “metamorphic zone” of communitas.76
The “zona tropical,” the tropical zone where these antagonistic al-
liances and commonalities are being forged and dissolved, is also an
“emergency area,” that is, a region of “natural disasters” the conse-
quences of which impact all its inhabitants alike, though not necessarily
to the same degree. In the emergency area of extractivism’s sacrifice
zones, the diminishing of the supplies needed to sustain life bring the
diversity of living forms into an extreme and dangerous proximity; yet
this very proximity also opens up the possibility of new assemblages,
“patterns of unintentional collaboration” that emerge in response to a
shared struggle for staying alive.77 Compare the following two passages,
the first from Brazilian regionalist writer Graciliano Ramos’s classic ru-
ral exodus novel Vidas secas (Barren Lives, 1938) and the second from
Quiroga’s short story “Yaguaí” (1913). In both examples the climate
events reconstellate relations between territory, liquids, and life:

The branches of the coral-bean tree down by the water hole

were covered with birds of passage. This was a bad sign. In all
probability the backland would soon be burnt up. The birds
came in flocks; they roosted in the trees along the riverbank;
they rested, they drank, and then, since there was nothing
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 55

there for them to eat, they flew on toward the south . . . The
sun sucked up the water from the ponds and those cursed
birds drank up what was left, trying to kill the stock.78

The drought continued; the mountain was left deserted lit-

tle by little, because the animals were concentrated in the
threads of water that had been great streams. The three dogs
forced the distance that separated them from the watering
hole of the beasts, with medium success, because being this
one very frequented in turn by jaguars, the small game be-
came distrustful.79

“Emergency,” in the sacrifice zones of extractivism, should also be

understood in the sense of a Deleuze-Guattarian “becoming-minor”—
insofar as all lives become subject here to a shared condition of dimin-
ishing supplies in a shrinking world that drives them into dangerous,
contagious yet also collaborative proximity. This dangerous closeness,
which also triggers frenetic attempts at preserving or reconstructing im-
munitary shields, is what makes possible a particular narrative device,
a free indirect speech of the extractive zone. This kind of interspecies
mode of narrative allows for the point of view to shift and oscillate
freely between one species and the next, including the human. On the
level of narrative form, interspecies free indirect speech makes manifest
the way in which human history, in its character as a geological force,
seeps into the living worlds affected by it to the point where “history”
and “nature” can no longer be distinguished. The beginning of Ramos’s
novel makes clear how, in the extreme proximity to one another of lives
suffering from diminishing supplies, the drama of constantly shifting
alliances and of communitarian assemblages under pressure also de-
mands, on the very level of form, the introduction of a transspecies
perspective:

Only the day before there had been six of them, counting
the parrot. Poor thing! It had met its end on the sand of the
riverbed, where they had taken their rest beside a mudhole.
With no sign of food in the vicinity, hunger had been too
much for the drought-sufferers. The dog had eaten the head,
feet, and bones of her friend and had no more recollection
of the matter. Now, standing there waiting, she looked over
the family belongings and was surprised not to see on top of
56 ❘ Chapter 1

the tin trunk the little cage in which the bird had struggled
to keep a balance. Fabiano [missed it at times, too, but then
he] remembered.80

The stories of the extractive zone (which is also a bio-contact zone)

narrate, from a transspecies point of view, the emergence of a “post-
natural” world.81 The struggles of formation and dissolution of alli-
ances that provide the plotlines of these stories—narratives including
food chains, bacteriological and molecular reactions but also intersemi-
otic regimes, “ecologies of living thoughts”—make themselves manifest,
as in the above quote, in a constantly shifting point of view that is itself
governed by dynamics of scarcity, of contamination and contagion.82
The extractive zone is also one of residues and afterlives, as embodied by
Ramos’s extended family of landless peasants-squatters, including their
animal companions and scarce belongings, or by the canine protagonist
of Quiroga’s short story: “And by the end of January, of the gaze lit, the
ears firm over the eyes, and the tall and provocative tail of the fox ter-
rier, there was nothing but a mangy skeleton, ears thrown back and tail
sunken and treacherous, which trotted furtively on the roads.”83
“Yaguaí,” one of several stories in Quiroga’s oeuvre featuring ani-
mal protagonists without abandoning the register of realist fiction, is
also one of the first to experiment with this floating, interspecies point
of view. Just as Graciliano Ramos’s Barren Lives, “Yaguaí” represents
what I will call a natural history of the Capitalocene: both are narra-
tives of breakup and transformation of interspecies alliances set on the
extractive frontier, where nature and history collapse into one. Both
“Yaguaí” and Barren Lives, furthermore, share almost identical plot-
lines (both are “drought stories”). They narrate the undoing, carried out
by the human associate, of the interspecies alliance with the dog, who
is suspected of having betrayed (even if involuntarily) this immunitary
alliance to the communitas of “wildlife” and thus of having turned into
a “pest”—a source of contagion that threatens the immunitary shield
humans are struggling to uphold in the zone of emergency.84 “Yaguaí”
recounts the life and death of the homonymous fox terrier who is ac-
cidentally killed by his English landholder owner when the latter con-
founds his mascot with “the dog of the peons.”85 It is, as are so many
of Quiroga’s stories set in the Misiones rainforest, a narrative of the
failure of the immunitary shield. Since, in lending his dog to the peón
(farmhand) Fragoso, the Englishman had intended to subject Yaguaí
to a process of immunization, exposing him to the “wild” life of the
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 57

servants’ dogs to better adapt him to the jungle habitat. The experi-
ment is unsuccessful until Fragoso’s orchard is invaded by rats, which
only Yaguaí—for once outperforming the native hunting dogs—helps
exterminate. Nonetheless, just as he has reasserted his place in the im-
munitary alliance—as an “exterminator of pests”—Yaguaí is himself
“accidentally” eliminated for having been confused with a plague, with
the “starving dogs” of Fragoso and the other servants that roam the
estate in search of food.86 Together with the almost unnoticeable shift
in point of view (from the dogs to the Englishman, passing through a
“panoramic long shot” operating the transition between the two), this
confusion of modes of “dogness” also conflates “the species history and
the history of capital,”87 to quote Dipesh Chakrabarty’s emblematic
phrase. It associates the division between nature and culture, between
lives to cultivate and lives to extirpate, with class struggle.
In Ramos’s Barren Lives, the death of the dog Baleia at the hands of
Fabiano, the small community’s paterfamilias, is less accidental but no
less associated than that of Yaguaí with this immediate articulation be-
tween class struggle (the politics of colonial enclosure depriving peasant
sharecroppers of fertile soils) and interspecies dynamics:

The dog was dying. She had grown thin and her hair had
fallen out in several spots. Her ribs showed through the
pink skin and flies covered dark blotches that suppurated
and bled . . . Fabiano, thinking she was coming down with
rabies, tied a rosary of burnt corncob about her neck. The
dog, however, only went from bad to worse. She rubbed
against the posts of the corral or plunged impatiently into
the brush, trying to shake off the gnats by flapping her dan-
gling ears and swishing her short, hairy tail, thick at the base
and coiled like a rattlesnake’s. So Fabiano decided to put an
end to her.88

Just as “Yaguaí,” Barren Lives represents a natural history of the

Capitalocene: a narrative in which human “history” converges (in a
mode of “familiarity” but also in violence) with the more-than-human
as it chronicles moments of crisis and reconfiguration of transspecies
alliances in the extractive zone. At the same time, both stories are also
different from the “returns of Anaconda” analyzed above in the way
they approach these dramas of alliance and community—in much the
same way as in ecohistorical terms droughts and floods are different
58 ❘ Chapter 1

yet also complementary geoclimatic events ensuing from deforestation,

agro-industrial expansion, and soil erosion.
Yaguaí’s and Baleia’s lives in these natural histories of the Capita-
locene represent lives on a threshold, which may be one of death but
also of transformation, of metamorphosis. Theirs are lives lacking a
proper place once they have abandoned—or better, have been aban-
doned by—the immunitary alliance, but are also no longer able to enter
the horizontal pact of communitas, into the “complicity” forged by “the
native elements of the tropics” in “El regreso de Anaconda.” The stray
dog, outlawed and infected with contagious diseases that the advancing
frontier unleashes on the sacrifice zone, is a postnatural hero. It is a life
that has fallen outside any kind of immunitary alliance: indeed, it is
what actively disarticulates such alliances. Just as the monsters inhab-
iting the margins of society in popular legends—the pariah, the bandit,
the wolfman—it is a being of the threshold that, as Agamben points
out, “is neither simple natural life nor social life but rather bare life or
sacred life.”89 But thus, as the bearer of a radical negativity, this life is
also biopotentiality in its most extreme form: it is what announces the
coming of an insurgent and contagious politics, which is neither the
politics of native communitas as in “El regreso de Anaconda” nor, much
less, that of the immunitary alliance of “Un drama en la selva.” It is a
politics of the Capitalocene, of the biocontact zone of sacrifice, of which
these narratives of drought and of human-canine violence offer a first
glimpse, and which, in multiple guises and transmutations, underwrites
many of the literary and political engagements with extractivism and its
legacies in Latin America throughout the twentieth and early twenty-
first century.

A N atu r a l H i sto ry o f t he C a p i ta l o ce n e

The reading I am developing here of Latin American regionalism’s sto-

ries of immunitary alliance and of insurgent communitas as natural his-
tories of the Capitalocene also attempts to bring the extractive frontier
into central focus. Rather than, as some of regionalism’s preeminent
analysts have done, including Argentine historian José Luis Romero
or Uruguayan and Brazilian literary critics Ángel Rama and Afrânio
Coutinho, to understand the movement’s dissidence with regard to the
modernist aesthetics of the cosmopolitan city as a nostalgic (though
sometimes politically progressive and emancipatory) response to the
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 59

perceived decline of local traditions,90 I want to show how this literature

is becoming newly relevant to us by making it speak to our own neo-
extractivist present with disturbing actuality. When understood as writ-
ings on, and of, the zone of sacrifice, where the advance of capitalism’s
extractive machine manifests itself in the uncertain, mobile border that
runs through the body of the earth at the same time as it divides human
and more-than-human existents into lives to be shielded or disposed
of, regionalist fictions brought into narrative form the entanglements
between two histories: those of the colonized, workers, women, and
Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples struggling for the recognition
of their “human rights” on the one hand and the species history of the
human as a geological force on the other. As Ericka Beckman points out,
“regionalism’s turn towards ‘nature,’ and ‘the land’ marked anything
but an escape from commercial culture: instead, the settings examined
by regionalism were precisely those at the center of export-led mod-
ernization. Under a system organized around the extraction of natural
resources, the rural hinterlands are always already marked out as fron-
tiers of accumulation and possible centers of production.”91
The small province of Santiago del Estero in the Argentine North-
west offers an eloquent case study of how cultural production thrived
on, as well as turned against, the commodity boom-and-bust cycle of
the extractive frontier. As early as in 1900, a local newspaper celebrated
that the logging of the region’s quebracho hardwoods was becoming
the area’s main source of employment and income, calculating the year’s
total volume of export merchandise at 1 million logs, 900,000 beams,
600,000 tons of firewood, and 25,000 tons of charcoal.92 In 1915,
according to the forest inspector and future governor of the province
Antenor Álvarez, 137 obrajes (logging stations) were in operation, em-
ploying over 15,000 lumberjacks and turning out more than 2 million
logs per year, equivalent to the 1,600 kilometers of rail track added
within the previous decade.93 Before the logging companies arrived, the
province had been a fairly typical case of what anthropologist Anna
Tsing calls a “peasant forest,” an area of “interlocking uses” where
grass prairies alternated with woodlands, maintained through seasonal,
controlled forest fires to contain the spread of brushwood and weeds,
which in turn favored the regrowth of young tree shoots.94 By contrast,
the massive logging of dominant tree species such as the red quebracho
rapidly led to erosion due to exposure of unprotected soils to heavy
rains. Lack of maintenance and irrigation caused by the exodus of the
rural workforce to the logging stations also provoked the invasion of
60 ❘ Chapter 1

grasslands by dry shrubs, worsened still by the deterioration of the local

microclimate due to the diminishing forest canopy. In addition to the
near total destruction of edible forest fauna (depriving peasants of a
crucial ingredient to their diet, as well as of a community-defining social
experience), deforestation also produced a new, secondary environment
of dry, thorny, and low-growing brushwood steppes and swamps, por-
trayed in a series of ink and tempera drawings by Argentine artist An-
tonio Berni (who lived in Santiago in the early 1950s) as a convulsive,
hostile jumble of plant and insect life seemingly about to leap out of the
frame of the image and at the beholder (fig. 6).
In this section I want to zero in on the frantic debates within San-
tiago del Estero’s small intellectual and artistic milieu at the height of
the environmental devastation wrought on the region by the logging
industry. More particularly, I will take us into the year of the Great
Drought in 1937 that caused widespread famine and rural exodus on a
scale that briefly made headlines even in faraway Buenos Aires.95 That
same year, the poet, sociologist, and literary historian Bernardo Canal
Feijóo—himself a native of Santiago del Estero—published his book-
length study Ensayo sobre la expresión popular artística en Santiago
(Essay on popular artistic expression in Santiago), which aimed to of-
fer a comprehensive overview of the interactions between environment
and creative expressions, the “integral pattern of landscape, customs,
accents, localities,” which represented the very bedrock of santiagueño
identity.96 Santiago del Estero, home to the first colonial city founded
in Argentina, Canal Feijóo argued, could claim “a small superiority”

Fig. 6: Antonio Berni, Sin título (Untitled) (undated, 1950s). Tempera on paper,
29.5 × 58 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of Fundación Antonio Berni, Madrid.
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 61

over the rest of the country with its population of more recent immi-
grants, “emanating from a certain conservative capacity” as manifest
in popular craftsmanship and in the persistence of the local Indigenous
language, Quichua. These latter features, in turn, spoke to a convivial
rather than contemplative attitude toward the environment. The santi-
agueño landscape, he continued, was a constitutive part of this “inte-
gral pattern,” since it actively denied locals the objectifying detachment
that characterized a colonial, extractive relation with the earth and, on
the contrary, invited an attitude of immersiveness, of ensimismamiento
(self-absorption):

For many, I know, it does not exist as a landscape, for it is

neither plain nor mountain. It is forest, scrub, undergrowth,
salt flat. Whereas the other landscapes are shaped in distance,
in flight, in infinity, as a whole, this one takes shape only in
small corners, in obscure, casual details. It is not made to be
seen from the train or from an airplane. In a way, it demands
the cohabitation of the human subject; not simply its ecsta-
sis. Man is before the plain, before the mountain, from the
point of view of his affective relationship with the landscape;
from this same point of view he could never be “before” the
forest: he needs to be in it, surrounded, immersed in it.97

This intense attachment, Canal Feijóo argues, conferred a particular

density on the region’s culture, all the while making it extremely vulner-
able in the face of external forces. Since these could not be incorporated
into the “integral pattern” of native society, they were fatally bound to
turn into pure destruction. As an economic system that remains “coolly
external” to local historical reality, Canal Feijóo contends, the logging
of Santiago’s hardwood forests may have produced “fabulous wealth.”
However, the latter never actually belonged to the province: “In a
mighty torrent, these riches were transferred directly from the source to
other latitudes: away from the Province, to Buenos Aires, to London, to
Brussels.”98 None other, he concludes, has been the baseline of provin-
cial history over the last fifty years, the impact of which, “reflected in the
native soul,” has resulted in “a destruction of the landscape.”99
Canal Feijóo’s reflections emerged in the context of a vibrant cul-
tural and literary scene in Santiago del Estero during the first decades
of the twentieth century, fueled to a large extent by the very same log-
ging boom, the disastrous human and environmental consequences of
62 ❘ Chapter 1

which his Ensayo sobre la expresión popular artística en Santiago was

decrying. During this period initiatives such as the Archaeological Mu-
seum and the People’s University of Santiago del Estero sprang to life,
popular libraries were being set up, and multiple newspapers circulated
throughout the province. The Asociación Cultural La Brasa (Ember
Cultural Association), founded in 1925, aimed to gather these cultural
and literary undertakings under a common umbrella, despite ideologi-
cal discrepancies.100 Important to bear in mind is this context of thriving
intellectual activity, as much the effect of an accelerated modernization
as of the destruction the latter wrought on the very foundations of local
society, to fully grasp the extreme tension that runs through literary
and cultural production from Santiago del Estero in the first half of the
twentieth century. Writers and artists were faced with the challenge of
addressing the destructive character of a modernity that, at the same
time, also provided them with expressive languages to name this very
process. Regionalist essayism, no less than fiction, had to draw on the
philosophical and literary arsenal of modernity to address what this
very modernity was in the process of destroying: the hecho ancestral
(ancestral fact) of an enduring conviviality between material and sym-
bolic regimes of production and their environment, “the phenomenon
of permanent impact” of nature within culture.101
Orestes Di Lullo, whose work I have just quoted, was a medical
doctor and founding member of La Brasa, as well as the author of El
bosque sin leyenda: Ensayo económico-social (The forest without leg-
end: Economic-social essay), also published in 1937 by a local santia-
gueño printing press. Just as Canal Feijóo, Di Lullo points to the close
interaction between environmental devastation and the social, cultural,
and political process at large: “Today, the razed earth has become
something else, and so have we,” he writes: “The logging industry has
destroyed the landscape.”102 A truly exceptional work not only for its
acute analytical insights but also for its powerful images and epic com-
position, El bosque sin leyenda marks a threshold moment in Di Lullo’s
oeuvre and career. After training as a medical doctor specializing in re-
gional pandemics such as Chagas disease or the skin infection known
locally as paj or “quebracho illness” (the focus of his doctoral thesis),
Di Lullo gradually developed his lifelong interest in traditional medicine
and the curative properties of plants into a more comprehensive en-
gagement with questions of popular nutrition and access to healthcare
and other social services. Following studies titled La medicina popular
en Santiago del Estero (Popular medicine in Santiago del Estero, 1929)
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 63

and La alimentación popular (Popular nutrition, 1935), between 1943

and 1944 Di Lullo also authored the multivolume El folclore de Santi-
ago del Estero (Folklore of Santiago del Estero), building on research
he carried out in the process of establishing the provincial history mu-
seum in 1941, which he directed until his retirement in 1967. Drawing
on science and culture alike, El bosque sin leyenda anticipates ecoliter-
ary classics such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring by several decades,
in an unprecedented attempt to understand the multiple intersections
between socioeconomic and cultural factors on the one hand, and a
“nature” understood on the other, from a vantage point informed as
much by Di Lullo’s parasitological and epidemiological research as by
his fervent Catholicism, as an organic totality: “Because Creation is the
organization of the eternal, or better, the perpetuation of life, constantly
renewing itself, such that it gains a single physiognomy impossible to
unmake, which persists through time.”103
Combining this holistic scientific vision with highly evocative literary
language, Di Lullo’s text divides its attention between the ecological ef-
fects of deforestation and what we might call the social anatomy of the
obraje, the logging station, an institution he describes as a tentacular—
half organic, half techno-economic—entity (fig. 7). The book is divided
into three parts in a gradual movement of abstraction taking us from
naturalistic description toward conceptual and historical synthesis. El
bosque sin leyenda begins introducing in short narrative vignettes the
main actors and productive operations of the logging machinery, from
the lumberjacks’ departure from their villages (“El éxodo” [Exodus])
to their solitary work felling trees in the forest (“La hachada” [Fell-
ing]); the storage, loading, and transport of the logs (“La rodeada,” “La
cargada,” and “La acarreada” [Assembling, loading, and moving]), and
the cutting up of timbers and carbonizing of firewood at the mill (“La
labrada” and “La quemada” [Cutting and burning]). Finally, Di Lullo
narrates the lumberjacks’ escape from the obraje, on the run from the
stations’ militia-like overseers, the capangas, heavily indebted and phys-
ically wasted by accidents, disease, and malnutrition (“El regreso” [The
return]). Ensuing from this impressionistic catalog of human types and
their functions in the extractive machine is a more systematic analysis of
workers’ enslavement, including the exclusive sale of provisions through
the company-owned stores (“La Proveeduría” [General store]) and the
complicity of state governments in granting concessions and building
railroads for the sole benefit of the logging industry (“El ferrocarril”
[The railway]). The survey concludes with an economic, social, and po-
64 ❘ Chapter 1

Fig. 7. Lumberjacks at a logging station in northwestern Argentina, ca. 1900.

Archivo Fotográfico del Ferrocarril de Santa Fe, Argentina.

litical assessment (“Resultados de la explotación forestal” [Results of

forest exploitation]), as well as its effects on the more-than-human (“La
madre tierra” [Mother Earth]), before moving on to an apocalyptic vi-
sion of the burned-down forest (“El incendio del bosque” [The forest on
fire]). Here, however, in a sudden change of tone, Di Lullo sees emerg-
ing from the ashes the faint hope of a “truce” (“Tregua”), calling on
national government to make common cause with science rather than
capital and to reorganize the exploitation and preservation of nature
(“Parques nacionales” [National parks]). Technology, he insists, must
be employed for the benefit of workers and the environment alike (“El
obraje de mañana” [The logging station of tomorrow]).
For Di Lullo, the logging industry was guilty of two major crimes: on
the one hand it had corroded the social fabric of the province; on the
other it was interfering with the natural rhythms of the earth. The terms
in which El bosque sin leyenda alerts us to people’s loss of attachment
to the native soil carry a strong moral undertone as they invoke a lost
golden age of pastoral bliss:
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 65

The farmhands had once been the energy reserve of the land.
The logging industry sucked them dry, threw them away . . .
No more orchards of blessed earth, no more overflowing,
if hard-won, harvests. Gone is the peace and tranquility of
germinating fields . . . They had deserted life. And on being
called by the forest, they went to their deaths. It was not
even betrayal or enslavement that caused the most damage.
The worst was losing their vocation for agriculture and for
herding. Fifty years of industrial logging have destroyed the
tradition of a people reared to work a plow and to tend to
the herds.104

By interfering with rainfall cycles and thus diminishing the native

fauna and flora, Di Lullo continued, deforestation had left the region’s
soils lifeless and barren. His description of the transformation of razed
woodlands into steppes and swamps combines the naturalist’s technical
vocabulary with the storyteller’s sense of drama and attention to the
clash of living temporalities: “The humus of the soil, slowly stratified
through countless years of exfoliation and moisture, dried up under the
intense sunlight, to be pulverized in the arms of the hurricanes crossing
the plains with their court of dust clouds in tail,” Di Lullo writes: “The
fat of the land, once protected by dense canopies, has been buried under
gales of sand, and its miraculous, bursting power of germination has
been suffocated through immersion in other, more sterile soils, which the
whirlwinds carry away into the distance.”105 The logging of the native
forests, in short, has given way to a “a postwar vegetation—an all-out
war that is being waged against the forest by Man. It is a vegetation that
lives with a defensive attitude, as if it were under constant attack.”106
This shared degradation of men and their environment harks back,
for Di Lullo, to a common cause: the perverse transformation, on behalf
of extractive capitalism, of human labor into pure, death-driven nega-
tivity, into “the labor of the entire being for the sole purpose of killing
itself.”107 In the logging forest, even survival is but a prolonged form of
suicide: “Working to live as a slave. Working so as not to die.”108 Log-
ging, Di Lullo claims, is a death-sowing activity that leaves the earth
“depleted of all life.”109 In El bosque sin leyenda, this destructive frenzy
culminates in the apocalyptic image of trees being piled up and pre-
pared to be burned at the stake, reduced to charcoal: an industrialized
form of murder of nonhuman lives that is described here in an open
allusion to the Christian martyrological tradition. At the same time, in
66 ❘ Chapter 1

this tragic and final moment of suffering, immediately before it is re-

duced to ashes, the forest’s vegetal community is gathered once more in
its rich diversity, as witnessed by the long enumeration of tree species
that is also a kind of eulogy:

At last, the furnace, ready once more, raises its lifeless hump.
In its entrails, side by side, lie the myrrh tree, the chañar, the
flowering acacia and the resinous brea, the mistol tree and
the oak, the cina-cina and the espinillo, the guayacán, the
quebracho, the pepper tree, and the itín, all the wealth of the
earth, after its juices have been sucked out from it. And sud-
denly the wood burner, flaming torch in hand, sets fire to the
pile. The sacrifice has been consummated . . . The plume of
smoke shadowing the forest, rising in thick bubbles from the
oven’s mouth, has a different meaning from the smoke that
rises from a factory chimney. It is not smoke that redeems; it
is sterile smoke, the smoke of destruction.110

In his attempt to identify the structural causes of this intermingling

of environmental and historical forces, Di Lullo’s essay becomes itself
caught in a tension that its author only partially acknowledges. Within
the textual form, this tension manifests itself in an alternation between
two poetic registers: the pastoral and the epic. In the idealized vision
of pastoral memory, the world before the logging companies’ arrival
resurges full of Edenic associations of bread-yielding fields and fertile
plains. Yet, within the same page or even the same sentence, Di Lullo
also suddenly switches to an epic vision of history, which sees in the
caravans of peasants departing in the direction of the logging stations
the tragic heroes of a vast rebellion against the rural latifundio, the
property regime responsible for concentrating scarce fertile lands in
few hands. The tension remains unresolved, driving Di Lullo to call
onto the scene, in the role of deus ex machina, science and the state
as the supposedly neutral, disinterested arbiters of the contradictions
the author cannot seem to resolve. The final pages of El bosque sin
leyenda thus offer, as historian Adrián Gorelik puts it, “a typically
voluntaristic passage, which aims to fix by way of a technological leap
a rift that is, in fact, political and cultural in kind.”111 In Di Lullo’s
book, the contradiction that this techno-voluntaristic leap is trying
to conceal is also one between different forms of conceiving the re-
lation between culture and nature. Whereas, from the vantage point
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 67

of pastoral nostalgia, the lost equilibrium between traditional culture

and the environment had been eternal and unchanging and thus also
outside of history, the epic vision of peasants struggling to break the
chains that tied them to an unforgiving, hostile earth has difficulties in
reconciling its narrative with the environmentalism that underwrites
El bosque sin leyenda’s defense of the forest’s community of more-
than-human lives.
In Canal Feijóo, this same difficulty faced by Di Lullo of reconcil-
ing two seemingly opposite poetic and cultural repertoires of thinking
about culture and nature appears in close association with the idea of
landscape. In the opening essay of Ñan (“path” in Quichua), the jour-
nal he edited from 1932 to 1934 (and of which he was, in fact, the
sole author), Canal Feijóo queries the meaning of the Santiago del Es-
tero landscape—one that, he asserts, might never actually have merited
that title in the first place. For Canal Feijóo, landscape, as a “psycho-
geographic event,”112 neither is purely a natural fact nor does it exist
solely in the mind of an observer who projects onto nature his own
aesthetic intentions. Rather, landscape emerges as an effect of the juego
(play) in which both become involved, resulting in mutual affections
and transformations. How—Canal Feijóo asks—can we conceive in
such terms an apparently formless or even deformed spatial ensemble,
to all appearances devoid of any ordering principle, if not as a nonland-
scape that encourages uprootedness and forges a mentality of passion-
ate extremes: a culture of constant resistance and rebellion against its
own environment?
Canal Feijóo introduces us to this cataclysmic nature in a section
of his essay titled precisely “El paisaje santiagueño” (The landscape of
Santiago), in which he also discusses the forms of popular aesthetic ex-
pression triggered by the encounter with this peculiar environment. The
local landscape, Canal Feijóo claims, is experienced by its inhabitants
with an attitude of fatalistic resignation toward “an earthly constric-
tion . . . an unwelcoming world.”113 Local popular forms of expression
are a kind of instinctive attempt at transcending this inhospitable envi-
ronment: “The santiagueño’s soul suffers from secular enslavement to
a nature devoid of landscape. Lacking the means, as yet, of dominating
the world through intelligence, he entrusts redemption to the musical
realm. In music, his soul excuses itself; through music, it takes flight.”114
It is the frailty, rather than the solidity, of people’s ties to the earth, Ca-
nal Feijóo argues, which accounts for the singularity of the fenómeno
santiagueño—the numinous or phenomenal identity and cohesion of
68 ❘ Chapter 1

Santiago del Estero. The peasant “does not belong within nature, he
does not find himself ‘in the landscape.’ Being in the landscape is to feel
dominion over nature, or to be its welcome guest. Neither one nor the
other is true for the santiagueño who feels like a stranger in his own
land, at best its prisoner.”115
However, in the subsequent issue of Ñan published two years later,
breaking with his previous environmental determinism, Canal offers a
wholly different view of this psychogeography, which he now sees as
being shot through with histories of struggle. In the long essay “Imagen
de Santiago: Reconocimiento de una provincia desconocida” (Image of
Santiago: Survey of an unknown province), he zeroes in on the fateful
triad of “El rapto del ferrocarril” (Abducted by the railway), “El asalto
de la selva” (Assault on the forest), and “La destrucción del paisaje”
(Destruction of the landscape).116 The bone-dry land where, in the pre-
vious essay, Canal Feijóo had sought a clue for understanding the native
soul, is now revealed to be but the result of decades-long practices of
pillage, which have victimized environment and culture in equal parts.
If the railway has uprooted the peasantry and depopulated the country-
side, the logging stations arriving on its heels, while satisfying the rail-
road’s insatiable need for timbers and charcoal, are also “a formidable
trench” in the war of position waged against the forest, in which “the
song of the saws performs a rigorous industrial autopsy.”117 Together,
railway and logging stations have provoked the despaisamiento (un-
landscaping) of the entire province.
Even more than deforestation and rural exodus, and even more than
the cumulative effects of both, Canal Feijóo’s neologism addresses the
withdrawal of any kind of relation between “man” and “nature” other
than radical destructiveness. “Despaisamiento”—unlandscaping—is Ca-
nal Feijóo’s term for thinking through the natural history of the Capita-
locene as a human violence entering and spreading through the web of
life. The lumberjacks working in the logging stations, he writes,

found themselves more miserable than they had been at

birth, since they had forsaken even their landscape. What
other Argentine could weep a tragedy as enormous as the
one endured by this santiagueño, condemned to carry out
the destruction, pure and simple, of his own landscape? And
what had he got out of all this? . . . One day, he suddenly
found himself alone and unprotected. With the last working
day, his landscape had gone, and that day’s clearing already
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 69

represented his own exile. It was as if unlandscaping had

arrived all of a sudden. And in the uncertainty of this trance,
his soul begins to follow the compass of the railway, as if
under a spell.118

“Unlandscaping” entails, in linguistic, cultural, social, and political

terms, the loss of all active forces of autonomy and, in consequence, the
very same “integral pattern” to which Canal Feijóo had previously at-
tributed the province’s singular cohesion. Even if migration had already
been a staple of regional labor regimes long before the rise of the logging
industry, only the combined effects of the railway and the logging station
transformed this long-standing practice into ceaseless flight: an emigra-
tion of between fifty and sixty thousand peasants per year, as Canal Fei-
jóo estimates in “Los éxodos rurales” (Rural exodus), an essay originally
written in 1938 and later added to his book-length study De la estruc-
tura mediterránea argentina (On the structure of inland Argentina).119
Part of the unfinished, multivolume project titled “Sociología Med-
iterránea Argentina” (Sociology of inland Argentina), De la estructura
mediterránea aimed to focus specifically on the crisis and disintegration
of rural communities in the “interior”—a embodied notion of geog-
raphy that, Canal argues, in Argentina is commonly counterposed to
Buenos Aires and the coastal region. The “interior” exists, he argues,
only to be labeled the cause of all the country’s real or perceived ills: the
culprit “of all difficulties, relapses and delays” is always “the ‘interior,’
standing in for, at different times, hinterland, province, or masses.”120
But this only means that “a spirit of evasion” is undergirding Argen-
tine national discourse, which remains under the spell of the “mirage
of the Pampas”—the fantasy of an unlimited fertile plain that has only
encouraged estrangement from the material realities of the land. But the
day of reckoning has now arrived:

Nature, over the last fifty years, has lost its generosity and
sweetness—possibly in angry response to the foolishness
with which it has been treated by Man. Rainfall averages
have diminished . . . Insufficiency of liquids is followed, me-
chanically, by erosion, sterility of the surfaces accessible to
subsistence work, and the spread of zoological plagues . . .
Whichever relation there may be among these climate events,
what is beyond doubt is that today, sanitary conditions in
our countryside are horrifying. We are used to hearing about
70 ❘ Chapter 1

malaria in particular, but just as bad and wide-spread is the

lack of assistance thanks to which all the other rural plagues
are on the rise, too: mountain goiter, trachoma, leishmania-
sis, brucellosis . . . venereal diseases, syphilis.121

In his 1948 essay, in fact, Canal Feijóo was already reflecting on a cli-
mate of history in which the more-than-human assemblages of rainfall
and drought cycles, of soil chemistry and erosion, and of bacteriological
and viral epidemics must be understood as so many active responses to
the insensatez (foolishness) of human actions. At the same time as he
brings into view this natural history, this entanglement of human ac-
tions with more-than-human responses, Canal Feijóo also regrets “the
loss of . . . a deep kind of husbandry that has always gone hand in
hand with working the earth.”122 Yet, since these ancestral and convivial
forms of knowledge have now become lost to the same degree in which
the soils they were once applied to have turned sterile—Canal Feijóo
concludes—a new, disillusioned and rational, attitude is called for to
contain the vicious cycle. Just as in the coda of Di Lullo’s book, here
the very figures and concepts that had previously made it possible to
name the “integral pattern” of provincial life are in the end sacrificed,
and the “ancient and, possibly, today merely cartographic concept of
Province, [is] replaced with the more vital, reasonable and realistic one
of Region.”123
Yet as regionalism finally hedged its bets on these dreams of technical
fixes, of science-engineered damage containment—parallel to the emer-
gence of a popular developmentalist government in which it briefly be-
lieved to have found a sympathetic interlocutor—the movement also all
but acknowledged that unlandscaping—despaisamiento—had already
run its course. In Canal Feijóo’s 1948 essay la planificación integral
(integral planning) takes the place previously occupied by the juego in-
tegral (integral pattern) underwriting his own earlier studies of popu-
lar expressions. This movement of abstraction and detachment from
a densely interwoven natural-cultural “phenomenon,” which had now
turned into little more than a “cartographic abstraction” and in which
the author himself confessed to have “lost his footing,” is not unlike the
experience of the tragic hero in Canal Feijóo’s projected sociology of
the Argentine interior: the rural migrant displaced from his native soil
by the effects of despaisamiento, of unlandscaping. Indeed, what Canal
Feijóo promotes as “a remedy” for the mal del cuerpo (sickness of the
body) that has befallen the region and its inhabitants alike124 is yet again
 Insurgent Natures ❘ 71

an immunitary shield that effectively reinstates, even if to contain the

effects of a fallacious modernity, the boundaries and oppositions this
same modernity had been founded on.
Just as for Di Lullo (and perhaps also for Horacio Quiroga), for
Canal Feijóo to let go of the promise of an “intelligent colonization”
capable of providing humans with a stable and sustainable immunity
against an insurgent nature, proved in the end too much of a challenge
to be imagined. Here, indeed, was a limit that even the most dissident
of Latin American regionalisms hardly ever dared to cross. But to ac-
knowledge these limitations does not mean that we have to forsake the
insights of Latin America’s literary and intellectual regionalisms into
what Jane Bennett calls a “vital materialism”: “the capacity of things—
edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the
will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with
trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”125 Nothing less
than this capacity of things and assemblages for intervening in human
affairs is what is being called out in Di Lullo’s and Canal Feijóo’s writ-
ings, precisely because these affairs are never exclusively human ones
to begin with. Their essays from the margins of the nation—which, at
the same time are also the focal edge of global extractivist circuits and
networks—also make a point about the essentially political nature of
these more-than-human agencies. Indeed, if the stories of environmental
insurgency we analyzed in the previous section of this chapter called
on the biopotential capacities of living communitas to resist and over-
turn the immunological biopower of the zone of sacrifice, the essayis-
tic critiques of despaisamiento studied in this final section also draw
our attention to the coagentiality of nonorganic materialities (soil and
climate), as well as their—difficult and contradictory—interwovenness
with forms of aesthetic expression on the one hand and with the spi-
ral of “creative destruction” unleashed by extractive capitalism, on the
other. Regionalist literature and thought, in short, deserve to take pride
of place in the project of marking out, in Héctor Hoyos’s apt expression,
“Latin American literature as a site of articulation [between] historical
materialism and new materialisms.”126
Chapter 2

The Country and the City

How can solid matter be put in motion; how can it be injected with
flow? How can architecture become an art of space as well as of place?
Flying over the Paraná River toward Asunción had been a revelation,
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret—the Franco-Swiss urbanist better known
as Le Corbusier—told his Argentine audience in October 1929 upon
returning to Buenos Aires aboard a hydroplane facilitated by his friend,
the novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s South American airmail com-
pany. Suddenly, Le Corbusier went on, the airborne vision of great
streams had made him realize how, in the current of liquids just as in
that of ideas, the straight line tends to be abandoned in the face of
obstacles, only to be regained in the moment of greatest undulation,
when the loops reconnect “at the outermost point of their curves . . .
It is the lesson of the meander.”1 Just as the waters of a river, when all
motion appears to have stalled, finally crush the obstacle that detains
them, “thus a pure idea has burst forth, a solution has appeared . . .
Moments of ‘simplicity’ are the unknotting of acute and critical crises
of complication.”2
The issue here then is not just how abstract reason imposes itself on
(as well as through) brute force. Rather, the meander’s lesson is also
about a certain way of seeing, capable of relating the visible surface
of things to the laws underwriting their relations with one another. At
ground level, Le Corbusier writes in La ville radieuse (The Radiant City,
1933), when “walking through the maze” of Rio de Janeiro, one easily

73
74 ❘ Chapter 2

Fig. 8. Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), La loi du méandre (The law

of the meander). Ink drawing. From Précisions sur un état présent de l’architec-
ture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: Éditions Vincent, Fréal & Cie., 1930).

loses sight of the real city: “you rapidly lose all sense of the whole.
Take a plane and you will see, and you will understand, and you will
decide.”3 For Le Corbusier, what the technology of flight offers up is a
morphological vision, one that discovers in the play of natural forms the
laws of abstract reason and thus derives the transcendent ideal from the
material immanence of nature—just as, indeed, the meander eventually
gives birth to the straight line.
Le Corbusier’s 1929 journey to Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay was
a foundational event for Latin American architectural modernism, yet
as Graciela Silvestri argues, South America “was also central for Le
Corbusier: it is only after this journey that, thrilled by America’s great
dimensions, he starts experimenting with urbanistic proposals that
will change the development of the modern city.”4 What Le Corbusier
discovered in the continent’s vast expanse was nothing less than the
Earth. The planet itself as “a liquid sphere . . . in constant evaporation
and condensation” was now to become the canvas for a new, literally
planetary, language of architecture.5 The very idea of the city as an or-
ganism with interdependent metabolic functions—circulation, leisure,
dwelling, work—was but a transposition onto a different scale of this
 The Country and the City ❘ 75

earth organism seen from the air. The urban machine, says Le Corbusier,
must mimic the earth machine in which it remains grounded: “When
the solutions are great and when nature comes to join them happily,
or better still, when nature integrates itself in them, it is then that one
approaches unity.”6
In this chapter, from the disconcerting closeness of the extractive
frontier underwriting Latin American regionalism and its literary and
political sequels, we shall move to the opposite pole of modernist cul-
tural production: the capital cities and their very different relation with
an “interior” that frequently remains what Paraguay had been for Le
Corbusier: a flyover state. Yet rather than, as Latin Americanist literary
and cultural criticism has a habit of doing, reinforcing these—almost
always coastal—metropoles’ self-attributed status as “cultural centers”
of the nation, here I want to focus on the peculiar kind of anxiety that
haunts what Ericka Beckman poignantly calls the “import catalogue” of
Latin American modernism.7 National modernities, as Beckman shows,
emerged in close interaction with the customs clearing houses in the im-
mediate vicinity of the principal art institutions: in a tense negotiation
of the relative values of local “raw materials” and the formal gadgetry
allowing for their refinement into “authentic” art, including audiovisual
media and compositional forms from abroad. But to make a bargain,
Latin American modernism also had to perform, time and again, a par-
ticular kind of disavowal that is brilliantly summed up in the second
“mapping” included in Amereida (1967), the anonymous, multivoiced
poetic report of navigating America’s “Sea Within” to which we turn at
the end of this chapter (fig. 9). The black dots of urbanization straddling
the coastline like mussel banks and leaving the continental interior al-
most blank are read here as the sign of the fundamental “inconsistency”
that is proper to a continent constitutively and persistently misrecog-
nized and disavowed in what it contains: “no vivimos acaso—the poem
asks—con ausencia o falta de continente / ni querido ni olvidado / pero
apagado y mudo?” (Do we not, in fact, live / with an absence or lack of
continent / neither beloved nor forgotten / but turned off and muted?).8
Amereida, as we shall see, would respond to these questions by tak-
ing poetry itself on the road, by bringing the poetic act of naming and
calling out as close as possible to this muted, inner space of “contained”
continentality. But even before this late-modernist antiepic of travel that
would in time also lead to the foundation of a “city” based on an idea
of integrating nature and form very different from Le Corbusier’s, dis-
76 ❘ Chapter 2

Fig. 9. “Vivir en los contornos de una figura” (Living on

the outline of a figure). Map. From Amereida (Santiago:
Editorial Cooperativa Lambda, 1967), 171.

sident strands of Latin American modernism had already challenged

the Franco-Swiss architect’s voiding of American space, conducted from
the detached and disembodied vantage point of airborne vision, of its
messy, meandering entanglements between human and more-than-
human histories and worldmakings. The Latin American avant-gardes,
I will argue, returned to the double register of landscape in visu and in
situ as a way of wresting representational sovereignty from the “impe-
rial eyes” of colonial chroniclers and neocolonial resource prospectors.
But in doing so they also had to acknowledge (voluntarily or not) that
this effort of reclaiming the legacies of colonial landscaping was bound
to run aground, literally speaking, under the weight of the material and
living assemblages it was summoning to the scene.
 The Country and the City ❘ 77

This insistence of a “ground-level” type of locality insistently re-

emerging at the very heart of modernist spaces predicated on the ab-
straction of living ensembles into “forms” and “laws” was embodied,
in emblematic fashion, by Roberto Burle Marx’s famed roof-garden
designed for Rio de Janeiro’s Ministry of Education and Health build-
ing constructed between 1936 and 1942—the flagship of the Estado
Novo’s politics of cultural modernization. Based on a blueprint pre-
pared by Le Corbusier himself, subsequently adapted by a team of up-
and-coming Brazilian architects helmed by Lúcio Costa, the building
inserted a fourteen-story, rectangular-shaped glass, steel, and concrete
carcass into downtown Rio, crossed at right angle by a low-rise ex-
hibition wing meeting the main building at the level of the pilotis and
thus also turning the remainder of the lot into an open, walk-through
plaza interrupting the urban maze. Whereas Le Corbusier had suggested
replicating the building’s geometry at ground level through palm alleys
bordering the access plaza, Burle Marx’s intervention substituted these
with a design of amoebic-shaped flowerbeds strewn across the plaza
and on the roof of the exhibition wing, planted with monochromatic
groups of daylilies, philodendrons, heliconia, strelitzia, and other native
herbs and shrubs. On the plaza, he also planted native palm varieties
and pau brasil trees, echoing as well as breaking up the symmetry of the
concrete pilotis sustaining the intersected wings of the building (fig. 10).
In its “fluvial iconography,” Valerie Fraser argues, Burle Marx’s garden-
scape also represents an “anthropophagic pun” on Le Corbusier’s formal
extractivism, which injects the meandering forms of tropical nature (as
seen from an airplane) into the rectilinear space of modernist architec-
ture.9 Burle Marx’s undulating designs (which also make their way into
the building by way of the amoebic-shaped carpet patterns on the second
floor) critically interrupt the functionalist geometry and anchor it in its
surroundings: not just the natural backdrop of Guanabara Bay and the
coastal mountains that at the time were still clearly visible from the area
but also the city itself as a living environment. Countering the building’s
right-angle frontality, the planted patches at ground level suggest ap-
proaches that meander and divert sideways rather than taking the most
direct line. But at the same time this rhythmic interplay between nature
and culture remains an abstract and nonmimetic kind: in the top-down
view from the upper floors (akin to Le Corbusier’s aerial vision), the
paths and flowerbeds on the plaza and the exhibition roof compose a
cartography that could represent microscopic as well as geological forms.
78 ❘ Chapter 2

Fig. 10. Ministry of Education and Health, south facade,

Rio de Janeiro, ca. 1945. Photograph by Marcel Gauthe-
rot. Courtesy of Arquivo do IPHAN, Rio de Janeiro.

In the pages that follow, I want to chart some instances of this new
kind of interplay—mediated now by technologies of accelerated trans-
port, communication, and reproduction—between the two registers of
colonial landscaping, the landscape in visu and in situ, the journey and
the garden. In these, I argue, just as in the jungle novels analyzed in
chapter 1, an urge to appropriate landscape’s formal repertoire as a
way of asserting a—national and postcolonial—sovereignty over non-
human lives and materialities clashes with (or alternatively invokes and
encourages) the reconstellation of alliances inevitably triggered by this
postcolonial relandscaping: human alliances (say, between urban avant-
gardists and folk artists, artisans, and herbalists from the backlands)
but also more complex transspecies and material assemblages. In these
crossings between the spaces and places of modernism, two new pro-
tagonists will also make their appearance: the accident and the weed.
 The Country and the City ❘ 79

A c c iden ta l J our ne ys:

A u tomob ilit y a nd t he A va nt- ga rd e

Traveling by car from Bogotá toward the Andes in 1936, Colombian

novelist Eduardo Caballero Calderón suddenly realized how, “against
the speed of the car’s violent advance toward the barrier of fog, the
countryside beyond appeared as motionless as an eternal thing, identi-
cal to itself, while the road quickly receded beneath the wheels and thus
created, and destroyed, within myself, in never-ending succession, reali-
ties, memories, dreams.”10 This strange new pleasure Caballero Calderón
encountered, “of letting myself go and letting the doors of daydreaming
open wide,”11 facilitated by an environment that ceases to claim even
minimal attention, responds to the same “withdrawal of landscape”
that historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch associates with the railway pas-
senger. The rail traveler of the European and North American “Second
Industrial Revolution,” Schivelbusch argues, only perceives the land-
scape through the machine ensemble—tracks and steam engine—such
that the foreground, the area through which painterly landscape had
defined the relation between beholder and visual object, fades behind
the speed of movement.12 This disappearance of the in-between—the
area where the image had negotiated its own limit and also the space
of social interaction between travelers and their surroundings—triggers
a techno-ontological separation. From now on, drivers and passengers
will perceive surrounding space as pure exteriority. “Seeing the country-
side in this way, forever receding, forever different and forever similar,
one loses sense not just of space but of time,” Caballero Calderón re-
flects: “Today I have never stopped crying out: What a beautiful tree!—
when this same tree had already become lost in the distance, collapsing
into the soft line of the horizon, and its fleeting image now drifts in a
sea of more recent ones.”13
This fleetingness of visions results in a smooth space in which the gaze
fails to take hold, to the effect that the traveler is quite literally encap-
sulated in his vehicle: “the superficial nature of the landscape and of my
thoughts make me turn inward onto myself,” Caballero Calderón con-
cludes.14 As landscape withdraws into indifference, speed instead allows
the traveler access to another, more structural or rhythmic—indeed, a
morphological—vision of continental space, not unlike Le Corbusier’s
aerial view of great natural forces. There is, in early accounts of motor-
ized travel, something of an origin scene of Latin American abstraction-
ism by way of the liberation of aesthetics from the referential function
80 ❘ Chapter 2

of colonial landscaping achieved thanks to technology. Yet, over the first

half of the twentieth century, such flights of fancy actually tended, more
often than not, to come to an abrupt halt. “On December 11, at noon,
we took off again, with myself in the lead,” the Argentine poet, novel-
ist, and physician Juan Carlos Dávalos narrates an attempt, in 1928,
to cross the Andes between Salta (Argentina) and Antofagasta (Chile)
aboard his Ford Cabriolet,

but even before we had done half a kilometer, the difficulties

started. The trail was nothing but dunes. The wheels span
throwing sand clouds into the air. And since the Chorrillos
slope involves at least a three-mile climb, these three miles
cost us the rest of the day: half a day of marching one step,
then another, like a man forced to walk on his knees, work-
ing ourselves up incredible gradients on which each car had
to be pulled by three or even four mules, with the motor
running at full force. Nightfall surprised us still fighting the
dunes atop Chorrillos, once again at four thousand eight
hundred meters above sea level. A chilly little Siberian wind
was blowing.15

What I call the “accidental journey” of early twentieth-century Latin

American traveling artists refers not just to the continuous experience
of the “machine ensemble” breaking down, for lack of passable roads or
of supply chains for fuel and spare parts almost as soon as one left the
perimeter of the big cities. It also calls attention to the syncopated space-
time pattern of acceleration and interruption these experiences brought
into being. In fact, syncopation—a rhythmic gesture of bringing acceler-
ation to an abrupt halt or of making apparent stillness suddenly revert
into speed—is also the characteristic most readily associated with the
new forms of dance music popularized all over Latin America by mod-
ern communications media such as the radio. The accidental journey, I
suggest, confronted travelers with a striated space-time continuum—
to use Deleuze and Guattari’s expression—in which the ground, reas-
serting its presence whenever the “machine ensemble” grinds to a halt,
incessantly interrupts and contradicts the smooth space forged by mo-
torized speed.16 If the Latin American avant-gardes, as Fernando Rosen-
berg has succinctly argued, developed a critique of modernism’s telos by
foregrounding their concern with space rather than time, this critique
also responded to the aspiration and challenge of forging, in the contra-
 The Country and the City ❘ 81

dictory chronotope of the accidental journey, a counterrhythm, a synco-

pated narrative and poetic time, capable of accounting for intersections
of temporalities that were incompatible with the frenzy of speed experi-
enced by European futurists.17
Yet even in accidented fashion, the journey form of the landscape in
visu still provided these artists with a narrative, poetic, or musical frame-
work, from Argentine surrealist Oliverio Girondo’s poem “El tren ex-
preso” (Express train, 1923) to Chilean Vicente Huidobro’s “Aviso a los
turistas” (A warning to tourists, 1925), or from Brazilian Carlos Drum-
mond de Andrade’s narrative travelogue “Viagem de Sabará” (Journey
to Sabará, 1929) to his compatriot Heitor Villa-Lobos’s orchestral toc-
cata “Trenzinho do Caipira” (The little train of the Caipira), first per-
formed the following year. Remarkably, many of these journey-themed
works also resulted from a new kind of relationship with European
fellow travelers, in a clean break with the previous century’s letrados
(men of letters) and their mostly bookish association with traveling
naturalists from overseas. Whereas in postindependence Latin America
elite men of letters would sift through foreign-language travelogues in
search for literary settings rather than set off themselves toward the ru-
ral interior, the avant-garde traveler became an actual travel companion
of overseas visitors: an “apprentice tourist” (in Brazilian writer-poet-
composer Mário de Andrade’s humorous expression) who entered into
playful yet also critical exchanges with fellow passengers from Europe
and North America. Quite literally, trains and steamers, airplanes and
cars, now became what Mary Louise Pratt termed “contact zones”—
spaces of conviviality among vernacular and cosmopolitan tourists.18
In Mexico the frantic, year-long ramblings of Sergei Eisenstein and his
crew in 1931 to shoot footage for their ill-fated revolutionary epic Qué
viva México also became a regular occasion for bohemian outings of
visiting artists and intellectuals who occasionally participated in the
shootings. In Brazil the presence of Franco-Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars
(who visited the country in 1924, 1926, and 1927–28) also became the
gathering point for a group of writers and painters from São Paulo who
would join Cendrars for a collective excursion-pilgrimage to the Ba-
roque mining towns of Minas Gerais, in an episode known in the annals
of Brazilian modernism as the “Second Discovery of Brazil.” However
precarious, the expansion of transportation networks also conjured up
a new, mobile time and space where emissaries of European modernism
could rub shoulders with an emergent South American tourist class,
offering ample occasions for comparing sketches and notebooks.
82 ❘ Chapter 2

In 1933, less than ten years after Cendrars and his Brazilian friends
had visited Ouro Preto (where they promptly created a “Society
of Friends of the Historical Monuments of Brazil,” chaired by poet-
playwright Oswald de Andrade), the old mining town was declared
Brazil’s first national heritage site. Mário de Andrade—unrelated to
Oswald—author of Paulicéia desvairada (Hallucinated city, 1922), a
collection of free verse, cubist hymns to São Paulo’s cityscape, drafted
the legislation, which was approved by Congress that same year. The
national heritage designation, subsequently extended to neighboring
Diamantina, São João del Rei, Tiradentes, and Mariana, was passed
at a time of extensive, state-funded highway construction (Brazil’s first
Federal Roads Law had been passed in 1927). Across Latin America, ar-
tistic travelogues reevaluating the visual, sonic, and material culture of
previously remote regions also dialogued with a push for infrastructural
integration spearheaded by modernizing governments, in close alliance
with transnational oil and automobile industries. Artists and politicians
joined forces with industrialists in the automobile clubs that sprouted
all over the region. At São Paulo, the mayor (and future national presi-
dent) Washington Luís also chaired the local chapter of the Movimento
de Boas Estradas (Good roads movement, inspired by the homonymous
US lobbying group), with Antonio Prado Júnior, brother of the essayist
and art patron Paulo Prado and himself a future mayor of Rio de Ja-
neiro, acting as treasurer.19 At Caracas, the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez
himself attended the inauguration in 1913 of the Venezuelan Automo-
bile Club, a party organized—the magazine Elite reported—“by gentle-
men who fancy sports and beautiful women.”20 Automobile travel, in
contrast to the railway’s arborescent grid, promised access to an open
network of destinations and connections, putting within reach of city
dwellers a vast “interior” that the railway had thus far bypassed.
The Ouro Preto Grande Hotel, designed in 1938 by Oscar Niemeyer
and completed in 1944, is emblematic of this reevaluation of the times
and spaces of the nation in light of modern technologies of vision and
speed (fig. 11). In its audacious combination of allusions to the Baroque
(including the tiled roof, the piano nobile housing the reception and caf-
eteria, and the curved access ramp mirroring the broad stairway of the
eighteenth-century government palace across the square) with elements
of International Style functionalism, the Grande Hotel offered visitors
a modern platform from which to reappraise the past. In a passionate
defense of his protégé’s project, Lúcio Costa (future author of the ur-
ban masterplan for Brasília) singled out the automobile and the mod-
 The Country and the City ❘ 83

ern hotel as complementary elements that jointly allowed the nation’s

historical monuments to be made available for the appreciation and
enjoyment of tourists:

Just as the latest car model navigates the hillsides of this

monumental city without causing visual offense to any-
one, and even contributes to bring to life the sensation of
“pastness,” thus the construction of a modern hotel, in well-
accomplished architecture, will not damage Ouro Preto in
any way, even taking into account the sentimental touristic
aspect, since, when seen next to a structure such as this one,
so light and clear, so youthful if I may say so, the old roof-
tops stumbling over one another, the beautiful traceries of
the portals of São Francisco do Carmo church, the Casa dos
Contos [Mint], heavy as the stone wedges from the Itaco-
lomy range—everything that makes this little past so full of
substance to us—will appear much more distant, it will, so
to speak, gain yet another century in age.21

Automobility offered access to a novel constellation of national

space and time, but in the process also triggered a literary, visual and,
most importantly, architectural production entrusted with reframing as

Fig. 11. Ouro Preto, 1939. Black-and-white photograph by Erich Hess. Cour-
tesy of Arquivo do IPHAN, Rio de Janeiro.
84 ❘ Chapter 2

a “system of sights,” the places and regions toward which this new,
touristic geography was expanding.22
Yet the automobile’s arrival in Latin America—the first vehicles
were unloaded in Brazil and the River Plate even before 190023—also
sharply exposed the contradictions between agro-exporting, oligarchic
societies with extreme concentrations of wealth and real estate, and
Euro-American industrial modernity, which needed to offload into new
export markets its surplus production and capital. Because of the lack of
spare parts and trained mechanics (often imported to Latin America by
wealthy car owners along with their machines), automobility remained,
approximately until 1910, an exclusive pastime for a small urban elite,
confined to a handful of paved streets in the main cities. Even so, with
the first import agencies and repair shops opening shortly after the turn
of the century, car ownership began to spread quickly, to the point of
putting several Latin American countries level with—or even above—the
European average: Argentina went from 9 imported cars in 1900 to 16
in 1901, 28 in 1902, and 62 in 1903; in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro counted
with just 6 automobiles in 1903 and 99 in 1907, and São Paulo went
from 5 cars in 1901 to 84 in 1904. In Montevideo, Uruguay, there were
already as many as 59 cars in 1905 and 109 in 1906. Over the follow-
ing decade, these numbers would rise exponentially: Argentina reported
4,800 cars in 1910, 75,000 in 1921, and 420,000 in 1931, becoming
not just the country with the most cars in all of Latin America but also
the fourth-ranking worldwide. Uruguay, during those same years, was
the country with the third-highest number of cars per capita through-
out the world. Brazil imported a total of 24,475 units from the US be-
tween 1908 and 1920, turning it into the fourth-to-fifth most important
export market for North American manufacturers. In the region, only
Mexico—runner-up to Argentina in the total number of cars—imported
more automobiles from the US than Brazil had during the same period.24
Throughout Latin America, the rise of automobility also entailed new
disputes over the right to public space and who was to enjoy access to
a new regime of speed that impacted profoundly the socioeconomic as
well as ecological physiognomy of the region. These included violent
displacements of bodies in city and countryside, of which the frequently
fatal accidents were only the most immediate consequence. Except for a
few isolated voices, literary and artistic culture largely shared the enthu-
siasm with which Brazilian urban chronicler João do Rio celebrated the
“automobile, lord of our time, creator of a new life, the enchanted knight
of urban transformation.”25 Avant-garde journals such as Brazil’s Fon-
 The Country and the City ❘ 85

Fon and Klaxón invoked in their very names the honking new sound-
scape of car traffic as an emblematic expression of their own strident
assault on traditional mores, but they also regularly included literary
accounts and even technical information on the latest gizmos of auto-
mobile technology. Enthusiastically backed by new illustrated magazines
such as Auto-Propulsão and Auto-Sport in Brazil or Motor and Auto-
movilismo in Argentina, the literary journals fervorously covered the
latest feats of pilot-adventurers such as the French count Pierre Lesdain,
the first to ascend Rio’s Corcovado mountain in 1908 aboard a sixteen-
horsepower, four-cylinder Brasier, or the Argentine José Piquero, the first
to cross the Andes in 1905 from Las Cuevas, Mendoza, to Santiago de
Chile, taking a mere seven days at the wheel of his Oldsmobile. A few
years later, between 1913 and 1916, in the company of her copilot Mary
Kenny, journalist and travel writer Ada Elflein drove across the plains of
Patagonia while keeping her mostly female readers of La Prensa abreast
of her adventures behind the wheel, which she promoted as “a form
of physical and moral education” through which “woman can broaden
her horizons, as she gains valuable geographical insights, understands
and forms a close bond with the national soul, and develops energies
that represent forces of life, which lie dormant in all those women con-
demned . . . to spend months or even years curled up in the cities.”26
On September 12, 1926 (the same year Elflein’s travelogue first ap-
peared in book form), Roger Courteville, military attaché of the French
Embassy, departed from Rio de Janeiro aboard a six-wheel Renault ca-
mionnette, arriving the following August in Lima, Peru, in a car that had
little in common with the one that departed from the Brazilian capital
almost a year before (see, e.g., figs. 12 and 13). When crossing the plains
of Matto Grosso, the engine had broken down and only the chance
encounter with a motorized army platoon saved the small party (which
also included Courteville’s wife, Marthe-Emma, and his mechanic Júlio
Kotzent) from dying of hunger in the midst of the savanna. While they
recovered at the barracks of Campo Grande, Courteville and Kotzent
were able to fit a new Ford Model-T engine and radiator, courtesy of
the army, and subsequently set course via Corumbá to Santa Cruz de
la Sierra, Bolivia, where a local blacksmith customized some spares for
their broken gearbox. Even so, the engine proved too weak to resist
the crossing of the Cordillera, and the travelers had to dismantle their
vehicle and send the parts separately across to Tortora on the back of
sixty-eight mules. There, during reassembly, the base frame broke and
had to be replaced with a wooden chassis improvised by local carpenters.
86 ❘ Chapter 2

Fig. 12. Top, “La voiture embourbée Fig. 13. Top, “La deuxième tentative
des quatre roues dans la forêt vierge.” n’est pas plus heureuse: Le radeau
Bottom, “Dans une prairie inondée.” s’enfonce.” Bottom, “Il faut démonter
From Roger Courteville, La première la voiture pièce par pièce.” From Rog-
traversée de l’Amérique du Sud en au- er Courteville, La première traversée
tomobile (Paris: Plon, 1930). de l’Amérique du Sud en automobile
(Paris: Plon, 1930).

The problems did not stop there: on entering La Paz, in the middle of
a parade organized in honor of the expeditioners, the brakes suddenly
stopped working midslope, and only by making a desperate U-turn into
the nearest uphill lane did Courteville narrowly avoid a fatal crash.
Upon arriving to Lima—the first time a car had made the journey across
South America from ocean to ocean—the gearbox fell apart completely,
and the travelers decided to gift what remained of their vehicle to the
Peruvian president, who had made a point of welcoming them in person.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the accident-prone nature of their
journeys, the adventures of Courteville and Elflein are emblematic of a
modernity in continuous expansion toward its own confines. The sus-
pense underwriting their travelogues stems from this same tension—and
at times also literally from the clash—between engine power and the
spaces and times that the former has not yet entirely co-opted into its
 The Country and the City ❘ 87

machine ensemble. Of this “primitive modernity”—the mobile frontier

that regionalist fiction revealed in a different register as the cutting edge
of the modern chronotope—the photograph of Courteville’s vehicle sur-
rounded by Bororó Indians posing for the camera (fig. 14) is as eloquent
an emblem as say the cosmopolitan cannibal imagined in Oswald de
Andrade’s celebrated Anthropophagic Manifesto a mere two years after
Courteville’s journey. As a mode of techno-graphic writing in and of
space, this new and unprecedented kind of avant-garde journey—the
automobile raid—also opened a mobile new contact zone where bohe-
mian artists rubbed shoulders with working-class bricoleurs, rural arti-
sans, and Indigenous hunter-gatherers, on whose skills the former relied
at various key instances of their voyage.
In the 1930s and 1940s, often under the auspices of national au-
tomobile clubs, the trails opened by these driver-adventurers became
the spectacular stages of epic, months-long transcontinental car rallies
featuring professional star pilots, before eventually becoming the thor-
oughfares of automobile tourism as a form of leisurely enjoyment of
“nature.” In these new experiences of leisure time, the point of arrival
was less important than the experience of getting there. “¡Conozca su
patria: Veranee!” (Get to know your fatherland: Go on a summer hol-
iday!), the Argentine magazine El Hogar urged its readers in 1931; “É

Fig. 14. “En route to Cuiabá, the Indians show an interest in mechanics.” From
Roger Courteville, La première traversée de l’Amérique du Sud en automobile
(Paris: Plon, 1930), 65.
88 ❘ Chapter 2

preciso revelar o Brasil aos brasileiros” (Let’s reveal Brazil to Brazil-

ians), the Brazilian automobile club echoed its slogan the following year
in a campaign to attract car enthusiasts to the country’s Northeast.27
These new ways of seeing, feeling, and consuming the nation’s “natural”
and “historic heritage”—including the new camping trend promoted
by the automobile clubs as a healthier alternative to the traditional,
summer-length seaside holiday—required a set of curatorial interven-
tions on behalf of artists, architects, and engineers whose task was to
turn the dangerous geographies of the earlier driver-adventurers into
leisurely occasions for experiencing picturesque nature. From the 1920s
onward, Latin America would see a concerted effort in producing sto-
ries, images, and architectures that reinvented the national landscape in
accordance with the new, discontinuous territory opened up by auto-
mobility. Frequently, as happened at Ouro Preto’s Grande Hotel, these
curatorial interventions would co-opt and reinscribe as a pedagogics of
tourism the earlier avant-gardes’ responses to the new technologies of
construction and transport: a whole new regime of space and time, in
short, which only a few isolated voices dared to challenge by exploring
the lines of flight this regime was opening.
The travelogues of these modernist dissidents—including the novel-
ist and playwright Roberto Arlt, in Argentina, or Mário de Andrade,
in Brazil—represented, in Fernando Rosenberg’s expression, “an effort
to distance [themselves] from the modernista project as much as from
the ethos of the metropolitan traveler,” to instead explore “the limits of
available narrative strategies to articulate nation, culture, and territory.”28
Their “errant modernism,” Esther Gabara suggests, actively resisted the
epistophilic desires of metropolitan audiences for firsthand insights into
remote locations, thus also “interrupt[ing] the unifying, foundational
promise of travel writing.”29 Ironically identifying as “antitravelers” or
accidental tourists, Arlt and Andrade in their itinerant dispatches from
Argentina’s and Brazil’s rural interior, respectively, refused to contribute
to tourism’s and the machine ensemble’s regime of territorial accumu-
lation. Instead, their travelogues explored the relations between space,
time, representation, and subjectivity triggered by these new technolo-
gies of locomotion and communication, by means of self-reflexive irony.
They inquired about the modes of spatial knowledge associated with
each of the vehicles they boarded, as well as their limitations. Take, for
instance, the photograph of his own shadow aboard the steamer Vitória
in Andrade’s 1927 travelogue, projected onto the surface of the river, and
captioned “Quê dê o poeta?” (Where’s the poet?) (fig. 15).
 The Country and the City ❘ 89

Fig. 15. Mário de Andrade, Rio Madeira. Retrato da minha sombra

trepada no toldo do Vitòria. Julho 1927. Que-dê o poeta? (Rio Ma-
deira, portrait of my shadow while standing on the tent of the Vitória.
July 1927. Where’s the poet?). Mário de Andrade Photographic Col-
lection, Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, University of São Paulo.
90 ❘ Chapter 2

An emblematic visualization of its author’s, literally speaking, re-

flexive stance on travel and its subject, the image also speaks to the
way in which dissident chroniclers such as Arlt and Andrade called into
question the project of national integration under the auspices of tour-
ism and of the modern machine ensemble. Beyond the latter’s glossy
horizons, as these probing, ironic, and self-critical accounts of modern
travel began to suspect, lay an altogether more complex and painful
reality of intensified extractivism along the capitalist frontier.
Arlt’s and Andrade’s travelogues coincide not just in the variety of
means of locomotion, from trains and cars to airplanes and steamboats,
they are also themselves wired into a different, informational machine
ensemble that dictates their accelerated, almost telegraphic, rhetoric.
Arlt’s notes from the early 1930s were wired as soon as they had been
pulled from his typewriter to the daily El Mundo in Buenos Aires, to
be published the next day, together with a photograph or sometimes a
drawing made by the author himself. Andrade’s writing sketches from
his 1928–29 trip to Brazil’s Northeast (as well as selections from the
previous one to the Amazon in 1927) were immediately dispatched to
São Paulo to feature in his daily column for the Diário Nacional, titled
“O turista aprendiz” (The apprentice tourist). In both authors, writerly
self-reflexivity often occurs in the form of anticipated captioning of a
photograph, which the author has not yet seen in print. Their chronicles
are, so to speak, a note scribbled on the margins of an unseen, future im-
age as reconstructed from memory, often limited to a few lines describ-
ing the circumstances of the image’s production: “We cross Paso de las
Ánimas. The sun throws an oblique band of mobile golden sheets onto
the chalky waters of the Paraná River, which travel toward the shore. I
take pencil sketches in a notebook, sitting on the iron stairs of the pan-
try,” Arlt tells his readers in a 1933 dispatch from Resistencia, Chaco.30
For both travelers, what matters is less the impact of speed on the
perception of surrounding space than the constant interruptions of this
engine-powered movement, as well as the characters and everyday prac-
tices inhabiting these interstices of time and space. “Once more on the
train,” Arlt relates his 1934 journey across the Patagonian Desert, “I
decide not to look out of the window. This landscape makes me angry.
I already consider it a personal enemy. It’s an unbearable bore who
repeats the same thing all over.”31 “There are stops aplenty, throughout
the journey,” Andrade jots down in 1928 aboard the Great Western Ex-
press between Recife and Guarabira: “People getting off and on, what
a hullaballoo! Northeasterners, in general, they don’t just speak in a
 The Country and the City ❘ 91

singing voice, they give concerts. I study the conversations.”32 The pho-
tograph illustrating this part of the trip, taken from inside the train, tilts
downward on a pair of passengers refreshing themselves in a puddle
next to the track, leaving out of focus the landscape in the background
(fig. 16). Andrade captions: “Great Western—Rio Grande do Norte, De-
cember 14, 1928. People from the train at a stop where there’s water,
getting off to drink some.”33
Here, rather than disappearing from the image as a result of machine-
powered speed, the foreground returns as spatial interruption of the
forward-moving time of travel. It opens a field of interaction between

Fig. 16. Mário de Andrade, Great Western—R.

G. do Norte, 14-XII-28. Pessoal do trem numa
parada onde tem água, se atira para beber (Great
Western—R. G. do Norte, 14-XII-28. People
from the train at a stop where there is water,
getting off to drink some). Mário de Andrade
Photographic Collection, Instituto de Estudos
Brasileiros, University of São Paulo.
92 ❘ Chapter 2

the passengers and the landscape that, in Arlt’s train ride across the
Patagonian Desert, had remained out of reach in the distance. And it
is this very moment of juxtaposition, of conviviality, made possible by
“accidental” interruptions of the touristic chronotope, which, in Arlt’s
and Andrade’s travel vignettes, not only commands the chronicler’s full
attention but also actually shapes the very form of his text. Arlt reports:

I board a coach of the “Ahora . . . Trini” company. Ten min-

utes later we’re on the move. We haven’t done ten blocks,
when a boy with incredibly dirty legs catches up running and
informs the conductor: My mum says if you can wait for her.
The driver says yes, and the boy darts off like a greyhound.
We wait for the missus. Three minutes go by until, finally,
huffing and puffing, the excellent lady arrives dressed in an
ash-grey bathrobe. “Ahora Trini” starts moving again.34

For Arlt, the time the roaming reporter and his fellow passengers on
the bus to Resistencia spend waiting for a poor villager to dress up for
her trip to the city is worth featuring in the following day’s dispatch
because it represents a crossroads of temporalities, rhythms of life: an
instant—three minutes on Arlt’s stopwatch—of juxtaposition between
lives that would never otherwise have coincided. The episode is some-
thing like the reverse of the one recorded by Andrade in 1929 while
driving across the arid backlands of Brazil’s Northeast:

The backwoodsman was mad with desire to try out a car.

When he passed the watering hole, he ran into one, empty.
He asked if he could join for a little, the driver let him. He
tied the beast to an Oiticica tree and settled down for a lei-
surely drive. The driver asked if he’d had enough; he asked
to go on a little more. Finally it was enough, and the car
went its way leaving the thankful backwoodsman behind in
the middle of the road, under such a burning sun!35

Even if only “for a little,” in Andrade’s account the countryman goes

from an object of ethnographic curiosity to become a travel companion.
As does Arlt, Andrade actively searches for unexpected encounters and
juxtapositions that only the accidented rhythm of his journey, with its
many stops and breaks, makes possible. “Antitravel,” for both writers,
 The Country and the City ❘ 93

is a way of forging from this accidented rhythm opportunities for un-

foreseen encounters between worlds the mutual separation of which the
machine ensemble was seeking to make into second nature.
In Andrade’s first journey in 1927, traveling up the Amazon River
by steamboat, the predominant register is still one of irony in its re-
deployment of the tropes of colonial travel in the mode of pastiche or
collage. Comic effect stems here from the deliberate confusion between
subsequent historical iterations of this discourse: the colonial chron-
icle of discovery, the naturalist’s expedition journal, and the modern
leisure traveler’s dandyish onboard diary. Their interplay subverts the
generic frameworks of all three, as when the lack of anything worthy
of observation, let alone discovery, leads Andrade to invent an object of
ethnographic fantasy, the Do-Mi-Sol Indians—a first sketch, Raúl An-
telo suggests, of the following year’s modernist-mythical novella Macu-
naíma.36 Elsewhere, relations between the traveling observers and their
object are playfully turned upside down:

I can’t bring myself to have dinner with this irony on my

mind. The first to spot them called the others. And we spent
a long time looking at the piranhas in the water, voracious
ashen and flesh-colored lightning rods, eating meat. The
meat they devour! Now, I feel the piranhas must all be spy-
ing on us from the water, impressed, commenting with one
another that we are eating meat.37

Yet, when crossing the jungles of Acre toward Bolivia aboard the
Madeira-Mamoré railroad, the construction of which, at the end of the
previous century, had claimed the lives of “thousands of Chinese, Arabs,
Greeks, who came in exchange for a few pounds,”38 the “apprentice
tourist” feels compelled to move from ironic subversion to bitter criti-
cism. Suddenly, what surges between the traveler and the landscape is
the violence of capitalist frontier expansion, which the passenger encap-
sulated in the machine ensemble cannot help but feel complicit with as
ghosts of the dead peer into his cabin with “weak, glimmering eyes”:

What am I doing here! . . . Today, the poet is traveling with

his lady friends on the Madeira-Mamoré, on a sparkling-
clean observation coach, comfortably seated on benches
made of cipó wood . . . Today the poet dines on grilled tur-
94 ❘ Chapter 2

key prepared by a master chef de primo cartello, who came

aboard the Vitória entrusted by the Amazon River Company
with sweetening our lives. On occasions the train stops, for
the landscape to be caught on Kodak, even a cinema has
been brought along! . . . What am I doing here! . . . What
is the reason for all these international dead being reborn in
the buzz of the engine, who come with their weak, glimmer-
ing eyes to spy on me through the windows of the carriage?39

It is this second kind of traveler—the one who spots, in the blurry in-
between space connecting and separating the modern machine ensem-
ble from the land, the ghostly presence of the victims of modern frontier
expansion—who will embark on the subsequent trip. At the end of
1928 and through the early months of the following year, Andrade trav-
els first, by steamer, to the provincial capitals of the Brazilian Northeast
(Recife, Natal, Maceió, and João Pessoa) and then, by car and in the
company of the painter Cícero Días and the journalist Antonio Bento,
into the arid hinterlands of Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco, Alagoas
and Paraíba. “Viagem etnográfica” (An ethnographic journey), as An-
drade subtitles his dispatches, his itinerary across a vast region affected
by a terrifying drought, along roads seeded with crosses commemorat-
ing victims of rural banditry, adopts an altogether more somber tone
than the previous year’s travelogue. Upon venturing out beyond the
coastal cities, the ironic antitourist of the Amazonian journey turns into
a surveyor of roads and irrigation works, bitterly denouncing the ab-
sence and inaction of the government. It is useful to quote several en-
tries of his diary to get a sense of the monotony and despair that begin
to haunt Andrade on his second journey:

In the car, January 22 . . . Excellent road cutting through a

landscape almost exclusively made of stone . . . The highway,
researched with intelligence, follows the watershed between
the Seridó and Barra Nova rivers . . . The road’s artworks,
all rectangular: concrete bridges, iron bumpers. It’s monu-
mental.40

In the car, January 27 . . . The flat tire becomes unbearably

monotonous, the horrible little road keeps throwing us out
of the car. Entering rocky ground doesn’t help a thing. The
road becomes worse still, strewn with trunks. It really isn’t
 The Country and the City ❘ 95

fun at all to stop every quarter of an hour to drag some stu-

pid stick out of the way.41

The road from Caicó to Catolé da Rocha, linking Rio

Grande do Norte with Paraíba, providing employment for
400 workers—which means 400 families being fed—for a ri-
diculous daily pay of 2.5 Rs$: national government suddenly
shut it all down. This hamlet found itself in complete misery,
starving during the drought. There’s no assistance whatsoev-
er . . . But national government is building a luxury highway
from Rio to Petrópolis.42

Here, the sudden end of the road, rather than reconnecting travelers
with a pristine realm of authenticity—as in the motorized adventures
of Elflein and Courteville—leads only into a space of abandonment, “of
sordid, unbearable, hideous misery.”43 Every so often, Andrade and his
party run into groups of peasants traveling the opposite way, as they
head toward the coast and on to the southern cities, escaping a life of
hardship: “I’m outraged. I don’t even throw them a dime. This trip has
become a disgrace,”44 Andrade complains. As the trio of artists journeys
across the Brazilian Northeast, the loss of orientation is not just geo-
graphical; it rather goes to the heart of the narrative form and its sub-
ject: “We haven’t done an hour of descent, and already the first wrong
turn . . . We ramble down each and every oxen trail or footpath.”45
“Gone amiss. Every man, every house, we ask for the way.”46
Instead of representing a deliberate antitouristic strategy, here the
travelers’ loss of direction threatens to undermine the text itself, casting
doubt on whether it is really worth the writer’s and readers’ while to
keep going: “tudo está errado” (everything’s amiss).47 The backlands of
the Northeast reflect back to the “errant modernist” a modernity that
has itself gone amiss, and this general loss of direction, undermining
both the subject of observation and the landscape object, takes narra-
tive shape in the form of an abyss suddenly opening in the road and
the text, threatening to swallow altogether the expeditioners and their
vehicle:

We’re climbing up the ridge, and already it’s raining on the

left, lightning flashes and all! A downpour this thick! Our
headlights become worthless . . . And the storm hits us.
Lightning flares up inside the car, rain falls, thunder rolls.
96 ❘ Chapter 2

Tree branches hit us. The abyss expands, now on this, now
on that side, exaggerated by nightfall . . . We’re in serious
danger . . . We even had our near-death moment, a classic on
these occasions. The car veered straight toward the abyss,
unconsciously I twisted left and disturbed the driver’s move-
ment, we were almost done with!48

The abyss, as a sudden, existential threat only narrowly avoided by

the travelers, also marks in textual space the uttermost limit of the “ac-
cidental journey” as a framework for early twentieth-century modernist
travel and its narrative. In fact, as we now realize, the apprentice tourist’s
playful experimentation with, and even debunking of, machine-driven
experiences of the margins of nation and continent had always depended
(as in Andrade’s own piranha-spotting anecdote) on a safe distance from
“wild” nature, guaranteed by the machine ensemble. Self-reflexive irony
was possible once travel had turned from a life-and-death “adventure,”
associated with colonial conquest and imperial resource-prospecting,
into a touristic experience of leisure. Even as they criticized the indiffer-
ence visited upon land and water by tourism’s machine ensembles, the
metropolitan modernists’ accidental journeys never strayed as far from
the modern script as did their regionalist counterparts analyzed in chap-
ter 1. Mário de Andrade’s terrified look into the abyss on the side of the
road is as far as an avant-gardist rewriting of the New World travelogue
would go. The sudden cranking of the wheel that saves the travelers
from their deadly plunge is therefore also a textual maneuver, steering
narrative itself back into the safety of the technological compound on
which, for all their playful critiques, modernist travelers had always
relied. Yet even as they roamed the confines of national territory aboard
the safety of the machine ensemble, these accidental tourists could also
not help but glimpse through the cracks of the chronotope of leisure
travel some indications of the violent, even deadly, impact inflicted by
the uneven new regimes of speed on human and more-than-human bod-
ies, assemblages, and materialities. Their limited understanding of these
insights is not necessarily only the travelers’ fault: indeed, I would ar-
gue, it is also up to us, as twenty-first century readers, to recognize these
moments of anxiety as early instances of a disaster writing that we have
seen coming into its own in writings and films such as Quiroga’s nar-
ratives of animal insurgency or Senna and Bodanzky’s dystopian road
movie shot along the Transamazônica a half-century later.
 The Country and the City ❘ 97

Weeded Ou t: Mo de r ni sm i n t h e G ard e n

If accidents, in some modernist redeployments of the landscape in visu,

provided an opportunity for exposing and challenging the neocoloniz-
ing effects of expanding infrastructures of transport and communica-
tion, weeds—and their “cultivation”—played a similar critical role for
avant-gardist landscaping in situ. What to plant—and how—became
a point of contention in Latin American architectural modernism, as
gardens and parks turned into a zone of negotiation between the built
environment and its natural setting—the coagency of which was recog-
nized (at least rhetorically) to an extent not previously seen in modern
architecture. Le Corbusier’s South American journey of 1929 had pro-
vided a new generation of architects with the language and symbolic
authority to challenge the prevalent turn-of-the-century eclecticism and
to advocate instead for an architecture that would echo, in the built
space of the city, the “morphology” of its environment. In his review of
Le Corbusier’s Précisions (the book collecting his South American talks,
sketches, and travel notes), published in the first issue of the journal Sur,
Argentine urbanist Alberto Prebisch saluted the Franco-Swiss maestro’s
call to open one’s eyes to the beauty of anonymous constructions, to
“the small popular houses, so pure and simple, uncontaminated by a
false urban culture.”49 In the following issue, Prebisch expounded on
his idea, counterposing the “absurd varieties of architectonic nonsense”
of present-day Buenos Aires, the sign of “the parvenu’s labored per-
sonal fancy,” to the modest and sober constructions of old, which had
still composed “what today we can only say with certainty if we give
credit to geography: an American city.” Humble, “without any boule-
vards, subways, or pretensions,” this earlier city prior to the arrival of
European mass immigration at the turn of the century, which—Prebisch
held—persisted in some of the suburbs bordering the Pampas, “was still
an architecture of men and not of architects; that is to say, its style
responded to very concrete needs and to the demands of climate and
custom.”50
A few years later, Brazilian novelist José Lins do Rego, commend-
ing the team of young architects in charge of Rio’s Ministry of Health
and Education (including its resident gardener, Roberto Burle Marx),
likewise insisted on the “authentic,” vernacular character of the final
design, which had “breathed life” into Le Corbusier’s merely “formu-
laic” proposal:
98 ❘ Chapter 2

Le Corbusier was . . . the point of departure that enabled the

new school of Brazilian architecture to express itself with
great spontaneity and arrive at original solutions. Like the
music of Villa-Lobos, the expressive force of a Lúcio Costa
and a Niemeyer was a creation intrinsically ours, something
which sprang out of our own life. The return to nature, and
the value which came to be given to landscape as a substan-
tial element, saved our architects from what could be consid-
ered formulaic in Le Corbusier.51

Philip L. Goodwin, curator of MoMA’s 1943 survey show Brazil Builds:

Architecture Old and New, 1652–1942, echoed Rego’s sentiment. Mod-
ern Brazilian architecture, he wrote, “has the character of the country
itself and the men there who have designed it; secondly, it fits the climate
and the materials for which it is intended.”52
The emergent consensus, which, as Valerie Fraser has shown, lasted
roughly from Le Corbusier’s first journey in 1929 to the construction
of Brasília (1956–60), held that a vernacular modernity could be found
in Latin American architecture’s “spontaneous” responses to the condi-
tions of climate, vegetation, and light specific to the tropical and sub-
tropical realm.53 To be modern, Latin American architects had to look
not overseas but within and to the past. They needed to reconnect with
an already existing vernacular repository of technical and formal crafts-
manship and to simultaneously reassess this unique heritage with an
eye trained in contemporary, International Style functionalism, to rec-
ognize the analogies between one and the other. Latin American archi-
tectural modernity had to literally reembody local skills and traditions
in the materialities of industrial modernity yet also extend the reach
of modern construction technology toward homegrown materials and
forms. In this game of translations among forms, building materials,
and techniques, the garden as a mediating interface between the built
environment and its wider spatial context gained an importance that
was more than just ornamental. The garden (and especially its public,
urbanistic expression, the park) was where architecture’s environmental
eloquence—its ability to engage and establish a relation with the forms
and conditions of tropical and subtropical nature while also remaining
true to its own expressive script—was being put to the test. Gardens
provided a both symbolic and material space of transculturation, a bio-
contact zone through which architectural space could put down roots
and turn into place.
 The Country and the City ❘ 99

In the southern hemisphere, Grigorij Warchavchik—the Russian-born

representative of Brazil at the 1930 International Congress of Modern
Architecture—told his audience, “our most efficient ally . . . is tropical
nature, which so favorably envelops the modern house with cacti and
other superb plants, and the magnificent light, which highlights the clear
and bold profiles of constructions against the dark-green background
of the gardens.”54 Some ten years earlier, on a visit to Rio de Janeiro’s
Centennial Exhibition, José Vasconcelos, the Mexican Minister of Cul-
ture and patron of muralism, had already reveled in similar visions of “a
refined and intense civilization answer[ing] to the splendors of a Nature
swollen with potency.”55 In the future, Vasconcelos marveled on con-
templating the exhibition’s neocolonial pavilions and monuments, “the
conquest of the Tropics will transform all aspects of life. Architecture
will abandon the Gothic arch, the vault, and, in general, the roof . . .
Colonnades and perhaps spiral constructions will be raised in useless
ostentation of beauty, because the new aesthetics will try to adapt itself
to the endless curve of the spiral, which represents the freedom of desire
and the triumph of Being in the conquest of infinity.”56
But if being “true to nature” could mean, in debates of the 1920s and
1930s, such diverse things as Warchavchik’s geometrical functionalism
and Vasconcelos’s delirious neo-Baroque, can “environmental adapta-
tion” really count as a determining feature of Latin American architec-
tural modernism? Did buildings really “spring out of life,” transcribing
the mandates of “climate and custom” just as the forms and colors of
the surrounding vegetation responded to local conditions of light, hu-
midity, and temperature? Or did these buildings in their “alliance with
nature,” in which the garden was the key site, not rather construct rep-
resentations of nature—and of a “nature” in which architecture could
claim its place? To what extent were these representations, as champions
of the new architecture (from Vasconcelos to Warchavchik and Rego)
insisted, the outcome of more reciprocal relations between designers
and the forces of “climate and custom” they claimed were their inspira-
tion, rather than just the latest iteration of the original colonial gesture
of taking possession of the land? Were the gardens of Latin American
modernism really the site of an incipient ecological hermeneutics or
a renewed instance of “colonial relandscaping” in the service of neo-
extractive nation-states?57 The question is not whether the gardens of
pioneering Latin American landscape designers, such as Burle Marx
in Brazil, Luis Barragán in Mexico, or Carlos Martner in Chile, were
“ecologically correct” representations of their locations. Architecture—
100 ❘ Chapter 2

including landscape architecture—always takes place, a place that only

emerges in the moment of the taking. To turn a supposed “truthfulness”
to the location into the benchmark of aesthetic judgments is to ignore
this intrinsically relational and dynamic nature of places, their charac-
ter as “space-time events,” in Doreen Massey’s poignant expression, in
which “a here and now” must be negotiated rather than just being out
there.58 Then why not ask a building or a park the questions we would
ask a poem or a painting: questions about the histories they tell about
this place and about how they accommodate it to our gazes and our
bodies so that we can inhabit it?
Among Le Corbusier’s earliest South American interlocutors was
Victoria Ocampo, the wealthy Argentine writer, editor, and socialite,
who had approached the Franco-Swiss urbanist in 1928 about a design
for her new townhouse in Palermo Chico, Buenos Aires, “something in
the manner of . . . the house at Garches”59—the Villa Stein-de Monzie
on the outskirts of Paris, which Le Corbusier had designed in 1927.
In 1931, the first issue of Ocampo’s new journal Sur featured, among
others, Prebisch’s review of Précisions and an essay by the editor herself
that borrowed its title from one of Le Corbusier’s 1929 lectures at the
Asociación Amigos del Arte: “La aventura del mueble” (The adventure
of furniture). There, after stating her allegiance to the modernist creed of
sparse and functional furnishings, Ocampo subtly twists Le Corbusier’s
question about the relation between beauty and functionality to instead
ask about how interiors are linked to external space: “I like houses that
are empty of furniture and flooded with light. I like houses with laconic
walls that open wide to give voice to the sky and the trees.”60 Hav-
ing introduced the question of modernism’s relation to place, her text
goes on to perform a second displacement, finding the answer elsewhere
and in another language: in photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s Manhattan
apartment, over the entrance of which Victoria reads the words “An
American Place.” And indeed, she goes on, just as Stieglitz had mastered
the spirit of the camera and forced reality to unveil its most dreamlike
and hallucinatory aspects, his arrangement against the backdrop of the
New York cityscape of “the first Cézannes, the first Matisses, the first
Picassos” to have reached the New World, also made his home “the only
place that plainly deserved such a title . . . on this splendorous island
of Manhattan.” Here, Ocampo concluded, was a setting that offered
“a refuge to those few men and women who suffer the suffocation of
Europe because they already carry America inside them . . . I understood
that I too belonged there, as the yankees say.”61
 The Country and the City ❘ 101

Ocampo’s notes in the first issue of Sur on Stieglitz’s Manhattan

condo can be read as a statement of purpose not only for her journal
that aspired to become an “American place” in its own right—a literary
and artistic contact zone between Old and New World—but also for
the homes and gardens that Ocampo was in the process of project-
ing and arranging. Victoria herself authored the design in 1927 for her
summer home at Mar del Plata, “the first modern house in Argentina,”
built “according to my own fancy”—she declared—where “I wanted
to restart from scratch everything related to architecture and furnish-
ings . . . I wanted it to be absolutely simple, absolutely naked.”62 The fol-
lowing year, construction began at Ocampo’s Buenos Aires townhouse
in the upscale neighborhood of Palermo Chico, which she had finally
entrusted to her friend Alejandro Bustillo rather than Le Corbusier. Sur-
rounding the building composed of rectangular cubes, the garden fea-
tured sculptural cacti planted in concrete flowerbeds—a nod to Gabriel
Guévrékian’s cubist gardens at the country home of Ocampo’s friends’
Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles’s at Hyères, Provence—which
echoed the sparsely furnished interior where abstract sculptures and
cacti served as visual highlights contrasting with the white walls. To-
ward the street, a gardenia hedge and cypress and palm trees provided a
vegetal buffer curtain. Finally, in 1930, this time with Prebisch acting as
consultant, Victoria also began refurbishing the Ocampo family mansion
at San Isidro, in the northern suburbs and on the shores of the River
Plate, which she had inherited that same year. The renovations to the
house and gardens—newly subdivided with her sister, the novelist Silvina
Ocampo, who moved into a new home next door with her husband,
writer Adolfo Bioy Casares—would keep Victoria busy for the better
part of the next two decades; the same period, incidentally, during which
Sur would grow to become the central reference for cosmopolitan liter-
ary and cultural modernism in Argentina. Sur, wrote Ocampo’s friend
and collaborator María Rosa Oliver, “was born, baptized, and clothed
under shreds of tree bark. The trunks of the eucalyptus trees provided the
color scheme for the cover pages.”63 The triangle of homes and gardens
located on the seaside, in the city, and on the riverbank, which Ocampo
kept refurbishing throughout her life, are thus also a kind of reception
room for the project of cultural translation that Sur embodied: “Ocam-
po’s houses,” as literary critic Beatriz Sarlo puts it, “translate on the level
of space the very activity of translation on which she had embarked. Just
as the houses represent the frameworks of modernism, they also stand
for the practices of translation that would define the space of Sur.”64
102 ❘ Chapter 2

Even more than the houses, I would argue, Ocampo’s gardens—those

at San Isidro in particular, which frequently offered a photo op for illus-
trious visitors, from Rabindranath Tagore and Igor Stravinsky to Gra-
ham Greene and Albert Camus—represented a space of transculturation.
Victoria developed these deliberately as a “window” onto the landscape
of the river and thus also onto “America” as seen from the viewing
platform of the refurbished mansion (fig. 17). Whereas the house’s inte-
rior combined the family memories of Creole Argentina with the visual
and artisanal hallmarks of European modernism, the gardens offered
a space of encounter between the aesthetics of modernist landscaping
and the vegetal and material assemblages of the estuarine environment.
Major inspirations included the gardens of Vita Sackville-West and the
Bloomsbury group, as well as the ideas pioneered by English gardeners
William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll for chromatic organization of
flowering cycles and for selecting native, site-specific plants.65 Victoria

Fig. 17. Villa Ocampo. Photograph by Gustav Thorlichen.

From Victoria Ocampo, San Isidro (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1941).
 The Country and the City ❘ 103

also prominently referred to the gardens of Dartington Hall, the pro-

gressive boarding school in Devon, England, set in a lushly landscaped
sculpture park, to which she had been introduced by Tagore.66
Botanical site specificity, the distribution of color and variety in
space and time through successive flowering cycles, and the creation
of distinctive microlandscapes or “rooms” that extend the home’s inte-
rior into the open space and vice versa, were the guiding principles of
Victoria’s garden at San Isidro. To couch the grounds against adjacent
properties and to filter out street noise, she introduced new brushes and
shrubbery, also removing the tennis courts to create a large lawned area
atop the slope, opening views toward the river. A pair of (nonnative)
ginkgo trees provided an arboreal threshold for the stairs leading into
the area, topped by a small circular viewing pavilion. To the back of
the house, rows of large-stemmed palms and eucalyptus enveloped the
pélouse (lawned area) surrounding the central fountain, creating an ex-
terior vestibule that extended the porch into the garden itself. On the
slope descending toward the river, Ocampo planted cacti and several
xerophyles to create a small serranía (ridge), typical of the dry mountain
landscape of northwestern Argentina, which thanks to its low-growing
vegetation also kept viewing channels from hillside to river open all
year round. The house itself was “dressed” in flowering climbers of dif-
ferent colors (samples of which Victoria would wear on the sleeves of
her tailleur): red peppervines at the front; white roses and jasmines at
the back; rose and light-blue oleanders, bougainvilleas, and gardenias
on one of the sides; and dark-green and orange clivias, hollies, and ferns
on the other. Just as in the house itself, historian Fabio Grementieri
points out, Ocampo’s refurbishing of the grounds, “influenced by an
Edwardian garden aesthetics as practiced by the Bloomsbury group . . .
takes a typical piece from 1900 and, while respecting its general struc-
ture, also recycles it according to an innovative canon, resulting in an
integration of modernity and tradition that would become the bench-
mark in garden design only in the last third of the twentieth century.”67
Gardening for Ocampo was yet another element of the “cultural
machine” she set in motion in the 1920s and 1930s, inspiring, as well
as taking cues from, her parallel activities in translation and editorial
work, architecture, and fashion. Like her writing of successive volumes
of Testimonios and Autobiografías, gardening was at once an exer-
cise in self-fashioning and in memory. Cutting, pruning, weeding, and
rearranging the family gardens at San Isidro is akin to the writing of
autobiography in the way it works the adult’s experience and formal
104 ❘ Chapter 2

repertoire onto the childhood past, the presence of which is even more
tangible here since, as Ocampo writes, “smell and sound . . . are the
most powerful fixes for memory, and because a garden, apart from en-
tering us through the eyes, enters through our noses, those doors of our
being that we can never close.”68 The suburban space of childhood, in
the way it remains tangibly present in vegetal matter and not just its
visual but also haptic and olfactory relationship with the surrounding
environment of the estuary, is a kind of earthly Wunderblock (the child’s
toy Freud took as an image of the unconscious as an archive of indelible
inscriptions), the meanings of which autobiographical writing draws
out and works through:

San Isidro was the half-open fig amid coarse leaves and the
peach still warm from the sun, the coconuts that the inacces-
sible palm tree would drop now and then . . . it was putting
your hand into the black earth where the gardener’s hoe had
driven from its hiding place an earthworm good enough for
use on the fishing hook; it was hiding a soap box among
the hortensias, the chest where we kept our precious stones:
pebbles collected on the garden paths. The landscape, in
those days, did not go beyond these things.69

Looking after the family garden is, just as autobiographical writing,

a way of valorizing these “small things,” the minute details of child-
hood memories, from the distance of an adult mind and a body al-
ready traversed by time and by the displacements and interactions with
other spaces and bodies. As Victoria reflects in a review of her sister and
neighbor Silvina’s Sonetos del jardín (Garden sonnets, 1948): “We are
talking not just of an exterior but an interior landscape . . . This wealth
of details, apparently insignificant, proves that we are actually talking of
something more than a landscape: in fact, it is the earth as a sweetheart,
which someone has fallen in love with.”70
Almost as a Proustian trigger of involuntary memories, the garden
here represents a space where elements from the past—the individual
one of childhood but also the collective past of the family and of a Cre-
ole, preimmigration Argentina—remain materially present, placing the
lives of those who continue to inhabit it: “Its slopes, its trees, the song of
its birds, its river . . . even the smell of the air that we breathe there, are
entangled with my entire life, as they were with the lives of those who
came before me.”71 Gardening and autobiography are complementary
 The Country and the City ❘ 105

modes of putting in perspective an intimate and personal place, offering

them to the reader-visitor as a guide for finding her way through what
visual forms such as landscape and photography cannot access. A gar-
den “cannot be photographed by a machine, as perfect as it may be and
as skillful the one who operates it,” Ocampo writes in her foreword to
Gustav Thorlichen’s photobook on San Isidro, published in 1941: “It
can only be photographed by the magic of words.”72
The novelty of this idea of the garden—as a local assemblage sus-
pended between intimacy and hospitality, between the native and the
cosmopolitan, and between the retrospective time of memory and
the open, forward-looking one of formal experimentation—becomes
clear when contrasting it to the one that immediately precedes it. In
the poetry of Latin American modernismo—the turn-of-the century
reimagination of European symbolism—the dreamy chiaroscuro of an
autumnal, swan-populated garden in decay had been a favorite trope:
an eroticized as well as locationally unspecific space. The ornamental
props of fin de siècle landscaping, which modernismo took up as its po-
etic settings—artificial grottos, ruins, pergolas—were the very elements
that avant-gardist gardening as embraced by Ocampo would seek to
weed out. But more importantly, a difference exists in the relations both
aesthetics establish between the garden, writing, and the body. For mod-
ernismo, the garden embodies the triumph and tragedy of all artifice.
The garden represents the delicate as well as ephemeral sovereignty of
form that art imposes on the natural elements, a triumph of beauty that
will irredeemably be dragged back into nature’s cycle of germination
and decay. Thus, for the modernistas the garden is also a figure for po-
etry itself, in the way the latter dis- and relocates erotic pleasure from
the body into language: a language that is but the celebration of this
very disembodiment, crafting a delicious and fragile instant of beauty
always already on the verge of relapsing into the immanence of the
flesh and its fatal association with decay and death. “Entre columnas,
ánforas y flores / y cúpulas de vivas catedrales, / gemí en tu casta desnu-
dez rituales / artísticos de eróticos fevores” (Between columns, urns and
flowers / and domes of living cathedrals / I whimpered in your chaste
nudity / artistic rituals of erotic fervor), begins one of the poems in Julio
Herrera y Reissig’s Los parques abandonados (The abandoned parks),
first published in 1909.73 Here the abandoned, ruinous garden offers a
setting and counterpoint to poetry’s own sublimation of sexuality. Just
as poetry eroticizes the body by transposing it into language, the garden
has momentarily abstracted nature from the concreteness of place into
106 ❘ Chapter 2

the space of aesthetic form: “Las nobles fuentes que el jardín decoran /
gimen en la abismada lejanía, / con esos balbuceos que ya lloran / y que
no son palabras todavía” (The noble fountains that decorate the gar-
den / moan in their abysmal distance / their stammerings that already
cry / and have yet to become words), writes Leopoldo Lugones in Los
crepúsculos del jardín (The garden’s twilights, 1905).74 Here the time
of botany is one of overgrowth and ruination, the time of wild weeds
that threaten these gardens visited, as it were, for one last time before
they inevitably relapse into natural immanence. Yet it is also this very
fragility that—just as in the delicate encounters of young lovers already
marked by the shadow of disease and death—brings the intensity of this
experience to its climax.
The garden’s displacement, brought about by the urban avant-gardes
of the 1920s and 1930s, into the temporality of childhood memories
and into the specific localities of barrio and suburb, represents a clean
break with modernismo’s poetic references to the belle époque garden-
scape: “Recuerdo mío del jardín de casa: / vida benigna de las plantas”
(My memory of the garden of the house: / benign life of the plants),
begins Jorge Luis Borges’s invocation of the family home in Buenos
Aires’ Palermo neighborhood.75 Yet this redeployment of the garden
form also proposes a new relation between local spaces and temporal-
ities and those of cosmopolitan modernity. In Borges’s poem, just as in
the gardens of Ocampo’s family home at San Isidro, the child’s sensory
experience of local vegetal life is evoked and idealized from the vantage
point of the adult’s experience and of the larger spatial configuration in
which this place is now inscribed. Thus, locality is not reclaimed here
as a bastion against cosmopolitan imports; on the contrary, it is itself
already a site of exchange, of trans-plantation.
Let me explain this point. In a letter addressed to Victoria Ocampo
in 1953, Gabriela Mistral—the Chilean poet and Nobel laureate—asks
her friend for botanical assistance in revising her Poema de Chile (Poem
of Chile), on which she would continue working until her death four
years later. In her letter Mistral complains that “almost all of our gar-
dens live from pure European botany.”76 Her own poetic landscapes,
Mistral laments, suffer from a shortage of native plant species, due to
the lack of attention these have received in the manuals of horticulture:
“I barely have a few books with just a few species of flowers . . . ay,
from the garden. I need trees, and it’s so aggravating not to find some-
thing about indigenous flora . . . Beyond the Chilean palm and the ar-
aucaria as well as the maitén, I don’t have any more, dear.”77 Ocampo’s
 The Country and the City ❘ 107

reply, however, cautions her friend against botanical nativism, instead

drawing her attention to the exogenous origins of many apparently in-
digenous plants. Yet for her, rather than a vegetal reminder of the Amer-
icas’ extractive and violent colonial histories, these transplantations are
instead evidence of a living, embodied cosmopolitanism that, like the
translational aesthetics of Sur, inextricably juxtaposes the endogenous
and the diasporic:

I’d really like to give you names of plants for your poem.
But don’t look down on European plants. Don’t become a
nationalist (côté indio), my dear Lucila. What’s more, lots
of purely American flowers are today much beloved in Eu-
ropean gardens, like petunias and zinnias, dahlias and cox-
combs. And many have come from Persia and India . . .
beginning with the very répandu [widespread] jasmine and
the paraíso (Melia azedarach, with its purple flowers that
smell of lavender and that grow around the door of every
proper farmhouse in the province of B. A.), which, although
it is a shade tree, in springtime (right now as I’m writing you)
it also produces those marvelous perfumed clusters that fill
the air of all the northern suburbs (Vicente López, Rivada-
via, Olivos, Martínez, San Isidro, San Fernando, Tigre). That
aroma comes in through the windows of the commuter
trains when they stop in the stations. It’s a smell that has
accompanied every one of my springtimes as long as I can
remember, and I remember smells (a sense that’s as sharp in
me as in some animals). Oh! How I have loved and continue
to love the pleasures of this land and many others!78

The scent of the Persian paradise tree invading suburban trains on their
journey from the port city toward the Paraná Delta, we might think, is
literally an “essence” of the cosmopolitan project that Ocampo pursues
through her journal and her gardens: an olfactory emissary from the
great contact zone of transplantations that spans the world at large,
and in which, she claims, art is teaching us to make ourselves at home.
At the heart of this tension between botanical nativism and the cos-
mopolitanism of aesthetic forms, however, is a question about ecology.
It asks about the capacity of the modern for establishing convivial
relations with locality and with the more-than-human or, as Roberto
Burle Marx—Brazil’s premium landscape architect—put it in 1954,
108 ❘ Chapter 2

the “problem of the garden” is also about “an application of adequate

knowledge of the ecological environment to meet the requirements of
civilization.”79 Yet at the same time the garden also offers “a space for
recovery and reflection” where “civilization” pauses to reconsider its
own relation to the world it is in the process of transforming:

The garden arranged in today’s urban space is an invitation

for conviviality, for recovering the real time of the nature of
things, as opposed to the illusory speed of consumer society
and its rules. The garden can and must be a means to raise
awareness about an existence in accordance with the true
measure of man, with what it means to be alive. It is an ex-
ample of peaceful coexistence among various species, a place
of respect for nature and for the OTHER, for difference: the
garden, in sum, is an instrument of pleasure and a medium
of education.80

Burle Marx’s own work, spanning more than four decades, is per-
haps the most ambitious, yet also contradictory, example of a tropical
modernism looking not just to balance formal rigor with ecological ad-
equacy but to forge common ground between the morphology of plants
and vegetal associations on the one hand and the formal concerns of
modern art on the other. In particular, the emphasis on the architectural
value of color, in Fernand Léger’s famous phrase, will serve both as
the organizing principle and subject matter of Burle Marx’s painterly
gardenscapes. Throughout his work, from the early projects overseen as
director of parks and gardens at Recife, Pernambuco, in the mid-1930s
(where, to the distaste of local elites, he replanted public spaces with
cacti and bromeliads from the arid sertão, vegetal forms previously dis-
missed as weeds, and urban ponds with aquatic flora from the Amazon)
to his large-scale park designs at Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, and Brasília
in the 1960s and 1970s, Burle Marx was concerned with the proper-
ties that modernism’s chromatic, rhythmic, and textural values could
acquire as living forms, embodied in the organic space and time of the
garden. The garden, he argues,

obeys certain laws, which are not exclusive to it but rather

inherent to all manifestations of art. They are the same prob-
lems of color, dimension, time, and rhythm. Only that, in
landscaping, certain characteristics have greater importance
 The Country and the City ❘ 109

than in other forms of art. Three-dimensionality, temporal-

ity, the dynamics of living beings have to be taken into ac-
count in the composition. Other elements have a peculiar
way of participating in the garden. Color, in nature, cannot
have the same meaning as color in painting. It is dependent
on the sunlight, the clouds, the rain, the hour of day, the
place and all the other environmental factors.81

Instead of just mimicking the complex “associations” found in any

given ecological milieu, the garden must also find an aesthetically pleas-
ing expression to make these meaningful and thus also enable them to
claim their place in modern life. Following his stunt at Rio de Janei-
ro’s Ministry of Health and Education building, Burle Marx expanded
his experimentations with the “biometric curve” and other elements of
organic abstractionism to a larger scale, thanks to a series of commis-
sions in the state of Minas Gerais between 1942 and 1945, arranged
by the ambitious young prefect of its capital Belo Horizonte—none
other than Juscelino Kubitschek, the future Brazilian president on
whose watch the construction of Brasília would be inaugurated and
completed. Burle Marx’s designs for the city’s new Pampulha quarter,
made in collaboration with Oscar Niemeyer (fig. 18), explore the chro-
matic potential of lawns, sand, and gravel as well as bedded plants,
each surface adding to the composition’s haptic and textural, rather
than only visual, complexity. His project for the Parque do Barreiro at
the thermal complex of Araxá (constructed between 1943 and 1945)
was also his first collaboration with botanist Henrique Lahmeyer de
Mello Barreto. Together, Mello Barreto and Burle Marx conducted
a geobotanical survey of vegetal associations typical of the local cer-
rado (woodland savanna), based on which they distributed a variety of
microenvironments throughout the park’s vast, curvilinear layout. Each
of the park’s segments, grouped around a large, amoebic-shaped arti-
ficial lake, represented a discrete subarea of regional phytogeography.
Visitors entered the park by way of a small palm forest adjacent to
the thermal baths, continuing through a sector of xerophytes (cacti and
bromeliads) typical of the arid steppes and, in a rockier part of the ter-
rain, moved into an area featuring mountain vegetation such as arnicas
and orchids. At the lake, crossing the bridge to the “island of love,” visi-
tors were welcomed by a leafy wood of cinnamon and ipê trees.
Yet, despite this newfound interest in the modes of plant sociability
already present in nature, at Araxá the designer’s signature also remains
110 ❘ Chapter 2

Fig. 18. Roberto Burle Marx, garden design for the Grande Hotel, Pampulha
(Minas Gerais, Brazil). Draft for unrealized project, ca. 1943–44. Burle Marx &
Cia. Ltda., Rio de Janeiro. Courtesy of Instituto Burle Marx.

clearly legible in the shapes of flowerbeds and the clear-cut borders be-
tween lawned and wooded areas. Here as well as in large-scale private
commissions he took on over the following decade, Burle Marx ex-
plored the benefits of large expanses to introduce a seasonal rhythm of
chromatic counterpoints, planting clusters of primary color in different
areas of the garden, which intensify or fade according to the flowering
and fruit-bearing cycles of individual species. At the gardens of Residên-
cia Odette Monteiro, commissioned in 1945 in Rio de Janeiro’s moun-
tainous Serra dos Órgãos region, Burle Marx’s “symphonic” interplay
of colors, interspersed with floral events framed by the light green of
the lawns, the dark-green and blue foliage of the surrounding forest,
and the black granite of the peaks, succeeds spectacularly—as Jacques
Leenhardt puts it—in drawing out the ensemble of aesthetic features
peculiar to the location through the introduction of nonlocal elements.82
Following his collaborations with Mello Barreto, by the end of the
1940s Burle Marx had already reimagined the landscape gardener’s craft
as a kind of Humboldtian naturalism adapted to the formal concerns
of postwar art and architecture and to geobotany’s insights into plant
sociability and resilience. Starting in the late 1930s, he would regularly
assemble multidisciplinary teams including botanists, architects, and vi-
 The Country and the City ❘ 111

sual artists for one- to two-week excursions into a variety of tropical

and subtropical habitats, not only for the purpose of gathering plant
specimens but also for observing in loco the morphology, ecological as-
sociations, and aesthetic effects of individual plants and vegetal ensem-
bles. The purpose of studying botany in the wild (and of sketching and
photographing individual plants and ensembles) was primarily an aes-
thetic one: to amplify the repertoire of tropical landscaping by bringing
the weed into the garden. In 1949, together with his brother Guilherme,
Burle Marx purchased an old fazenda, a former coffee plantation, on a
hillside location at Guaratiba, south of Rio de Janeiro, comprising dif-
ferent phytogeographic milieus—a perfect spot for experimenting with
the cultivation of native plants for horticultural purposes. Over time,
the site, Santo Antônio da Bica, would grow into the largest tropical
plant repository anywhere in the world; its collection including 750
species of philodendrons, more than 200 kinds of bromeliads and or-
chids, and over 120 different banana plants and arrowroots. In creating
a feedback loop between his horticultural laboratory—both a commer-
cial plant nursery and an open-air design workshop for observing plant
associations and their effects over time—and the practice of regular
field trips, Burle Marx also revisited the interplay between the journey
and the garden—the landscape in situ and the landscape in visu—that
had underwritten colonial landscaping.
But in redeploying the devices and practices of previous iterations
of natural history, Burle Marx also twisted their underlying extractivist
premise of isolating individual species by inquiring instead about the
living associations—the forms of sociability and transfection among
vegetal communities—which the garden can take advantage of for aes-
thetic as well as educational purposes. In Vera Siqueira’s expression,
the Burlemarxian journey “modifies the underlying picturesque im-
plications of the notion of collecting. It is not about finding the dif-
ferent, rare, or exotic, but rather about valuing those species that are
considered weeds in their places of origin.”83 Together with his growing
awareness of environmental destruction—making him one of Brazil’s
earliest and most vocal ecologists—Burle Marx now turned his interest
toward phytophysiognomic transition zones and the plant life in post-
deforestation areas, seeing in these models of resilience, adaptiveness,
and instability yet also living memorials to the fragility and delicacy of
plants as living, social organisms. The plant, as he writes in a 1962 essay
on gardening and ecology, “has, in its highest degree, the property of
being unstable. A plant is alive as long as it changes. It suffers a constant
112 ❘ Chapter 2

mutation, a lack of equilibrium which is in the end the search of equi-

librium itself.”84 Its aesthetic power, its capacity to please and enchant,
is therefore inextricably bound up with this very mutability, as well as
with the necessarily social being of a plant, the relation it maintains
with its habitat. Plants, as philosopher Emmanuele Coccia puts it, point
us to the atmosphere as a space of mixture and complicity, in which all
living things are submerged,85 or in Burle Marx’s own words: “A plant
lives in resonance to its surroundings . . . To make gardens, indeed,
means sometimes to ‘create’ microclimates.”86
On the other hand, this reimagining of the two great series of co-
lonial landscaping—of the landscape in visu and in situ—also makes
manifest in the garden’s own space and time the interplay between, on
the one hand, the evolving temporality of plant associations striving
toward phytocoenosis—or the state of stable community—and, on the
other hand, the visitors’ embodied, kinetic experience of walking in the
garden. Thus, Burle Marx also redeploys the garden form’s historical
nature as a structuring principle to challenge the “colonial hybrid land-
scape” of metropolitan gardening, with its legacy of “forced association,
comixture, violent enclosure, and territorialization” that are imagi-
narily “returned to Arcadian innocence.”87 Rather than reperforming
the ideological work of colonial landscaping, by effacing the traces of
violent intervention and weeding out, Burle Marx’s gardens make the
artifice of their own designs transparent and legible. Yet at the same
time, in the way these designs also echo the expressive forms of organic
abstraction—“biometric curves” and amoebic-shaped, monochromatic
volumes of color and texture—his gardens seek to educate, in emblem-
atic rather than mimetic fashion, about the histories of plant associa-
tions and their conflictive encounters with human social and economic
history. His gardens, he claims, assume the “pedagogical task” of “com-
municating to the masses a feeling of esteem and comprehension of the
values of nature.”88
Let us look at one more example. At Caracas’s Parque del Este, Burle
Marx chose to intervene a historical working landscape in one of the
city’s popular quarters—the remains of an old sugar and coffee planta-
tion, partly forested to provide shade for the coffee plants and partly
cleared for the drying and roasting of the beans—and used the already
existing trees to shelter the growth of new vegetation. Without requir-
ing major interventions, one part of the park, design and construction
of which he oversaw between 1956 and 1961, would thus become a
sinuous forest landscape crossed by undulating paths, while the oppo-
 The Country and the City ❘ 113

site area was turned into fluid grasslands for picnics and games, with
only sparse arborization along the main walkways. Together, the two
sectors also offer a synthetic experience of Venezuela’s geobotanical en-
vironments, from the llanos (prairies) and cordilleras to the lowland
tropical forests, interconnected through a series of patios (fig. 19). These
shady enclosures by the park’s main entrance, each surrounded by walls
tiled in simple modernist designs, recall traditional backyard gardens
of the colonial city yet also reimagine these for the modern capital of
the present age. As Anita Berrizbeitia points out, the park actively pre-
cludes the visual detachment enjoyed by visitors of English and French
landscape gardens, by withholding belvederes and elevated platforms.
Instead, it encourages the active, kinetic immersion of mobile bodies in
the diversity of milieus assembled in the park’s microcosm: “The visi-
tor’s relation with the landscape is not one of detached contemplation
but one that concentrates on the material and tactile experience of the
landscape. Parque del Este deals not in generalities but specificities—
material, visual, tactile, spatial, volumetric and experiential ones.”89
The park’s multisensory experience, then, always exceeds the merely
visual apprehension elicited by the landscape architect’s blueprint (fig.
18)—yet the formal simplicity and clarity of the latter also ensure the
legibility of the design, such that gardened space never conceals its own

Fig. 19. Roberto Burle Marx, Parque del Este, Caracas, 2009. Wikimedia
Commons.
114 ❘ Chapter 2

character as a planned and managed, indeed, a social landscape. Even

when this signature appears to be rigid, it is highly fragile and requires
constant attention and maintenance to contain the effects of seeding
out or to maintain the design’s overall coherence as plants grow and
die over time. Usually, Burle Marx would continue monitoring his com-
missions long after completion of the initial landscaping work. Each
garden represented a dynamic environment in constant need of new
interventions and solutions, which is why it is somewhat misleading to
date his designs as one would a painting or even a building. Indeed, at
large-scale public projects such as Parque del Este, Burle Marx insisted
on creating on-site nurseries and greenhouses for staff and visitor train-
ing purposes as well as for ongoing maintenance—a wager on the con-
tinued existence of the midcentury developmentalist state’s commitment
to public expenditure that would promptly be dishonored, for multiple
reasons, by the latter’s dictatorial and democratic successors in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century. As Rossana Vaccarino puts it,
by “incorporating temporality and change” as a key aspect of the de-
sign, Burle Marx sought to generate “projects with the character of a
living organism. The delayed construction and the possibility of watch-
ing progressive growth provided, in fact, the time for both Burle Marx
and the park users to establish a deep relationship with the landscape,
in a way very similar to the relationship that humans establish among
themselves.”90
Not unlike Victoria Ocampo’s family garden at San Isidro, the public
gardens of Roberto Burle Marx sought to establish an affective relation-
ship with place while also inscribing the latter into the cosmopolitan
space of modernity. He did so by using an expressive language that rep-
licates this same interplay in fusing the elementary forms of abstract art
with the morphology and mutability of plant physiology. The biometric
curve, Burle Marx’s signature element in the design of so many of his
gardens, makes this constitutive tension the centerpiece and organizing
principle of spatial organization, at once recognizing and disavowing
the limit between the designer’s sovereign decision and the already “bio-
metric” shapes of individual plants and vegetal ensembles. The line is
thus a porous border allowing for resonances and transpositions be-
tween one side and the other, between the elementary forms of nature
and those of art, while also keeping intact their separation. Burle Marx
would almost certainly have read Rudolf Borchardt’s The Passionate
Gardener, written in exile in 1938, which discusses the notion of order
in the garden as an unsurmountable tension between the “prehuman”
 The Country and the City ❘ 115

order of the flower and the “human mode of order,” for which the gar-
den as a whole strives as a way of making up for the irretrievable loss of
prelapsarian harmony. In attempting once more to “conjugate life and
form,” as Robert Pogue Harrison concludes, the garden for Borchardt
“stands at the center of a human mode of being that stretches between
two impossibilities, two irrevocable losses: nature and God.”91 Burle
Marx’s and Ocampo’s attempts at gardening the New World, different
as they may be, also bring a historical, postcolonial, dimension to this
foundational tension at the heart of gardening: even if only obliquely,
they both mourn a preextractivist “nature” of the past at the same time
as they attempt to devise modes of human-vegetal conviviality for their
own present and future.

A mer eida : N av i gat i ng t h e Se a Wi t h i n

They must have been quite a sight: a bunch of scruffy, oddly dressed
guys hopping off from a weather-beaten Chevrolet van on September 4,
1965, just before noon when everything closes for a long siesta in the
sleepy provincial capital of Santiago del Estero, Argentina. Their vehicle
packed to the roof with wires, paper, cloth, and aluminum sheets, two
of the travelers promptly start performing pranks for the kids gathering
at the plaza, while the others, unsuccessfully, try to cash a check at the
bank (it’s a Saturday). Having made their introductions later that same
afternoon to the handful of regulars hanging out at the nearby “Di-
mensión” bookshop, all go to have dinner together and agree to meet
up again at lunchtime the next day at the poet Alberto Alba’s cabin at
El Zanjón on the outskirts of town.92 There, continuing the previous
night’s “improvisations by the poets and games on a piece of paper,”
the visitors return the locals’ hospitality through a host of poetic and
sculptural interventions: “Alberto paints the door and one of the front
windows. Tronquoy makes a bas-relief on one side of the house. Fa-
bio paints a poem by Edy on a styrofoam sheet. Godo writes a poem,
which Tronquoy engraves onto a copper plate. Boulting writes another,
which Alberto copies onto a size nine paper thread.”93 Gradually, Alba’s
little cabin on the outskirts of Santiago del Estero is thus transformed
into an early iteration, a blueprint, of the poetic travelogue the trav-
elers would publish some two years later, Amereida (fig. 20). There,
as we have seen, they would likewise resort to poetic as well as visual
cartographies to “invert and redirect” the continental silhouette, in the
116 ❘ Chapter 2

Fig. 20. Travesía de Amereida, Alberto Alba’s house, Santiago del Estero, Sep-
tember 5, 1965. Photograph by François Fédier. Ritoque, Chile: Archivo Corpo-
ración Cultural Amereida.

process also laying down the foundations for Ciudad Abierta, an ex-
perimental site north of Valparaíso, Chile, where some of the travelers
would take up residence in 1970. In their bitácora (logbook), two of
the expeditioners—sculptor Claudio Girola and architect Fabio Cruz—
explain the cabin’s intervention as follows:

Our journey: Tierra del Fuego—Santiago del Estero. The

location of this town is represented through these painted
doors.
The door is what’s primordial. The window: view, light.
No mere hole, something already more elaborate. Santiago
del Estero is in the countryside, here, at El Zanjón, or: at
the doors’ base. These doors sought to represent, on their
surface, the doors to be opened and closed.
A door is opened. A door is closed . . .
Both doors, then, allow to see the plane that extends be-
tween them. South is North, our orientation, which is no
longer called North or South. The Southern Cross is called
the Polar Anchor. The Atlantic contributes the Light. The Pa-
cific is the Adventure. Whereas the tropics and the Antilles
 The Country and the City ❘ 117

are the Origin: therefore, 1. Anchor, 2. Light, 3. Origin, 4.

Adventure.
Santiago del Estero: Alberto Alba’s house.94

Alba’s cabin becomes home to an alternative, poetic geography. It

shelters a new and dissident triangulation of American space, the mean-
ings of which the group was to proclaim on reaching their destination:
the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, where plains, mountains, and
forest—the three “rhythms” of the southern subcontinent—converged.
Or so the travelers would have done if their journey had not been cut
short, only a few days after the encounter at Santiago del Estero, by Bo-
livian military authorities who suspected them of being in cahoots with
the guerrilla force that Ernesto Che Guevara was just then beginning to
assemble in the Bolivian interior. Only the intervention of the Argentine
consul at Tarija—a university friend of one of the travelers—saved them
from further complications arranging their safe passage back to Argen-
tina and, eventually, to their countries of origin.
Who were these men, and what was the meaning of the map they left
behind in Alberto Alba’s cabin? Alberto Cruz and Godofredo Iommi,
the driving forces behind the journey, had first met in 1950 in Santiago
de Chile shortly before Cruz was offered the chair for architecture at the
Universidad Católica of Valparaíso. Cruz accepted so long as he could
bring along a bunch of fellow architects (Arturo Baeza, Jaime Bellalta,
Fabio Cruz, Miguel Eyquém, and José Vial) and artists (painter Fran-
cisco Méndez and sculptor Claudio Girola) who would collaborate not
only in updating the curriculum and in setting up a new research space,
the Institute of Architecture, but also in conducting an experiment of
communal living that sought to integrate the avant-gardist dream of
fusing art and life with the “making of space through Architecture.”95
Godofredo Iommi, an Argentine, had come to Chile to visit fellow poet
Vicente Huidobro—only to fall in love with the latter’s companion, Xi-
mena Amunátegui, whom he would marry shortly after. In 1939, stuck
in Brazil on his way to Europe due to the outbreak of World War II,
Iommi had already dreamed up another poetic journey, traveling up
the Amazon River in the company of Brazilian poets Gerardo Mello
Morães and Abdias do Nascimento, while jointly reading, translating,
and performing Dante’s Divine Comedy. Throughout the 1950s, when
he and Amunátegui moved to Paris, Iommi would regularly visit Cruz
and his group in Chile, while also making friends with the French poet
Michel Deguy (with whom he would cofound the Revue de Poésie) as
118 ❘ Chapter 2

well as a host of artists and writers including the philosopher François

Fédier, painter Jorge Pérez Román, sculptor Henri Tronquoy, and poet
Edison Simons. All these would later join Iommi after his return to
Chile in 1965, along with Cruz’s group, on the travesía de Amereida
(Amereida crossing): a collective, experimental, and largely improvisa-
tional journey through the continental interior from its southernmost
tip at Tierra del Fuego to Santa Cruz, the “poetic capital of America.”
While Iommi was in Paris, Cruz and his fellows had been trying at
Valparaíso to rethink architecture not as the mind work, the “master-
plan,” of a demiurgic individual but rather as a collective, integrated
process of revealing place through shared inhabiting, a practice involv-
ing both everyday activities and creative events. Inspired by modernist
notions of integrating plastic and poetic values—advanced most nota-
bly by Le Corbusier in his Poème de l’angle droit (Poem of the Right
Angle, 1955)—Cruz questioned the autonomy and self-sufficiency of ar-
chitecture, insisting instead on its subordination to poetry as the origin
and end of the built environment. “It is the poetic word that provides
the foundation for architecture,” as Iommi would declare: “Poetry not
as an inspiration, which is how everyone else uses it, but as an indica-
tor.”96 If poetry is the invention of the human in language, then architec-
ture is entrusted with “making room” for this inaugural event and thus
with “realizing” it as it indicates the latter’s “position” regarding the
material universe. Architecture endows poetry with a body; it “incorpo-
rates” it within the site of emplacement. Architecture is the making of
poetic space: “Posición y palabra. Arquitectura y poesía” (Position and
word. Architecture and poetry), as Cruz would sum it up on one of the
pizarras (chalkboards) he used to prepare for classes at the Institute of
Architecture (see, e.g., fig. 21).
This idea of architecture as a spatial and material translation of po-
etic language took as its inaugural moment what the group called a
phalène—according to Iommi, a word he had stumbled on by chance
in a dictionary, and which in French referred to the moth’s deadly flight
toward the light that attracts it. The phalène was a kind of playful po-
etic exercise through which, in collective associations, card games, or
by throwing a dice that would determine the arrangement of a verse,
a form of “inscription” was being enacted in a particular location. The
phalène calls on place by making the act of poetic invention contingent
on its material and living surroundings (see, e.g., fig. 22). At the same
time, the poetic act also becomes a form of inquiry into the “situation”
and “destiny” of this place, a method, according to Pendleton-Jullian, of
 The Country and the City ❘ 119

Fig. 21. Alberto Cruz Covarrubias, chalk drawing showing the site of
Ciudad Abierta at Ritoque. Photograph taken at the exhibition Pizarras
escritas, 1972, Instituto de Arquitectura de la Universidad Católica de Val-
paraíso. Archivo José Vial Armstrong, Viña del Mar, Chile.

“discover[ing] and generat[ing] ‘correspondences’ between things—the

physical site and space, the cultural site and space, form and materi-
ality, space and gesture, gesture and construction, parts, components,
and phenomena of each—in place of the singularity of concept mak-
ing.”97 First put into practice through the regular outings of students
and teachers into the urban space of Valparaíso, the seismic topography
and patched-up buildings of which certainly contributed to the idea
of place as a continuous process of invention, the concept of phalène
was subsequently also introduced by Iommi into poetic and artistic
circles in France where, almost certainly, it would have entered into
cross-fertilization with contemporary Situationist ideas of “psychoge-
ography” and the dérive (drift).98 In the way its poetic form, as playfully
teasing out the potential meanings of the location, “is integrally linked
to the place in which the act unfolds,” the phalène also “introduces the
120 ❘ Chapter 2

Fig. 22. Phalène de la electricidad. Pozos de luz (Electric phalène. Wells of light).
Action at Ciudad Abierta, 1977. Archivo José Vial Armstrong, Viña del Mar,
Chile.

possibility of linking poetry to place and space: to the place in which it

occurs and to the space which it configures. It is precisely in service of
this that the poetic act achieves its status as initiator of the architectural
process.”99
The phalènes, carried out in the streets, stairs, and hillside eleva-
tors of Valparaíso by the members of the institute and in French town
squares and housing projects in the banlieues by Iommi and his friends,
were an attempt to conceive the poetic event as a collective experience,
collapsing the exceptional with everyday space and time. As Iommi put
it, quoting Lautréamont’s famous maxim: “Poetry has to be made by
all, not just one.”100 Rather than a complete and definite “work,” the
phalène’s poetic production was the ephemeral and contingent event
of collective and spontaneous cocreation of community through shared
poetic experience, in which “players” and bystanders alike intervened,
if sometimes involuntarily. The Amereida journey of 1965, in fact, was
also an attempt at rearticulating the previous iterations of the phalène
in Chile and France and at inventing, in the words of Michel Deguy, “a
superior phalènic event.”101 The journey’s poetic program, right from its
 The Country and the City ❘ 121

title that fused the continental name with the title of Virgil’s epic of the
foundation of Rome, the Aeneid, embraced a double logic of founda-
tion. On the one hand the new argonauts aboard the Amereida would
perform an inaugural act of naming, while on the other they themselves
were to become confounded with, or “traversed by,” the living presence
of the continent’s material geography in the very instance of its “cross-
ing.” The travelers set out to reexperience America as a poetic object,
the invention of which would also be a way of instituting community—
not just among the group of navigators but also among those they
would reach out to, as in the intervention of Alba’s cabin at El Zanjón.
Thus, Amereida also attempted once again to “casar a la tierra con el
nombre” (wed the earth to the name), as the collective poem stated.102
What Amereida wanted to achieve—as a “superior phalènic event”—
was nothing less than to conceive of “la poesía como acto para celebrar
las bodas del lugar y de la formula” (poetry as an act that celebrates the
wedding of place and program).103
Amereida also radicalized previous initiatives of dissident, antitour-
istic travel in Latin American modernist art and literature. At the same
time, in its “foundational” relation to Ciudad Abierta, the travesía
sketched out a lived alternative to existing relations between place and
the urban: it returned to the colonial dialectic of space making between
the landscape in visu and the landscape in situ, only to eventually leave
it behind. Spearheaded initially by Iommi and his Parisian friends, the
initiative was enthusiastically embraced by the Valparaíso group. At the
end of July 1965, only a few months after Iommi had returned from
Europe, the travelers embarked by plane to Punta Arenas and continued
to Puerto Natales at the southern tip of the continent. Their road trip,
however, would not remain conflict free. Whereas for the European art-
ists and poets joining from overseas (Deguy, sculptor Henri Tronquoy,
philosopher François Fédier, and English poet Jonathan Boulting) the
travesía de Amereida also revisited a legacy of modernist travel going
back to the South American journeys of Blaise Cendrars, Antonin Ar-
taud, or Henri Michaux earlier in the century, for the Latin Americans
(apart from Iommi himself, Chilean architects Alberto and Fabio Cruz,
sculptor Claudio Girola and painter Jorge Pérez Román, both from Ar-
gentina, and poet Edison Simons, from Panama), it was rather a way
of doubling down on previous experiments with poetic emplacement.
Their aim was less to venture out into the great unknown and rather
to develop, by putting themselves on the move, a new and different
notion of architecture as a continuous, creative mode of inhabitation
122 ❘ Chapter 2

that could even include abandonment and starting anew: to travel, to

put themselves in movement, was always already a means of enabling
a return and thus, a renewed and different attachment to place, which
they would put into practice only a few years later with the foundation
of Ciudad Abierta.
Although not clear-cut, this diversity of expectations converging
aboard the Amereida’s Chevrolet van is reflected in the different modes
of textuality, of bearing witness, that the travelers produced—at least in
those they chose to make public. The long, 190-page poem Amereida,
which included contributions from all the journey’s participants but
was compiled and edited mainly by Iommi, was published in 1967 by a
small printers’ cooperative in Valparaíso.104 A second and third edition,
under the auspices of the Universidad Católica, were published in 1986
and 2011, respectively. Also in 1986, as if to mark the essentially un-
finished, open-ended character of the poetic (re)foundation initiated by
the journey, a “Second Volume” was released, adding another 156 pages
of poetic testimony as well as a bitácora (logbook) in prose, written by
Girola and Cruz (although their names are omitted, as in fact are any
authors’ names in either of the two volumes). In a series of footnotes to
the text, the logbook also includes some of the writings composed jointly
during the journey and inscribed or painted onto rocks, shacks, and ad
hoc sculptures, images of which are not included in either iteration of
the poem.105 The choice of keeping from public circulation, until more
than twenty years later, any narrative description of the initial journey of
1965, as well as any of the photographs taken by the participants, speaks
to a deliberate rejection of a documentary, mimetic relation between ex-
perience and writing. At the same time, the first volume of Amereida
does contain almost a dozen black-and-white artists’ maps, making it
unlikely that the omission of photographs would have been due purely
to technical limitations. In fact, the poem itself, rather than offering a
narrative in verse of the journey, only discusses its motivations and ob-
jectives, offering a program for future navigations rather than a reckon-
ing with the one that has already occurred. Each of the writings of the
travesía, the poem and the logbook, is predicated on the other’s absence:
the logbook offers merely an external description of the journey’s trajec-
tory, withholding the poetic, material, and gestural content of phalènes
and recitations, whereas the poem purely consists of reflections on the
travel’s meaning in the absence of any account of the journey itself. As
readers, we are literally at sea in Amereida, adrift in a textual interior the
geographic referent of which evaporates before our eyes.
 The Country and the City ❘ 123

In formal terms, Amereida is characterized by the alternation be-

tween passages written in verse and others in prose-like paragraphs.
The latter generally provide self-reflexive, metapoetic commentary on
the former, where versification is frequently displayed in a cascading
typography suggesting an argument, a mode of poetic reasoning:

colón
nunca vino a américa
buscaba las indias
en medio de su afán
esta tierra
irrumpe en regalo
mero
regalo
surge
contrariando intentos
ajeno a la esperanza
trae consigo
su donación
sus términos
sus bordes106
(columbus
never came to america
he was searching for the indies
right there in his eagerness
this land
arose as a gift
a mere
gift
it arose
against all intent
a stranger to hope
bringing along
its offering
its ends
its edges)

America, the poem suggests, appears in Western history as an unex-

pected gift. But the meaning of this self-offering was never grasped by
the colonizers, blinded as they were by their search for ends—gold,
124 ❘ Chapter 2

spices, trade routes: “¿no fue el hallazgo ajeno / a los descubrimien-

tos?” (was not the finding a stranger / to discovery?) (3), the poem asks
right from the outset. “Discovered” but never “found,” America came
into existence as alienated from itself, and only poetry insofar as it “es
signo que vela y desvela el sentido” (is the sign that veils and unveils
meaning) (12) can take on “la prueba de ese desierto entre la cosa y
el nombre” (the trial of this desert between thing and name) (81):
“¿quién sino ella dice de un origen / pues sólo poéticamente se apa-
rece?” (who else would speak of an origin / since only poetically can it
appear?) (13).
The poem’s entire first section, also including the first two maps—
one showing the silhouette of South America rising from the ocean floor,
and the other indicating the centers of population dotting its coastline
(see fig. 9)—is given over to this “problem of America” as the poetic
challenge to which the travesía aims to respond:

américa regalada
¿se ha aceptado a sí misma?
¿cómo respondernos?
¿podemos interrogar poéticamente
el propio desenvolvimiento del signo
tratar de discernirlo
a través
de cómo nos hemos vuelto americanos
quienes lo somos
para que él mismo
nos manifieste en la palabra? (15)

(america gifted
has it accepted itself?
how can we answer ourselves?
can we interrogate, poetically,
the sign’s own development
attempt to discern it
through the way
in which we have become american
those of us who
have
such that, of its own
it will become manifest to us in language?)
 The Country and the City ❘ 125

Poetry is the only mode of speech capable of receiving America’s gift,

Amereida suggests, and thus also of exchanging an objectifying, colonial
attitude incapable of grasping anything but surface appearances of bodies
and things for one that opens toward “el nuevo mar / de nuestra muda
interioridad” (the new sea / of our mute interiority) (19). It is for poetry,
in America, to undertake the navigation of this “Sea Within,” inverting
the colonial chroniclers’ approach to the continental land body from the
outside.107 Poetry, on the contrary, must make appear inside language
“aquello cuyo don no percibimos / más ¿cómo llamarlo? / ¿cómo provo-
car su aparición?” (that whose gift we had not perceived / yet, how call
on it? / how can we urge it to appear?) (18). By way of the travesía—the
continental crossing—the poem replies: by putting into practice an itiner-
ant poetics that navigates this interior land ocean and thus renounces the
mere “discovery” of objects and materialities. Rather, what poetic naviga-
tion is after is not to discover but to “find”—to unmoor continental real-
ity from objectness by allowing language and its subject to be themselves
“traversed,” crossed, by what provides them with a body—that is, by
materiality: “travesía / que no descubrimiento o invento / consentir / que
el mar propio y gratuito nos atraviese” (crossing / unlike discovery or in-
vention / to consent / to being traversed by our own gratuitous sea) (25).
Following these preliminary deliberations, the poetic voice takes “in-
ventario” (inventory—the term that opens the following section, printed
on an otherwise white page). The poem inventories the items each of the
travelers carries along before offering (in a paragraph displayed in open
verse, with the spaces interrupting continuity equivalent to the silences
and introjections in a conversation) a first working definition of what
the journey is about:

nosotros tratamos de hallar otra vez la inscripción

la posibilidad de inscripción que fue durante siglos el gran gesto
scripturario . . .
¿el viaje?
acaso hay que venir a celebrar en el lugar mismo ver
marcar inscribir (79–80)

(we are trying to reencounter inscription

the possibility of inscribing which, through the centuries, has
been the great scriptural gesture . . .
the journey?
perhaps it’s necessary to come and celebrate at the location itself
to see to mark to inscribe)
126 ❘ Chapter 2

Maintaining the same, conversational, open-verse style, ten lengthy

meditations follow, as many as the journey’s participants, unified only
through their shared last line: “mañana partimos a recorrer América”
(tomorrow we’ll set out to roam America). As in a sequence of dramatic
monologues, each of the voices that will carry the poem starts out by
disclosing their motivations and anxieties as well as, more fundamen-
tally, their state of openness to real experience, their readiness to shed
received knowledge.
But, just as we expect it to move, finally, from anticipation to action,
the poem leaps not forward but back in time, returning, in versified
form, to some key passages from Antonio Pigafetta, the Italian chroni-
cler of Ferdinand Magellan’s first circumnavigation of the globe (1519–
22). The moment we find ourselves returned to is a crucial one: the
fleet’s desperate search—at Tierra del Fuego, also the Amereida’s point
of departure—for the passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Here in
the colonial navigator’s reflection on his companions’ incapacity to un-
derstand the Native Fuegians’ indications, which puts toponymy and
the land constantly at odds with one another, the “abysmal” nature of
American continentality becomes manifest: “como un monstruo para
nosotros y un impedimento para el pasaje” (like a monster for us, and
an obstacle to our passage) (158). What makes America monstrous, in-
commensurable, is “algo irreductible a la unidad de medida” (something
irreducible to a unit of measurement), which is therefore “de un orden
negativo” (of the order of the negative) (158). As the abyss of represen-
tation, America can be apprehended only in a state of trance: “estar en
trance no de un antes a un después o de una barbarie a una civilización
sino en trance presente” (being entranced, not to move from a before to
an after or from barbarism to civilization, but entranced in the present)
(163). Entrancement, the poem suggests, requires a language capable
of assuming—of making room for—this incommensurable dimension,
in the manner of the rainforest people described by a sixteenth-century
chronicler, who built their homes and made their paths in the treetops as
a way of living safely alongside the wild beasts on the ground:

sólo se consuela la tierra sólo se logra suelo cuidando del

abismo sólo es suelo lo que guarda el abismo lo que da
cabida a la irrupción y proporción al trance
estar en trance es vivir con asombro un choque de ruptura y un
arranque de abismo (160)
 The Country and the City ❘ 127

(the earth is appeased only there is ground only in looking

after the abyss only what can hold the abyss is a ground what
gives space to irruption and measure to trance
to be entranced is to experience with amazement the impact of a
rift and the opening of an abyss)

Amereida, in short, attempts nothing less than to poetically chart

how this ungrounding earth opens an abysmal rift within language it-
self, which can only be traversed in a state of trance. It aims to forge a
poetic cartography that “inverts and turns” the lands mapped out by the
chronicles of discovery and to reveal the manifold origins and destinies
converging on them (see fig. 23). “¿qué lenguaje pues?” (what kind of
language, then?), the last of the monologues preparing for an imminent
departure had asked, to which the poem replies: “un lenguaje en que

Fig. 23. “América invertida y retornada” (America in-

verted and turned). Map. From Amereida (Santiago: Ed-
itorial Cooperativa Lambda, 1967).
128 ❘ Chapter 2

paisaje y acontecer comparecen en el mismo rango . . . este lenguaje de

lo múltiple debe hablar en américa” (a language where landscape and
event coincide in the same capacity . . . this language of multiplicity has
to speak in america) (124). Seen from within, from the land, America
ceases to be the object of a foreign, extractive gaze and becomes itself
an origin for multiple departures and worldmakings:

¿qué es esta américa retornada e invertida?

¡es américa vista a partir de la tierra!
a partir de lo debajo dicho de otro modo

de donde viene dante y donde están los muertos (174)

(what is this america turned and inverted?

it’s america as seen from the land!
from below or to put it differently

from where dante comes and where the dead are)

Having laid out the program for a poetic remapping of the continent
and still only “setting out to roam America,” the poetic voice is already
on the return: “todo llegar es un volver así como el alba es un per-
petuo volver” (every arrival is a return just as the dawn is a perpet-
ual return) (184). To return means—at least for the travelers belonging
to Cruz’s group—to return to Valparaíso and to the task of commu-
nal placemaking. Yet it also implies attempting a renewed departure:
“mañana partiremos a américa para alcanzar a llegar a ella para
volver a ella” (tomorrow we’ll set out to roam america to finally
reach her to return to her) (184). The poem’s final passages, in short,
sketch out an idea of permanent dwelling in movement, arriving and
departing at one and the same time, which already anticipates the Ci-
udad Abierta’s own fluid relation to space and place. This same idea is
reiterated by the poem’s last verse—a single line on an otherwise blank
page following the final pair of maps that show the journey’s itinerary
(one with and one without the continental silhouette placing the line in
its geographical context): “el camino no es el camino” (the path is not
the path) (189). There can be no single path in the multiplicity of itin-
eraries opening once America is no longer the destination of (colonial)
discovery but a refound origin of spatial as well as aesthetic and con-
ceptual displacements. Indeed, the very inconclusiveness of the journey
 The Country and the City ❘ 129

and of the poem that sings it only corroborates the validity of this idea:
that earth must be apprehended in its abysmal dimension, in a state of
trance.
Founded in 1970, in the sand dunes of Ritoque bay just north of the
seaside resort of Concón, Ciudad Abierta attempted to put into living
practice this twofold return: from space to place, and also from poetic
experience to its architectural transposition and embodiment. Yet Ci-
udad Abierta also claimed to be a new departure in its own right, yet
another “return to America” of the kind sketched out only a few years
earlier by the poetic travesía. The project had emerged in the aftermath
of a nationwide struggle for university reform, in which, right after
their return from Bolivia, Cruz and his group had vocally participated,
suggesting to extend the institute’s communal ethos of fusing life and
work, research and learning, to the Universidad Católica of Valparaíso
as a whole. When their ideas were rejected outright by the university’s
conservative establishment, the majority of the group stepped down
from their teaching posts and in 1968—taking advantage of recent land
reform legislation facilitating the collective purchase of uncultivated
lands—formed a cooperative to acquire some seven hundred acres of
terrain on the Pacific coast. Removed from the constraints of academic
duties, the founders of Ciudad Abierta put into practice their ideas of
living in “hospitality” toward others and their material surroundings in
a distant echo of—among others—Frank Lloyd Wright’s desert school
at Taliesin West, Arizona, established in 1937.
The inaugural ceremony for “opening the terrain” had initially been
scheduled for March 20, 1969, to mark the centennial of the death of
Friedrich Hölderlin, a key poetic reference for Iommi and others. But
the fatal accident suffered by Henri Tronquoy, one of Amereida’s partic-
ipants, on a trip to the Caribbean in completion of the Southern Cross
that the journey begun at Tierra del Fuego had sought to project onto
the continental surface, delayed proceedings for more than a year. In
these inaugural acts, including phalènes in which participants had to
walk across the sands blindfolded or reach the shore by boat from the
small rocky islets strewn across the bay, “it was all about reaching the
terrains of the Open City and in this attempt to stumble and to come up
against the limit.”108 Walking through the sandy dunes, where they ate
and spent the night, the group playfully discovered, as Iommi puts it,
“the endless relapse into not knowing” that became “the foundation, or
the statute, of the terrain itself and of the Open City.”109 In their volatile
materiality, the sands that “are not firm but rather at the wind’s mercy,
130 ❘ Chapter 2

neither earth nor sea and, thus, also no longer beach,” offered a kind of
Wunderblock in reverse, where every footprint was being erased almost
instantly.110 The dunes were a form without memory, an incessant meta-
morphosis, which an architecture indebted to poetry had to find a way
of translating into a mode of inhabiting that was congruent with this
nonplace. As Iommi described it:

the sands reveal themselves to us as an endless relapse into

not knowing, which is not the same as ignorance as opposed
to wisdom. Instead of the stability of a form of acquired
knowledge, this mere trance of disappearance speaks to us of
a continuous return to not knowing, which precludes dwell-
ing in an acquired knowledge with respect to that which is
yet to be known and, in consequence, is also not a knowl-
edge to be conquered.111

In line with this ethics of inconclusiveness through an active pro-

cess of collective unlearning of the basic principles of modern urban-
ism, construction of Ciudad Abierta would begin in an “impuntual”
(pointless) fashion.112 The “city” deliberately lacked any kind of previ-
ously indicated center, such that instead “the placement of works de-
rived solely from poetic acts.”113 Instead of plans and blueprints, Ciudad
Abierta’s archives of individual buildings and sculptural interventions
feature watercolors, poems, and transcripts of discussions among build-
ers and residents, as well as photographs of inaugural phalènes and of
successive stages of construction (see, e.g., fig. 24). In the absence of an
overarching goal, as a visiting Argentine architect observed in the mid-
1980s, these buildings would frequently “take on an additive aspect of
partial inventions and solutions.”114 Work was largely carried out using
local materials, including driftwood, cheap bricks, and tiles, often also
reusing material from earlier constructions that were being absorbed
into later ones to the extent that learning about the location and its
requirements progressed.115 Their “materiality remains attached to the
process of building as it reveals the hand of the builder.”116
“The first architectural task to be accomplished, to be invented,” as
Iommi had written on occasion of the inauguration, “is for the Open
City to cease having a reverse or margin [insofar as] on placing itself
on the sand, the Open City will allow the ocean to claim presence in
its relation to the earth.”117 Instead of treating the site as landscape and
thus as an “option” open to intervention, the Ciudad Abierta would
 The Country and the City ❘ 131

Fig. 24. “Construcción de la Hospedería del Pan” (Construction of the Hospe-

dería del Pan), Ciudad Abierta, ca. 1972. Archivo José Vial Armstrong, Viña del
Mar, Chile.

take shape in the “without option” (“lo sin opción”) of the poetic ge-
ography revealed by Amereida. Its buildings and monuments respond
(though not in any direct, calculable fashion) to the idea of “proper
North” indicated by the Southern Cross (one of the cardinal points of
poetic navigation painted at Alba’s cabin), their arrangement following
“the new orientation, in the location itself, along the horizontal axis
between the Sea Within and the Pacific Ocean.”118 This, of course, was
less a geographical than a conceptual and poetic mode of localization.
Yet for this very reason, generally speaking, the buildings at Ciudad Ab-
ierta turn their backs on the seashore, which, rather than as prospect or
visual landscape, is invited into interior space as an aural and luminous
presence, as in the beautiful Sala de Música (Music Room), a communal
meeting hall centered on a rectangular glass chamber that turns exterior
space into the innermost element of the community gathering there. In
similar fashion, during one of the inaugural acts, “on the shore, instead
of entering the sea, the earth was dug up for the sea to enter as if into a
fjord” (fig. 25).119 “The Ocean,” Iommi wrote, “can only become ours by
maintaining, manifesting, realizing this relation with the Sea Within.”120
This idea of place as destiny, to be revealed through poetic acts and
through open-ended, “inconclusive” engagement with the location, also
132 ❘ Chapter 2

Fig. 25. Digging a fjord at the seashore. Poetic act (phalène), ca. 1972–73.
Archivo José Vial Armstrong, Viña del Mar, Chile.

underwrote a form of social organization centered on the notion of hos-

pitality. There are only two kinds of buildings at the Ciudad Abierta: on
the one hand, the ágoras—environments that may be open-air or inte-
rior spaces created for the communal assemblies of the same name. It is
here that, apart from the poetic acts themselves, the practical, everyday
aspects of conviviality are being discussed and decided by consensus.
The second kind are the hospederías (guesthouses) or life-work spaces.
At least initially, there were also meant to be two different varieties of
these, even though in practice this distinction never really materialized:
bottegas (storehouses) and talleres (workshops)—the latter reserved for
services offered to outside partners (including the university, where some
residents continued to teach), the former for the “work the Open City
does for itself,” where “masters and apprentices” would alternate roles
in relation to their “skills” (oficios), which would be redefined contin-
uously in the process of their collective (un)learning.121 The integration
of life and work under one roof is of critical importance here, although
distinctions persist between “an intimate economy that does not require
home ownership of any kind but which is in need of care, tending to its
living quarters as well as to the body and soul,” on the one hand, and
“a public economy where skills have their place,”122 on the other. The
concept of hospedería (guesthouse) is to the social organization of the
Ciudad Abierta what the notion of the Sea Within is to its relation to
the physical location. As Enrique Browne, the visiting Argentine archi-
tect, explains: “In every building lives at least one family, which is re-
sponsible for protecting it against damage and for making the necessary
repairs to its fragile material condition. Although it is their home, no
family owns the place, and they practice hospitality. Whoever arrives
can come and receive food and shelter, on the sole condition of saying
who he or she is.”123
The coincidence of the Ciudad Abierta’s early years with the most
convulsive period in modern Chilean history, however, severely limited
 The Country and the City ❘ 133

possibilities of putting into practice this hospitable ethos as well as,

more widely, the project’s capacity for dialogue with the larger archi-
tectural and artistic field. Despite the Ciudad Abierta’s largely apoliti-
cal stance during the Allende administration, several of its inhabitants
had been actively involved with the Urban Improvement Agency, and
on various occasions the site was targeted during army raids following
the military coup of 1973 in pursuit of dissidents seeking shelter there.
After 1974, moreover, the name Ritoque became a synonym not of the
Ciudad Abierta but rather of the concentration camp that the Pinochet
regime set up in a former seaside resort at the opposite end of the bay.
There, the architect Miguel Lawner—former head of Urban Improve-
ment—as well as faculty members of the Universidad Católica such as
the playwright Óscar Castro were held prisoners.124 Responding to this
twofold threat, residents at the Ciudad Abierta called on the protection
of the university—a traditional stronghold of Valparaíso’s conservative
elite—and largely refrained from public interventions, let alone political
activism. Such self-enclosure, while safeguarding the site’s continuity
over time, also contributed to its further estrangement from the Chilean
artistic field and turned on its head the very program of hospitality on
which the community had been founded.
Arguably, once phalènes and a series of new travesías including resi-
dents as well as university students and teachers were being reintroduced
in the mid-1980s, the Ciudad Abierta was able once again to make good
on its experimental promise. In 1984, the year travesías were made a
part of the architecture curriculum at the university, groups departed
from the Ciudad Abierta to the Atacama Desert, to the city of Belém
at the mouth of the Amazon, and once more to Santa Cruz de la Sierra
in Bolivia; others traveled by boat up the Paraná River, to Robinson
Crusoe island in the Pacific, and to Cape Froward at the continent’s
southernmost tip, performing public readings and making site-specific
interventions en route. The following year, the isle of Amantaní inside
Lake Titicaca, the Santa Rosa basin in the Argentine Pampas, and Eas-
ter Island were among the destinations. Placemaking at Ciudad Abierta
had become contingent once more on new departures and on the ways
in which these reconnected the site’s coastal location to the Sea Within
that had underwritten its “founding charter”: not so much in the sense
of “lay[ing] down structures and laws but instead establish[ing] the
foundation for a way of acting.”125
Poetic foundation—the lyrical voice of Amereida had already
argued—cannot follow the example of “la palabra real,” the royal
word: the Crown patents bestowing on European conquerors the rights
134 ❘ Chapter 2

to “una tierra donde lo desconocido de ella / está de antemano reglado

/ estableciendo de este modo una unidad” (a land where that which is
unknown / is from the outset regulated / thus establishing a form of
unity) (90). Instead, only those who traverse the materiality of the earth
in search of the real name—“la real palabra”—will ever navigate the
Sea Within. To poetically experience the earth amounts to a “búsqueda
de la real palabra / la real palabra que permite obrar / se da en el obrar”
(search for the real word / the real word that allows to act / that gives
itself in the act) (93).
Chapter 3

The Matter with Images

Historia de la física (History of physics, 1982), an approximately

twenty-minute video installation based on an action-performance by
Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn, offers a radical critique of authorship.
Cross-edited with found footage and intimate images—a boxing match,
a nightclub crooner, the artist’s wife in labor giving birth to their first
child, a swimmer training in an empty pool—the video’s main thread
shows Dittborn in the desert of Tarapacá in northern Chile, turning
over a ninety-gallon barrel of used motor oil and attempting, with little
success, to spread the sticky substance across the sand with his bare
hands (see fig. 26). Together, the thickness of the oil and the sand’s dry-
ness and volatility defy and resist the artist’s form-giving attempts, lit-
erally forcing him aground until his hands and white shirt are soaked
in oily matter: the spill refuses to become painting, action gets caught
up in stuff. Ironically referencing Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings from
the 1940s and 1950s, as well as their reprise in Robert Smithson’s Pours
series (1969), the—quite literally—humiliation suffered by Dittborn at
the hands of the materialities he seeks to bend to his will also spills over
into the video-image sequence, calling into question the author-editor’s
ability to turn defeat into victory by means of second-degree image
making. The associative chain set in motion by the video’s montage of
attractions, which appears to reinstate the artist’s demiurgic powers of
formation—and even his phallic power of procreation—clashes with
the stubborn refusal of the elements “at the heart of the matter” to yield

135
136 ❘ Chapter 3

Fig. 26. Eugenio Dittborn, stills from Historia de la física (History of physics),
1982. SD video, color and black and white, 13:06 min. Courtesy of Alexander
and Bonin, New York.

to their enframing on the video screen: the blob remains a blob however
much we look at it.
Historia de la física, in the way it forces us to continuously readjust
our attention from the figural to the concrete, from the devices of fram-
ing to the entangled agencies of body and matter in the field, also re-
flects on—as well as enacts—what I want to call the environmental turn
in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century Latin American art. The
hybrid, unclassifiable nature of the piece—land or video art? Sculpture,
painting, or performance?—attests to a major characteristic of this turn,
in which, as we shall see, the convergence between a variety of spatio-
temporal “acts” is determined not so much by the generic frameworks
of photography, theater, sculpture, or film but by the materialities these
acts assemble. “Unspecificity” (rather than just “interdisciplinarity” or
“mixed media”) is the result here of a turning away, or a turning loose
from, the institutional circuits and generic protocols of the art system
and toward the field of action and of coagency that opens once matter
ceases to be a mere support, a “raw material” from which form can be
extracted. Even though a political environmentalism is not necessarily
on the cards in these interventions, many of them nonetheless partici-
 The Matter with Images ❘ 137

pate in a critical revision of the ideas of “work” and “form” as derived

from an inert and passive material base, to instead reenvisage them as
an open-ended and contingent process of engagements that are by ne-
cessity collective, coagential, and inherently more-than-human.
In the field of art history, the Brazilian critic and curator Mário Pe-
drosa was among the first to notice this emergence of an arte ambiental
(environmental art), which, in a 1966 essay on Hélio Oiticica, he already
proposed to think of as “postmodern.” The environmental turn, Pedrosa
argued, heralded a new cycle “that is no longer purely artistic but rather
cultural” since, in the events and experiences it produced, “nothing is
isolated. There is no longer a work that can be appreciated in and for
itself, as in a painting. What predominates is instead the perceptive-
sensorial ensemble.”1 More than ten years later, in a seminal essay
published in the journal October, art historian Rosalind Krauss would
address in similar terms the dissolution and reconstitution of sculp-
ture in the “expanded field” of postrepresentational practices that also
blurred boundaries between architecture and landscape through their
interventions into, and engagements with, the materialities and dura-
tions of the location. Sculpture, Krauss argued, in its high-modern, post-
Rodin iteration, had inhabited the in-between space opening between
the fields of architecture and of landscape, and thus also negotiated
the relations between them. In the work of artists such as Constantin
Brancusi or Henry Moore, sculpture had carved out its own autonomy
as the “negative condition of the monument,”2 no longer marking any
place in particular but rather asserting a double negativity in its being
neither landscape nor building. Yet, starting with post–World War II
neo–avant-gardes such as land art and kinetic art, sculpture as the very
form that had acted as the constitutive limit producing the discrete and
mutually exclusive fields of “nature” and “culture’”—architecture and
landscape—was now itself diluting and amplifying into the “expanded
field” of indecision that opens once the boundary between these two
collapses.
Krauss’s expanded field then is also the space of radical contingency—
indeed of “in-formation,” of the folding inward of form—that opens
once the aporias silently underwriting the bio- and geopolitics of dis-
tinguishing nature from culture, bodily matter from expressive gesture,
are out in the open. Therefore (even though Krauss in her attempt to
define and thus also to integrate these new generic variations into the
fold of art history would not yet go as far), the very distinctiveness of
art in relation to the larger field of contemporary social and political
138 ❘ Chapter 3

mobilizations would come under attack. As Kynaston McShine wrote

in his catalog essay for MoMA’s epoch-defining 1970 show Information
(which also included works by Oiticica, Marta Minujin, Carlos d’Ales-
sio, and Artur Barrio):

If you are an artist in Brazil, you know of at least one friend

who is being tortured; if you are one in Argentina, you prob-
ably have had a neighbor who has been in jail for having
long hair, or for not being “dressed” properly; and if you
are living in the United States, you may fear that you will be
shot at, either in the universities, your bed, or more formally
in Indochina. It may seem inappropriate, if not absurd, to
get up in the morning, walk into a room, and apply dabs
of paint from a little tube to a square of canvas. What can
you as a young artist do that seems relevant and meaning-
ful? . . . Art cannot afford to be provincial, or to exist only
within its own history, or to continue to be, perhaps, only a
commentary on art. An alternative has been to extend the
idea of art, to renew the definition, and to think beyond the
traditional categories—painting, sculpture, drawing, print-
making, photography, film, theater, music, dance, and poetry.
Such distinctions have become increasingly blurred.3

Nelly Richard’s reflections on the “dimension of social exteriority in

the production of art,” developed in her groundbreaking catalog essay
on the Chilean Escena de avanzada (the “scene of advance”) for the
1986 traveling exhibition Art in Chile: An Audiovisual Documentation,
make explicit this intrinsically social as well as “unspecifying” aspect of
Krauss’s expanded field.4 In the context of escalating political tensions
across the Americas, Richard was eager to draw attention to the ways
in which, beyond the break with the formal rhetoric and genre tradi-
tions of high modernism, contemporary artistic practice as “inscribed
in the living materiality of the body and its social landscape” also re-
sulted in modes and gestures of intervention that sought “to disrupt the
prevailing systems, to infringe the norms and disciplinary techniques
controlling meaning, to make an act of dissent.”5 Just as the “use [of]
biography as a support for creativity” and that of “voluntary pain [as]
legimitat[ing] one’s incorporation into the community of those who
have been harmed,”6 the attempt “to exceed the spatial limits of art
by moving away from the format of painting . . . toward the use of
 The Matter with Images ❘ 139

landscape (the social body as a support for artistic creativity)” was no

mere formal or conceptual gesture.7 What all these elements of post-
coup artistic practice in Chile had in common, Richard claimed, was
their aim to break free of the institutional confines of art as a way of
reflecting and incorporating the wider process of destruction of the in-
stitutions, modes, and languages of the social unleashed by dictatorial
violence. This unspecification of art came about, Richard notes, in an
exercise of “aesthetic reprocessing of the coordinates of social expe-
riences,”8 in which the spatiotemporal frameworks of sociability and
even the boundaries of body and subject had been radically undermined
by the comprehensive and capillary presence of dictatorial terror. As
a result, “social exteriority” that until then had been a counterpart to
and representational object of the autonomous artwork and its insti-
tutional space of production and circulation, now became the very di-
mension into which the aesthetic had to dissolve and in which it could
seek refuge. As a clandestine “undercover” form of resistance and sur-
vival, art had to find ways of forging alliances and complicities rather
than addressing audiences in the monologic and closed mode of the
fully fledged “work.” The “Chilean in the street,” Richard concludes,
is “no longer a passive spectator of images but is actively involved in
the creative process: he becomes part of the living material of the work
through his own interaction with it, by being urged to intervene in the
whole network of social conditioning in which he is ensnared.”9
Yet even Richard’s focus, despite her insistence on the dissolution
of the aesthetic into gestures, habits, and materialities of the “social
exterior,” remained fixed primarily on the rhetoric of rupture and re-
fusal that would allow her to inscribe these elements within the wider
context of modernist avant-gardism. Right from the title of her essay,
“Margins and Institutions,” a dynamic of exodus is both celebrated
and conditioned on its ongoing relation of negativity toward the in-
stitutional field it left behind. Even as they staged, time and again, the
rupturing of the institutional realm of art, the margins also paradox-
ically validated yet again the very centrality of the art institution, as
Pablo Oyarzún argues in a contemporary response to Richard’s thesis.
Oyarzún highlights the “lack of caution regarding the need each and
every option for the margin has of recognizing the center, of projecting
it, and especially of projecting itself negatively into it, so as to extract
from this relation of resistance the negative as discipline, as rhetoric,
and as habit in its own practice—as well as, most importantly, as a
mechanism of self-confirmation.”10 In a move the art system would be
140 ❘ Chapter 3

only too happy to adopt and replicate in countless curatorial proposals,

the critical commentary in “Margins and Institutions” that offered itself
as an ally operated simultaneously as a custodian of artistic practices,
the centrifugal gestures of which it tied back once more to the “interior”
of the institutional field they had left behind. But the ephemeral and
contingent nature of such assemblages was also being submitted once
again, Oyarzún warned, “to the consistency of the so-called historical
process” when aesthetic practices themselves were opening possibilities
for a “displacement and a provocation, of reading the historical from
the point of the ephemeral.”11
Following Oyarzún’s suggestion, in this chapter I ask what it means
to leave the frame of art and venture into the field of practices, bodies,
and materialities in which the aesthetic becomes enmeshed once it sheds
its institutional affiliations and dares to become unspecific. In paying at-
tention to the way art actions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first
century encourage us, according to Jane Bennett, “to experience the re-
lationship between persons and other materialities more horizontally,”12
I try to forge an inversión de escena (inverted scene), to quote the title
of a famous intervention by the Chilean group CADA (Colectivo de Ac-
ciones de Arte—Art Actions Collective), to be discussed in more detail
below. What kinds of alliances and assemblages, I ask, emerge in these
acts of exodus, apart from a relation of negativity towards the institu-
tional complex of art? What happens to the aesthetic once it dissolves
into and enters association not only with mass media discourse and
with political and unionist activisms but also with the things and mate-
rialities of everyday routines and even with the stuff of discarded matter
and decaying bodies that heap up on the margins of the Latin American
neoliberal transition?

Stu ff Matters: Mat e r i a l i t y a nd P o l i t i cs

in Latin A me r i c a n A rt A c t i ons

The crowd gathering in front of the old townhouse at Calle Córdoba

in downtown Rosario, on the evening of November 3, 1968, must have
caught the attention of more than a few passersby: some standing on the
sidewalk or even the street only a few yards down from an army post and
the municipal police’s headquarters, chatting or having a smoke while
they waited for others, in single file or in pairs of two, to climb over the
sacks of sugar blocking the entrance to the headquarters of the CGT
 The Matter with Images ❘ 141

de los Argentinos (CGTA)—the most combative of the country’s trade

unions—where the “First Biennale of Avant-Garde Art” was opening
that same night (see, e.g., fig. 27). According to some of those present,
more than a thousand people attended inauguration night alone—some
of them, we can assume, not quite aware that they were about to enter
an art show and attracted, rather, by the enigmatic graffiti, posters, and
stickers that had popped up all over town in recent weeks, emblazoned
with the slogan that was also spray-painted on one of the exhibition
walls: “TUCUMAN ARDE”—Tucumán is burning. Tucumán, a prov-
ince in the Northwest of Argentina, had been a focal point of labor
conflicts in the country since the military coup that had installed the
Onganía dictatorship two years earlier, due to the shutdown of several
large sugar plants—a calculated attempt on behalf of the local oligarchy
to drive up prices by hoarding stocks while simultaneously crushing the
organizing capacity of the labor movement through mass layoffs. In
response, the regime had launched “Operativo Tucumán”—Operation
Tucumán—a sinister precursor to its near namesake, “Operativo Inde-
pendencia” (Operation Independence), launched in Tucumán only seven
years later on the eve of the 1976 military coup, the opening shot of
the “Dirty War” that left thirty thousand dead and “disappeared” and

Fig. 27. Inauguration of Tucumán Arde, regional headquarters of the CGT de

los Argentinos, Rosario, November 3, 1968. Photograph by Carlos Militello.
Archivo Graciela Carnevale, Rosario, Argentina.
142 ❘ Chapter 3

countless others tortured, abducted, and exiled. In addition to support-

ing the sugar barons’ lockdown of the plants through police and mili-
tary repression of workers and peasants, the Operativo Tucumán also
included a nationwide media campaign to promote the benefits of eco-
nomic “diversification,” to which the CGTA was responding through
mass mobilizations and a solidarity campaign to sustain the laid-off
sugar workers in their struggle.
The surprise of those entering the show—union activists, art con-
noisseurs, and curious onlookers alike—would have continued past
the entrance. The corridor leading to the offices and meeting spaces
transformed into exhibition rooms was carpeted in packing paper on
which the names of Tucumán’s sugar factory and plantation owners
had been painted. Throughout the building, including in the staircases
and kitchen, walls were covered entirely with blown-up photographs
of plantation and factory workers and of shantytown inhabitants in
Tucumán, as well as posters with the exhibition’s title and placards em-
blazoned with political slogans, imitating those displayed in the photo-
graphs hanging across an occupied sugar factory. More patient visitors
would also have stopped to ponder the graphs and texts tacked on the
walls next to the images, explaining in more detail the exploitative struc-
ture of sugar production in Argentina and providing statistical evidence
of the alarming sanitary, nutritional, and educational standards in the
province celebrated by government propaganda as the “Garden of the
Republic.” One of the meeting rooms was packed floor to ceiling with
large sacks of sugar, while visitors being served cups of bitter, unsweet-
ened coffee could literally taste the effects of hoarding. In another room,
boxes with food donated for the workers of Tucumán were piled up, to
be driven up north by union activists the following day. Loudspeakers
were blasting out interview footage of workers and union leaders re-
corded in Tucumán over the previous month by the artists and activists
responsible for the show. In another room, slides and short films were
being projected—interrupted every few minutes by a blackout cutting
electricity throughout the building to illustrate the rate at which chil-
dren were dying in Tucumán on any given day. “Bienvenidos al jardín
de la miseria” (Welcome to the garden of misery), a large placard hung
across one of the main rooms on the ground floor greeted visitors.
Tucumán Arde, perhaps the most emblematic manifestation of the
Latin American 1968—“the most accomplished attempt to formulate
a collective program for continuing to make art outside of art,”13 in
historian Ana Longoni’s expression—forced visitors to immerse them-
 The Matter with Images ❘ 143

selves into poverty and struggle as lived, embodied experiences. On

entering the building that had been “squatted” in its entirety, “people
were getting inside the world of poverty,” as one of the artists involved
in the show, Rubén Naranjo, described it.14 Exhibition visitors were
incited to become actively involved in a process of struggle to change
their position—as had the artists, by moving out of the gilded spaces of
galleries, museums, and academic centers and into that of unionist mil-
itancy, and also by renouncing their role as individual author-creators
of “works” in favor of a collective, mediating function that supported
workers’ self-organization through the construction of a counterinfor-
mation network to the government’s propaganda campaign, a circuito
sobreinformacional (super-information circuit). Through the “art bien-
nale” secretly sheltering a bold act of political resistance but also in the
preceding campaign that used the public space of Rosario to generate a
climate of expectation and curiosity, as well as in the months-long work
of documentation and networking undertaken in Tucumán itself, the
collective of artists, academics, and journalists behind the event sought
to “activate a process of de-alienating the image of Tucumán’s reality
elaborated by the mass communication media.”15 In this way, the man-
ifesto circulated at the inaugural show explained, the very notion of
“aesthetic creation” would be reframed as a “collective, violent action
destroying the bourgeois myth of the artist’s individuality . . . Revolu-
tionary art acts on reality through a process of capturing the elements
of which it is composed, drawing on lucid ideological concepts based on
the principles of materialist reason.”16
Tucumán Arde, then, was not so much a singular event—a “cultural-
political happening,” as literary critic Beatriz Sarlo claims17—but rather
a multistep process, aimed at blending two endeavors: the avant-gardist
idea that from aesthetic experience the radically new and unexpected
can emerge, on the one hand, and the political avant-gardism of direct
action, base organization, and guerrilla struggle, on the other. Rather
than a manifestation of politicized art, it was an attempt to push art it-
self beyond its institutional confines to make it a form of political action
in its own right. Understandably, most analyses of Tucumán Arde have
focused primarily on its idiosyncratic and subversive use of media and
communications, the “super-information circuit” put together in subse-
quent “phases.”18 Following the decision, at an encounter of avant-garde
artists from Rosario, Buenos Aires, and Santa Fe in August 1968 to join
forces in a collective act of resistance against the dictatorship, contact
was made with the CGTA, where some artists had already been active,
144 ❘ Chapter 3

and the struggles in Tucumán were chosen as the intervention’s focal

point. In early September a small group of artists traveled to Tucumán
to reach out to local labor and student leaders, at the same time as they
garnered support from the province’s secretary of culture, whom they
had convinced of the potential benefits of hosting a group of renowned
metropolitan artists creating a collective piece of “information art.”
Protected by the authorities—whose goodwill was further consolidated
by a press briefing on avant-garde art at the provincial capital’s public
library—a larger group visited Tucumán in September and October to
collect documentary materials in the factories and cane fields. One part
of the group remained in the provincial capital to keep the local press
and authorities busy with interviews and visits to local art spaces, thus
maintaining a smokescreen of fashionable avant-gardism that allowed
the others to carry out their evidence gathering. They also collected,
classified, and dispatched daily to Rosario the photographs, super-8,
and taped audio recordings made in the field, to prevent them from be-
ing seized by police if the group’s cover was blown. In parallel, another
part of the collective, which had remained in Rosario, were processing
the material sent from Tucumán for use at the show in November (sub-
sequent ones had been scheduled to open at the union’s headquarters
in Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, and Córdoba, but the closure of the Bue-
nos Aires sequel by police only hours after its opening on November
25, 1968, upended the sequence for good). Through October, posters
and graffiti with the words “TUCUMAN” and “TUCUMAN ARDE”
started appearing across Rosario, including on stickers left in bars and
on public transport and on the margins of cinema tickets. Just before
leaving Tucumán, the artists gave a second press briefing revealing the
true aims of their project—a surprise coup that only partly succeeded,
since provincial authorities in Tucumán had already begun to suspect
the visitors’ motives and had warned the mainstream press against at-
tending the briefing.
Deploying alternating tactics of exposure and deceit that mimicked
the combat strategies and even the military discipline of guerrilla war-
fare, as artist and critic Luis Camnitzer argues,19 Tucumán Arde also
hijacked and inverted the spatial and temporal dynamics of (neo)colo-
nial extractivism and its aesthetic correlate—the landscape form—of
which Tucumán’s sugar industry was only the latest incarnation. The
avant-gardist travelers’ material-gathering expeditions from coastal me-
tropolis to agrarian interior and subsequent showcasing of their find-
ings in a miniature environment—a diorama—in the country’s urban
 The Matter with Images ❘ 145

centers closely followed the script of colonial landscaping in visu and in

situ.20 Tucumán Arde turned into its own formal script the mode of pro-
duction sustaining colonial landscaping. As in the colonial landscape
tradition, the event compressed “resources” into “immutable mobiles”
(Bruno Latour’s term for images, plant samples, or refined cane sugar
made ready for transport from margin to center21), and subsequently as-
sembled these into an urban, miniature environment, an “imperial nurs-
ery” staging the extractive frontier in the midst of the metropolis itself.22
Yet Tucumán Arde also challenged this extractive apparatus by turning
the image itself into raw material that could be hoarded, withdrawn,
and multiplied at different ends of the production chain, in ways that
not only drew attention to its own materiality but also to the alienating
function this image (and the mass media apparatuses that generated
it) had been performing as part of the general regime of production.
Tucumán Arde forced the image to speak its truth hidden in plain sight:
not just through the piled sacks of sugar that brought into view the
hidden truth of abundance behind the bitter taste of lack palpable on
visitors’ palates but also, more importantly, through the materiality of
images (and of writings, sound, and film recordings) as themselves part
of the same uneven and exploitative relations of production they are in
the business of disavowing.
Rather than “happening” or “antihappening,” perhaps the term that
comes closest to describing Tucumán Arde’s “processually, temporally,
and spatially discontinuous” sequence involving bodies and materials,
is the notion of “assemblage.”23 I am thinking here of how political
scientist Jane Bennett deploys Deleuze and Guattari’s term in her anal-
ysis of the 2003 blackout across an area affecting Canada and the US,
which despite the vastly different frame of reference nonetheless also
provides a pretty neat description of Tucumán Arde’s patchwork of
elements:

Assemblages are ad-hoc groupings of diverse elements, of

vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throb-
bing confederations that are able to function despite the per-
sistent presence of energies that confound them from within.
They have uneven topographies, because some of the points
at which the various affects and bodies cross paths are more
heavily trafficked than others, and so power is not distrib-
uted equally across its surface . . . The effects generated by an
assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that
146 ❘ Chapter 3

their ability to make something happen . . . is distinct from

the sum of the vital force of each of materiality considered
alone. Each member and proto-member of the assemblage
has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper
to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage.24

I am acutely aware, of course, of the awkwardness with which Ben-

nett’s Spinozian “vital materialism” of conative substances turning into
confederate bodies through mutual affection sits with the straightfor-
wardly historical materialism of Tucumán Arde’s 1968 manifesto. But I
also agree with Héctor Hoyos’s assertion that Latin American cultural
production affords us a “site of articulation of these two strands”—of
new materialisms and the Marxist critique of extractivism—and thus
also an opportunity “to show that the study of things as a means to re-
veal the true nature of social relations should counterbalance appraisals
of objects as autonomous, nonhuman entities.”25
Reading Latin American radical art of the late twentieth century in
terms of the emergent properties unleashed in assemblages of bodies
and materialities affecting one another might be productive for two rea-
sons. On the one hand, it enables us to uncover the ongoing relevance of
this art, produced in a context of struggle against neoliberal transitions
administrated by military dictatorships and their “democratic” succes-
sors. It makes these experiences continue to speak to us today with their
emphasis on the body as medium rather than as the object of expres-
sion and on the materiality of media as themselves already objects and
commodities. On the other hand, it also brings politics and history back
into vital materialism by insisting that body-affect assemblages are not
outside relations of power but are in fact themselves enmeshed in the
extractivist matrix that puts bodies and things in motion in a context
of neocolonial capitalism. Latin American artists and critics amplified
and radicalized Mário Pedrosa’s observations from the mid-1960s on
how an emergent “environmental art” was breaking down the bound-
aries of the art system and dissolving into the wider field of “culture,”
by taking up his notion of the aesthetic and reassessing it under condi-
tions of clandestine resistance and guerrilla struggle. In 1970—only two
years after Tucumán Arde, and one after the underground publication
of Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Ur-
ban Guerrilla, launched months before its author was killed in a police
ambush—Brazilian critic and curator Frederico Morais likened the role
 The Matter with Images ❘ 147

of the artist to that of the guerrilla fighter. In an article titled “Against

Affluent Art: The Body as Motor of the Work,” published in the journal
Vozes, Morais argued that, just as the urban guerrillero, the contem-
porary artist, drawing on their own body as material support, created
through their actions or interventions a critical opening in everyday
space and time that forced spectators to take position, to renounce their
passive role as consumers of ideology and make the leap into action:

Today, the artist is a kind of guerrilla fighter. Art is a form

of ambush. Acting out of nowhere, in the least expected
time and place, and in surprising ways (since anything can
be transformed today into an instrument of war or of art),
the artist creates a state of permanent tension, of constant
expectation. Everything can become art, even the most ba-
nal everyday event. Constant victims of the art guerrilla, the
spectators are forced to sharpen and activate their senses.26

The body and things are transformed into instruments, together un-
leashing a state of tension found to have been always already at work in
everyday spaces and times: here we already encounter, in a nutshell, the
very notion of political assemblage I am trying to describe. The “state
of tension” Morais refers to, I suggest, frequently emerges in relation to
the affective impact of materials torn from their typical mode of circu-
lation as commodities, thus also unveiling their exploitative regime of
production and bringing into view (and into hearing, touch, and smell)
the obscene real of scarcity and abundance under extractivism.
Already since the beginnings of the 1960s, in Venezuela, the artists
gathered in the collective El Techo de la Ballena (The whale’s roof) had
started challenging the slick surfaces and geometries of petrol-fueled
modernism (such as the kinetic sculptures of Carlos Cruz-Diez and
Jesús Rafael Soto) with an insistence on the abject, deadly, and form-
destroying nature of the fossil matter sustaining such modernizing fan-
tasies. In 1961 the group launched its first collective show titled “Para
la restitución del magma” (For the restitution of the magma), accom-
panied by the first issue of their journal Rayado sobre el techo. It pages
were illustrated with black ink drawings by Ángel Luque that materi-
alize the gush of mineral matter in the ink splatter running across the
page.27 The poem-manifesto opening the journal and framing the show
proclaimed:
148 ❘ Chapter 3

Es necesario restituir el magma la materia en ebullición la

lujuria de la lava
colocar una tela al pie de un volcán restituir el mundo la
lujuria de la lava . . . la materia se trasciende la materia
se trasciende28

It is necessary to restore magma the boiling matter the

luxury of lava
to place a piece of fabric at the foot of a volcano to
restore the world the luxury of lava . . . matter
transcends itself matter transcends itself29

Also in 1961 the sculptor Daniel González—one of the group’s

founding members—exhibited at the National University’s School of
Architecture and Urbanism a series of objects made from used oil bar-
rels, scrap metal, and machine spares, including Tótem de Petróleo (Pet-
rol totem) and Rescatador de tuberías muertas (Dead pipeline rescuer).
Other actions and pieces, including the group’s rabble-rousing second
show Homenaje a la necrofilia (Homage to necrophilia, 1962) and Car-
los Rebolledo’s 1968 film Pozo muerto (Dead well), also revisited the
theme of dead or rotting matter animating the spectacle of “national
development” while simultaneously being disavowed and abjected by
highbrow art and commercial mass culture alike.
In their call to embrace the abject matter of extractivism and thus for
deriving pleasure from what modernist “export reverie” had to disavow
for this same materiality to be “refined” and reimported at profit, El Te-
cho de la Ballena was an early precursor to the “environmental turn” of
the following decades.30 Yet in the group’s work the power and agency
of material substances are still largely a theme or point of reference
rather than themselves providing the embodied support and expres-
sive framework for aesthetic experience. Even more than in Tucumán
Arde, by contrast, the affects unleashed by matter in its abundance and
scarcity—exposing what political economists call the resource curse of
extractive capitalism—are at the core of two groundbreaking art ac-
tions of the late 1970s and early 1980s in Chile and Peru carried out
by the collectives CADA and E. P. S. Huayco, respectively. Beyond their
near coincidence in time—CADA’s Para no morir de hambre en el arte
(For not dying of starvation in art) and Inversión de escena (Scene in-
version) took place within two weeks from each other in October 1979,
Huayco’s Arte al paso (Takeout art) and the unnamed Sarita Colonia
 The Matter with Images ❘ 149

shrine painting were assembled on May 14 and October 26, 1980,

respectively—both groups’ actions also display striking similarities in
using an elementary food staple (milk) as their material support. At
the same time, just as Tucumán Arde had done with sugar more than a
decade before, both were taking milk’s economics and politics of pro-
duction and circulation as the spatial and temporal framework of a
multipronged, performative approach that forced everyday locations,
moments, and things into acting out the violent state of permanent ex-
ception they had thus far been functional in disavowing.
CADA—short for Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (Art Actions
Collective)—sprang into action in 1979, to become one of the central
protagonists of Chile’s Escena de avanzada when Chile was under the
dictatorship of Pinochet. Its members included visual artists Lotty Ros-
enfeld and Juan Castillo, writers Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita, and
sociologist Fernando Balcells. The group became perhaps best known
for its interventions No+, undertaken from 1984 to 1985, in which
they would cover public spaces with graffiti that could be read as “No
more . . .” and which anonymous user-collaborators would quickly
complete with antidictatorship slogans and messages—so much so that
the formula (including its design with the “más”/“more” indicated by
a plus sign) became an official slogan of the anti-Pinochet campaign in
the 1988 referendum that finally brought down the dictatorship. Other
actions included the monumental ¡Ay Sudamérica! (1981), in which the
group had four hundred thousand leaflets (the text of which was simul-
taneously published in an illustrated magazine) printed and thrown out
over Santiago from six small airplanes, as well as Residuos america-
nos (American residues, 1983), an installation at a gallery in Washing-
ton, DC, featuring used clothes from the US that would normally have
been sent to Chile for resale, and Viuda (Widow, 1985), the portrait
of a woman whose husband had been murdered by the dictatorship,
published simultaneously in several newspapers and magazines with a
short text exhorting readers to “look at her gesture, extreme and pop-
ular. To pay attention to her widowhood and survival. To understand
a people.”31 E. P. S. Huayco—a Quechua term for the flash floods and
mudslides occurring in the high Andes (but also in the barriadas [shan-
tytowns] surrounding the coastal capital of Lima, inhabited mostly by
Andean migrants), combined with the acronym standing for “Estética
de Proyección Social” (approximately, socially conscious aesthetics)—
was a relatively short-lived Peruvian art collective active between 1980
and 1981.32 It consisted of Swiss-Peruvian Francesco Mariotti, who
150 ❘ Chapter 3

together with his partner María Luy had already been active in commu-
nity projects in Cuzco under the Velasco Alvarado government’s Sistema
Nacional de Movilización Social (National System of Social Mobiliza-
tion, SINAMOS), as well as Charo Noriega, Juan Javier Salazar, and
Mariela Zevallos, and also counted the on-off support of the poet and
critic Mirko Lauer. In addition to Arte al paso and Sarita Colonia, the
group also conducted in January to February 1981 a public poll of ur-
ban audiences’ aesthetic preferences, carried out simultaneously at the
Parque Universitario in downtown Lima, the upmarket neighborhood
of Miraflores, and the working-class neighborhood of Óvalo Balta de
El Callao.33
Likewise, CADA had turned the segregated social geography of Santi-
ago, exacerbated further by the dictatorship’s neoliberal shock-doctrine
politics, into the extended canvas of its first two actions in October
1979. Para no morir de hambre en el arte (For not dying of starvation in
art), the first of the two, consisted of “four simultaneous occupations”
in different parts of the city on October 3.34 At the Comuna La Granja
shantytown, the artists distributed rations of powdered milk among res-
idents; at the Centro Imagen art gallery in downtown Santiago, thirty
liters of milk were being deposited in an acrylic container (within a few
days, a rotting smell would emanate from them, pervading the space).
On the transparent cover sealing the box the artists had engraved two
lines of verse: “Para permanecer hasta que nuestro pueblo acceda a sus
consumos básicos de alimentos / Para permanecer como el negativo de
un cuerpo carente invertido y plural” (To remain here until our people
gain access to their basic food needs / To remain as the negative of a suf-
fering, inverted, and plural body). Subsequently, outside the suburban
headquarters of the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin
America (CEPAL), a speech was delivered denouncing the adverse ef-
fects of the dictatorship’s policies on public health and nutrition, as well
as on human and civil rights, which simultaneously appeared in Hoy,
the only remaining opposition newspaper. Even though, of necessity,
only the speech-manifesto’s publication in Hoy occurred, strictly speak-
ing, in simultaneous fashion with the three site-specific components of
the intervention, the artists’ own video documentation splices footage
from all three together in nonchronological fashion to suggest a spatial
rather than temporal relation between them, urging viewers to focus
on the material and symbolic transmutations of the most elementary
of food staples—milk—between opposite margins of urban space (the
outward-facing, high-modernist architectural complex of international
 The Matter with Images ❘ 151

institutions and the wood-and-tin-shack neighborhood populated by

rural migrants, with the downtown spaces of arts and media caught in
the middle). As Rodrigo Cánovas has noted, the intervention’s symbolic
efficacy also derived from its easily understood allusions to the Salvador
Allende government’s campaign only a few years earlier to provide ev-
ery Chilean with at least half a liter of milk per day. References to “cul-
tural values put forward during the Unidad Popular—the half liter of
milk, the artists venturing out into the shanties—involved a symbiosis
between the new and that which had once been desired, an attempt to
re-signify old categories that remained valid from the vantage point of
notions produced in the here-and-now of dictatorship.”35 The work of
CADA, Cánovas suggests, used to its advantage the confusion between
a still-fresh memory of “public art” in the service of democratic social-
ism and its promises of wealth redistribution, and the language, media,
and routines associated with dictatorial neoliberalism—including the
use of video and advertising, commissions and contracts with private
enterprise, and a rhetoric that drew on both the previous, revolutionary
utopianism and the entrepreneurial messianism of the present.
Cánovas is referring in particular to Inversión de escena (Scene in-
version), the sequel to Para no morir en el arte, realized on October 17,
1979. Once again, the action conjoins the commodity chain of milk as
a way of mapping out the uneven and unjust social geography of the
city, with the physical and symbolic place of art as sanctioning (in its
institutional, literally static or place-bound form) social injustice and
renouncing its capacity to speak out. This time, the collective hired eight
milk trucks from the Soprole dairy company to make the journey from
the milk factory situated on the city’s outskirts to the National Mu-
seum of Fine Arts in downtown Santiago where they remained parked
in line for several hours, while the artists covered the museum’s front
entrance with a large white cloth (fig. 28). The color white referred both
to the matter in question (milk) and to art’s incapacity of addressing
the appropriation of basic nutritional needs by the visual languages of
branding and advertising. The group’s video of the event concludes with
the stark image of a Soprole truck parked in front of the museum’s
cloth-covered neoclassical facade, emblazoned front to back with the
company logo and slogans (“Soprole—Natural Products”; “Gift your-
self with Soprole”), as well as with a photograph of a young boy flexing
his muscles framed by two yogurt containers and the slogan “Da tanto
por tan poco” (Giving so much for so little). As if to substitute for the
art institution’s—quite literally—blank-faced response, the video con-
152 ❘ Chapter 3

Fig. 28. CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte), Inversión de escena (Scene in-
version), 1979. Video still. Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, Santiago. Courtesy of
the artists.

cludes with a black screen featuring the sentence “El arte es la ciudad
y los cuerpos ciudadanos desnutridos” (Art is the city and the citizens’
undernourished bodies).
E. P. S. Huayco’s similarly two-pronged action the following year
also juxtaposes the commodity chain of food production with the un-
even geography of the city—Lima—which, even more than Santiago de
Chile in CADA’s interventions, also stands in here as a microcosm of
Peru’s neocolonial ethnic and class divisions. Just as with Para no morir
and Inversión de escena, the sequence running from Arte al paso (Take-
out art) in May 1980 to the monumental installation of a Sarita Colonia
memorial—reproducing the iconic image of a popular saint—near the
Pan-American highway south of the capital in October that same year,
performs a double movement. At the same time as the Huayco collective
introduced into the physical and institutional space of art the disavowed
material realities of malnutrition, it also took the concerns and formal
expressions of contemporary cosmopolitan art into the “dimension of
social exteriority,”36 into the city and even the surrounding landscapes
of rural-urban migration and of peasant memory and spirituality. But
in addition to challenging the apolitical snobbery and quietism of the
limeño art scene, much like CADA had challenged the santiaguino art
scene in its “occupations” of the Centro Imagen gallery and the Na-
 The Matter with Images ❘ 153

tional Museum, Huayco’s approach to commodified matter also took

into consideration the multiple forms of recycling, refunctionalization,
and appropriation—symbolic as well as economic and political—to
which the discarded and abjected materialities of extractive capitalism
are being subjected on the part of what sociologist Verónica Gago, in
her analysis of the “informal economics” of Latin America’s urban mar-
gins, terms the “baroque transactions” of “popular pragmatics.”37
Arte al paso (Art to go)—also known as Salchipapas, or “sausage
and fries,” the city’s best known takeout dish at the time—was a group
show at Lima’s Galería Fórum, featuring silk-screen prints by Luy, Mar-
iotti, Noriega, Salazar and Zevallos (many of them loosely referencing
the visual rhetoric of pop art while also adding a particularly Peruvian
iconography, such as the effigy of poet César Vallejo or that of the Inca
Manco Cápac as a rural migrant traveling by minivan), as well as pho-
tographs of urban garbage collectors and texts by critics and writers
on the disencounter between Peruvian art and socioeconomic realities
in the country. The following year the group also incorporated into its
leaflet documenting the event a contribution from economist Manuel
Lajo discussing how Peru’s nutritional emergency was being caused by
an export-oriented production model and the increasing reliance on ex-
pensive imports of elementary foodstuffs controlled by transnational
megacompanies. But the show’s centerpiece was a mosaic image of a sal-
chipapas dish painted on ten thousand recycled cans of powdered milk
from urban junkyards that covered the entire floor of the showroom,
forcing visitors to walk across their edgy surfaces. Before the show’s
opening, the piece had also been briefly on display at an open-air space
in nearby Parque de Barranco.38 The use of the cans as monochrome
base units immediately recalls the Ben-Day dots of Roy Lichtenstein’s
paintings. Yet whereas the US pop artist imitates an industrial print-
ing technique in the manual, single-author medium of painting (just as
his subjects imitate the image content of industrial publishing, comic
books), the Salchipapas floor mosaic literally grounds modern industrial
mass production in the local recycling and repurposing economy based
on the former’s leftovers. Indeed, just as the powdered milk they had
contained in their previous incarnation, the cans themselves had also
been imported from overseas rather than made in Peru. In a multilev-
eled game of recyclings and appropriations, the installation brought the
glamorous cosmopolitanism of pop art down to the material realities of
an import-dependent, colonial-extractive margin and to a commodity
fetishism of the poor, in which cheap, second-hand materials are made
to celebrate an equally cheap, derivative offspring of global fast food: a
154 ❘ Chapter 3

neocolonial hotdog. In the words of Lauer’s essay flyer written for the
show, “Arte al paso: Tome uno” (Takeout art: Help yourself to one), the
exhibit represented an “ecological exercise revealing the umbilical cord
linking the city’s discards to the city’s art, from the cans that arrive at
the shantytown empty and that now return to the gallery all painted
over, and tomorrow will return all painted to the shantytown so that
one day they may arrive full at the shantytown. Between the discards,
food, and art, an ecosystem needs to be revealed ever more clearly.”39
Even though the show made quite a few waves—not least for the
aggressive use of sexually charged language and imagery in some of the
silk-screen prints—some critics, Lauer included, also challenged E. P. S.
Huayco for having limited its intervention to bringing trinkets of urban
poverty into the space of art, which ran the risk of turning them into
just another fashionable quotation easy to absorb into the very export
economy the show was railing against (in fact, the gallery had even
hired a salchipapas vendor to attend the inauguration). In response, the
group started to think about recycling Salchipapas itself, thus also in-
verting (as Lauer had already suggested in his exhibition commentary)
the cans’ recycling itinerary—from import commodities to rubbish col-
lected and recycled on the urban margins to “raw material” for cosmo-
politan art—by taking them back into the space and time of everyday
experience. Discussions about the new image content to be painted onto
the cans (which the group would subsequently share with urban resi-
dents in the form of the public survey on artistic preferences carried out
the following year) quickly yielded an agreement: the image would be a
blown-up version of the widely circulating effigy of Sarita Colonia, an
Andean migrant woman who had died in Lima at a young age after a
life of hardship (according to some versions owing to the consequences
of rape) and became a popular, noncanonical patron saint not just
among migrants but also taxi drivers, prostitutes, street vendors and
the LGBQT+ community. Adding another 1,600 cans to Salchipapas’s
original 10,000, the monumental “mural brought down to earth”40 was
first painted collectively at the group’s workshop in Lima, and then its
parts were transported on October 26 to a barren hillside in view of the
Pan-American highway fifty kilometers south of town, where they were
assembled that same day (fig. 29).
This time, rather than maintaining the dotted structure used for Sal-
chipapas, the group opted for painting over the previous image with
a true-to-source reproduction of a popular vignette blown up to scale,
in what thus amounted to a double gesture of erasure: not just of the
 The Matter with Images ❘ 155

Fig. 29. E. P. S. Huayco, installation of Sarita Colonia, October 1980. María

Luy with daughters Patricia and Laura, and Herbert Rodríguez. Photograph by
Marianne Ryzek. Courtesy of Archivo Mariotti-Luy, MALI, Lima. Courtesy of
the artists.

previous, pop art–derivative image but also of its material support—

the cans—the shapes of which no longer coincided with those of the
religious icon they were made to carry. Yet at the same time (just like
the other shrines to Sarita Colonia and other popular saints that pro-
liferate on the sides of the Panamericana) the recycled and repurposed
nature of the materials remains clearly visible even from a distance,
their “poor” and makeshift character standing out even more clearly
in the tension with the “noble,” painterly shapes of the iconic content.
Having been installed without previous notice and omitting all the art
system’s rituals of inauguration, the work—which, incidentally, is also
situated in proximity to Pachacámac, one of Peru’s most important
“huacas,” or Inca sanctuaries—would quickly become incorporated
into the devotional practices of migrants and travelers, as evident from
the cacti planted by anonymous worshippers in its proximity over the
following years forming the shape of Sarita’s name. As Gustavo Bun-
tinx argues, in the cans’ rerecycled and anonymous installation, “paint-
ing” a popular religious icon into a deserted site that is simultaneously
a through route for rural migrants and a ritual center of preconquest
spiritual practices,
156 ❘ Chapter 3

the work acquires a fundamentally twofold nature. Politi-

cal art, avant-garde art, for an illustrated audience access-
ing it upon finding out about the peculiarities of its material
support—including the disguised presence of Salchipapas—by
way of leftwing publications or specialized works . . . But also
religious icon for the migrants seeing it from the highway on
which they travel toward the great criollo city they are about
to turn into their own, mestizo city . . . This exchange, this
tacitly established communication, carries a political and cul-
tural charge that had been absent from artistic experience in
Peru. In the successful ambivalence of Sarita Colonia, petty
bourgeois radicalism finally accomplishes, at least figura-
tively, its articulation with an emergent popular universe.41

In both CADA’s and Huayco’s actions, then, the circulation of “raw

material” through multiple situations acts out the city’s and nation’s
inscription in, and subordination to, the political economy of extractiv-
ism. Both collectives adopt a double movement, reflective of the two
different audiences they address: on the one hand their actions interpel-
late the institutional circuit of art, forcing it to acknowledge the stuff
it had been complicit in disavowing; on the other hand, it reaches out
into the “social exteriority” of everyday spaces and times where their
interventions attempt to turn spectators, as Richard puts it, into ac-
tive coparticipants of the creative process, into “part of the living ma-
terial of the work through [their] own interaction.”42 In the actions of
both collectives, elementary nutrients and their manufactured scarcity
through commodification provide the material link between these two
fields of intervention—as they were already doing before their incorpo-
ration into art actions, as mobile matter connecting (in a commodity
network of production and consumption) all the different parts of the
city. But whereas CADA’s milk distribution in the shanties and parading
of Soprole vans through Santiago’s main thoroughfares aimed to trigger
Brechtian public performances of (de)alienation in the here and now of
everyday situations (showing these to be shot through with historical
memory and trauma), Huayco made a different aesthetic and political
wager, premised on the long term. In “abandoning” the final iteration of
their can-mosaic assemblage for it to blend in with popular cultures of
devotion—which it comes to coincide with on the level not only of the
image itself but also of the recycled and repurposed matter providing
the former’s basis of support—the group was also putting its faith in the
 The Matter with Images ❘ 157

material afterlife of the assemblage, and its capacity for turning itself
into the object of new, contingent appropriations and generations of
meaning over time.43
If CADA’s and Huayco’s interventions, as well as those of El Techo
de la Ballena in the previous decade, also coincided in returning to the
scene the discarded, or abjected, materialities sustaining commodity
production and consumption in a context of extractivism, perhaps the
artist who, in late twentieth-century Latin America, went furthest in
exploring the political affects of abjection was Artur Barrio. Born in
Portugal—where he would briefly return following the 1974 Carnation
Revolution—Barrio had moved to Rio de Janeiro at age ten and had
attended art school at a moment of peak social and political mobiliza-
tions, shortly before the 1968 “coup within a coup” that suspended civil
liberties and inaugurated the bloodiest period of Brazil’s decades-long
military dictatorship. At the 1969 Salão da Bússola (Compass salon)
at Rio’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM)—a landmark exhibition that
also featured major works by Antonio Manuel and Cildo Meireles—
Barrio contributed the piece Situação . . . ORHHH . . . ou . . . 5.000 . . .
T. E . . . . EM . . . N. Y . . . . City . . . 1969—approximately “Situation . . .
ARGHHH . . . or . . . 5.000 . . . B. B . . . . IN . . . N. Y . . . City . . . 1969,”
with “T. E.” (B. B.) standing for “trouxas ensanguentadas” or “bloody
bundles.” In using “perishable, cheap materials . . . such as: garbage, toi-
let paper, urine, etc.”—as he proclaimed in a manifesto composed that
same year—Barrio sought to confront “elite art” and its material and
institutional supports, through “momentary situations with the use of
perishable materials, in a concept from the bottom to the top.”44 As the
Salão da Bússola intervention made abundantly clear, “bottom to top”
here literally meant the invasion of the cerebral space of art by excre-
mented, abjected materialities—the dirty leftovers of social production
and of bodily digestion alike. The piece consisted of paper bags, hanging
from the ceiling as well as piled up on the floor, filled with old newspa-
pers, garbage, and concrete, which Barrio had doused in red paint and
bundled up with string. At the show’s closing, Barrio left his “bloody
bundles” behind in the museum’s gardens—one of the iconic spaces of
Brazilian public landscape, designed by Roberto Burle Marx—where
the next morning they were removed by police after failing to obtain a
response from the MAM’s authorities as to whether this stuff was art
or trash.
Barrio’s intervention posed a radical challenge to the show’s and the
museum’s role as agents of canonization and safeguards of art’s auton-
158 ❘ Chapter 3

omy, by invading their space and time with a type of matter that was
the mirror opposite of the artwork: similarly withdrawn from circuits
of production and consumption, yet not as an effect of institutional
consecration but, on the contrary, because of their abjected nature as
nonrecoverable surplus: as remainder, discard, excrement. In an act of
“poetic terrorism,” art critic Lígia Canongia argues, Barrio’s interven-
tions introduced into the temple of aesthetic modernism in Brazil an
impulse of radical de-formation, a collapse of meaning echoed in the
titles’ breaking down of linguistic continuity surrendering, as it were, to
retching from nausea: “The T. E. were incongruent, terrible, and men-
acing things, and their unexpected and violent apparition would unfurl
quite disturbing moods or psychic states”45—including faintings and
vomitings from shocked visitors, which Barrio considered to be sponta-
neous contributions from the audience.46
As would CADA and Huayco a decade later, Barrio also adopted a
two-pronged approach to take his abject assemblages and their violent
forcings out of bodily, impulsive, and subconscious reactions among
“spectator-contributors,” from the museum interior into “social exteri-
ority”—an everyday that, in the case of Brazil under dictatorship, was
already awash in violence and terror of a different but not unrelated
kind. Similar to how Direct Cinema filmmakers would actively tease out
social interactions so that the camera could observe them, Barrio’s “sit-
uations” triggered impulsive reactions from passersby that could range
from indifference to physical violence, and which he would frequently
(though not always) register with the collaboration of photographers
and cameramen. In 1970 Barrio prepared and distributed throughout
Rio de Janeiro some five hundred plastic bags filled with excrement,
tampons, toilet paper, hair and nail cuttings, bones, and food waste,
about a fifth of which also had the artist’s signature taped on them.
Left behind in urban space, the work aimed at a “transformation of the
environment, desanctifying it,”47 and effectively lasted at least until the
last of the bags would have been picked up by municipal rubbish collec-
tors or would have merged with the landscape of urban residue. Also in
1970 Barrio took part in Do corpo à terra (From body to earth), a leg-
endary open-air exhibition at a public park in Belo Horizonte curated
by Frederico Morais, for which he purchased forty pounds of meat and
bones from a local slaughterhouse, which he bundled up in white sheets
and left behind in marginal areas of the park such as sewer drains and
parking lots (fig. 30). As documented by Barrio’s collaborator, the pho-
tographer César Carneiro, on more than one occasion these bloody
 The Matter with Images ❘ 159

Fig. 30. Artur Barrio, register of Situação T/T1, April 20, 1970, Belo Horizonte,
Minas Gerais, Brazil. Photograph by César Carneiro. Courtesy of the artist.

bundles provoked violent standoffs between police and the multitudes

gathering around them, when the former aimed to remove the “evi-
dence” (on order from the municipal police headquarters, all bundles
were picked up and sent to a forensic lab for analysis on the very day of
their “installation”).
Just as CADA’s actions a decade later in the context of the Pinochet
dictatorship, Barrio’s abject installations forced people into unsolic-
ited encounters with the excremented and obscene play on the perva-
sively uncanny nature of everyday experience under state terrorism.
They forced into view a latent violence, which had already inhabited
the places where the bloody bundles made their appearance, only to be
recognized by passersby as that which they had always expected to ap-
pear there—an expectation of which, paradoxically, they only became
aware on stumbling across Barrio’s bundles. Barrio’s work forced out,
as a physical reaction from a body affected by the powers of matter,
what a politics of fear and complicity had kept people from speaking
or even thinking. The abject is the stuff of politics and is what had
already lingered in a ghostly fashion at the borders of consciousness:
what has not been fully expelled and removed from the physical and
social body. It is—as Julia Kristeva has so forcefully argued—the limit
that becomes object, neither “I” nor “it,” neither past nor present, nei-
160 ❘ Chapter 3

ther dead nor alive: it “is what disturbs an identity, a system, an order.
It disrespects limits, places, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous: the
mixed up.”48 In this sense, the materialities engaged by the late-modern
art actions discussed here are all rendered abject after being stripped of
their objectness as everyday commodities (or, in the case of Barrio, by
contaminating objectness with the deformed, shapeless yet still recog-
nized abjection of remains and excrements). They straddle the bound-
aries between object and thing, between matter and stuff, to paraphrase
Bill Brown.49 But in doing so, they also reveal extractivism to be a pro-
cess of simultaneous, and interdependent, production of objects and of
the abject, which is in turn related to the (local and global) distribution
and movement in space of bodies and things.

Shelter in P l ac e : Mi gr a nt E mp l ace m e n t s
a n d the B odysc a p e

Composed of shacks, tents, and “nests” made of straw, leaves, plastic

sheets, and fabric, Éden, the centerpiece of Hélio Oiticica’s “White-
chapel Experience” (1969), was to be experienced, according to his
own program notes, as a taba—the communal “Great House” of the
Indigenous nations of the Amazon—and thus also as “an area open
to myth.”50 Even though the exhibition, Oiticica’s first and only major
overseas show in his lifetime, also included key pieces from his pre-
vious trajectory such as the seminal ambient installation Tropicália—
premiered at MAM Rio only two years earlier—the new, purpose-made
materials also sought to reinscribe these within a comprehensive, seam-
less “experience” in which, rather than walking through an art show to
take in successive individual works, visitors would immerse themselves
in a sensorial continuum of their own choosing, navigating the spaces
and objects at their disposal. Returning to some of the forms and ma-
terials already used in Tropicália (such as the sand on the gallery floor
visitors were invited to touch with their bare feet and the “penetra-
bles,” cabin-like structures for people to immerse themselves in a space
of color), Oiticica’s show at the Whitechapel Gallery offered passersby
not so much a playful and ironic allusion to Brazil but rather a space
for experiencing crelazer (“creation-leisure”)—an experimental form
of nonproductive freedom, self-care, and togetherness. In Hélio’s own
words, “those arriving from the cold of London’s streets—repetitive,
closed, monumental—when they examine the created environment,
 The Matter with Images ❘ 161

their behavior opens up and they reinvent themselves as if returning

to nature, to a childlike candor that allows itself to be absorbed, to the
uterus of a built yet open space.”51 The artist himself was “inhabiting”
this experimental space-time almost continuously for the length of the
show, sometimes taking naps in the bólide-cama (fireball bed), listening
to music inside the carpa Caetano-Gil (Caetano [Veloso]–[Gilberto] Gil
tent), or scribbling notes while hanging out in the sand or in one of the
“penetrables.”
As Guy Brett suggests, different from US land art, which Oiticica
dismissed as a “belated expression of the landscape ethos, with the im-
plication of a detached gaze inspecting and turning the earth neutral
and available,”52 Éden was bringing things and materials into tangible,
intimate closeness, creating possibilities for experimental practices and
sensorial assemblages between the body and its environment. The space
and time of the show, Brett argues, offered an instance “of protection, of
shelter, which envelops both the material and the human, encouraging a
harmonious kind of exchange between both.”53 In this way, the “White-
chapel Experience” also represented an important turning point in Oiti-
cica’s career, at once the most fully fleshed-out version of the programa
ambiental (environmental program) he had been busy elaborating since
the breakup of the Neoconcretists in 1961 and the beginning of its rad-
ical reformulation. As Oiticica himself put it years later in an interview
with Iván Cardoso, if Éden represented the ultimate “mythification of
the street, of dance, of Mangueira” (the Rio shantytown where Oiti-
cica had joined the local samba school), the experimental experience of
crelazer also meant taking a step further, “of demythification, together
with mythification, one already comes mixed up with the other.”54 With
Éden, Oiticica explained in one of his working notes, he had set out “to
transform a synthetic image—the Tropicália—then passing through the
formulation of the ‘Super-Sensory’ until I arrived at the idea of Crelazer
(Creation-Leisure).”55 The Whitechapel intervention represented, in
short, a leap from the programa ambiental toward a programa pra vida
(program for living).56
In this reformulation, Oiticica also shifted gears from his previous
“tropicalist search for ways of engaging with the ‘raíz-Brasil’ (Brazil-
ian root)” and toward an exilic ethos of “nonunifying entanglements
between locations, concepts, and gestures” the manifestation and sup-
port of which was to be found less and less in the artwork-object and
rather in lived, everyday experience itself.57 Crelazer, creation-leisure,
also meant breaking down distinctions between artistic production as
162 ❘ Chapter 3

“work” and the leisure time of “imagination.” In the cosmopolitan un-

derground of London and New York, Oiticica found an opportunity for
exploring a sense of self and of community cut free from linguistic, sex-
ual, and conceptual moorings. As Hélio himself put it in “Subterrânia”
(approximately “Underground Earth”), a short poem-manifesto penned
in London in September 1969, “tropicália é o grito do Brasil para o
mundo => subterrânia do mundo para o Brasil” (tropicália is the scream
of Brazil toward the world => subterrânia that of the world toward
Brazil). Subterrânia, he concluded, “é a glorificação do sub . . . como
consciência para vencer a super—paranoia—repressão—impotência—
negligência do viver . . . desapareçamos, sejamos o não do não” (Subter-
rânia is the glorification of the under . . . as consciousness that defeats
the over—paranoia—repression—impotence—neglect of aliveness . . .
let’s disappear, let’s become the no of the no).58
In what follows I want to explore the aesthetic and conceptual shifts
and reformulations that the experiences of exile and migration unleashed
in Oiticica’s work. Although plans for his Whitechapel show predated
the explosion of military repression in Brazil following the Institutional
Act suspending civil rights on December 13, 1968, Oiticica’s decision
not to return to the country until ten years later was certainly informed
by politics at home, not least by the months-long incarceration of his
“tropicalist” fellow travelers and friends Caetano Veloso and Gilberto
Gil only weeks after the dictatorial regime had dissolved congress.59
After discussing Hélio’s exilic reassessments of his previous “environ-
mental” work in terms of a mobile and itinerant ethos of self-liberation,
I move on to compare these to the near-contemporary performances
of exilic reemplacement by Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. In
Mendieta’s Silueta Series, I argue, relations between locality and the
migrant body in motion are similarly a key theme. But whereas, in
Oiticica, uprootedness is celebrated as a liberating experience of self-
hood that can be turned against the agents of repression, in Mendieta
what returns to the fore is the wound that exile inflicts on body and
ground alike, which makes the migrant experience an extreme, even
prophetic, example of the more general, and traumatic, separation be-
tween the human and the earth under a colonial-capitalist patriarchy.
In 1970, initially thanks to a Guggenheim scholarship, Oiticica
moved to New York City, where, in his loft on Second Avenue in the
Lower East Side, he started assembling a communitary living structure
of semitransparent nesting units—the Babylonests—which he shared
with a varying cast of friends and lovers, and where, in addition to
 The Matter with Images ❘ 163

producing a vast amount of writings, drawings, and maquettes, he also

experimented with photography and recording in Super-8 and sound.
Yet instead of “wanting to create an aesthetic world, an art-world, by
juxtaposing a structure onto the everyday,” as he characterized the proj-
ects of Mondrian and Schwitters, the impact of which he still acknowl-
edged in his previous work, what Oiticica now claimed to be looking
for were the “elements of this same everyday life, of human behavior,
to transform it through its own laws, through open propositions with-
out any preconditions.”60 Although often compared negatively to the
“optimistic, utopian period of the 1950s,”61 Oiticica’s eight-year stay
in Manhattan as well as his return to Brazil shortly before his untimely
death in 1980 could actually be read more productively as an analytical
reworking of his own individual and artistic trajectory up to that point,
to then double down on its wager: “vigília de mim mesmo” (caring for
myself), as Hélio calls it in a fragment from 1970.
Self-analysis as a mode of exilic reconnection with the underground
earth takes shape in multiple forms: from the proliferation of writings
that in themselves take on an increasingly experimental—fragmented
and translingual—character to the invention of new, public as well as
intimate modes of intervening the body and space (including the Block-
Experiments in Cosmococa or the Parangolé-Situations staged on street-
corners or in the subway) and to their image and sound recording as in
the Quasi-Cinema Super-8 reels and the Heliotapes. Also, while living in
downtown Manhattan, Oiticica produced a great number of maquettes
for new “penetrables”—often accompanied by detailed plans and
notes—loosely grouped together as Subterranean Tropicalia Projects.
These were to be constructed in neuralgic spaces of cities worldwide,
including New York’s Central Park and São Paulo’s Praça da República
(only a small number have been realized after the artist’s death, and in
art spaces such as Rio de Janeiro’s Museu do Açude or the Inhotim Con-
temporary Art Institute, Minas Gerais, rather than in the urban centers
originally intended by Oiticica).
As in Oiticica’s previous work, these projects were usually also ac-
companied by an intense conceptual reflection, including new notions-
objects such as the Barracão and the Conglomerado (conglomerate).
Barracão—approximately “big shack’”—was a term Oiticica had started
developing while still in Brazil, initially for a planned community on the
outskirts of Rio (“a wooden house just like the ones in the favela”), an
idea he discarded as dictatorial repression intensified after 1968. As the
political context in Brazil would have “made this experience impossi-
164 ❘ Chapter 3

ble and suicidal,” Oiticica reconceived the Barracão as an “adaptable

structure . . . open to circumstances: a circumstantial project.”62 Here
an environmental form was being reinvented as a mode of lived, im-
provisational ethics—as programa pra vida—which also productively
turned the experience of exile into the very condition for experimental
self-experience freed from the bonds of routine. Conglomerado, on the
other hand, was how Hélio thought about the discontinuous yet not
therefore unrelated or aleatory order of the great number of writings
(working notes, essays, poetry, manifestos) he churned out and meticu-
lously archived during his time in London and New York, and which he
intended to publish as blocos (“building blocks” but also a type of car-
nival street party), parts of a book bundle or fascicle series he planned
to publish under the title Newyorkaises.63 Exile for Oiticica provided
a context that allowed him to rethink and redeploy some of his previ-
ous work’s fundamental stakes and to turn this exercise of self-analysis
into the catalyst for an experimental life-work practice. At the same
time, it was only by analytically reworking his own previous production
from the exilic standpoint of spatiotemporal remove that Oiticica could
eventually envisage a possibility of returning to Brazil without therefore
having to renounce exile’s existential freedom: a return that does not
imply going back to the roots. “The roots have been ripped out and
burned a long time ago,” as Oiticica told the Jornal do Brasil shortly
after his arrival in Rio in 1978.64 Return, for Oiticica, only became pos-
sible once he had figured out a way of bringing uprootedness home.
A key text of his time in New York, “Mundo-Abrigo” (World-
Shelter), dated September 1973, is exemplary for this new, conglomerate
mode of thinking and the resultant experimental shift from environ-
mental location specificity (associated with the popular forms, sounds,
and materiality of favela culture) to an exilic ethos of “subterranean”
self-exploration, playfulness, and global commons.65 The text’s reflexive
movement is anchored in a cascade of associations between terms in Por-
tuguese and in English. It constructs a translational system that incor-
porates, along with the etymological and semantic properties of terms
highlighted in capitals and italics, numerous philosophical, literary, and
musical references (including several from Oiticica’s own work). Thus,
the ideas of abrigo (shelter) and casca (shield)—which could also be
associated with two key forms of Oiticica’s environmental oeuvre, such
as the penetrable (cabin) and the parangolé (cape)—are put in relation
here with the English term “shelter”: “do ANGLO-SAXÃO scildtrum:
a troop of men with shields . . . shelter: da casca-proteção primeira do
 The Matter with Images ❘ 165

corpo / à SHELTER coletiva-total em que o mundo / é guarida” (from

the ANGLO-SAXON scildtrum: a troop of men with shields . . . shelter:
from the body’s first protective shield / to the collective-total SHELTER
when the world itself has become / refuge).66 This idea of the world
as shelter segues into a close reading of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 song
“Gimme Shelter,” approached from the vantage point of Marshall Mc-
Luhan’s Understanding Media (1964) where housing and clothing are
conceived as so many human modes of protection and refuge. Oiticica
looks to the Canadian theorist’s “ALDEIA GLOBAL TVizada” (televi-
sual GLOBAL VILLAGE),67 to find a global, high-tech equivalent of his
own Tropicália and Barracão: a virtual space of life experimentation the
most comprehensive manifestations of which he sees in the great rock
festivals: “WOODSTOCK é o ambiente planetário / TERRA tornado
/ SHELTER” (WOODSTOCK is the planetary environment / EARTH
turned / SHELTER).68 Shelter, as demanded in Mick Jagger’s voice and
as practiced at Woodstock, does not refer to place as a refuge protecting
us from the exterior world’s contingencies but rather, Oiticica argues,
to the very instance of self-opening toward a space of potentiality and
freedom. The world becomes shelter in the moment it is embraced in
its openness, when “postos de lado todos os hang-ups que nos ligam
ao ambiente-terra imediato onde ‘crescemos’ e o convívio compulsório
q daí advém (família etc.) e nos lançamos on our own numa condição
de explorar (nem q por um instante) e conhecer o q não se conhece e
nesse instante o MUNDO torna-se SHELTER” (when we put aside all
the hang-ups binding us to the immediate world environment where we
“grew up” and to the ensuing, compulsory conviviality (family, etc.) and
plunge on our own into a condition of exploring (not just for an instant)
and of learning what isn’t known, in that very moment the WORLD
becomes SHELTER).69
The idea of exile as an opportunity for embracing “Subterrânea,”
the underground earth of global counterculture and that of aesthetics
as experimentation with, and care for, the self thus reinforces one an-
other mutually. For, says Oiticica, “assim como JOYCE ter-se desligado
da terra IRLANDA pra q pudesse experimentar MUNDO e tornar a
IRLANDA do dia-a-dia simultânea à ÍTACA odisséica” (just as JOYCE
separated himself from the land IRELAND so he could experience THE
WORLD and make every day IRELAND simultaneous with the Odys-
sey’s ITHACA),70 so the Stones’ chorus (the “multitude scream / loud,
ecstatic”) also does not ask for shelter as refuge but, on the contrary, it
demands “MUNDO como campo experimental” (THE WORLD as a
166 ❘ Chapter 3

field of experimentation).71 “Grita pedindo SHELTER / q não é família-

casa-namorada / é SHELTER-mundo” (It screams out for SHELTER /
which isn’t family-home-girlfriend / it’s the world as SHELTER).72 Yet
this world-shelter of the “children” of Woodstock—who, in refusing to
abide with the alienated adult life of home and family, are collectively
putting into practice the experimental exercise of freedom Mário Pe-
drosa had associated with Oiticica’s work—is also under threat from a
repressive violence the Stones’ song decries right from its opening lines
(“Oh, a storm is threat’ning / My very life today”). This threat, Oiti-
cica concludes, is not directed at just “uma vida: ‘a minha’ . . . ameaça
LIFE em geral: a vida-children coletiva” (one life: ‘mine’ . . . it threat-
ens LIFE in general: the collective child-life).73 Repression threatens the
experimental exercise of freedom the multitude has embarked on as it
abandons an alienated regime of subject production in exchange for “o
mundo tomado como PLAYGROUND e onde o comportamento in-
dividual (-coletivo) não quer se adaptar a patterns gerais de trabalho-
lazer mas a experimentações de comportamento mesmo q essas nasçam
fragmentadas e isoladas” (a world taken as PLAYGROUND where in-
dividual (-collective) behavior no longer conforms to general patterns
of work-leisure but, instead, to behavioral experiments, even if these
emerge only in isolated and fragmented fashion).74
Oiticica’s own return to Brazil in 1978, shortly before his sudden
death in March 1980, would see an intense effort to bring these reflec-
tions on displacement and freedom to bear on the very place of ori-
gin. Especially the two acontecimentos poético-urbanos (urban-poetic
events) organized by the artist—Programa in Progress Cajú, which took
place on December 18, 1979, and Esquenta pro Carnaval (Warm-up
for Carnival), staged at Mangueira on February 9 the following year—
can be seen as attempts to tie back together the concepts of Barracão
and Crelazer with the social geography and popular culture of Rio.
For the first of these, Oiticica contributed Devolver a terra à terra (ap-
proximately “Returning the soil to the earth”), also referenced as the
“contra-bólide 1,” the “first antifireball,” returning to a term the artist
had previously used for a series of container or recipient-type objects
filled with a variety of materials, to be experienced in haptic as well
as visual fashion. The antifireball complicates this idea by adding to
the function of “containing” that of “unloading/displacing.” Similar in
kind to the almost simultaneous material mobilizations of CADA and
Huayco, the action performance started by digging up soil from the
swampy region of Japarepaguá south of the city, for it to be transported
 The Matter with Images ❘ 167

as well as unloaded and regrounded, in the shape of an 80 × 80 cm

square, in the Cajú neighborhood to the north, in the vicinity of Rio de
Janeiro’s municipal landfill. Earth, the very element into which roots
grow, was here being put on the move across the city and discarded into
the urban junkyard. But in this moment of radical estrangement and
uprooting, it also acquired form—a black square that, not by accident,
references Kazimir Malevich and the apex of abstraction—one that it
would gradually shed again as it dissolved into the new ground, as the
soil became one with the earth. The second “contra-bólide,” which was
dropped off at a central meeting place in the Mangueira shantytown on
the eve of Carnival and returned (similar to a carnival float or a proces-
sional shrine) to the artist’s home after the end of festivities, was called
Ready Constructible (fig. 31). To the ideas of displacement, unloading,
and regrounding, it added the notion of blocos and the Conglomerado,

Fig. 31. Hélio Oiticica, Ready Constructible no. 1,

1978–79. Mixed materials. Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio
de Janeiro.
168 ❘ Chapter 3

which Hélio had previously conceived of as a spatial image for writing

and archiving. Here, on a square of pebbles and rubble of similar di-
mensions as the first antifireball’s square of soil, Oiticica constructed
with industrial bricks a walled second square open at the top and at the
sides, the “windows” of which alternatively led into the interior “court-
yard” or into an individual brick and thus also toward the adjacent
“window” interrupting the wall sequence.
A wordplay on the Duchampian Readymade as well as the construc-
tion materials that comprised it, the Ready Constructible gave tangi-
ble form to Oiticica’s project of bringing home the very experience of
displacement and its ensuing exilic ethos and life practice. In its com-
plex, self-contradicting structure of openings and closures, the Ready
Constructible produced as well as defied space, or as Hélio put it in
his working notes, it “FUNDA ESPAÇO/ (EM) ABSOLUTO / herd o
IN-OUT / o dentro e o / huis-clos / aberto-fechado / aberto-aberto /
fechado-fechado” (FOUNDS SPACE / IN (THE) ABSOLUTE / [in]herits
the IN-OUT / the inside and outside / huis-clos / open-closed / open-
open / closed-closed).75 This simultaneous opening and closure is also
echoed in the structure’s itinerant emplacement/displacement before
and after Carnival as well as in the way it reverts back into its constit-
uent materials after failing to cohere into a stable and definite kind of
form: “o sólido e o arenoso / e quem sabe o q / poderia vir a ser / lama
líquida!” (the solid and the sandy / and, who knows, also what / might
even become / liquid mud!).76
Crucially, both “antifireballs” were also challenging the concept
genre of the bólide from Oiticica’s own preexile work and career in
that neither of them was supposed to be experienced as a single, self-
contained object and rather within the context of the “urban-poetic
events” for which they had been designed and which, it is reasonable to
assume, were supposed to remain their exclusive time and space of “ex-
hibition.” Also incorporating public poetry readings, performances, and
video shootings by artists Lygia Pape and Ana Maria Maiolino, samba
dancer Miro da Mangueira, filmmakers Júlio Bressane, Sonia Miranda,
and Iván Cardoso, and poets Jorge Salomão and Heloisa Buarque de
Hollanda, among others, Programa in Progress Cajú—also known as
“Kleemania” in homage to the centenary of Paul Klee—and Esquenta
pro Carnaval were largely improvisational, collective gatherings-
happenings that reunited Hélio’s friends and followers in similar fash-
ion as Apocalipopótese (the landmark 1968 happening at downtown
Aterro do Flamengo) had done a decade earlier.77 Now, however, the
 The Matter with Images ❘ 169

act of displacement from city center to urban margins also sought to

tie back together the “environmental turn” of the 1960s and its explo-
rations of the “dimension of social exteriority in the production of art”
with the following decade’s exilic explorations of the self and of itiner-
ance as an aesthetic and experimental experience in its own right.78 In
the garbage-dump neighborhood of Cajú, the space of urban discards
and of scavenged matter, Oiticica found an ideal context in which to
stage the reinscription of “Mundo-Abrigo” (World-Shelter)—of a mi-
grant ethos of self-liberation through uprooting—within the very ge-
ography of his home city. As he proposed in the “Cajú Manifesto,” a
handwritten notepad in which over several months he collected stage
directions for the event: “o programa in progress CAJU propõe aos
participadores abordar-tomar o bairro do CAJU como um playground
bairro-urbano . . . O CAJU É O GROUND: A PARTICIPAÇÃO DOS
PARTICIPADORES FAZ O PLAY” (the program in progress CAJU sug-
gests that its participants engage with and take the CAJU neighborhood
as a playground-urban neighborhood . . . CAJU IS THE GROUND:
THE PARTICIPANTS’ PARTICIPATION PROVIDES THE PLAY).79
Ana Mendieta’s earth-body works, roughly from the same time as
Oiticica’s New York exile and ultimate return to Brazil, similarly reg-
ister the transhemispheric (and thus also geopolitical) itinerance of a
body—her own—in the way they trace the spatial markings this body
leaves behind, as well as the coagential processes that bodily presence
unleashes in the materialities with which it comes in contact. Just as it
had for Oiticica, furthermore, addressing her exilic condition allowed
Mendieta to quite literally lay the groundwork for a return to Cuba
in 1980 where she produced her series of petroglyph-like Rupestrian
Sculptures in a park outside Havana. Yet, whereas in Oiticica’s exilic
performances and reflections space is turned into an extended world-
shelter or nesting unit for the experimental practice of selfhood, Mendi-
eta’s markings of a seemingly endless variety of places with the physical
imprint of her own presence, “like a dog, pissing on the ground,” stages
an almost obsessive return to a body and self that can neither com-
pletely assert nor erase itself.80 Its presence/absence therefore takes on
the character of a wound that prevents matter from fully cohering into
place. Even though from 1975 Mendieta ceases to use her own body
as an earth-marking device and rather resorts to a generic female form
alternately fashioned onto or “found in” different materials including
mud, pebbles, or a grassy plain, this ominous bodily trace nonetheless
never ceases to remain closely attached to the artist herself, to this par-
170 ❘ Chapter 3

ticular body and the way it is itself marked by the biopolitics of race,
gender, and class.
Although never quite as emblematically as in Isla (1981) (fig. 32), a
persistent tendency nonetheless runs through much of Mendieta’s work,
in particular her Silueta Series created between 1973 and 1980, to rec-
oncile and suture through a body that becomes ground and through
earthly matter that strives to become body, the uprootedness this same
body incarnates in its exilic condition. Yet, again and again, each suc-
cessive iteration of the gesture also defers the act of suture it invokes
beyond the work’s own space and time. The very out-of-placeness of
a migrant female body is entrusted, in these acts of (un)grounding, to
material assemblages that are almost always fragile in the extreme: a
hollow in the sand where the surf hits the beach, some flowers and
leaves floating in a stream, the bent leaves of a grass meadow still bear-
ing the shadowy trace of a body lying down. If exile is present here as a
symbolic dimension, it is only in the classical sense of the symbolon, as
the fragment or remainder of a piece of ceramic that has been broken,
to be rejoined (symballein in Greek) only when those carrying its pieces

Fig. 32. Ana Mendieta, Isla (Silueta Series). Black-and-white photographic print
(1994) from negative (1981). © 2022 The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection,
LLC. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York City.
 The Matter with Images ❘ 171

meet again. In Mendieta’s earth-body encounters, however, the earth to

which the body returns and in which it takes shape is not the missing
ground of an origin. Rather, the marked earth becomes symbolic here
only as the ruin, the wounded stump, which calls out for its missing
counterpart. As Jane Blocker has suggested, “by engaging the contra-
dictions of identificatory practice relative to the female, the primitive,
earth, and nation, Mendieta occupies the discursive position of exile,
and she uses this position to produce in us a sense of the uncanny. She
uses, in other words, exile performatively to question the limits and
fixity of identity.”81
Mendieta’s harrowing childhood experiences—her forced US exile at
age twelve, when her fiercely anti-Castro family sent her on an odyssey
of foster homes and orphanages as part of the CIA-sponsored Peter
Pan “rescue” operation—as well as the never clarified circumstances
of her violent death, have perhaps unduly overshadowed the formal
complexities of her work, read instead as the literal inscription of per-
sonal trauma. The more than a hundred works comprising Silueta Se-
ries, initiated in 1973 during a University of Iowa summer residence in
Mexico (which offered Mendieta a chance to return to Latin America
only on condition of previously acquiring US citizenship, thus renounc-
ing her own Latin Americanness) certainly follow closely the artist’s
own biography and self-reflection on her personal as well as political,
ethnic, and gendered affiliations. They accompany this biography, as
Luis Camnitzer has suggested, in the way of a constantly retraced and
modified self-portrait, yet they thus also complicate it:82 not just because
of Mendieta’s break with her own family background on taking up an
openly third-worldist, anti-imperialist stance but also because of the
way she reframes the violent uprooting experienced in her own flesh
within the larger context of racist and patriarchal violence of which—
and this is a crucial point—the scar inflicted on the maternal earth-body
is a constitutive part. In their oscillation between a form that emerges
before our eyes and its dissolution, forcing us to constantly shift atten-
tion from figure to matter and back, Mendieta’s Siluetas also reiterate
time and again this body’s insistent belonging to, as well as irreversible
separation from, the earth.
As Susan Best has pointed out, the female figure’s serialization effec-
tively counteracts the ephemeral character of each individual iteration:
“Repetition works to assert the present and the appearance of the fig-
ure alongside disappearance. The sheer quantity of repeated actions . . .
insists upon the presence of the body in nature.”83 Each of the figure’s
172 ❘ Chapter 3

new “reencounters” in different materialities thus cancels out its dis-

appearance staged in the previous one. Unlike, say, in Andy Warhol’s
silk-screen and offset reproductions, seriality in Mendieta’s works does
not seek to eliminate individuality and originality. Rather, each new ech-
elon of the series celebrates the resumption of continuity thanks to the
discovery of “yet another silhouette,” different from all previous ones
in the way it marks out a location by imprinting it with the ephemeral
presence of a human, female figure. As Anne Raine observes, Mendieta’s
silhouettes thus also provoke an uncanny effect of déjà vu “because of
the ordinariness of the scenes, and because of the continual recurrence
of the silhouette, whose roughly anthropomorphic shape evokes a sense
of something utterly familiar yet made strange by its repetition across a
variety of materials and sites.”84 At the same time, however, each reap-
pearance of the silhouette not only allows for the series’ continuity to
resume but also, through its own eventual dissolution into elementary
matter, reactualizes the threat of ultimate interruption of seriality, of the
exhaustion of possibilities and materialities in which to recompose the
vanishing figure and thus of the end of the connection between body and
ground it so desperately upholds. The disappearance of the re-appeared
figure, be it in the anticipatory mode of the photograph recording it as
a moment that has already passed by the time we see it or in the ghostly
reperformance of the silhouettes’ appearance and dissolution caught on
Super-8 film, also carries an implicit threat of extinction—that of the
dispositive and its author but also more widely of human presence and
even of the earth recording its imprint.
Rather than merely documenting the physical performance of the
earth-body works, Mendieta’s photographs and short films also contrib-
ute themselves to their mise-en-scène by inviting our gaze to become
haptic, to immerse itself in the ground rather than to contemplate land-
scape as object. It is almost as if, on “finding” the figure in the ground,
we could repeat the artist’s own gesture registered on Super-8 in Corazón
de roca con sangre (Rock heart with blood, 1975) where Mendieta lies
face down inside the muddy cast of a silhouette excavated on the edge of
a creek. But this pleasurable experience of (con)fusion, of body and earth
becoming one, is always counterpointed by the anxiety of indecision,
of not being able to decide clearly whether the anthropomorphic shape
still belongs to, or is in fact set apart from, the materialities from which
it emerges. And this ambiguity of a figure performing its own appear-
ance from and disappearance into the ground is also what challenges the
landscape form as the prevalent mode of imagining the earth. Susan Best
 The Matter with Images ❘ 173

has rightly pointed us to the way Mendieta’s photographs frequently

delete the horizon line by adopting a tilted, ground-facing camera angle.
Instead of providing us with a distant vanishing point that would allow
placing the figure as a landmark organizing the surrounding territory, in
most of Mendieta’s images “the picture plane is tipped upwards, allow-
ing nature to appear on the same plane as the body: horizontal earth
versus vertical body is rarely in evidence. Nature in this tight framing
then ceases to be landscape and becomes figured more as matter, force,
growth, decay (mud, ice, fire, waves, water, or growing things).”85
During Mendieta’s own lifetime, and even after her sudden and tragic
death, critical reception of her work has oscillated mainly between Klein-
ian and Lacanian psychoanalysis on the one hand and Gaia-feminist
approaches on the other. For Anne Raine, for instance, the “utopian
fusion of self and landscape/maternal body” plays a fort-da game, at
the heart of which “is both the ambivalent substitution of images and
signifiers for the absent mother and the potentially absent self, and also
the impossible signified of the self’s inevitable disappearance in the real,
material dissolution of the body.”86 Gaia-feminist readings, by contrast,
take their cues from Mendieta’s own assertions of “becoming one with
the earth” through her performances, resulting in a “reactivation of pri-
meval beliefs . . . in an omnipresent female force, the after-image of
being encompassed in the womb.”87 In this reading, Mendieta’s earth-
body works reperform the embrace of nature, womanhood, and Afro-
Latinx ethnicity not just in their common condition of being oppressed
by a colonial-extractive patriarchy but also restoring in their (physical
as well as political) reunion a lost primordial bond. Thus, for instance,
Jane Blocker claims that “for Mendieta, the earth symbolizes the essence
from and against which subjectivity is inevitably constructed—not just
her own, not just Latin America’s, but everyone’s. By obsessively staging
a ritual of return, Mendieta exposes the privilege of dominant culture
to represent its own identity as untroubled.”88 Undoubtedly, Mendieta’s
earth-marking performances call into question dominant claims to land
coded in terms of gender, race, and class, invoking a maternal bond to
challenge the immobilizing and objectifying discourse of patria, the fa-
therland. But this lost, umbilical nexus her performances stage as both
wound and suture also needs to be articulated with the uprootedness,
the exilic—or better, migrant—condition of the body at once at the cen-
ter and absent from, the majority of the Siluetas.
A silhouette is first and foremost what separates (rather than con-
nects) a body from its surroundings. It is neither figure nor ground but
174 ❘ Chapter 3

merely the line that runs between the two. Indeed, the very name Men-
dieta chose for this kind of earth-body work, Silueta Series, could also
be seen as replicating on the level of language the in-between space
whose reiteration it describes. Silueta Series combines a Spanish noun
in the singular with an English one that could be read as either singular
or plural, thus calling attention not just to a self that oscillates in the
transhemispheric, geopolitical border space of the Americas but also to
the tension between the singular and the generic that underwrites both
the series as a whole and each of its individual iterations. It is not by
accident that Silueta, the term referring to the particular, unrepeatable
nature of each performance, is in Spanish, and Series, the one referring
to its serial and generic character, is in English. Silueta Series, I suggest,
names the metonymic displacement occurring in the space and time be-
tween one silhouette and the next, erasing the previous marking act even
as it reinstates it elsewhere. Thus, it also insists on migration as a (geo-
political as well as postcolonial) condition of the work’s own making.
In the way they mark out, as a mobile, transhemispheric border space,
the uncertain limit between body and ground, Mendieta’s Siluetas—as
well as Oiticica’s antifireballs in their mobilization of earth and brick as
ungrounded, migrant places—might thus be reapproached today from
what Elizabeth Povinelli calls the question of geontopower. Rather than
concerning itself, as does Foucauldian biopower, merely with the gover-
nance of the living (with “making live” and “letting die”), late-capitalist
geontopower polices the boundary between Life and Nonlife even as
it is sustained by an extractivist matrix that treats both as exploitable
resources. For Povinelli, geontopower is therefore haunted by threshold
figures and scenarios including the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus,
all of which challenge in their own fashion the foundational fiction of
an inert, nonagential Nonlife and threaten to pierce “the skin of life,”
the “final membrane that links and separates it from its environment.”89
Oiticica’s and Mendieta’s exilic performances suggest that we add an-
other figure to Povinelli’s arsenal of characters threatening late-capitalist
geontopower in their violent yet also pleasurable collapsing of body and
environment, of animate and inanimate matter: the migrant—and in
particular the female or queer migrant of color. The female or queer
migrant’s going aground, I suggest, defies late-capitalist geontopower at
the extreme point of life’s becoming dispensable, the point where, in its
dimension as “Cheap Nature,” the work/energy of the human becomes
undistinguishable from that of other living and nonliving forms. As the
excess or remainder of life and at the same time as insufficiently alive,
 The Matter with Images ❘ 175

the female or queer migrant represents, as Jill Casid puts it, “a life gone
to seed”—a derogatory expression to name “forms of plant matter that
become no longer harvestable or extractable because their energy has
gone into the making of seed.”90 But this life gone to seed also defies
the sovereignty of geontopower in the way it insists on the “unsettled
and unsettling processes of decay and alternative forms of resistant gen-
eration,” which it projects as a potential, future outcome of the close
encounter between body and ground representing the violent horizon
of the migrant experience. The migrant body as an earthly trace—which
also means as a body always already fallen out of place, erased, faded,
decomposed: a cadaver—is therefore also one that, “rather than staying
still, roil[s] with the mixed means of making something out of contacts
and contamination that draw together the differences—sexual, racial,
gendered, geopolitical—that make up rather than dissolve into the hor-
izontality of necrolandscaping as connective transversal exposure to
mortality.”91

A fter N atu r e : B i oa rt, E c oa rt, a n d U n s p e ci f i c L i ve s

In early 1968, only a few months before Hélio Oiticica first showcased
his labyrinthine, immersive Tropicália installation at Rio de Janeiro’s
ground-breaking Nova objetividade (New objectivity) exhibition, a
very different kind of environment was on display at Buenos Aires’s
Galería Rubbers. Microzoo, a solo show by architect and visual artist
Luis Fernando Benedit, featured artificial habitats for living organisms
(e.g., fig. 33). These included “labyrinths” for mice, cockroaches, and
ants as well as a “vegetable labyrinth,” in which a germinating plant had
to choose its way between two plexiglass tubes leading, alternatively,
toward a light bulb or toward darkness and death. The concept of the
labyrinth, of such key importance to Oiticica’s work, was being trans-
ferred here to nonhuman organisms and combined with the notions
of the zoo and of microscopy as modern, disciplinary forms of human
spectatorship on nonhuman life. In the catalog of his show Projects and
Labyrinths at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1975—the same venue,
incidentally, where Oiticica had displayed his immersive Éden environ-
ment seven years earlier—Benedit described his “animal and plant hab-
itats [as] biological sculptures,” adding: “There is a definite relationship
between the forms and their inhabitants (mice, ants, fish). They reflect
both the forms I wish to create and the needs of the plants and animals
176 ❘ Chapter 3

Fig. 33. Luis Fernando Benedit, Prototipo: Habitat-laberinto para cucarachas

(Prototype: Habitat-Labyrinth for Cockroaches), 1971. Varnish paint and felt
pen on blueprint. Photograph by Peter Schaechtli. Daros Latin America Collec-
tion, Zurich.

for which they have been intended and thus each work can be seen on
several levels . . . I think of them as ecological objects where the balance
of interacting elements is created artificially.”92
Benedit’s statement begs an intriguing question. What are the mice,
ants, and cockroaches inhabiting (or learning to make their “habitat”)
in these biological sculptures? Do we still recognize them as natural
beings or are they, rather, themselves assembled into the artifice—and
if so, how? As living objects or as coauthoring the “forms” to which
they adjust their “needs”? And, finally, who or what is the bearer of
an aesthetic experience in relation to these peculiar kinds of sculpture:
the human spectators, who can observe through them the adaptations
of animal or vegetable behavior to manmade circumstances (provided,
of course, they change their viewing habits from the one-off mode of
visual consumption of the art gallery visitor to the laboratory scientist’s
repeated observation at regular intervals)? Or is it the nonhuman par-
ticipants of the assemblage, whose lives are being transformed, quite
literally, by the experience of art? In fact, I suggest, in the microzoos the
species form of life itself emerges as the effect of a machinic assemblage.
Mice, ants, lizards, and cockroaches make themselves known through
 The Matter with Images ❘ 177

the specific modes of use each invents for the labyrinth setting: the mode
of existence each forges from the artifice. Indeed, the synthetic material-
ity of Benedit’s habitats (polystyrene and acrylic plexiglass) is no minor
detail; it highlights and reflects the plasticity of the living as it enters
the artifice to make its home there. Hence, “labyrinths for mice, ants,”
etc.: the manmade setting is of a propositional character, the “nature”
of which will only be known after its adoption on behalf of an animal
performance: a becoming mouse, ant, cockroach.
This notion of the living machine undoubtedly owed much to Ben-
edit’s collaborations with fellow members of the Group of Thirteen,
including Víctor Grippo, Jacques Bedel, and Clorindo Testa, with whom
he also participated in the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (Center of
arts and communication [CAyC]), a Buenos Aires–based hub for artistic
research founded in 1968 by Jorge Glusberg. The group’s first show,
Arte de sistemas (Art of systems, 1972), expressed a shared interest in
cybernetics—the “scientific study of control and communication in the
animal and the machine,” according to Norbert Wiener’s founding defi-
nition, which explores the self-governing, systemic functions of living
and artificial organisms as well as their machinic assemblages.93 For
the artists working at CayC, cybernetics also provided the conceptual
scaffolding for a contemporary aesthetics short-circuiting art and life
(a survey exhibition organized by Glusberg in 1969 at Galería Bonino,
Buenos Aires, was explicitly called Cibernética y arte [Cybernetics and
art]). Grippo’s installation Analogía 1, for instance, featured a large pile
of potatoes interconnected through electrodes and wires, such that the
electric emissions (an average 0.7 volts per unit) generated alternately
by the sprouting tubers or by the gases emanating from dead and putre-
fying potatoes entered a circuit that also powered a voltmeter. The latter,
Grippo argued, was “analogous” to human consciousness: it provided
a disembodied, mechanical stand-in for the mind as itself wired into en-
ergetic circuits it translated into information, into data. “Sistema,” the
system, the show suggested, is the mode of reality that can be perceived
by collapsing onto one and the same plane energy, matter, and thought.
Benedit’s own Biotrón, an installation developed in collaboration
with biologist José Núñez and first shown at the 1971 Venice Bien-
nale, likewise puts forward a notion of life as an “autopoietic system,”
a concept coined by neuroscientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela only the year before. Just as in Grippo’s installation, here the
relation between the living and the realm of aesthetics is no longer of
the order of imitatio, of the latter representing the former, but rather of
178 ❘ Chapter 3

co-agitatio: of assemblage, circuitry, cross-pollination. The work con-

sisted of a transparent plexiglass and aluminum structure with a tube at
one end, which, perforating the wall of the exhibition building, opened
toward the adjacent gardens of the biennale, and on the other end a
plexiglass-encased honeycomb with four thousand live bees. Inside the
Biotrón an “artificial plain” with “electronic flowers” secreting a sugary
solution at regular intervals provided a source of nutrition. The bees
were free to “decide” whether to venture into the gardens in search
of organic nourishment or to remain inside the artificial structure. Yet,
contrary to predominant readings of the work, Biotrón was not so much
a reflection on how to manage the superseding of nature by technology.
Rather, it turned the bees into the agents of a historical investigation,
into time travelers between successive regimes of technological admin-
istration of the living: the landscape garden and the electrochemical
“artificial plain.” In fact, both are artificial natures, but they function
according to different principles of grafting living organisms into the
labyrinth of manmade forms: a notion of representation as imitatio in
the first case—of reproducing surface appearances into an imago veri-
tatis (the garden as an enhanced and improved image of nature)—and
of functional equivalence in the second (the electrochemical circuit as
a machinic surrogate for metabolic processes occurring in nature). The
work, in short, makes manifest a shift in the very notion of life, from the
world picture of gardened and visual landscapes toward an algorithmic
calculus of machinic layouts and energetic loops and feedbacks.
The living assemblages of Benedit and Grippo are among the earli-
est examples in Latin American art to reflect on, as well as embody, a
transition from what art historian Daniel López del Rincón calls “bio-
thematic” to “biomedial art”94—from a notion of art as the mirror of
(and ideal for) life to an art that, in Brazilian bioartist Eduardo Kac’s
oft-quoted statement, “works in the living.”95 In what has been called
the “age of biocybernetic reproduction,” the phrase “after nature” that
once defined practices of still-life and plein air painting and that under-
wrote Western notions of art since the Renaissance as imitatio vitae,
has taken on a radically new meaning.96 Not only does it call out the
existential chasm that separates us from the notion of nature as the
primary object of perception and target of the mimetic faculty, now that
“hyperobjects such as global warming and nuclear radiation surround
us, not some abstract entity such as Nature or environment or world.”97
To the extent that life itself is always already enmeshed with technology
and artifice in its very materiality and reproductive processes—in its
 The Matter with Images ❘ 179

“plasticity,” to borrow a concept from philosopher Catherine Malabou

that Benedit himself might have applied to his labyrinth-habitats98—it
can also no longer supply the “primary material” for art, be it in the
mode of mimetic imitatio or even (as in kinetic and earth-body art) as
embodied, sensory-motor support of the aesthetic event. Rather, if (our)
living bodies are already techno-organic assemblages—we ourselves
are, literally speaking, no longer “100% organic” but contain in our
bodies numerous artificial ingredients such as plastic fiber—then the
question, as contemporary bio- and ecoartists might put it, is no longer
about whether art and life should become one but how.
There is no longer any life that is not already artificial, and this is also
why Kac’s assertion that “bio art uses the properties of life and its ma-
terials, changes organisms within their own species, or invents life with
new characteristics” is actually less scandalous than it might appear.99
“Bio art is in vivo”100 but is also, more importantly, in vitro: bioart en-
ters the laboratory, the space and time of techno-scientific production
of the living, which it contaminates with the indeterminacy and auto-
reflexivity it carries over from an older, Kantian notion of the aesthetic
as the coming into its own of truth freed from necessity (fundamentally,
from the need for survival). Bioart and ecoart, despite their somewhat
different political and aesthetic genealogies and affiliations—the former
emerging from the cross-pollinations over the final decades of the twen-
tieth century between arts, computing, neuroscience, and genetics, and
the latter from environmentalist and alter-globalization movements—
also share common ground in the way both set in motion a process of
unspecification of the aesthetic. By bringing the artist into the lab or
into the field, by cross-contaminating the instrumental reason of sci-
ence, the political dynamics of community organizing, and the aesthetic
reflexivity of the artwork, bioart and ecoart are two rival but also fre-
quently overlapping modalities of a new ars vitae.
Brazilian ecoartist and critic Louise Ganz has associated these new,
unspecific practices taking place on the uncertain boundary between
art, science, and politics with Theodor Adorno’s notion of the essay
as a form of reflexivity characterized since Michel de Montaigne by
its ability to bypass the emergent division of labor between the arts
and sciences.101 The essay turned on an emergent, modern politics of
form through a mode of supplementary writing, taking hold of some-
thing already written to rearrange its components and make explicit
the modes of mediation previously hidden underneath the protocols of
artistic genres and scientific reasoning. We could conceive of bioart and
180 ❘ Chapter 3

ecoart then as essayistic practices in the age of biocybernetic reproduc-

tion, which take hold of not only expressive languages but also hybrid
materialities—hard, soft, and wetware—to dis- and reassemble partic-
ular modes of capturing, administering, and intervening in the living.
Bioart and ecoart inscribe into the regimes of art, science, and politics
a vector of unspecification, introducing not only an aesthetic mode of
reflexivity alien to the lab’s procedures but also itself subject to muta-
tion once it sheds the artwork’s foundational autonomy and exemption
from instrumentality.
This space-time of generic hybridity turns, literally, into a living envi-
ronment for hybrid organisms. Bioart emerges in the cross-fertilization
between the lab’s protocols of experimental verification and the studio’s
aesthetic self-reflexivity—an encounter that engenders “monstrous” hy-
brids and chimeras such as Kac’s phosphorescent green rabbit, GFP
Bunny (2000), bioart’s scandalous poster child conceived in vitro by
adding a bioluminescent protein found in Northern Pacific jellyfish to
the DNA of an albino rabbit. In Kac’s earlier “telepresence” work, this
dimension of hybridity had still been associated with the interface be-
tween living flesh and computational extensions of the mind, before
gradually moving into the realm of interspecies assemblages. In Tele-
porting an Unknown State (1994–95), for instance, internet users were
invited to live stream light recorded by webcam through a video projec-
tor to a plant seed inside a darkroom, allowing it to photosynthesize and
thus literally transforming the web into “a life-supporting system.”102
With Genesis (1999), Kac advances from physiological engagements
with computing technology to the level of the genome itself. The bib-
lical sentence mandating human mastery over the forms of Creation is
being “translated” here, first into Morse code and subsequently through
a system of “rules of equivalence” devised by the artist, into a sequence
of the four nucleobases—adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and
thymine (T)—which in combination compose the double helix of DNA
molecules. The “artist’s gene” thus generated is subsequently inserted
into E. coli bacteria identified by the addition of a bioluminescent pro-
tein. Exhibited in a petri dish that is also filmed and projected onto a
wall as well as live streamed over the internet, these transgenic bacteria
are also highly photosensitive: they react and mutate when exposed to
ultraviolet light, which visitors must switch on if they want to actually
see this “living scripture.” The irony of Kac’s installation—made mani-
fest by “retranslating” the sentence at the end of each show—is that the
divine mandate will only (potentially) prevail if it is being renounced, if
 The Matter with Images ❘ 181

spectators refrain from taking (visual) possession of the bacteria. Oth-

erwise, Man’s enactment of divine entitlement will trigger a contingent
and unforeseeable process of mutations and transspecies interactions.
In what Kac himself has referred to as an instance of “performa-
tive ethics,” his transgenic artworks dramatize some of the fundamen-
tal aporias of biotechnology, which are normally occluded from view
thanks to the at once ordinary and pervasive presence of transgenics
in our everyday experience.103 In Kac’s own words, “the physical real-
ity of the human body, for everyone, is that you have ten times more
bacterial cells than you have human cells. As a physical mass you are
more bacterial than human . . . So Rimbaud was right. ‘Je suis un au-
tre.’ In reality, we are never alone.”104 At the same time, however—and
this sets Kac’s “biomedial” artworks apart from “biothematic” ones,
which address biotechnological issues from the vantage point of repre-
sentational media that are not in themselves “alive”—the position of a
detached and unimplicated “critical” spectatorship is also immediately
withdrawn here. In Genesis as well as other transgenic artworks such
as the microenvironment The Eighth Day (2000–2001) or Specimen of
Secrecy about Marvelous Discoveries (2006), a series of paintings/bio-
topes based on microbial forms living in a medium of earth, water, and
other materials (figs. 34 and 35), spectatorship always already implies
co-agitatio. By taking the E. coli bacteria as an object of aesthetic appre-

Figs. 34 and 35. Eduardo Kac, Oblivion from the series Specimen of Secrecy
about Marvelous Discoveries, 2006. Living artwork composed of microscopic
organisms, photographed in 2006 and 2010, respectively. Courtesy of the artist.
182 ❘ Chapter 3

ciation, as a visual form submitted to my gaze through reflected light, I

am also contributing to the transformations this object undergoes. Yet,
even by renouncing my spectatorship, by deciding that I will not switch
on the lamp, I won’t necessarily stop transgenesis from happening but
merely slow down the biochemical process. My decision not to interfere
would thus amount to a deliberate act of irresponsibility, one that is un-
cannily similar to my everyday acts of consuming transgenic products.
Kac’s transgenic artworks force us to make explicit our modern-day
Bartleby stance: we would prefer not to know. Transgenic art, as Kac
puts it, can “contribute to reveal the cultural implications of the revo-
lution under way and offer different ways of thinking about and with
biotechnology. Transgenic art is a mode of genetic inscription that is at
once inside and outside the operational realm of molecular biology.”105
Yet this paradoxical interpellation of the spectator as the subject of
an ethical decision also runs the risk—as critical theorist Nicole Ander-
son cautions—of reinstating the same Kantian subject of reason that
transgenic art allegedly seeks to unravel and disseminate into the hy-
brid assemblages in which it is shown to have always been enmeshed.
What if not an autonomous, reasoning spirit present in and unto it-
self reemerges and directs the action through which “I” contribute—or
not—to the bacteria’s mutations or the plant seed’s growth? Bioart, An-
derson argues, “attempts . . . to use the interactivity of the exhibits to
foster affective responses that challenge the normative perception that
humans stand outside of, or apart from, the biological system.”106 Yet
by soliciting spectators’ critical reflection on their own agency, bioart
itself also “perpetuates [not only] a humanist form of agency but, in
turn, a humanist notion of political action and criticism, one that fur-
ther perpetuates the hierarchical opposition between the human and the
animal.”107 Art itself then becomes the Kippfigur—the reversible figure
or point of inflection—which, once invoked, also reinstates the species
order of being. Yet at the same time, only through the critical interrup-
tion of the lab’s routines thanks to the invocation of the aesthetic can
the bioartistic moment of unspecificity become possible.
How can an art that works in the living harness the “living thought”
that extends through the organic assemblages the artwork co-opts as
well as sets in motion?108 How can the coagentiality of nonhuman lives
be accounted for as a form of coauthorship, thus pushing the very no-
tion of aesthetic experience beyond the confines of the human? Where
Kac’s works, for all their self-reflexive irony and provocativeness, nev-
ertheless run the risk of reinstating a demiurgic and human-centered
 The Matter with Images ❘ 183

notion of authorship and authority, other recent bio- and ecoartistic

projects have foregrounded instead those areas that, as living forms,
remain inaccessible or only partially commensurable to human design
and spectatorial experience. Instead, coauthorship is present here not
just on the level of artist-scientist collaborations but also on the one of
“symbiopoietic” chain reactions involving human, organic, and mate-
rial agents in collaborative “speculative fabulations, string figures” and
storyings that amount to a communitary “sowing [of] worlds.”109
Several art actions by Brazilian artist-activist Maria Thereza Alves,
carried out around the same time as Kac’s transgenic artworks, focus on
the dissemination and germination of plants as a chronotope mirroring
yet also preserving a degree of autonomy and exteriority toward human
histories of modernity, coloniality, and diaspora. In Wake (2000) Alves
took earth samples from various construction sites across postreunifica-
tion Berlin, which then were placed in a greenhouse offering optimized
conditions of light, temperature, and humidity for the “dormant seeds”
preserved in the soil to sprout. In parallel, Alves also embarked on an
in-depth archival investigation into Prussian commercial and migratory
history, the botanical traces of which resurfaced in the vegetal remnants
of exilic trajectories from French Huguenot or Eastern European refu-
gees, yet also from the nonhuman historicities and mobilities that ac-
companied these remnants, some interrelated with, some independent
from human migrations. As Alves writes in her project notes, “I see
Wake as a story that we have involved ourselves in simply by walking
around Berlin. Each step links us to mini-stories of a passer-by, or of a
bird flitting from a bush to a rooftop, perhaps on its way to Africa from
Siberia.”110
As she was researching Wake, Alves also initiated a long-term, mul-
timedia project titled Seeds of Change (1999–ongoing). The series—
realized, just as Wake, in consultation with Finnish botanist and
ecologist Heli Jutila—explores the ballast flora of port cities including
Marseilles (1999–2000), Reposaari (2001), Exeter-Topsham (2004),
Liverpool (2004), Dunkirk (2005), Bristol (2007), and, most recently,
New York City (2017). Ballast flora (as Jutila had shown in her 1996
doctoral thesis) is a compendium of plant material, some of which has
sprouted and metamorphosed with local flora, while some has remained
“dormant” in seeds that can remain in latency for decades or even cen-
turies. Ballast is the mud and clay that was being carried from the Amer-
icas and the Caribbean to Africa and Europe (and vice versa) in the
cargo holds of ships transporting slaves and colonial staples across the
184 ❘ Chapter 3

Atlantic. Often, this earthly matter, along with the seeds it comprised,
was being disposed of in the middle of night, on the shores of river
mouths and outside harbor entrances, to avoid paying tax duties. Un-
earthing these violent histories of colonial transplantation from the soil
of port cities and bringing back to life the dormant vegetal archives of
human as well as more-than-human uprootings, Alves’s art also turns
plants into dissident storytellers capable of gathering hybrid commu-
nities around them. The “rescuing” of dormant seeds in each iteration
of Seeds of Change effectively includes reaching out to contemporary
migrant communities who are invited to contribute culinary or phar-
maceutical advice on the uses and perils of germinated plants that are
native to their own countries of origin yet which, at the same time, are
also found to have been long-term coresidents in the very ground of
diasporic destinations.
Colonization, as Alves insists in the notes to her Vera List Prize–
winning Seeds of Change: New York—a Botany of Colonization
(2017), “is built into the very soil of New York”; therefore, “a process
of decolonization must begin in the ground.”111 First in Bristol—where,
together with landscape architect Gitta Gschwendtner, she created a
floating ballast seed garden on a reclaimed river barge—then in New
York City—in a multisite installation at Manhattan’s High Line as well
as the Weeksville Heritage Center and the Red Hook Pioneer Works at
Brooklyn—Alves’s earth-revolving archival work is subsequently turned
into ballast seed gardens designed, planted, and tended to with the help
of local communities. “The gathering force of the project,” as Jill Casid
succinctly puts it, “lies in its rousing of the dormant.”112 It not only
calls on ballast seeds as a counterarchive to chronicle the violent histo-
ries of uprootings and transplantations but also draws on plants’ resil-
ient, worldmaking powers to forge new, future-oriented assemblages.
As Anna Tsing has written, “[a]ssemblages don’t just gather lifeways;
they make them. Thinking through assemblages urges us to ask: how do
gatherings sometimes become ‘happenings,’ that is, greater than the sum
of their parts? . . . Assemblages drag political economy inside them, and
not just for humans.”113
Many recent ecoartistic actions have similarly drawn on the gather-
ing potentials of plants and on a community-driven and nonfinalistic
idea of gardening as “countercolonial landscaping.”114 In Argentina, the
Ala Plástica collective founded by artist Silvina Babich, botanist Rafael
Santos, and legal scholar Alejandro Meitín has over the last twenty-
 The Matter with Images ❘ 185

some years developed a sustained reflection on rivers as ecological and

geopolitical connectors of “bioregions” under threat from environmen-
tal devastation as well as from the social and demographic effects of ex-
tractivism. In one of Ala Plástica’s earliest interventions, Junco/Especies
emergentes (Reed/Emergent species, 1995), designed in collaboration
with environmental scientists as well as local fishing and basketmak-
ing communities, the group created beds for semiaquatic plants (called
“emergent species” because of their capacity to thrive below as well
as above water) near Punta Lara on the River Plate. Because of their
unique, rhizomatic root structure, reeds can bring about sedimentation,
creating an amphibious environment that also supports a host of other
animal and vegetable organisms while also cleansing water of chemical
pollutants. In their work, subsequently expanded into the storytelling
and cognitive mapping-based AA Project (2000–ongoing), Ala Plástica
links “the ‘emergent’ characteristics of aquatic plants producing the
conditions necessary to sustain a diversity of life forms to the ‘emergent
character of creative ideas and practices’ and ‘a corresponding rhizom-
atic expansion of community.’”115 Meanwhile, in Brazil, the group show
Jardinagem: Territorialidade (Gardening: Territoriality [2015]) held in
Curitiba echoed some of Alves’s earlier work in creating an inventory of
herbs growing in urban wastelands (based on an idea by Faetusa Terzelli
and Gabriela Leirias) as well as creating a “Banco de sementes criou-
las” (Creole seed bank) based on the community orchard of the Bairro
Taquara shantytown (the work of Coletivo Municipal), the individual
gardens and orchards of which were also transformed into destinations
of a walking tour for residents and visitors (hosted by Faetusa Terzelli
and Iracema Bernardes). Some of these collectives have made common
cause with anti-GMO groups promoting forms of militant resistance
against agro-pharmaceuticals such as Monsanto’s infamous Roundup
herbicide. These include actions such as the Puesto Amaranto encamp-
ment at Córdoba, Argentina, started in 2013 in protest against the local
factory of transgenic seeds (some species of amaranth weed have proven
to be glyphosate resistant and have been used by anti-GMO activists to
invade transgenic soy plantations, reducing yields by more than half).
Yet whether in openly politicized or more subtle fashion, all these ac-
tions seize on the garden as a modern-colonial apparatus, only to turn it
against the extractive matrix in which it had been inscribed, to instead
draw out the assemblage-gathering, community-forging potential that
had always been latent in practices of sowing, growing, and harvesting.
186 ❘ Chapter 3

Recent biorobotic art, on the other hand, has attempted to close the
gap between bioart’s lab-embedded use of scientific protocols and or-
ganic materials for nonutilitarian purposes and ecoart’s appropriation
or co-optation of botanics and ecology for the purpose of gathering
communities human as well as more-than-human. Art critic Daniel
López del Rincón puts forward the useful distinction between three dif-
ferent attitudes towards the lab: in his terms, between bioart’s use of the
lab as an artist’s studio and ecoart’s deliberate choice of “amateurism
as a rejection of the laboratory,” biorobotic art might be understood
as drawing on the “laboratory as a source of techniques and materi-
als.”116 Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza’s project Plantas nómadas (No-
madic plants, 2010–ongoing), for instance, stems just like Ala Plástica’s
work from a concern with the deleterious impact of human activity
on aquatic environments, but, rather than conceptually and metaphor-
ically, the project literally attempts to counteract the former by forging
an autonomous, machinic species consciousness. The nomadic plant is a
hybrid, mobile robotic system sustaining a species of Gramineae, devel-
oped in collaboration with bioengineer Carlos Godínez and mechanical
electronics specialist Alejandro Rodríguez Ángeles (fig. 36). The bioro-
bot, approximately the size of a cat, is powered by a combination of
photovoltaics and biocombustible energy, sourced from microbiae na-
tive to contaminated water. The robot, then, is also a minimachine for
bioremediation: thanks to a rodlike sensor fitted with a hose, it can de-

Fig. 36. Gilberto Esparza, Planta nómada (Nomadic Plant), 2008–13. Vegetable-
machine hybrid. Photograph by Edi Hirose. Courtesy of the artist.
 The Matter with Images ❘ 187

tect and move toward water sources and load up the cylindrical-shaped
microbial fuel cell inside its body, where, through a process of biodeg-
radation, pollutants are absorbed by the bacteria and transformed into
electrical energy, while the decontaminated water nourishes the plants
and thus contributes to oxygen release. During resting periods, the ro-
bot offsets surplus energy though the emission of tiny, birdlike sounds.
During its existence, the biodegradant body/brain powering the robot’s
movement increasingly acquires and memorizes experience in operat-
ing and fine-tuning its signals to the robotic components of the assem-
blage. Thus, in gradually becoming self-sustainable, Esparza’s hybrid
organisms—as art critic Karla Jasso observes—effectively “acquire a
consciousness both of themselves and of their surroundings and of the
‘well-being’ gained thanks to self-supply.”117
Working in the Netherlands, Brazilian artist Iván Henriques has like-
wise explored the “action potential” of vegetal organisms, a concept
originally forged in the field of neurobiology to describe the principle
enabling transmission of nerve impulses among neurons and other forms
of animal tissue. In a series of “prototypes” collectively titled Plants &
Machines (2011–14), Henriques and his botanical and engineering col-
laborators investigate the possibilities of vegetal-powered autonomous
movement based on the sensory-motor capacities of plants. Jurema
Action Plant (2011), for instance, connects a “hacked wheelchair” to
a Mimosa pudica, also known by its vulgar name “action plant” or
“touch me not,” thanks to its capacity for recoiling from touch and for
reacting to the movement of nearby bodies by capturing and translating
their electromagnetic emissions into an electric signal traveling through
the cells inside the plant. By way of electrodes connected to the plant’s
leaves as well as a signal amplifier, these signals can be registered and,
via a custom-made circuit board (similar to Grippo’s voltmeter wired
into the potatoes’ energetic circuit), transmitted on to the engine pow-
ering the wheelchair, whose response thresholds are set for the plant to
move away whenever an approaching person touches it (fig. 37). Proto-
type for a New Bio-Machine (2012) exchanges the Mimosa pudica—a
plant species with exceptional action potential yet only limited interface
options due to its relatively small leaves—for a large-leafed tropical
Homalomena plant. Although less responsive to environmental stimuli
than the leaves of the Mimosa pudica, the large leaves of the Homalo-
mena allow for bioelectrical energy levels and signal frequencies to be
analyzed over a much greater surface, to be subsequently transmitted to
an electronic plaque operating the wheelchair on which the plant lives.
188 ❘ Chapter 3

Fig. 37. Iván Henriques, Jurema Action Plant, 2011–12. Mixed media. Mimosa
pudica plant, hacked electric wheelchair, customized electronic board, water
reservoir. Verbeke Foundation collection. Courtesy of the artist.

Another “prototype,” Symbiotic Machine (2014), is a solar-powered,

floating kinetic structure that extracts additional energy from the al-
gae it absorbs and crushes into photosynthetic particles, thus also, as it
were, vacuum-cleaning water surfaces and removing the vegetal curtain
that blocks access to light for subaquatic microorganisms, which can
result in a proliferation of harmful toxins.
Henriques’s and Esparza’s mobile plant-machines are, on one level,
just a clever pun on Norbert Wiener’s limited understanding of cyber-
netics as restricted to “control and communication in the animal and
the machine,”118 by making manifest the ways in which plants are just
as complex communicative agents as animals, as well as plugged into
machinic circuits in which they are not merely base material but are
themselves in charge of the control tower. As Emmanuele Coccia has
pointed out, “if the world is a garden, plants aren’t (or are not really
or not just) its content or its inhabitants. They are the gardeners them-
selves. We as all other animals are the object of the gardening action of
plants,”119 insofar as it was only through plants’ machinic (photosyn-
thetic) operations that an oxygen-rich atmosphere sustaining aerobic
life came into being in the first place. Mobility, in other words, has
always been reliant on the active contributions of nonmobile vegetal
 The Matter with Images ❘ 189

machines, and all Esparza’s and Henriques’s biorobotic contraptions

do is turn the tables on an assemblage in which “we” and our vegetal
associates have always been cross-wired: they expose us, as Henriques
puts it in the program notes to his 2016 show Repaisagem, “to the pos-
sibility of thinking nature not as a wild substrate to be returned to its
originality, but as a hybrid environment inhabited by living beings and
machines.”120 Although they may be opening themselves to accusations
of reproducing the technical fix narratives of green capitalism—just as
bioart has incurred the scorn of critics accusing it of mobilizing the
artwork’s indeterminacy for purposes of “airbrushing the ethical image
of biotechnology”121—Henriques’s and Esparza’s biorobotic models, as
T. J. Demos rightly cautions, “given their small scale and isolated oc-
currences, acknowledge the limited effectiveness of their techno-fixes,
yet still try to operate within the world and ameliorate its dysfunctional
conditions.”122
Yet perhaps this difficulty of pinning down what remains properly
artistic, as opposed to “scientific” or “activist,” in an “art after nature,”
also provides a cue to this most recent of environmental turns.123 Since
just as the living matter providing them with their very form of expres-
sion, these current manifestations of bio- and ecoart thrive on a generic
unspecificity that is at once key to their aesthetic power and always at
risk of falling over into any of the fields on the borders of which they set
up shop. Whereas the danger lurking behind the bioartworks of Edu-
ardo Kac is precisely that of relapsing into “art,” thus also reinstating
the subject-object ontologies of Kantian “correlationism”—in Quentin
Meillassoux’s expression124—to therefore demand that “human art . . .
has to actually be a science, part of science, part of cognitively map-
ping . . . the biosphere touched by global warming”125 would be to fall
into the opposite trap. “Becoming science” (or, for that matter, “becom-
ing engineering” or “becoming community politics”) is an option that
Esparza’s, Henriques’s, or Alves’s works at once invoke and resist. Their
symbolic efficacy is predicated on the degree in which they cease to be
easily identifiable as art yet without fully converging with any of the
adjacent fields (science, engineering, horticulture, activism) into which
they venture out. Whereas for Walter Benjamin in his 1935 essay on
the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction, the response to fas-
cism’s aestheticizing of the political could only be the politicizing of art,
in the age of biocybernetic reproduction, relations between art, technol-
ogy, science, and politics appear to be less clear-cut. Rather than fully
“becoming” politics or science, art is now in the business of calling into
190 ❘ Chapter 3

question their boundaries. Perhaps for now we need to settle for unspec-
ificity as a mode of addressing a threshold moment in relations between
life and matter, the very continuity of which appears to be at stake.
Chapter 4

The Afterlives of Landscape

Can art help us survive the end of the world? Absurd as the question
sounds, it may be the most pressing one we in the humanities are facing
today. By “end of the world,” I am referring not only to the breakdown
of geophysiological conditions for human survival as a real historical
prospect but also to the surge of “precarity as an earthwide condition,”
in anthropologist Anna Tsing’s expression, which ensues from the col-
lapse of symbiotic relationships between humans and nonhumans,
which are the driving force of all “world-making projects.”1 End of the
world is the “process of becoming extinction,”2 which is already under
way with the disappearance of planetary biodiversity and of human
linguistic, cultural, and spiritual patrimonies alike. It is a moment of
earthly trauma, when “holobiomes”—the “entire” or “safe and sound
beings” assembled from the “sympoietic” relationships of reciprocity
and care between different kinds of organisms—break apart; the mo-
ment, as Donna Haraway puts it, “when a partner involved critically in
the life of another disappears from the earth.”3 The current, so-called
Sixth Extinction Event—the first to be triggered mainly by anthro-
pogenic action and, according to biologists, probably also the most
quickly accelerating one in planetary history, with species disappearing
at a rate of fifty to five hundred times the estimated “background rate”
of extinctions in the Holocene4—is resulting in a proliferation of sin-
gular lives orphaned from their holobiomes and thus also stripped of
their capacity for establishing meaningful, communicative relationships

191
192 ❘ Chapter 4

with those around them. Earthly trauma thrusts the living remainders
of holobiontic relationships into a space and time of radical solitude
where there is no longer an “around,” a realm of resonance where cries
of despair could be shared and cathected into languages of collective
mourning. The withdrawal of world—or, indeed, the event of becoming
unworld, inmundo—also calls for a new art of survival, one that can
“bring the dead into the present, so as to make more response-able liv-
ing and dying possible in times yet to come.”5
Jean-François Lyotard calls l’immonde (translated as “unclean non-
world”) that which lurks beyond the world rendered as landscape to the
sovereign gaze of a human subject. Yet a landscape, Lyotard writes, is
always already “an excess of presence. My savoir vivre is not enough. A
glimpse of the inhuman, and/or of an unclean nonworld (l’immonde).”6
Excess and lack, Lyotard claims, are simultaneously in play insofar as
the experience of one’s surroundings as landscape “always requires
something that is TOO . . . (if only too little).”7 Experiencing one’s sur-
roundings as landscape, for Lyotard, is the opposite of a sense of place:
“ESTRANGEMENT [dépaysement] would appear to be a precondition
for landscape.”8 Lyotard proposes a paradoxical relation between land-
scape’s worldmaking and its unworlding capacities, in which the very
cultural form that bestowed on the (Western) human subject the power
to command “surrounding” space to its all-encompassing apparatus of
visual capture also displaces this same subject and keeps her from in-
habiting any place whatsoever. Landscape suspends “savoir vivre” be-
cause it has drawn a radical separation between the subject and the
living. It thrusts its beholder into “a TEMPLUM, a neutralized space
time where it is certain that something—but what?—might perhaps
happen.”9 Landscape offers a space of pure presence, a “temporality
outside durée” addressing a gaze similarly removed from history into
the transcendental time of a “founding perception,”10 but only at the
cost of casting the beholder into radical uncertainty about what is to
come from beyond its horizon. The landscape form, then, foreshadows
inmundo—the unworld—not just because its very mode of composition
is based on the inclusive exclusion of history, of the time and space
of productive relations that landscape makes obscene and abject, ex-
pelling them beyond the horizon line while also keeping them within
the picture as a marked absence. More importantly, it also anticipates
the mode of radical estrangement (dépaysement), which—as Bernardo
Canal Feijóo, the Argentine regionalist thinker we studied in chapter 1,
already described in the same terms—becomes the shared yet also un-
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 193

communicable experience of solitary afterlives in the aftermath of des-

paisamiento, of unlandscaping.
In this chapter I want to explore this encroachment of inmundo
onto landscapes that are not so much painterly as aural, haptic, and
mnemonic ones. This turn away from vision and toward sensorial di-
mensions that are more directly connected to bodily rather than just
cognitive experience, I argue, are also part of a process in contemporary
Latin American aesthetic and epistemological production (even though,
as we shall see, this shift was already in evidence from the very outset
of modernity in the region) that reflects and responds to the effects of
despaisamiento driven by the expansion of the extractive frontier. By
using the Spanish equivalent of Lyotard’s term—inmundo—which just
as the French immonde connotes filth and revulsion, I also want to call
attention to the colonial-extractive longues durées that have a habit
of remaining conspicuously absent from French (and European) grand
theory. Perhaps—following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s provocative sugges-
tion more than two decades ago—we should therefore start consider-
ing the latter as a “provincial” thinking in and of the inmundo I am
trying to constellate here, contrasting with the epistemologies implicit
in Latin American (or Global South) aesthetic production that theorize
the latter in its universal, indeed cosmo-logical dimension.11 To fully
grasp this unlandscaping dimension that is always already at the heart
of the landscape form, we also need—to stay in the image—to broaden
the horizons of the European landscape tradition toward the Americas,
and especially toward the circum–South Atlantic, the space of Iberian
colonial expansion from the fourteenth century onward. A colonial-
extractivist matrix first developed here through a series of “world-
ecological revolutions” ensuing from successive cycles of opening and
exhaustion of commodity frontiers.12
Coinciding with the introduction of slavery-based plantation regimes
to Portuguese-occupied Madeira and subsequently Cape Verde and São
Tomé, Ibero-colonial expansion also brought about on the level of plan-
etary imaginaries a key shift in the mundus-immundus tropology the
Renaissance had inherited from early Christianity. For medieval theo-
logians, drawing on St. Augustine, only those renouncing the material
trappings of an unclean (immundus) world (mundus) would be granted
access to God’s kingdom.13 With the advent of colonial-capitalist global-
ization, the valences of this wordplay on the double meaning of mundus
as both noun (“world”) and adjective (“clean”) would undergo an actu-
alization as well as a transformation. On the one hand, colonialism now
194 ❘ Chapter 4

claimed to be cleansing the “new worlds” into which it expanded from

previous, “immund” conviviality between beast-like non-Europeans and
their wilderness habitats by imposing moral order—that is, patriarchal-
extractive “husbandry” of the land and its mineral and organic “flesh.”14
Yet, on the other hand, the Ibero-American sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries also witnessed an emergent critical strand identifying colonial
extraction-accumulation itself with a planetary turn away from virtue
and toward the mundane—a movement, indeed, of “world constitu-
tion through world rejection.”15 These shifting tropologies of the (un)
worldly in the metropolis reflect as well as disavow the very real un-
worldings wrought on Amerindian societies and on Africans and Afro-
descendants in the Plantationocene. What we have started to explore
through the concept of trance also aims to mobilize for a critique of
present discourses of planetary crisis, the embodied, incantatory, and
hallucinatory, responses to Indigenous and Afro-descendant experiences
of afterlife under the sign of a radical destructiveness, after an “end of
the world [that] has already happened—five centuries ago.”16
As the colonial-extractive matrix nears its exhaustion, inmundo now
names both our incapacity of relating to world as place and, at the
same time, the state of unrelatability this very attitude has wrought on
the geos in its planetary dimension. The “immund” in contemporary
art is not limited to the scatological or the abject,17 or only insofar as
these partake of a more general, “mundane” attraction to the fleshly
and the material: to the realm of interminglings and assemblages which
Christian-colonial-capitalist unworldings have for centuries negated,
exploited, and abstracted into exchange value. Only an arts address-
ing the inmundo in its disarrayed resilience, its damaged materiality—
thus the aesthetic as well as political wager of the concept—can help us
turn the afterlives of colonial-extractive unworlding into alliances of
survival.

N oc tu r n a l V oi c e s: So und Mat t e r
a n d A c ou sm at i c Ghost s

La Selva (The forest, 1998), Spanish sound artist Francisco López’s

seventy-minute compilation of “sound environments from a neotropi-
cal rainforest” that he made from field recordings in the homonymous
Costa Rican lowland forest reserve during two successive rainy seasons,
is on one of its many levels a nod to one of the founding texts of acoustic
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 195

ecology: Alexander von Humboldt’s short essay “Das nächtliche Thier-

leben im Urwalde” (The nocturnal life of animals in the jungle). Added
to what was perhaps the German naturalist’s most popular work, An-
sichten der Natur (Views of Nature, 1808), only from its third edition
published in 1849, Humboldt’s essay compels us to join its narrator in
an act of immersion that gradually penetrates and replaces the “noise”
of anonymous animal cries ringing through the forest with a more
structured listening. As we shall see, López’s sound piece, made with
hardly any off-location editing other than the arrangement of individ-
ual fragments into a temporal sequence imitating (in much-condensed
fashion) “a prototypical day cycle of the rainy season beginning and
ending at night,”18 nevertheless also departs radically from Humboldt’s
effort to transcribe the noisy wilderness into an orderly soundscape: an
orchestral score of animal voices cuing in and out at the prompt of the
naturalist-conductor’s wand. Instead—thanks to, crucially, the media-
tion of digital recording technology—López’s soundwork aims to trig-
ger a different kind of “revelation” in the listener: “the unfolding of the
non-representational layers of sonic reality” and thus to force out the
emergence of sound as body, as a mode of objectuality and materiality
in its own right.19
In Humboldt’s essay, the sleepless naturalist bivouacking in the up-
per Orinoco Delta eventually learns, aided as usual by his Indigenous
guides, to break down the noise of the forest into individual sound
patterns associated with different animal species and to recreate their
ebbs and flows in his own narrative tapestry. Or better: Humboldt in-
vites us to read his text as a verbal score, an evocative notation of the
rhythms, pitches, and timbres of animal voices that, just like individual
instruments in an orchestral work, rise above the basso continuo of the
forest’s incessant ground hum. I quote from Elise Otté’s and Henry G.
Bohn’s first English translation published in 1850. “Among the many
voices which resounded together,” writes Humboldt,

the Indians could only recognize those which, after short

pauses, were heard singly. There was the monotonous, plain-
tive cry of the Aluates (howling monkeys), the whining, flute-
like notes of the small sapajous, the grunting murmur of
the striped nocturnal ape (Nyctipithecus trivirgatus, which
I was the first to describe), the fitful roar of the great tiger,
the Cuguar [sic] or maneless American lion, the peccary, the
sloth, and a host of parrots, parraquas (Ortalides), and other
196 ❘ Chapter 4

pheasant-like birds . . . Sometimes the cry of the tiger re-

sounded from the branches of a tree, and was then accom-
panied by the plaintive piping tones of the apes, who were
endeavoring to escape from the unwonted pursuit.20

Humboldt’s account of the “education of his senses”—in Oliver Lu-

brich’s apt expression—also sketches out, and puts into experimental
practice, an alternative project to Views of Nature’s overall, visual-
ekphrastic framework of transcribing life into text.21 Instead, “The
Nocturnal Life of Animals in the Jungle” proposes to zero in on the
sonic manifestations of life’s invisible forces and on their interplay of
mutual affections. The text gradually develops a technique of “close
listening,” which, once established, will also be deployed by Humboldt
on the only seemingly silent diurnal forest:

but if, in this apparent stillness of nature, we listen closely for

the faintest tones, we detect a dull, muffled sound, a buzz-
ing and humming of insects close to the earth, in the lower
strata of the atmosphere. Everything proclaims a world of
active organic forces. In every shrub, in the cracked bark of
trees, in the perforated ground inhabited by hymenopterous
insects, life is everywhere audibly manifest. It is one of the
many voices of nature revealed to the pious and susceptible
spirits of man.22

It is as if the absence, in the nocturnal forest, of visual purchase on

reality as landscape had suddenly alerted Humboldt to something that
had always been copresent in, but also in excess of, the former’s appara-
tus of capture, and which is therefore also in need of a different kind of
mediation to be both sensually and rationally apprehended. As Lubrich
points out, in Humboldt’s account of nightly listening, “Ansichten der
Natur have become Stimmen der Natur—voices of nature—as if Hum-
boldt had spontaneously changed the character of his project. He has
thus learned to convey the character of a place not solely as vision bus
also as a symphony: landscape as soundscape.”23
Of course, we should keep in mind that this symphonic transcription
of the forest soundscape implies not one but two previous instances of
translation. It is not the naturalist but his Indigenous guides who first
single out, and put a name to, the animal sound that is being recognized.
This first name, produced through an act of collective memory making,
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 197

is the native or “vulgar” one that is still relatively close to the sound
source itself, which (as in “parraqua”) it may even mimic through on-
omatopoeia. Humboldt’s original German version of the essay does
something similar in the way it proceeds to transcribe this native term
into a German noun—“aluates” becomes “die Aluaten”—after which,
in parenthesis, are usually added either the German vernacular name or
its Latin taxonomic equivalent. Moreover, each of these double acts of
naming is also accompanied by a short description of the sounds emit-
ted by each of the animals, generally by likening them to musical instru-
ments or vocal timbres. What Humboldt is inventing here is a recording
technology avant la lettre, or perhaps rather avant la machine: a meth-
odology of ekphrastic note taking that approximates in the medium of
writing the capture and classification of sounds that would only become
possible some thirty years later using Thomas Edison’s phonographic
cylinders first patented in 1877.
For “noise” to turn into “voices of nature” revealing themselves to
the “pious and susceptible spirits of man,” it must also undergo a mul-
tistep process of translations and transculturations, first in the field and
then at the desk.24 All these steps are necessary as “nature” must re-
veal itself to the human “spirit,” in equal measure, through feeling and
through reason: hence, the language of classification must never over-
write but merely bestow order on the original, physical sensation of
listening. Humboldt’s point in “The Nocturnal Life of Animals” as well
as in Views of Nature as a whole is twofold. On the one hand, he is re-
flecting about the differences between how nature can be apprehended
visually as landscape or prospect and how its sonic and rhythmic tex-
ture can make manifest to the sensorium the interplay of living forces—
indeed, how it turns the human body into an instrument resonant with
these. Yet on the other hand, framing this discussion of the differences
between visual and aural purchase on one’s surroundings, a more gen-
eral argument arises concerning the relation between language and the
senses—that is, the degree of proximity to and of detachment from the
Naturgefühl or “feeling of nature” as opposed to the latter’s abstraction
and capture by way of taxonomic classification. The wider question
Humboldt is after in “The Nocturnal Life of Animals” is about how
erudite, scientific language can hold on to the felt “liveliness” of natural
elements (“Lebendigkeit des Naturgefühls”) that remains present, he
asserts, in the native languages of the inhabitants of steppes, deserts,
and jungles. Indigenous languages, Humboldt claims, literally bear the
imprint of close, daily contact with nonhuman organisms and materi-
198 ❘ Chapter 4

alities and thus remain concerned with use rather than exchange value,
with the hunter-gatherer’s or herdsman’s need for interspecies channels
of communication rather than the naturalist’s abstract, orderly naming
of living organisms. “Speech acquires life from everything which bears
the true impress of nature,” writes Humboldt, “whether it be by the
definition of sensuous impressions received from the external world, or
by the expression of thoughts and feelings that emanate from our inner
being.”25
But then language itself is in fact a crossroads of “animations,” a
kind of membrane that is permeable from both sides. Language is an
exchange medium between the “impressions” of environmental stimuli
on the one hand and the ideas and feelings emerging from inside the
mind on the other. The trick of naturalist description—not unlike that
of shamanic invocation—is to facilitate this in- and outflow through a
technique of controlled suspension of thought. “That which is written
down on the spot,” Humboldt claims, “or soon after the impression of
the phenomena has been received, may at least proclaim to possess more
freshness (“Lebensfrische”) than what is produced by the recollection of
long past events.”26 The art of writing in the field is to preserve the plas-
ticity of language received from an environment’s native inhabitants.
This requires an exercise of self-limitation on the part of the observer
to maximize the mind’s permeability as a kind of embodied recording
device. Making language amenable to the “impressions” of the location,
the naturalist concludes, “will be the best attained by simplicity in the
narration of whatever we have ourselves observed and experienced, and
by closely examining the locality (“durch die beschränkende Individual-
isierung der Lage”) with which the subject matter is connected.”27
By subsequently moving from these general considerations on writing
in the field to the “sample case” of the nocturnal forest transcribed into
a textured as well as textualized soundscape, Humboldt also appears
to single out sound, rather than vision, as a shortcut from life to lan-
guage. Because language itself is sonic, the insistent humming or stirring
(“Regung”) of the living that, in the final scene of the naturalist pressing
his ear to the bark of a tree, manifests the ever-present interplay of the
great vital forces, also remains materially present in the linguistic sign,
in much more vivid fashion than ocular impressions do in the landscape
view. For Humboldt, then, soundscape has to supplement landscape for
the latter to be able to convey a “living image.” The space and time of
sound complement those of vision because they exceed, rather than co-
incide with, the visual tableau’s scope. Therefore, at night, when vision
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 199

is suspended and the naturalist does not have to busy himself with the
exercise of visual capture and composition, he can at last lend his ear to
the sonic matter around him. The “voices of nature” are the supplement
emerging in the space and time of the suspended image: exactly the po-
sition that “The Nocturnal Life of Animals” occupies within Views of
Nature as a whole.
In fact, Humboldt’s prescient reflections on the translational ethics
and affects of field notes and on the relations between language and the
sonic environment are also no far cry from one of the most influential
discussions on music in Latin America: Mário de Andrade’s Ensaio so-
bre a música brasileira (Essay on Brazilian music), published in 1928 just
before the author’s journey to the Northeast we discussed in chapter 1,
during which he avidly collected and transcribed for piano samples of
popular rhythms such as Alagoan coco and Pernambucan caboclinho.
The piece, written at a time of fervent artistic and cultural debate about
“national expression” triggered by the São Paulo “Modern Arts Week”
of 1922 and the legendary Revista de Antropofagia, published between
1928 and 1929, discusses how a “Brazilian soundscape” that is already
latent in popular forms can be “elevated” to the level of art without
clashing with either the Scylla of ornamental exoticism or the Charyb-
dis of empty formalism. Whereas Humboldt had speculated about the
impact of environmental sound patterns in Indigenous languages, to the
effect that the more-than-human remains indexically as well as sym-
bolically present in these, Andrade sees in the hybridization of musical
forms a direct reflection of the development of the “Brazilian race.” Be-
cause music and dance (discussed in terms of rhythm, melody, instru-
mentation, and voice) are expressive forms that draw on the body as a
performative device and support, they are also immediately connected
to the physiology of the Brazilian people: “A national art,” Andrade as-
serts, “is already being made in the unconscious of the people.”28 Rather
than literature or the visual arts, “Brazilian popular music is the most
complete, the most totally national, the strongest creation as yet of our
race.”29 But this very proximity to the—itself miscegenated—popular
body, Andrade continues, also means that music in Brazil is still a “so-
cial” rather than an “aesthetic” phenomenon: Brazilian music remains
at a “primitive” stage, in a “phase of construction”30 because, to become
available to the erudite composer’s sensibility that will individuate “so-
cial,” collective forms of expression and thus transcend national partic-
ularity into universal meaning, popular forms first need to be patiently
sourced, transcribed, and classified. It is, Andrade suggests, “through
200 ❘ Chapter 4

intelligent observation of the populace and by making use of it, that

artistic music will develop” in Brazil.31 “Artistic music” emerges when
the unconscious, embodied expression of the race—sampled, analyzed,
and archived by folklorists such as Andrade himself—is drawn on by
the inspired, classically trained composer, shorn of any documentary or
representational purpose and serving as base material available just as
any other to the creative impulse: “The artist only has to give to the al-
ready existing elements an erudite transposition that would make pop-
ular music into artistic music, by turning it immediately disinterested.”32
Whereas, throughout his text, Andrade argues against the self-
exoticizing use of Indigenous motives as a shortcut towards national
musical expression—variously snubbing Antônio Carlos Gomes’s Indi-
anist folly Il Guarany, an opera based on José de Alencar’s homonymous
novel, which premiered (with an Italian libretto) at La Scala in Milan in
1870—a composer he frequently singles out is Heitor Villa-Lobos. Al-
though Andrade is more interested in the latter’s inspired combination
of popular syncopated rhythms in pieces such as the diptych for piano
Saudades das selvas brasileiras (Longing for the Brazilian forests, 1927)
than in the personal myth of the composer-adventurer that sprung from
these, he nevertheless sympathizes with Villa-Lobos’s early interest in
ethnomusicological research. Indeed, as early as in 1919, for his collec-
tion of short choral works Canções típicas brasileiras (Typical songs of
Brazil)—the fourth movement of which, the Afro-Brazilian macumba
chant “Xangô,” Andrade discusses at some length—Villa-Lobos also
incorporated field recordings made of Pareci ritual chants by anthro-
pologists Edgar Roquette-Pinto and Elsie Houston in 1912 for the two
opening movements “Môkôcê-cê-máká” and “Nozani-na,” which also
maintain the pentatonic scale of the original Amerindian source. An-
other orchestral piece, Uirapuru: The Enchanted Bird—begun in 1916
but not performed until 1935 when it was incorporated into the bal-
let Amazonas (originally from 1917)—draws on a Pareci myth about
an enchanted Uirapuru, or tropical musician-wren, which Villa-Lobos
claimed to have heard during his own travels through the Amazon in
1910. Here the bird’s call becomes a leitmotif performed by a violino-
phone (a violin mechanically amplified with a metal resonator and a
gramophone horn attached to its body, a contraption sometimes used
in early twentieth-century salon music). Maria Alice Volpe attributes
Villa-Lobos’s Uirapuru theme to the birdsong transcription made by
British botanist Richard Spruce during his 1849–50 expedition to Bra-
zil.33 Villa-Lobos would continue to use Indigenous rhythms, scales, and
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 201

percussive instruments in a range of works evoking the forest landscape,

including Erosão (Origem do Amazonas) (Erosion: Origin of the Am-
azon, 1950) and the orchestral overture Alvorada na floresta tropical
(Dawn in a tropical rainforest, 1953). Previously, in a series of pieces
including New York Skyline Melody (1939) and Melodia da montanha
(Mountain melody, 1942), as well as the sixth symphony Sobre a linha
das montanhas do Brasil (On the outline of the mountains of Brazil,
1944), Villa-Lobos had also been experimenting with the “millimetri-
zation” technique for environmental sonorization invented by Russian
theorist-composer Josef Schillinger, in which the contours of a land-
scape image are condensed into a graph, to be subsequently transcribed
into musical pitches and melodic lines.34 Here the geological morphol-
ogy of the land is not so much evoked (as in Erosão) as “embodied”
in the melody and pace, and in the crescendos and diminuendos of the
orchestral pitch.
Not unlike Humboldt, then, Andrade and Villa-Lobos were looking
to mobilize the indexical as well as the symbolic capacities of sound.
Or, to put it differently, sound for them was both an archive capable of
maintaining present its source or origin (the land, the animal, the native,
the racial unconscious) and a mode of representation, through which
the local and particular can be transposed and restaged in metropoli-
tan or universal forms: the ballet and the symphony are to their field-
recorded source materials what the naturalist’s essay, for Humboldt, is
to the first notes “written on the spot” and still afresh with direct, aural
memories of animal cries. Both, moreover, are underwritten by the same
distinction between the base material of “raw” sonic matter and the “re-
fined” final product, the soundscape. Modern-day acoustic ecology—
inspired initially by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer’s 1969
manifesto “The New Soundscape,” followed by his seminal book The
Tuning of the World (1977)—has attempted to close the gap between
these two modes of transcription (Humboldt’s textual writing out and
Villa-Lobos’s instrumental rescoring of more-than-human sonorities).
Situated ambiguously between sound art and ecological science, acous-
tic ecology has moved on from its earlier focus on isolating and classi-
fying the sound patterns emitted by individual (especially bird) species,
and toward a more holistic attempt at capturing the composite struc-
ture of particular sonic environments or soundscapes. It assumes—in
the words of two prominent contemporary practitioners—“that natural
soundscapes consist of a combination of biophonies and geophonies—
the acoustic examples that typically originate within the landscape . . .
202 ❘ Chapter 4

Biophony and geophony together make up the voice of what remains of

the untrammeled natural world.”35
Note that to recover an “untrammeled natural world,” ecoacoustic
recording and rendering of “natural soundscapes” as advocated here
still requires a subsequent instance of cleansing or filtering: namely,
that of human aural presences, including any sounds that cannot be
attributed to natural organic (“biophonic”) or inorganic (“geophonic”)
sources. Moreover, in its distinction between biophonies and geopho-
nies, soundscape also remains ekphrastically predicated on landscape
and on its distinction between figure and ground, adopted here for the
purpose of rendering the “composite structure” of a particular envi-
ronment. Against such attempts at modeling aural on visual space, the
work of Francisco López has instead sought to mobilize the modernist
French composer Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of acousmatics—“a sound
that is heard without its cause or source being seen”36—to bring about
“a perceptual shifting from recognition and differentiation of sound
sources to the appreciation of the resulting sound matter.”37 Acousmatic
experience—which, López insists, is akin to the way animals in environ-
ments such as rainforests live day-to-day, hearing but not seeing their
conspecifics, predators, or prey—rather than to soundscape’s ekphras-
tic sonic image, “can contribute significantly to . . . ‘blindness’ or pro-
found listening.”38 In contrast with Humboldt and Villa-Lobos but also
with acoustic ecology, in what López calls environmental acousmatics,
“nature is not present as a reference, symbol or nostalgic evocation,
but rather through the sound itself. [His] recordings do not consist of
soundscapes . . . but of sonic milieus.”39 This is because, in La Selva—
but also in the two other pieces released alongside it in the American
Trilogy series, Buildings (New York) (2001) and Wind (Patagonia)
(2007)—“the presence of the noisy milieu/medium is not minimized.
Rather, signal and noise, foreground and background, event and con-
text are presented together, alluding to the notion that what is heard
stems from the combination of sound source and its environment.”40
Listening to La Selva is in many ways an experience surprisingly close
to that of a classical symphony, bringing back to mind Humboldt’s anal-
ogy of the orchestral forest. Beginning with a percussive chatter that
may or may not be the composite sound of cicadas, frogs, and bird cries
(but which also sounds a lot like electronic noise in industrial techno
music), the more than hour-long piece takes us through the acceleran-
dos and rallentandos of multiple animal voices as well as their reverber-
ations and those of nonorganic forces such as rain and thunder through
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 203

the tree canopy and the underbrush. Long periods of relative stillness,
alerting us to the occasional bird or insect sound piercing the low-level
rhythmic tapestry of the cicadas, suddenly give way to the dramatic
crescendo of thunder welling up from a distant murmur to full-blown
banging on the timpani, and of a storm agitating the treetops before
torrential rain hits and literally drowns out all other voices. At different
times of the day—compressed into short, movement-like sequences—a
variety of animal voices or of combinations of these take the lead, from
the stirring up of bird cries and insect sounds as the storm recedes to
the trancelike huffing and howling sounds that may or may not be those
of monkeys. Sometimes, the low buzzing of an insect flying close to
a microphone assumes the role of soloist although, most of the time,
there is no clear distinction between lead and supporting voices in the
intricate call-and-response structure of animal and environment sounds
cuing in and out of the niches left by others. Unlike most ecoacoustic
soundscape recordings, La Selva does not include a glossary of species
for listeners to refer to as they patiently unravel (as Humboldt does in
“The Nocturnal Life of Animals”) the sound tapestry to distinguish and
identify individual threads. Rather, La Selva entices us to take in the
forest as a single, composite, and nonunitary objet sonore (as Schaef-
fer in his writings on musique concrète called the sound that is heard
independent of its originating source and thus allows listeners to focus
exclusively on its inherent sonic characteristics41). In López’s record-
ing, “many ‘natural’ sounds are rendered abstract, their sources elusive:
there are electronic-sounding chirrups and abrasive buzzing of uniden-
tifiable origins. Some sounds move gradually between background and
foreground, while others rapidly appear and disappear.”42
This “formalist” rendering of the forest as corresponsive sonic body
of resonance chimes with anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s notion of
forests as composite, semiotic networks of “living thoughts” where
morphodynamic processes of form-giving play themselves out in inter-
species communications. “The biosocial efficacy of form,” Kohn argues,
“lies . . . in the way it both exceeds and is continuous with its com-
ponent parts. It is continuous in the sense that emergent patterns are
always connected to lower-level energetics and materialities.”43 Form, as
perceived in the rhythm and sound patterns of multispecies or vegetal-
climate interactions in La Selva, is but the semiotic manifestation, as
sign, of energetic and material modes of exchange, at the same time as it
in-forms these: life is always already networked and at once material
and semiotic. Coevolution, of which the forest is the composite expres-
204 ❘ Chapter 4

sion, is “a reciprocal proliferation of regularities or habits among inter-

acting species. The tropical forest amplifies form in myriad directions
thanks to the ways in which its many kinds of selves interrelate.”44
Yet before we hurry to commend López for producing a more truth-
ful representation of this signifying forest than ecoacoustic soundscape
recordings, his own warning against the “illusion of place” and his as-
sertion that “La Selva (the music piece) is not a representation of La
Selva (the reserve in Costa Rica)” should give us pause.45 Although his
own professional background is in entomology and ecology, in La Selva
as well as in other soundworks recorded in tropical rainforests such
as Belle Confusion 966 (1996)—mixing materials sampled in Central
and South America as well as Africa and China—and Untitled 308
(2013)—recorded in Mexico—López has made a point of distinguish-
ing his scientific from his musical work, even as he acknowledges the
former’s influence on the latter. “I consider La Selva to be a piece of
music, in a very strong and profound sense of the word,” he writes in
the liner notes to the album: “I believe in an expansion and transforma-
tion of our concept of music through nature . . . music is an aesthetic
(in its widest sense) perception/conception of sound. It’s our decision—
subjective, intentional, non-universal, not necessarily permanent—what
converts nature sounds into music.”46 Music is in the ear of the listener,
López claims, and it occurs whenever an aesthetic—that is, a purely
sonic, concrete, nonrepresentational—relation to sound as object in and
for itself is being forged. In this sense, recording itself is not only a rep-
resentational but also a presentational, or sound-producing, technology,
insofar as it generates a sound object that is no longer (as is listening in
the field) related to any particular purpose such as seeking shelter from
the advancing storm or the growl of a predator. As López has argued,
“along with the semantic, the symbolic, the iconic . . . , another layer
of musical ‘reality’ sneaked into the sound recordings: the sonic, the
phenomenological, the Schaefferian concrète. That, and not ‘music,’ is
what became materialized for the first time in history. Or, we could say,
music . . . as heard and memorized by machines.”47
Indeed, López provocatively suggests, we might also listen to La Selva
as a concrete jungle, one of aural signals registered and digitalized by
high-sensitivity tech wizardry: as “nature” in the machine age and thus
also as irreducibly entangled with technology. As sound-recording ma-
chines are by definition incapable of perceiving the sound-emitting body,
sound becomes itself the body object, its own materiality coming to the
fore. But let us stay for a moment with the idea of “decision” on the part
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 205

of the listener whether to hear in La Selva this material concreteness of

sound matter or rather the (indexical or metonymic) representation of
“La Selva” the place. If the nature of sound is in the ear of the listener,
this also means that (as Humboldt had already begun to realize) the
sound-image relation always hangs in the balance. It has the character
of a suspended presence. Machines may be capable of what Schaeffer
called a “reduced listening” (López prefers “blind” or “profound” lis-
tening), but for the human listener acousmatic sound also inevitably
calls back one of the formative experiences of subjectivity, the infant’s
aurally continuous perception of the mother who meanwhile moves in
and out of the visual field. This same relation of sound to an image both
remembered and potentially yet to materialize—actively embraced in
Humboldt’s ekphrastic note taking and also in nature-evoking program
music à la Villa-Lobos—is also still at work, I would argue, in the hu-
man listeners of López’s La Selva who have to actively force themselves
to suppress the mental images that inevitably pop up in the echo cham-
ber of blind listening (try for yourself!). It is also, of course, a founding
principle of sound film, the narrative grammar of which is to a great
part built on the on-off relationship between sound and image that elec-
tronic composer and film theorist Michel Chion calls the acousmêtre.
As Chion reminds us, the uncanny nature of acousmatic sound in film
is not so much the absence on screen of an identifiable visual source but
rather the sudden revelation propelled by this sound-image fissure that
all sound is “out of frame.” Because a film’s soundtrack never fully co-
incides with the flow of visual impressions, there is really no such thing
as an “on-screen voice.” Sounds constantly enter and exit the image,
which also means that cinema constantly hovers over what Chion calls
the acousmatic zone: “a place that has no name, but which the cinema
forever brings into play.”48
The acousmatic zone, “neither inside nor outside” the image, and
thus instead “defined as fluctuating, constantly subject to challenge by
what we might see,”49 is therefore also what takes the place writing had
held for Humboldt at the interstice between image and sound, but it
does so in an entirely new fashion. Whereas Humboldt’s project of no-
tation in the field proposed the voluntary suspension of reason as a way
of turning the mind itself into a resonating chamber (a recording device
avant la machine), the cinematic acousmêtre as theorized by Chion trig-
gers an even more radical lapse of selfhood that threatens to dissolve the
spectator-subject as she gives in to its temptation: “Being in the screen
and not, wandering the surface of the screen without entering it, the
206 ❘ Chapter 4

acousmêtre brings disequilibrium and tension. [It] invites the spectator

to go see, and [it] can be an invitation to the loss of the self, to desire
and fascination.”50
I want to conclude this part of the chapter by reconnecting Chion’s
idea of acousmêtre to the question of the presence or absence of the
human in the soundscape, which we briefly touched on above. The way
I see it, the notion of acousmêtre can add some welcome nuance and
purpose to the somewhat stale discussion in ecoacoustics as to whether
anthropogenic sound (such as airplane engines or electric chainsaws)
should be maintained or filtered out from “nature recordings.” Rather,
I suggest, acousmatics might offer us a way of understanding what eco-
logical historian Jason Moore calls the “double interiority” between the
histories of nature and of capitalism on a planetary scale, or between
“capitalism’s internalization of planetary life and processes” on the one
hand and “the biosphere’s internalization of capitalism” on the other.51
To understand this “world-ecological” relation between interdependent,
coconstitutive spheres (or “bundles,” in Moore’s vocabulary), I shall
briefly comment on documentary filmmaker Tatiana Huezo’s ravish-
ingly beautiful as well as intensely moving debut feature El lugar más
pequeño (The smallest place, 2011), in which she revisits the Salvadoran
highland village from which her mother and grandmother had to escape
to Mexico before she was born, in the midst of a genocidal counter-
insurgency war waged by the national army against real or perceived
guerrilla hideouts. In a radical break with the compositional conven-
tions of narrative testimonio and of postdictatorship cinemas of mem-
ory, two modes of remembrance widely practiced across Latin America,
Huezo’s film separates the stories told by survivors on the soundtrack
(who returned to the abandoned village after the end of the civil war)
from a visual sequence dominated instead by tracking shots and close-
ups taken during hikes through the surrounding forest or through the
still half-ruined village of Cinquera where traces of past lives and deaths
abound—sometimes literally in the form of human remains found in the
underbrush or else in the form of treasured belongings, photographs,
and murals recalling loved ones brutally murdered by the military. The
simple but highly efficient principle of separating the narrators’ voices
from the bodies of survivors who appear on screen toward the end,
looking silently at the camera when all stories have been told, gener-
ates, as Kaitlyn Murphy observes, “a sense of haunting and in-between-
ness in the film, resulting in a testimonial space that feels more affective
than transactional, and unlocks the commonly understood relationship
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 207

between testimony and witness.”52 Rather than anchoring the voice in

the survivor’s body (who is simultaneously the guarantor as embodied
evidence of the narrative’s veracity), here it is instead spread out across,
and intermixed with, the aural manifestations of the fields and forest
surrounding the village, including the grunts and clunking bells of cows
driven out in the morning, the cries of birds and the croaking of frogs
in the forest at nightfall, and even the tiny crackling eggshells of chicks
being hatched. Indeed, the human voices themselves, with their unmis-
takably Central American accent, verbal and propositional forms and
their penchant for diminutives, contribute to the impression of a testi-
monial milieu that is aural rather than visual in kind, and where human
and more-than-human lives and deaths respond to and reinforce one
another. In a way that recalls literary classics such as Juan Rulfo’s Pe-
dro Páramo (1955), acousmatic testimony separated from the body and
“reflected back” from the sonic milieu of the forest not only fashions
a dimension of ghostliness onto the voices of the living but also, more
importantly, makes those of the dead matter.
From the opening story of an old woman narrating the survivors’
return to Cinquera, punctuated by bird cries, the song of the cicadas,
and the nightly croaking of frogs as she tells of a ruinous, hellish place
strewn with bones and inhabited only by snakes and bats, the more-
than-human environment is present not only as an aural background
but also as an acousmatic witness in its own right. It “backs” the nar-
ration, yet not in ornamental fashion but as entering in dialogue with it
from other living temporalities that have always overlapped with those
of the human inhabitants of Cinquera (just as the lives of the families
sheltering for months in forest caves before being discovered by the
army had overlapped with those of bats and lizards). The acousmatic
zone, in Huezo’s film, as an area of encounter and exchange between
human and more-than-human becomings, is also where the dead and
disappeared remain present as ghostly matter but matter no less: it forg-
es—as Murphy rightly points out—a time and space between historia
and ambiente (history and environment) which is of an affective rather
than representational kind. More-than-human witnessing is summoned
forth, The Smallest Place suggests, by the historical storytelling of hu-
man witnesses but it also exceeds and complements these through a
mattering of absences that is not representational but rather presen-
tational. Indeed, as we have seen, “The Nocturnal Life of Animals in
the Forest” (or, for that matter, the Dawn in the Rainforest or “Sound
Environments from a Neotropical Rainforest”) are the stuff of music,
208 ❘ Chapter 4

a composite objet sonore—but that does not mean that they cannot
also be (as Romantic composers of program music knew well) a par-
ticular kind of storytelling. Hearing, as cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
pointed out decades ago, is closer to touch than vision, not least because
as listeners we are on the receiving end rather than in charge of the
action: “The sound of rain pelting against leaves, the roll of thunder,
the whistling of wind in tall grass, and the anguished cry excite us to
a degree that visual imagery can seldom match . . . Why is this? Partly,
perhaps, because we cannot close our ears as we can our eyes. We feel
more vulnerable to sound.”53 Unlike visual landscape, which renders
our surroundings into an object at the behest of our gaze—which is thus
always at least potentially an “extractive eye,” to slightly twist Mary
Louise Pratt’s expression—the aural environment undermines this kind
of subjective self-entitlement. We are ultimately not in control of the
sounds that address and enter us, whether we “decide” to hear in them
the music of nature or the ghostly voices of history. As Huezo’s film so
beautifully reveals, the two may not be separate from one another in
the first place, and it is us who they make resonate with their nocturnal
voices, who they turn into their sonic object, making sound matter.

The N ew R egi ona l i sm: R e e nac t men t

a n d the Mo r e - t ha n- H uma n

The year could be 1978 though this is not how time is being measured
in memory and in dreams. Nor is it how the women, men, and children
would have remembered it had they survived that fateful day. Perhaps
for them it would have been the time they had arrived at (or maybe
returned to) the creek, some putting up shelters with palm fronds and
others starting a fire from the embers while the little ones were taking
a nap or playing with the pigs and the monkeys before taking a plunge
into the shallow stream. All we know is that this is how the warrior
remembers it who, meanwhile, gathers his spears and goes out into the
forest to hunt: it is to him that the scene returns, in dreams, for it is he
whom we have seen, just moments before, in black and white and as
an old man, once again piling up palm leaves to rest on before he has a
smoke and lets the mind drift. We know this because in the dream it is
he who arrives at the end of the world where the forest is suddenly cut
off by railway tracks, on the other side of which the trees disappear and
the farmlands of the cattle ranchers begin—the space, too, from where
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 209

the gunmen have departed who at this very moment are setting the
shelters on fire and shooting at random into the bush as they advance,
leaving behind, when Carapiru finally catches up with his people (that’s
his name, as we later find out), only a newborn baby who will die soon
after. Serras da desordem (The hills of disorder, 2006), the late Andrea
Tonacci’s last feature release, bar the compilation film made together
with Cristina Amaral and Patrícia Mourão, Já visto jamais visto (Seen
once seen never, 2013), is a story about the afterlife and the end of the
world, which, as a radical discontinuity first in space and then in time,
is present right from the very beginning. The cruel paradox here is that
Carapiru survives the massacre of a community that had already been
one of survivors even before then, holding on to life in the forest, even as
the forest had come to an end and ceased to be the “world.” Survival for
Carapiru and for the baby alike, only for a shorter or longer period, is
to live on after the world has ended. To survive is to turn into the excess
or into the remainder of absent community, to inhabit “the rubble of
broken symbionts,” of human as well as more-than-human togetherness
and community.54 Survival is the becoming extinction in an unworlded
space and time where world depends—as the following sequence of su-
perimposed footage of Carapiru makes clear, who is running down a
dirt road as if only partly (or ghostly) present there—on the survivor’s
constant effort of keeping together the shards and fragments of material
and spiritual surroundings always on the verge of fading into nothing-
ness (fig. 38). Survival in the inmundo means to reenact worldings from
what remains after the world has come to an end.
No wonder then that Tonacci’s film deploys reenactment in what
could be considered a docufiction of Carapiru’s life story on the basis
of a constant oscillation between modes of narrative. On the one hand,
passages in black and white show Carapiru and the villagers and FUNAI
officers (Brazil’s Indian Affairs Agency) reperforming key moments from
the past when, after ten years of roaming the backwoods of northern
Brazil in solitude, they had offered Carapiru shelter and eventually re-
united him with other Awá-Guajá survivors of subsequent massacres
and epidemics. On the other, sequences in color usually provide a “docu-
mentary” outer frame where, as in a Brechtian alienation effect, the “ac-
tors” let down their guard and comment on the original story and their
emotions on reencountering Carapiru more than two decades later. Yet,
as the opening sequence of Indigenous community life (in color) remem-
bered from the (black-and-white) vantage point of the elderly Carapiru
indicates, it is actually far from clear what is fact and what is fiction,
210 ❘ Chapter 4

Fig. 38. Carapiru running. Film still from Andrea Tonacci, Serras da
desordem (The hills of disorder), 2006, 135 min.

where experience ends and reenactment begins, with the predominant

feeling being that of “a permanent ambiguity between the documenta-
tion of the present and the reconstruction of the past, and with a sugges-
tive contamination between fiction and documentary ensuing from the
duplication of temporalities.”55 This cross-contamination stems not only
from Tonacci’s editing but also crucially from our incapacity of telling
performance from experience in Carapiru’s engagements with the cam-
era. Tonacci himself, when asked about the nature of Carapiru’s collab-
oration in Serras da desordem, has insisted that, while always responsive
to his own (or rather his interpreters’) instructions during the shooting,
Carapiru had seen little sense in replaying a story that concerned him
alone and performed his part in the film “only as presence.”56 But then,
as Ivone Margulies has asked, “if testimony is based on the transmission
of a person’s past experience, what happens once the film’s central char-
acter’s consciousness is inaccessible, when Carapiru’s memory and sense
of self remain opaque throughout the film? What then is the function of
the reenacted presence if he cannot speak or be understood?”57
Similar to the effect of disembodied, acousmatic testimonial voices
in Huezo’s The Smallest Place, then, in Serras da desordem the mute,
speechless bodily presence of Carapiru denies us access to individual
and collective experience, the traces of which we are instead urged to
seek out in his physical interactions with the material world that sur-
rounds him. Environmental witnessing comes about here as an effect of
suspended testimony. It is called on by withdrawing not just speech but
also the way in which narrative cinema usually articulates speech, face,
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 211

and body in relation to the setting as a way of constructing (and sutur-

ing the spectator’s gaze into) diegetic space and time. Instead, the silent,
impermeable body of Tonacci’s protagonist appearing in front of cam-
era “only as presence” requires us to pay intense heed to his interactions
with the physical environment—usually depicted in medium-length
shots as if to make sure that nothing escapes our attention—insofar as
animals, objects, and materialities often take the place here of the human
addressee and physical interactions stand in for verbal dialogue. The ef-
fect of this minimal performance, of this enigmatic self-reenactment by
an Indigenous nonprofessional actor replaying what may or may not be
his own everyday experience, is the transformation of what we initially
take to be a background setting into a kind of surrogate character: an
actor-witness. In what I call the “new regionalism” in Latin American
contemporary cinema, boundaries between action and setting as well as
between the human and the more-than-human become blurred, similar
to but also different from the way they had already come under chal-
lenge in the literary regionalism of the previous century that we studied
in chapter 1.
The new regionalism’s challenge to figure-ground relations I have in
mind here should not be confused with the Deleuzian opposition be-
tween action-image and time-image, even though I draw on its critique
of narrative suture in the name of place to think about uprootedness
and dislocation, about unworlding and the sympoietics of survival in
the inmundo. Cinematic landscape has been theorized as interrupting
the narrative topography of what Tom Conley calls a “cartographic cin-
ema,” one that “plots and colonizes the imagination of its spectators . . .
A film, like a topographic projection, can be understood as an image
that locates and patterns the imagination of its spectators.”58 Similar to
the way in which—in Laura Mulvey’s classic analysis—the star’s iconic
body and the visual pleasure it unleashes interrupt (yet thereby also
underwrite) diegetic continuity, landscape emerges when the continuity
of narrative space is being challenged by the breaking forth of place as
material presence and as real duration that exceed the diegetic chrono-
tope.59 As film scholar Martin Lefebvre suggests, landscape flickers in
the instant audiences switch from “narrative” to “spectacular” viewing,
tearing through cartographic cinema’s narrative mapping to instead
zero in on the nonhuman, organic, or material presences on screen:

[Landscape] is subjected simultaneously to the temporality

of the cinematographic medium and to that of the specta-
212 ❘ Chapter 4

tor’s gaze, which is given to shifting from the narrative to the

spectacular mode and back again from one moment to the
next. This doubled temporal existence results in the precar-
iousness of a landscape that more or less vanishes when the
narrative mode takes over and the cinematic space resumes
its narrative function as setting.60

Now let us remember here that landscape—even as it interrupts the

setting’s subordination to the diegetic chronotope—stands itself in an
already precarious relation to place, which is simultaneously one of ex-
cess and one of lack. This precariousness of the landscape in cinema
ensues not just from its always already imminent relapse into the con-
tinuity of diegetic form but also from its no less imminent withdrawal
prompted by, as Lyotard puts it, the “estrangement that landscape pro-
cures” and which “is absolute, it is the implosion of forms themselves,
and forms are mind.”61 The landscape form is perched not just on the
edge of narrative space but also, more importantly, on the verge of a
breakdown in mind-world relations, in the imminence of unworlding
or of the inmundo; this fragile and threatening (indeed “monstrous”)
limit of the world and the human alike is, I suggest, where the new re-
gionalism takes us.
My notion of the new regionalism is less concerned with the polit-
ical geography of province versus capital, with the emergence of new
filmmaking hotspots such as Recife and Contagem in Brazil, or Cór-
doba and San Luis in Argentina, or even with the conflicts and crisis
of rural or Indigenous life as a narrative theme. Even though many of
these elements are present in the films I discuss here, my notion of the
new regionalism attempts to highlight instead the continuities with (or
reimaginings of) literary regionalism’s formal, expressive challenge to
the active exclusion of more-than-human agencies by the narrative ap-
paratuses of modernity. Just as. in The Smallest Place, the acousmatic
weft of disembodied voices emerging from the forest also redeployed
in novel and unexpected fashion Juan Rulfo’s narrative construction of
the rural backwater of Comala in Pedro Páramo, the new regionalism
I have in mind here takes up again, in the medium of film, the ways in
which, in the earlier literary regionalism, the more-than-human back-
ground setting intrudes into human foreground action. And just as
it had in literary regionalism, this intrusion of the more-than-human
also inscribes the impact of an escalating cycle of neoextractivism in
Latin America on the level of film form rather than as an object of
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 213

representation—sometimes more directly and sometimes more as an ef-

fect of “precarity as an earthwide condition” ushered in by late-liberal
neoextractivism.62
The ways in which, in the new regionalism, more-than-human kinds
of actor-witness encroach on and permeate cinematic storytelling, per-
formance, and actorship do not just interrupt diegetic continuity by
prompting spectatorial engagement with place, as Lefebvre claims the
landscape does: they also actively call into question whose, and which,
stories are being told and for whom. In Huezo’s and Tonacci’s films as
well as in a host of other recent work from Latin America, reenactment
and acousmatic sound-image relations, as well as the foregrounding of
haptic interactions among bodies, things, and materialities, are key el-
ements of a formal and expressive arsenal that speaks to the forging of
new alliances under conditions of precarious survival. As anthropolo-
gist Anna Tsing has argued, “precarity is a state of acknowledgment of
our vulnerability to others . . . If survival always involves others, it is
also necessarily subject to the indeterminacy of self-and-other transfor-
mations. We change through our collaborations both within and across
species.”63 The new regionalism is thus a form of storytelling and of
performing the adventures of making and unmaking alliances of sur-
vival through self-and-other transformations in the inmundo, forcing
us to engage with the unexpected, “monstrous” liveliness proper to the
“abandoned asset fields” of neoliberal extractivism as they “yield new
multispecies and multicultural life.”64
Take the two most recent films by Chilean documentary filmmakers
Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff, Surire (2015) and Los Reyes (2019).
Both are named after their location that, so to speak, becomes the story
or is all there is left to tell: a salt lake in the high Andes on the border
between Chile and Bolivia in Surire and a skater park on the outskirts
of Santiago in Los Reyes. But this becoming story of the location in
both films is also the result not of the empowerment of place through
the prevalence of spectacular over narrative viewing but, rather, of the
crisis of place, which suspends the very opposition between narrative
and spectacle. As a result, animals, things, and materialities become
themselves agential and turn into characters in their own right. The
two signature shots of the documentary duo best known for their 2011
feature The Death of Pinochet are on frequent display in both films,
often to the point of eliminating all others: the extreme close-up, shot
with a microlens that focuses in detail on the pores of skin, the lice in-
festing an animal’s fur or the bubbles emerging from a mineral source
214 ❘ Chapter 4

in the desert, and the wide panoramic shot, often in long, still frames in
which, literally, we lose sight of things and people in the sheer vastness
of city and countryside. There is in both films a difficulty both for those
in front of camera and for us spectators as we face the screen to inhabit
and make sense of the middle ground, which is where classic, narrative
cinema had placed its action-image. This vacating of the scene of action
comes about as the effect of a clash between spaces and times that are
simultaneously too large and too small to fit into the action-image’s
chronotope. The action-image was made to fit, as we begin to under-
stand some way into both films, an exclusively human affair when the
story (if indeed there is one) would also have to include flies, tectonic
plates, global trade networks, donkeys, and the devil. More explicitly in
Los Reyes and in more subtle fashion in Surire, Perut and Osnovikoff
challenge us to follow the story even when the lead role is passed on
from humans to dogs, mountains, and minerals.
In Surire the alternation between panoramic shots and extreme close-
ups, usually held for long periods to allow us to perceive the beings
and elements that move in the midst of an intense quietness, gradu-
ally reveals the eponymous Andean salt flat to be a space in which two
temporalities violently intersect and clash: the pastoral time of Aymara
llama herding that over centuries has accommodated itself to and thus
also coproduced this austere environment, and the time of late-liberal
resource extraction in the form of lithium mining under the salt surface,
for export to East Asian factories where it will be transformed into
mobile phones to eventually be reimported to Chile at profit. The use
of a telescopic angle lens is highly effective here in the way it flattens
the depth of field when shooting the vast salt plain from a distance,
bringing llamas, rocks, and native herdsmen into close proximity with
the mining trucks incessantly crossing the background of the image. In
a particularly impressive shot, a flock of flamingos standing in the shal-
low water gradually moves out of focus as the wide-angle lens zeroes
in on the source of what had previously appeared to be acousmatic
noise: the long line of trucks in the distance, exceeding the limits of the
image at both ends, as they queue at the border post. These shots, for
all their apparent simplicity and stillness, are highly analytical. They
perform, so to speak, a political economy—or perhaps we should rather
say a historical ecology—of late-liberal primitive accumulation in the
form of what anthropologist Gastón Gordillo, drawing on the work
of David Harvey and Ann Stoler, calls “destructive production.” What
we see in the coincidence and clash of spaces and times on screen is a
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 215

sample case of capitalism’s creation of “vast amounts of wealth, objects,

and places . . . through what Stoler calls a ruination that ‘lays waste to
certain peoples, relations, and things.’” This destruction of space by
way of its transformation into a zone of sacrifice, Gordillo concludes,
“disintegrates not just matter but the conditions of sociality that define
a particular spatial node.”65
The extreme close-up, on the other hand, is where the effects of
such macroecological processes of disintegration make themselves felt—
literally speaking, as it is in the pores and blisters of people’s skin (af-
fected by the toxins seeping into the soil as well as the extreme dryness
of the climate) and the disintegrating fabric of wool garments and
straw roofs that these larger processes become embodied. It is where
extraction matters. The scene of action—the middle ground, the space
of interpersonal (“social”) relations—is being vacated, or rather is pres-
ent only in the form of an ellipsis, because what matters is what goes on
in the panoramic long shot and in its microscopic, literally molecular
effects, both of which are similarly out of reach for human action and
its cinematic grammar, the shot/reverse shot. If the old Aymara couple—
the last, it seems, not to have abandoned the plain—feels stripped of
all force by the work of the devil (as the old woman mutters while dis-
emboweling a young llama), this is effectively what Surire is all about:
“the main measure of [productive destruction],” as Gordillo says, “is
its impact on human bodies and practices as well as all forms of life.”66
The world ecology of late liberalism, as Jason Moore calls the “real
bundle of human and extrahuman natures” emerging at the juncture of
“capital, power and nature,”67 ushers in “precarity as an earthwide con-
dition.”68 Yet the ways in which this condition makes itself felt as well as
the forms of togetherness (of survival alliances) that it ushers in, and the
modes of aesthetic expression these call forth, vary from one instance of
destructive production to the next. Such is the wager of Perut and Osno-
vikoff’s Los Reyes, which takes Surire’s arsenal of documentary expres-
sion to a space that could hardly be more different: a skating park in a
lower middle-class neighborhood of the capital Santiago. Once again,
the filmmakers decide to take their leave from human interaction, in this
case from the youths hanging out at the park to play, talk, and flirt—or
better, they remain present only through their conversations providing
a constant aural background to the on-screen story the protagonists of
which are instead the park’s two resident dogs, Football and Chola. As
so many of Santiago’s sizable population of quiltros (street dogs), the
two playmates (a grizzly old male and his much younger, pitch-black
216 ❘ Chapter 4

female companion) survive on the residues of cheap street food as well

as occasional offerings of animal foodstuffs from park visitors and the
youths they spend their days with (one of Chola’s favorite pastimes is to
drop and catch an old rubber ball from the asphalt trough of the skating
rink). By following the dogs through the seasons and in their day-to-day
interactions with the skaters as well as with domestic dogs being taken
for their daily walk or with the donkeys pulling a ragpicker’s cart, Perut
and Osnovikoff chronicle life on the urban margins as, once again, an
extended event of alliance making, of assemblage, between multispecies
bodies and materialities. What the extreme close-up reveals are the bac-
terial and metabolic effects of precarious living, as Football (so named
by the filmmakers for his fondness for an old, airless leather ball) grad-
ually succumbs to illness and old age, his fur becoming infested with
sores full of lice and flies.
Its counterpart, the panoramic long shot of the illuminated skat-
ing rink at night, an island of light in the darkened neighborhood far
away from the luminous clusters of the city center and the motorways
in the distance, provides viewers with a macroeconomic (or an urban-
ecological) framework in which to situate these, literally, microhistories.
But differently from Surire, the space and time of human, social inter-
actions are not so much absent here as only acousmatically present,
in much the same fashion as nonhuman life usually is in “action mov-
ies” (think of the omnipresent song of the cicadas in any self-respecting
Western). Los Reyes narrates nothing less than an urban ecology, in-
cluding (as background noise) the adventures and misfortunes of young
marginals and castaways whose experience of precarity is, in the end,
not so different from that of their nonhuman neighbors with whom
they form (as does the film by editing together their sounds and images)
an assemblage, a “real bundle of human and extra-human natures.”69
In one way or another, the films I have been analyzing all appear to be
set in times and spaces marked by radical destruction and unworlding—
sometimes violent and sudden, as in Serras da desordem, and some-
times everyday and inconspicuous as in Los Reyes—to the effect that
their “adventure,” the only one there is left, tells of the forms of com-
munity and alliance that nevertheless continue to reemerge from the
rubble. Yet these resilient modes of togetherness often lack a common
language, whether they are among humans or across species boundar-
ies, and therefore also resort to other kinds of affective transmission
such as touch. Either because speech is altogether absent (as in Tonacci)
or because it turns into disembodied, acousmatic background noise (as
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 217

in Perut and Osnovikoff), in Latin American neoregionalist cinema we

find ourselves confronted with an aphasic unworld (inmundo) in which
all characters experience infancy as a shared condition, whether they
are children or grown-ups, humans or animals. Yet theirs is not the
child’s point of view as sustaining a “pure optical and sound situation
which takes the place of faltering sensory-motor situations,” as Gilles
Deleuze famously analyzed the role of the child actor in Italian postwar
neorealism, whose passive gaze offered access to the real itself beyond
the action-image’s diegetic suture.70 Instead, we are closer to Giorgio
Agamben’s idea of infancy as suspended communication, not merely
“something which chronologically precedes language and which, at a
certain point, ceases to exist in order to spill into speech” but a dimen-
sion that “coexists in its origins with language—indeed, it is itself con-
stituted through the appropriation of it by language in each instance to
produce the individual as subject.”71
Infancy, unlike the child’s gaze with which it can sometimes coincide,
does not refer here to unmediated access to “real experience.” Instead,
it describes a relation with the world as inmundo, as no longer or not
yet accessible to verbal communication and thus also no longer to be
made sense of in terms of subject-object, foreground-background re-
lations. Deleuze referred to this mode of filmmaking as “naturalism”
or the impulse-image, one that grants access to “originary worlds”
recognizable by their “formless character”: “It is a pure background, or
rather a without-background, composed of unformed matter, sketches
or fragments . . . which do not even refer to constituted subjects. Here
the characters are like animals . . . They are human animals. And this
indeed is the impulse: the energy which seizes fragments in the originary
world.”72
I am also thinking here, in the realm of narrative, of a take from the
beginning of Gabriel Mascaro’s Boi Neón (Neon Bull, 2015) where we
see the cowherd Iremar (Juliano Cazarré) scavenging a muddy plain
where the leftovers from a vaquejada—a Brazilian rodeo—have been
thrown out (fig. 39). Eventually Iremar comes across a heap of man-
nequins’ body parts—a torso, a pair of legs, an arm, finally a head—
which he picks up to (as we find out further along in the film) add to his
back-of-a-van sewing workshop where, using pieces of fabric likewise
picked up from the rubbish and a colleague’s used copy of a porn mag
as a design template, he assembles costumes (fantasias in Portuguese)
for Galega (Maeve Jinkins), the owner-driver of the truck transporting
a motley bunch of farmhands and oxen from one rodeo festival to the
218 ❘ Chapter 4

Fig. 39. Iremar (Juliano Cazarré) sifting through the leftovers from the vaque-
jada (Brazilian rodeo). Film still from Gabriel Mascaro, Boi Neón (Neon Bull)
2015, 101 min.

next. Galega, in her spare time when she is not cooking for the crew or
looking after her young daughter Cacá, moonlights as a go-go dancer,
dressing up in a pair of boots ending in horse hoofs and wearing an
eerily realistic horse mask on her head ending in a blond mane not un-
like her own. In a fashion almost too literal to be true, the body offering
itself to our gaze and that of the cowboy audience in the film is that of
a horse-woman, a she-mare—the centauresque opposite and mirror im-
age of “Lady Di,” the prize mare who is auctioned off at the same festi-
val to turquoise stage lighting and cheesy, romantic background music,
having been coiffed for the occasion by similarly blond-maned horse
hairdresser Valquíria (Abigail Pereira).
The ruinous, apocalyptic universe of landscapes devastated by strip
mining and monocrop agro-industries through which Boi Neón’s small
cast of characters (human and animal) navigate has turned its back on
the social and political geographies of the nation prevalent in previous
instances of Brazilian Cinema Novo. Here these only appear as vestiges
and remainders, as in the rocks painted with ocean waves amid the
dusty plain, promoting a nearby beachwear outlet—all that is left now
of popular mystic Antônio Conselheiro's prophecy that the "Desert will
turn into the Sea and the Sea into the Desert," revisited in Glauber Ro-
cha's 1964 landmark film Deus e o Diabo na Terra to Sol (Black God,
White Devil). Filmic space is “off the map” and can no longer be placed
in relation to the cartographies of the nation and its narratives, though
vestiges of these abound—not least in the spectacle of the cattle rodeos
to which the characters travel, full of glitzy evocations of cowboy man-
liness and of a bygone, rural golden age that is constantly belied by the
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 219

dirty, unheroic backstage labor of cleaning, feeding, and preparing the

oxen for the show. Men, women, and beasts live in intimate, even erotic
closeness with one another because they also share the earthwide con-
dition of precarity: in one sequence, Iremar and other cowherds hose
off cows and horses outside the stable before they themselves shower
inside; in another, Galega and the cowherd Júnior make love by a cor-
ral, next to the oxen lining up by the water trough. The “animalization”
attributed to cinematic naturalism by Deleuze, which the film’s charac-
ters experience as a day-to-day proximity and even an interchange of
features with a host of animal bodies, imposes on Mascaro’s film a syn-
copated rhythm of languishing takes interrupted by sudden discharges,
a temporality governed not by a relation between the verbal sign and
its confirmation by the sound image as in human-centered narrative
cinema. The characters are indeed “like animals” (when they are not in
effect animals) because their very language has ceased to be altogether
human and opens toward other species, as in the huffing and grunting
sounds the vaqueiros (cowboys) make to chase the cattle in and out of
the corral. It is a language that relapses into the body and toward the
dimension of haptic, physical encounters, dragging the camera along
with it. In neoregionalist cinema, the making of the human subject in
and through language, which in narrative cinema had also provided the
gaze with orientation inside the image in terms of distinguishing fore-
ground action from background context, is always at least potentially
suspended through this brutalization of speech in which the body is
becoming infans and the human makes way for the “human animal.”
La mujer de los perros (Dog Lady, 2015) by Verónica Llinás and
Laura Citarella offers a fascinating counterpoint to Boi Neón but also
to Serras da desordem, insofar as it foregrounds—as does Los Reyes in
the register of documentary—the sympoietic nature of the interspecies
intimacies that arise in the inmundo as alliances of survival. In the film,
Llinás plays a homeless woman living on the outer margins of Greater
Buenos Aires in conditions of extreme precarity with the pack of dogs
she has rescued from abandonment. Even more than in Boi Neón—
where constant physical closeness had likewise incited forms of ten-
derness and reciprocity across species boundaries—the human-animal
relation in Dog Lady comes across as a form of mutual care (fig. 40). The
film portrays an economy of affects in which all partners have an equal
stake: the woman shares with the dogs the food leftovers she scavenges
and the water she collects in buckets and barrels around her makeshift
shed, while the dogs help her hunt nutrias and foil in the meadows
220 ❘ Chapter 4

Fig. 40. The woman (Verónica Llinás) and her dogs providing shelter for one
another. Film still from Laura Citarella/Verónica Llinás, La mujer de los perros
(Dog Lady) 2015, 98 min.

nearby, as well as providing warmth and protection to the woman and

each other through the cold and rainy seasons. Indeed, we could think
of the film’s woman-dogs assemblage as a holobiont or “safe and sound
being,” a term Donna Haraway borrows from evolutionary biologist
Lynn Margulis. Rather than, as biologists had traditionally held, an eco-
nomic relation of mutual benefits—a zero-sum game—we should think
of holobionts as primarily an affective constellation, Haraway suggests.
The idea of holobiont, she claims, “does not designate host + symbionts
because all the players are symbionts to each other, in diverse kinds of
relationalities and with varying degrees of openness to attachments and
assemblages with other holobionts.”73
Haraway’s notion is intriguing since Llinás and Citarella’s film
seems to be oscillating between this sympoietic notion of radical
horizontality—present for instance in a sequence in which the woman
falls ill and is being cared for by the dogs who take turns at her bedside—
and another more “vertical” understanding of the same relationship, in
which mutual care for each other maintains woman and dogs in their
places. In this second reading, it is the animals’ gaze, with its charge of
responsibility and confidence, that helps the woman hold on to her hu-
manness, forcing her to maintain a rigorous discipline of self-care even
in the most adverse of circumstances, always remaining busy repairing
and safeguarding her little shelter against the hazards of the changing
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 221

seasons. The animal gaze, paradoxically, also humanizes the woman,

countering and unmaking the adverse effect of her animalization by the
youths by the water fountain or the health workers at a medical office
where the woman checks in on one of her visits to town, all of whom
reduce her to the condition of an excedent, monstrous, abjected life—
“una vieja bruja” (an old witch). In return, the woman also imposes
order on the pack and keeps individual members out of harm’s way—as
when, in a particularly moving sequence, she prepares a makeshift set
of leashes to tie up her pack and sits by an old, abandoned dog she finds
agonizing near the edge of the wood.
Dog Lady also ties the question of infancy and of more-than-human
alliances of survival back to the one of reenacted experience we consid-
ered at the outset of this section. In a way that is not altogether unlike
the relationship between Carapiru and the Bahian villagers in Serras
da desordem, the gestures of trust and affection between the woman
and her dogs betraying a relation of intimacy is playing out in front
of a camera a sympoiesis based on real experience. Just as, years be-
fore Tonacci made his film, the solitary Awá-Guajá warrior roaming the
backlands had in fact been adopted into the village community (even
without being able to “understand” each other’s language), the canine
characters of Dog Lady follow the lead actress around and respond to
her and to each other’s gestures because they are the dogs that Verónica
Llinás, the codirector/actress, picked up from animal shelters. I am not,
of course, attempting to equate Carapiru and the pack of dogs—rather,
what I am after is a dimension of indeterminacy that is common to
many of the films discussed here, where “real life” and its “reenactment”
overlap yet also crucially differ from one another. Thus, the dogs in Dog
Lady are certainly Verónica’s animal companions yet are also those of
the dog lady, the character she plays in the film. The dogs enter into the
game their “lady” plays, perhaps—although who can be sure?—without
fully understanding its rules. The dogs’ actorship in Dog Lady (and
also in Los Reyes) is an act of faith, a display of trust—yet it is also a
game—an act of “playing,” and of playing along to the actress’s act as
she “gets into character” and of keeping her company as she inhabits
the wastelands and brownfields the film chooses as settings. And it is,
we can imagine, precisely the renouncement of speech on behalf of the
human symbiont that during the filming would have been the cue for
the dogs to follow her into the world of fiction, of playacting. By with-
holding her voice—the same which, we can assume, would have been
“calling by their names” the dogs in a context of everyday conviviality,
222 ❘ Chapter 4

placing them in the territorial and species-distinctive order that in the

film is restricted to the domestic (acousmatic) dogs barking from the
other side of a garden fence—Llinás also grants her dogs the freedom
to roam the space of fiction on their own terms and to respond to her
gestures “in character” in ways that may or may not be those of real
life. Indeed, gesture and play turn out to be in the end the “common
form”—to use Gabriel Giorgi’s expression—humans as well as nonhu-
mans have recourse to imagine a becoming with, a mode of community
as survival alliance.74 Sympoiesis is a form of reenactment of commu-
nity that playfully invents new functions and assemblages for modes of
expression that have lost their communicative meanings. But it is also
a form of embodied storytelling—of making history extend beyond the
human.

Fa llin g Sk i e s: E x t r ac t i v i sm, Me m o ry, an d M at t e r

The forest—uhiri—says the shaman, does not grow for no reason. It is

where, at the beginning of time after the old sky Hutukara fell and its
flesh and skin became the earth on which we now live, Omama placed
në rope, the value or principle of all that grows, whose image has danced
by the Yanomami’s side ever since, accompanied by her noisy troop of
bird xapiri, the animal ancestor spirits that announce her coming. At the
beginning, when the forest was still young, there were only humans on
the new earth but eventually many of them would turn into peccaries,
deer, agoutis, and turtles, and “it is ancestors turned other that we hunt
and eat today . . . the images that we bring down and make dance as
xapiri are their form of ghosts. These are their real hearts and true inner
parts. And so these animal ancestors from the beginning of time have
not disappeared. They have become the game that lives in the forest, but
their ghosts also continue to exist.”75 Animal bodies are but the multiple
metamorphoses of a shared human essence, the ancestral embodiments
of which continue to visit the shaman in dreams, when he himself be-
comes xapiripë and is dis- and reassembled so that from his throat the
true words can rise. The forest, in fact, has the form of a crystal where
bodily appearances and spiritual essences—including those shattered
fragments of the fallen sky that continue to live underground and that
whites call minerals—intermingle and watch one another both through
their ghost and their real or spirit eyes: “Wherever human beings live,
the forest is populated with animal spirits . . . The animals we hunt
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 223

only move through the parts of the forest where the mirrors and paths
of their ancestors’ images that become xapiri are. [White people] must
think the soil and the mountains are placed there without reason and
that the forest is just a great quantity of trees. But the shamans know
it belongs to the xapiri and that it is made of their countless mirrors!
There are far more xapiri than humans in the forest, and all its other in-
habitants know them!”76 This is why, to speak truly, in hereamuu mode,
the shaman elder must begin by naming the “old forests where his fa-
thers and grandfathers lived as . . . they came down from the highlands”
and eventually also “recall the time of the yarori animal ancestors.”77
What the whites call politics, the shaman says, “for us is something
else. It is the words of Omama and those of the xapiri, our elders’ here-
amuu speeches, and our feasts’ wayamuu and yāimuu talks.”78 This, he
concludes, is why “our memory is long and strong . . . Our words are
ancient and numerous. They are the words of our ancestors . . . We do
not need to draw them, like the white people do with theirs . . . for they
remain fixed inside us.”79
I have been quoting at some length from The Falling Sky, a series of
stories and reflections by the Yanomami shaman and activist Davi Ko-
penawa translated and edited for print by French anthropologist Bruce
Albert, for the insights it offers us into the forest as an amalgamated
living entity. More than a mere “environment,” the forest is itself agi-
tated: it is “vibrant matter” animated by multiple layers and modalities
of past being, which must be engaged by way of their recall or literally
their (re)presentation in the shamanic trance. Shamanic invocation of
these ancestral layers that continue to sustain the living forest is first
and foremost a politics of memory, a translational exercise that allows
the Yanomami to stay on diplomatic terms with the more-than-human
in the forest’s complex cosmopoliteia. The forest, just as much as it is
a spatial entity, a territory, is also an interface or a crystallization of
temporal layers, a mnemonic ecology; Kopenawa says, “the words of
‘ecology’ are our ancient words, those Omama gave our ancestors at the
beginning of time.”80 Kopenawa, as Peter Gow points out, “knows this
because the forest comes to his home to tell him.” In The Falling Sky, he
argues, “things are not spoken about, they speak. The central character
in this book is uhiri, ‘the forest,’ which Kopenawa is clear is not the
Yanomami equivalent of our notions of nature or the environment, but
rather a livable world for the Yanomami people.”81 How, I ask, can we
bring this shamanic forest memory into conversation with the politics
of memory in Latin America as these have been constellated over the
224 ❘ Chapter 4

last half-century by experiences of dictatorial state terrorism and pro-

longed civil war, forced displacement and ethnic cleansing at the hands
of counterinsurgency states and paramilitary actors?
Indeed, my wager here is to bring The Falling Sky in dialogue with
two canonic genres of political memory in Latin America: on the one
hand, the witnessing—in survivors’ accounts but also in verbal, vi-
sual, and architectural forms of monumentalization—of the dictatorial
state’s clandestine (yet not therefore less “public”) system of abducting,
torturing, and killing suspected “subversives” and, on the other, the In-
digenous or peasant testimonios of community suffering and resistance
against structural violence unleashed by counterinsurgency warfare.
How, I ask, can Kopenawa’s memories of extractivism—of mining and
agro-induced land grabs, massacres, and the wiping out of entire vil-
lages by epidemics but also of the turmoil unleashed in the forest’s frag-
ile equilibrium of embodied as well as spiritual temporalities—be heard
in a cultural, political, and juridical field that has so far been configured
exclusively around the notion of “human rights”? As Idelber Avelar has
noted, the “primacy of the human and the exclusivity of the human
species as the only subject of rights” has lately come under criticism
from the proponents of buen vivir (in Quechua, sumak kawsay) in the
context, for example, of constitutional debates in Ecuador and Bolivia
and of the struggle against open-sky mining, oil and gas prospecting,
and hydroelectric megadams in the Andes and Amazonia.82 In the same
vein, I want to suggest, if the horizon of life on a planetary scale is now
increasingly one of “becoming extinction,” shamanic forest memories
such as Kopenawa’s may be our best bet yet to return the politics of
memory to the center of public struggles as the memories of the victims
of state terrorism and Indigenous and peasant testimonios had done in
the aftermath of dictatorship and counterinsurgency wars. In listening
to shamanic forest memory, can we return agency and presence in the
public arena to those humans and more-than-humans the advancing
extractivist matrix of late liberalism is making disappear, in the same
way political memory had done to the disappeared of state terrorism?
Human rights memory in Latin America had already come under fire
from a different angle in the wake and aftermath of the millennium,
as biopolitical critiques emerged under the conceptual umbrella of the
“postdictatorship.” Rather than as a monstrous and unprecedented
interruption of democratic continuity, these critiques recast state ter-
rorism as a mode of reconfiguring the social as a state of permanent ex-
ception that could usher in the neoliberal “transition’”—in other words,
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 225

as the ongoing foundation and horizon of the political. Yet the cycle of
neoextractivism triggered by the global commodity boom of the 1990s
and 2000s—around the same time that challenges to the Washington
Consensus opened up a new threshold for progressive politics in Latin
America that became known as the “Pink Tide”—also contained this
biopolitical critique of the neoliberal transitions within the limits of
the contemporary regime of governance that anthropologist Elizabeth
Povinelli calls “geontopower.”83 Geontopower, as pointed out earlier,
characterizes a mode of sovereignty founded not so much on the deci-
sion to make live or let die—the domain of Foucauldian biopower—but
rather on the fundamental separation between life and nonlife. Even
as the effects of anthropogenic climate change, ocean acidification, or
chemical residues of the mining and pharmaceutical industries “take us
to the increasingly unavoidable entanglements of Life and Nonlife in
contemporary capitalism,”84 Povinelli argues, the sovereign people of
geontopower are those who continue to abide by their ongoing separa-
tion, even if they accept the need to recompense those Indigenous “an-
imists” who, for reasons of “cultural difference,” can claim exemption
from the geontological doxa. For Povinelli, “what is sovereign is the di-
vision of Life and Nonlife as the fundamental ground of the governance
of difference and markets. Where Indigenous people agree to participate
as an Animist voice in the governmental order of the people they are
included as part of this sovereign people. Where they do not, they are
cast out.”85 Thus, for instance, during the cycle of the Pink Tide, at the
same time as Brazil’s federal government under Dilma Rousseff finally
forced the military to acknowledge human rights violations commit-
ted under the dictatorship, it also rammed through congress the Belo
Monte project of a hydroelectric megadam, with disastrous ecological
and human consequences in the Alto Xingú, the very same region where
some of the most abhorrent massacres committed by the armed forces
had occurred. Such tensions speak eloquently to the geontological foun-
dation of national-popular developmentalism in Latin America as well
as to the difficulties of human rights memory and biopolitical critiques
alike to challenge its basic assumptions and to avoid conscription into
the geontological consensus.
Critiques of extractivism emerged in Latin America as a result of the
fracture, around the millennium, of the contingent “resource-radical”
alliances that had united peasant and Indigenous activists with miners’
unions and urban residents struggling with exorbitant tariffs. Yet poli-
cies under the Pink Tide renationalizing of primary resources, combined
226 ❘ Chapter 4

with a massive hike in demand for commodities, especially from China,

effectively entailed what economists refer to as the “reprimarización,”
or primary resource dependency, of the region,86 bringing about “further
fiscal dependency on the extraction and export of natural resources and,
in many cases, a territorial expansion of the extractive frontier, subject-
ing Indigenous communities to displacement and fragile ecosystems to
contamination.”87 Postextractivism, as a critical discourse and as activ-
ist practice, diverged from neodevelopmentalism in aiming not at max-
imizing revenue to create conditions for the leap toward autonomous
industrialization but rather at a societal transformation, fostering “a life
that puts the self-sufficiency and self-management of human beings who
live in communities at the core of its existence.”88 In this view, extractiv-
ism is found to be the fundamental fact subtending a modern-colonial
as well as racialized world capitalism based on a predatory relation to
the living: “the reproduction of capital can only take place if it destroys
human beings to the same extent as nature,” in the words of Ecuadorian
philosopher Bolívar Echeverría.89 Postextractivist critique, then, in the
way it seeks to counterpose the “good life”—as “a life-system based
on the communion of beings (human and otherwise) and nature”90—to
the destructive impulses of extractivism, enters into productive but also
controversial dialogue not just with geontology (i.e., the critique of late-
liberal sovereignty as grounded in the divide between life and nonlife)
but also with Capitalocene theory, for which capitalism does “not act
upon nature but develop through the web of life.”91 For Capitalocene
theory, it is not the destruction but rather the constant production of
nature (including human work or energy) as appropriable resource out-
side the commodity system that is the condition of successive regimes
of accumulation. Shamanic forest memory, I argue, in its capacity to
summon and gather multiple kinds of existents, also hints at a way
in which we might articulate postextractivist critiques with geontology
and Capitalocene theory.
A final element I want to bring into my discussion of shamanic forest
memory as a memory of extractivism is Rob Nixon’s notion of “slow
violence.” The concept alerts us to a representational difficulty shared
by human rights memory, among others, to account for “the long dy-
ings” unleashed by extractivism, the violence of which, according to
Nixon, “is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental
and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of
temporal scales.”92 Because slow violence—including long-term medical
conditions, genetic modifications, and species extinctions caused by re-
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 227

source extraction and industrial pollution—often takes effect only over

decades or even generations and across spatial extensions far beyond
the original source, it does not conform to an idea of violence as a sud-
den, radical alteration inflicted on individual bodies and places, such as
murder, mutilation, rape, or carpet bombing. Yet this difficulty also calls
attention to the way slow violence operates as a mode of representation
insofar as it engages in not only “a struggle for crude, material domi-
nance but also (threaded ever closer into that struggle) a battle for the
control over appearances.”93 The problem, in short, is not that slow vio-
lence is invisible but rather that it is constantly and actively erased from
modern apparatuses of representation. Slow violence “creates and sus-
tains the conditions of administered invisibility” that result in the pro-
duction of “unimagined communities.”94 Extractivism, Nixon argues, is
also a mode of representation that incessantly manufactures emptiness
and renders native communities of resource-rich areas (humans as well
as more-than-humans) into “virtual uninhabitants,”95 whose statistical
removal precedes and makes possible their always already imminent
physical disappearance.
I have sketched out the wider political and conceptual frame of enun-
ciation in Latin America—which, I suspect, could at least in part be
extended to the Global South at large—between the proxy effects of
the Cold War and the present, neoextractivist scramble for resources,
to better understand the wager of Kopenawa and Albert’s project of
translational activism. The Falling Sky, we can now see, is in fact a
constant balancing act, a slipping in and out of character, which coun-
teracts how the Yanomami are unimagined into virtual uninhabitants
of the forest by developmentalist resource nationalism—to say nothing
of the unabashedly genocidal racism of the Bolsonaro regime that has
succeeded it in Brazil—by seemingly “agreeing to participate as an Ani-
mist voice in the governmental order” of geontopower.96 Kopenawa, in
other words, skillfully wields his shamanic credentials to get a hearing
in the courts of geontological sovereignty: “I am a shaman and I see
all these things with the yākoana and by dreaming. My xapiri spirits
never remain still . . . Through their words, I can understand all the
things of the forest.”97 Yet, in a bold and cunning move, Kopenawa
also claims that the very same “spirits” who thus authenticate and au-
thorize his own “animistic” representation of them in the courts of ge-
ontology also foreclose any space of negotiation this speech act might
open: “They constantly make words grow in me, words that refuse to
open our forest to the white people.”98 Having been granted a hearing,
228 ❘ Chapter 4

as animist or interpreter of “primitive beliefs,” Kopenawa immediately

renounces—in fulfillment of his “representative” mandate on behalf of
the xapiri spirits—the logic of “compensation” to which his voicing of
the character of the animist would have entitled him:

I do not know how to make accounts like they do . . . All

the white people’s merchandise will never be enough to ex-
change for [the forest’s] trees, fruits, animals, and fish . . .
Everything that grows and moves in the forest or under the
waters, as well as all the xapiri and human beings, has a
value far too important for the white people’s merchandise
and money. Nothing is solid enough to restore the sick for-
est’s value. No merchandise can buy all the human beings
devoured by the epidemic fumes. No money will be able to
return to the spirits their dead fathers’ value.99

The point here is not just that money cannot bring the dead back to
life (and even less restore their earthly dwellings to the spirits orphaned
from their human and more-than-human hosts). Rather, the all too ob-
vious absurdity of such an equation points to a deeper problem con-
cerning the limits of translatability between different orders of being.
When Kopenawa says “What we call xawara are measles, flu, malaria,
tuberculosis, and all those other white people diseases that kill us to
devour our flesh,”100 he does not mean that xawara is the Yanomami
name for infectious diseases brought to the forest by whites nor that it
is the “animistic” form in which the Yanomami imagine what is really
the work of different viral agents. Rather, while fully conscious that a
measles epidemic, which had wiped out almost his entire family, was
triggered by Protestant missionaries unaware that their daughter had
caught a virus infection, and that his own near-fatal tuberculosis re-
sulted from sharing a room with a gravely ill person at a FUNAI out-
post, Kopenawa also insists that, in dreams, he has seen “the image of
the epidemic beings, the xawarari . . . They are the thokori beings of
the cough, which slit our throats and chests, and the xuukari diarrhea
beings, which devour our guts, but also the tuhrenari nausea beings, the
waitarori scraggliness beings, and the hayakorari weakness beings.”101
These beings “look like white people, with their clothes, their glasses
and their hats” and “live in houses overflowing with merchandise and
food, like gold prospector camps.”102 They thrive in places where goods,
food, and amenities abound and travel in the white people’s footsteps
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 229

and aboard their machines: “They come to settle in our houses like in-
visible guests by escorting the white people’s objects. Merchandise has
the value of xawara epidemic.”103 Just as the xapiri, as anthropologist
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains, are not representations of ani-
mals’ real, humanoid spirit bodies as opposed to their only apparent
material ones but rather “non-representational images, ‘representatives’
that are not representations” and therefore point toward “the disjunc-
tive synthesis which connects-separates the actual and the virtual, the
discrete and the continuous,”104 so the xawarari are not the “true,” es-
sential representations of measles, tuberculosis, and so forth. Rather,
they mark out a zone of “disjunctive synthesis,” an area of indiscern-
ibility that is accessible only to shamanic becoming-other and where
the cosmo-logical (or world-historical) struggles of what manifests
itself on a different level of being as medical emergencies, are being
played out.
What Kopenawa—and Bruce Albert, his anthropological editor-
collaborator—aim for in The Falling Sky is a form of cultural translation
that eschews the logic of equivalence (which, in the discursive regime
of geontological sovereignty, grants a limited form of citizenship to the
“animistic” other) and rather tries to force open a space of disjunctive
synthesis as its own arena of negotiation across cultural and linguistic
boundaries. This arena of negotiation is also akin to the one the Yano-
mami themselves have carved out to deal with the various classes of
otherness—human, animal, and spirit—with which they share the forest.
The Falling Sky, more than an autobiography or eyewitness account
yet also more than a book of shamanic teachings, enacts an Indigenous
cosmopolitics, an experimental diplomacy that uses the “paper skin” to
invite us into a new and radical form of agreement. Even though the
success of the operation may not be unanimous throughout, we can-
not but admire Kopenawa’s acute awareness of the difficulties involved
in “talking to white people,”105 as well as his courage in facing these
head-on. If learning the “good speech”—hereamuu—is among the Yano-
mami a central aspect of the lifelong formation of shamans, who have
to call on certain animal ancestors and on the memories of community
elders passed on to them, to keep alive the history of the village as
interwoven with the larger, cosmic history of the forest world, the cata-
strophic impact of white society’s advance into Yanomami territory—in
particular the Roraima gold rush of the 1980s—meant that Kopenawa
“had to learn to discourse in front of outsiders when [he] was very
young.”106 That is, long before he had learned the basic skills and ac-
230 ❘ Chapter 4

quired the spirit powers necessary for “speaking well,” Kopenawa de-
cided, he says, “to make [white people] hear the thoughts of the forest
inhabitants and speak to them firmly all the way into their own cities.
I was angry. I did not want my people to continue dying, devoured by
their xawara epidemics.”107 Talking to white people, then, is an emer-
gency measure, which presents a double challenge to a Yanomami: to
address the catastrophe that has befallen his people, he cannot draw on
the truth value of accumulated experience that guides hereamuu speech,
yet he nevertheless needs to mobilize this spirit power to make his words
persuasive. In talking to white people, he will have to both “translate”
and “reinvent” hereamuu, turning a mode of cultural memory into a
way of addressing a moment that is radically new in kind.
On returning to his work at FUNAI and beginning to travel the coun-
try as a spokesperson for his people, Kopenawa begins to master the
almost impossible task of speaking to white people in hereamuu thanks
to a twofold learning experience. On the one hand, he starts attending
gatherings of the Union of the Indigenous Nations, as well as commu-
nity events of neighboring native people, during which a new, politi-
cal and public voice emerges, in the construction of which Kopenawa
takes an active part. On the other hand, and while he learns the white
people’s language and travels to their cities, Kopenawa also continues
his apprenticeship as a young shaman and, when drinking the yākoana
(hallucinogenic snuff), starts being visited by “the white people ances-
tors’ napënapëri spirits” as well as those of the animal ancestors who
were already trading with them at the beginning of time, and even-
tually “Remori and Porepatari’s images placed their spirit larynx into
my throat so I could imitate the white people’s talk . . . They put their
napënapëri ancestors’ language into me. If I had been alone, I would
never have been able to make speeches in this outsiders’ language!”108
What Kopenawa sketches out here is nothing less than a theory of “nar-
rative transculturation,” to borrow Angel Rama’s notion, which like-
wise attempted to conceptualize a mobilization of “traditional” modes
of storytelling to convey a radically new experience—the advance of the
modern-capitalist extractive frontier on the “traditional” lifeworlds of
the provincial interior.109 But Kopenawa’s transculturating practice, im-
provised on the hoofs of a catastrophic moment of emergency, also goes
further than the mid–twentieth-century literatures Rama has in mind
since it does not bring its constitutive “disjunctive synthesis” into the
formal cohesion of a genre such as the novel or the autobiography but,
on the contrary, leaves it in suspension as a space of enunciation that is
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 231

akin to shamanic practice itself and thus also one where a Yanomami
voice can be heard. As Viveiros de Castro explains:

If shamanism is essentially a cosmic diplomacy devoted to

the translation between ontologically disparate points of
view, then Kopenawa’s discourse is not just a narrative on
particular shamanic contents—namely, the spirits which the
shamans make speak and act—it is a shamanic form in it-
self, an example of shamanism in action, in which a shaman
speaks about spirits to Whites and equally about Whites on
the basis of spirits, and both these things through a White
intermediary.110

Viveiros de Castro’s observations on the mediated character of

The Falling Sky are important since—as Bruce Albert makes clear in
his editorial postscript—the narrative’s first person, more than an au-
tobiographical subject-witness is really a conduit for an intensely in-
tersubjective process. The text was not just the outcome of successive
recording sessions of Kopenawa’s storytelling, transcribed and edited
by Albert as well as subsequently “proofread” together at the village of
Watoriki, it also included other Yanomami participant-listeners (such
as Kopenawa’s father-in-law and shamanic mentor) and, last but not
least, also “embod[ied] the voices of many shamanic ‘images’ of animal
ancestors and cosmological beings.”111 “The message—as Gow puts it—
has been very clearly thought through and is presented in a form of lan-
guage far removed from those of normal Yanomami speech,”112 which,
as it enters the global public arena in the objectual and institutional
shape of a “book,” also puts The Falling Sky in conversation with the
field of political memory.
But important differences also complicate the text’s inscription into
this field. On the one hand, just as the testimonial voices of victims of
clandestine imprisonment and torture under the military dictatorships
and just as the Indigenous or peasant witnesses of counterinsurgency
warfare, the first person of The Falling Sky is that of a survivor of vi-
olent acts against a much larger community. Just as the one of testi-
monio, moreover, his is also a mediated voice, at the same time as the
collaborative and consensual terms of this mediation exemplify a mode
of transcultural exchange based not on violent coercion but on values
of solidarity and mutuality, which the narrative offers as an example
of the political and activist response it exhorts us to give as readers-
232 ❘ Chapter 4

turned-secondary witnesses. Indeed, many of the survivor memories of

intellectuals-activists abducted and imprisoned by the dictatorships in
Brazil and the Southern Cone also draw, just as does the shaman-narrator,
on particular knowledges and skills to move from their own individual
suffering to the level of a collective experience: architecture and drafts-
manship in Chilean urbanist Miguel Lawner’s account of his journey
through the detention and torture camps of Pinochet; literary storytell-
ing in Argentine Nora Strejlevich’s novel Una sola muerte numerosa (A
single multiple death, 1997); and video installation and performance in
the work of Argentine visual artist Julieta Hanono, to mention just a few.
Just as these camp survivors find in aesthetics a way of moving from per-
sonal experience to an impersonal, or better, transpersonal knowledge,
shamanic practice is for Kopenawa—who more than once compares it
explicitly to book-based study and learning—a way of introducing into
his narrative account of personal and collective sufferings a second, an-
alytical point of view. The visions and messages conveyed by the xapiri
also offer insight into the “mechanisms and technologies of repression”
insofar as they “reveal the nature of power itself,”113 to quote from Ar-
gentine sociologist and camp survivor Pilar Calveiro’s seminal analysis
of the Argentine dictatorship’s concentrationary apparatus.
Shamanic forest memory, deploying the tools of critique proper to
Yanomami epistemology, effectively turns in the hands of Kopenawa
into an analytic of the rationality of extractivism. It becomes a way
of understanding the ultimate, cosmo-political purpose of the interplay
between armed violence, germs, and merchandise that materializes in
the convoluted image of the xawarari. The use of memory (which, let us
recall, is also paramount to the capacity of hereamuu) does not just de-
mand the recognition of past sufferings but, much more urgently, is the
condition for understanding the designs for the present and future of the
community that past violence already held in store. In this way, with the
help of the xapiri—that is, in putting to work the virtual multiplicity of
xapiripë, the space and time of indiscernibility activated in the shamanic
trance—Kopenawa is able to develop the critical systematicity that he
brings to the analysis of extractive capitalism as it enters and trans-
forms the cosmopoliteia of the living forest. In this process of thrusting
a world into turmoil, of ushering in what I have been calling inmundo,
or the unworld, white people are but the mindless instruments of the
xawarari’s plottings, while it is the more-than-human forces unleashed
by their foolish actions that are the real—or maybe we should say the
hyperreal—actors on this cosmic stage:
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 233

The things that white people work so hard to extract from

the depths of the earth, minerals and oil, are not foods. These
are evil and dangerous things, saturated with coughs and fe-
vers . . . The forest is the flesh and skin of our earth, which is
the back of the old sky Hutukara that fell in the beginning of
time. The metal Omama hid in its soil is its skeleton, which
the forest surrounds in its humid coolness. These are our
xapiri’s words, which the white people do not know. That is
why these outsiders continue relentlessly digging the earth
like giant armadillos . . . they do not think they will be con-
taminated like we are. They are wrong . . . Having become
ghost during my sleep, I also saw the white people working
with these minerals. They tore out and scraped big blocks of
them with their machines to make pots and tools. Yet they
did not seem to realize that these fragments of the old sky
were dangerous! They did not know that the thick yellowish
fumes emanated from them are a powerful epidemic smoke
that thrusts like a weapon to kill those who come near and
breathe it.114

At the same time as, in the way it alternates between first-person re-
membrance and self-removal (by way of dreams and of yākoana-induced
trance), it echoes some of the discursive strategies of postdictatorship
memory in Brazil and the Southern Cone, Kopenawa and Albert’s text
also dialogues with the enunciative structures of testimonio as defined,
among others, by accounts of guerrilla struggle in Central America such
as the ones we studied in chapter 1 but also by Indigenous and peas-
ant life accounts. In The Falling Sky, just as in Indigenous women’s life
narratives such as the testimonios of Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú or
Bolivian Domitila Barros de Chungara, the first person produced in the
interplay with the non-Indigenous mediator is only a vehicle through
which experiences of not only the narrator but also other members of
the community, which is the real protagonist, can be channeled.
Yet, as we have seen, unlike Rigoberta’s and Domitila’s testimonial
voices that assume this collective speech act thanks to their political
status as activists, Kopenawa’s speech is also a transculturated form
of hereamuu or more-than-human forest memory as mobilized by the
shaman. Shamanic forest memory further radicalizes testimonio’s ge-
neric challenge to the conventions of autobiographical writing, since
it refuses to abide by the geontological divide between life and nonlife
234 ❘ Chapter 4

and instead gives expression to what Anna Tsing calls the “polyphonic
assemblage” of human and nonhuman worldmaking projects.115 If, as
Donna Haraway has suggested, “to renew the biodiverse powers of
terra is the sympoietic work and play of the Chthulucene,” a term aim-
ing to think our present living and dying together that “unlike either the
Anthropocene or the Capitalocene . . . is made up of ongoing multispe-
cies stories and practices of becoming-with,”116 how can such narrative
community be put in effect today and how can it begin to gather com-
munities of mourning in an act of political memory work in the present?
Shamanic forest memory, I contend, effectively calls on the “chthonic
ones [as] beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the-minute,” to the
effect that “human beings are not the only important actors . . . with all
other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings
are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this
earth are the main story.”117 Yet how can this narrative’s summoning
of the chthonic ancestors as conarrators be brought into the arena of
political memory, challenging its own geontological bias, its fixation up
until now with the human? And conversely, can we really draw on the
memory struggles of state terrorism survivors and their relatives as well
as those of the Central and South American counterinsurgency wars to
devise a politics of memory for the more-than-human disappearances
and the forms of slow violence coming to the fore in our own present?
In a lecture originally given in 2011 under the title “The Equiva-
lence of Catastrophes: After Fukushima,” Jean-Luc Nancy argues that,
once technologies such as the civil and military use of nuclear fusion,
deep-sea drilling, or the transgenic modification of crops and animals
have irrevocably enmeshed social and political issues with geophysical
phenomena, “natural catastrophes are no longer separable from their
technological, economic, and political implications or repercussions.”118
We can no longer distinguish between natural disasters and historical
catastrophes, says Nancy, given that the new regime of radical imma-
nence under which we now live has not only put to rest the concept of
nature but also that of the human itself as at least partly removed from
the natural realm. What can no longer be sustained, Nancy claims, is a
notion of the human as the subject of judgment, as invested with critical
self-consciousness and thus capable of transcending its own subjection
to the realm of physis and of imposing its will on it. None of this per-
sists since rather than being confronted with a world image that surges
in front of and around us—a land and sea to be scaped—we now find
ourselves immersed in the maelstrom of “a generalized transformabil-
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 235

ity that, at the same time, does not provide the unity of some prin-
ciple or law of transformation, but that on the contrary never ceases
diversifying and multiplying the modalities, directions, causalities of all
forms of transformation, transport, transposition, or transmutation.”119
In this liquefied unworld into which the human dissolves, the true
catastrophe—still according to Nancy—is the impossibility of attribut-
ing a tragic dimension to ongoing and comprehensive de-formation. We
can no longer address, he argues, the intolerable pain and suffering that
such unworlding brings about by drawing on the idea of the incommen-
surable, which had once provided the abysmal horizon of tragic mean-
ing. Orphaned from the latter’s threshold of (negative) transcendence,
which nonetheless still upheld and reinstated the presence of the divine
amid despair over earthly loss, “we are being exposed to a catastrophe
of meaning.”120
If, indeed, tragic katastrophein (“overturning” in Greek), in its abys-
mal opening toward the incommensurable, also reaffirmed the subject’s
founding tension between determination and transcendence and thus
allowed to reinscribe pain and defeat in the continuity of a narrative
time open toward a meaning yet to appear, the catastrophe of radical
immanence only points to a loss that is incalculable. This is because,
paradoxically, due to the very same “generalized transformability” to
which bios and geos have likewise become subject, “the regime of gen-
eral equivalence henceforth virtually absorbs, well beyond the monetary
or financial sphere but thanks to it and with regard to it, all the spheres
of existence of humans, and along with them all the things that exist.”121
Catastrophe here no longer refers to the tension between individual will
and cosmic forces, which the human subject could still inhabit as the
origin and addressee of tragic meaning. Instead of the incommensurable
as tragic harbinger of a meaning yet to emerge, the incalculable ushers
in an infinite metonymic chain of mutant equations devoid of any ulti-
mate meaning or reason:

Marx uttered more than the principle of mercantile exchange:

He uttered the principle of a generalized reabsorption of all
possible values into this value that defines equivalence, ex-
changeability, or convertibility of all products and all forces
of production . . . This is the law of our civilization. The
incalculable is calculated as general equivalence. This also
means that the incalculable is calculation itself.122
236 ❘ Chapter 4

This annihilation of meaning, Nancy claims, was ushered into the

world under the names of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, both of which
refer to “a crossing of limits . . . the limits of existence and of a world
where humanity exists, that is, where it can risk sketching out, giving
shape to meaning.”123 Ushering in does not imply here a relation of tem-
poral succession but one of rupture, since the radically new dimension
of this “unworld after the end” is unlike anything that came before it.
The rupturing of time opens the space for infinite, incalculable equiv-
alence: “what Fukushima adds to Hiroshima is the threat of an apoc-
alypse that opens onto nothing, onto the negation of the apocalypse
itself.”124
The end of the human, for Nancy, is concomitant with the end of the
world—the same idea already sketched out by Lyotard in his medita-
tions on the landscape form discussed earlier in this chapter. But if the
threat looming on our horizon—“looming so as to abolish our horizon,
or any horizon,” as Timothy Morton puts it125—is indeed thrusting us
today into a horizonless unworld where neither our distinctiveness as
humans nor the worldliness of world hold up any longer, do we nec-
essarily have to think of this moment as an apocalypse opening onto
nothing, as Nancy claims? Is the radical immanence into which we—
whoever this we might be—find ourselves thrown only imaginable as
the nonevent of infinite and incalculable equivalence, in the absence
of any transcendental referent that might invest this space with mean-
ing? Or is this, as Morton urges us to consider, rather the moment “of
something beginning . . . of discovering yourself inside of something”
such that we would finally “have the prospect of forging new alliances
between humans and non-humans alike, now that we have stepped out
of the cocoon of world”?126
None other is indeed the suggestion of Donna Haraway for whom
“making oddkin” (“the colloquial term for other-than-conventional
biogenetic relatives”) is the only way in which a “people of the Chthu-
lucene” can still be imagined to emerge. In Haraway’s words,

it is past time to practice better care of kinds-of-assemblages

(not species one at a time). Kin is an assembling sort of word.
All critters share a common “flesh,” literally, semiotically,
and genealogically. Ancestors turn out to be very interesting
strangers: kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought of
was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active.127
 The Afterlives of Landscape ❘ 237

Haraway’s “geostories” of extractivist slow violence in Latin Amer-

ica and the Global South, as brought to us, say, by Kopenawa, Albert,
and the journeying xapiri of the shamanic trance, in their contradic-
tory yet also close interwovenness with the longue durées of colonialism
as well as the contemporary histories of dictatorship and counterin-
surgency wars in the region, make us see more clearly than Nancy’s
reflections on the impossible yet also inevitable thinking together of
Auschwitz and Fukushima, that the political question posed by this
intersection of temporalities is one not of equivalence but of kinship,
of making oddkin. It is a question of “stringing together”—Haraway’s
term—the storytellings of “the two histories” between which, as Isabelle
Stengers puts it, we find ourselves suspended today: storyings of the
struggles of victims of state terror and counterinsurgency wars as well
as of displaced people, women, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ people for
their “human rights,” yet also of the “irruptions” of uhiri—or of Gaia,
or the chthonic beings—as a consequence of the long-term ecological
and geological impacts of deforestation, open-sky mining, oil and gas
prospecting, or the transspecies consequences of proliferating epidemic
agents. It is this new testimonial community (new to us non-Yanomami
readers but also to Yanomami listeners who have never heard hereamuu
or the voicing of the spirit-ancestors’ advice deployed in such a fashion)
into which, I argue, Kopenawa and Albert’s book wants to invite us.
As Danowski and Viveiros de Castro remind us, the Indigenous
peoples of the Americas are “veritable end-of-the-world experts” who
“have a lot to teach us now that we are on the verge of a process in
which the planet as a whole will become something like sixteenth-
century America: a world invaded, wrecked, and razed by barbarian
foreigners”128—invaded by “humans,” to be precise, by that foreign
species that continues to abide by the geontological division between
life and nonlife and by the species boundary between the human and
the nonhuman. But for these Indigenous storytellings to be heard be-
yond specific, disciplinary fields such as anthropology, and for their
multispecies communities of memory and mourning to be heard in the
arena of political memory, they will first need to be convoked and rec-
ognized—as oddkin, as uncanny yet oddly familiar relatives—by the
memory communities that have preceded them. The (re)presentations
of those whom dictatorial and paramilitary violence had absented from
the space and time of the polis had always possessed a dimension of po-
litical entrancement, in materializing, through photographs, siluetazos,
238 ❘ Chapter 4

chantings, headscarves, and street parades, the absence of the disap-

peared and thus also turning this absence into a gathering space for
emergent communities of resistance and mourning. They forced people
to look and listen to the actively silenced and unseen of city and nation,
to acknowledge its active yet also haunting and uncanny presence there.
In a similar but perhaps even more difficult way, shamanic forest mem-
ory urges us today to acknowledge the presence within our own space
and time (which for most of us readers tends to be located in the met-
ropolitan center of command that appears remote from the extractive
frontier), of the more-than-human assemblages called on to story the
slow violence, the multiple unworldings, to which they have been sub-
jected over time. A new kind of storyteller, of testimonial witness, says
Stengers, is urgently needed today to account for such intersected yet
not therefore analogous or equivalent experiences of survival at the end
of time: “We need, we desperately need to fabricate such witnesses, such
narratives, such celebrations. And above all we need what such wit-
nesses, narratives, and celebrations can make happen: the experience
that signals the achievement of new connections between politics and
an experimental . . . production of a new capacity to act and think.”129
Shamanic forest memory, as a political memory of extractivist slow vi-
olence, extends an invitation for inventing, for stringing together, such
experimental thought and action in the present. It is up to us in the end
to listen and to act on what we are hearing.
Coda

Dense, thick, fibrous, enmeshed: there is no exact equivalent in English

for espesso, the term João Cabral de Melo Neto, one of Brazil’s great
modernist poets, associates with the living in “O cão sem plumas” (The
Dog without Feather, 1950), the first part of a poetic trilogy centered
on the Rio Capibaribe, the river that meanders through the cane fields
of his native Pernambuco until it meets the sea at Recife. Thomas Col-
chie, in his 1971 translation for the Hudson Review, settles for “heavy”:
“What is living is heavy / like a dog, a man / like that river. // The way
everything real is heavy.”1 Although Colchie’s solution is powerful in the
way it evokes the burden life has to bear, it sacrifices the sensation of
a thick, viscous, even deadly interconnectedness, which the Portuguese
original implies, because “O que vive fere” (“what is living wounds”)
and “choca com o que vive” (“collides with what is living”): “Viver / é
ir entre o que vive. // O que vive / incomoda de vida / o silêncio, o sono,
o corpo” (“To live / is to go into what is living. // What is living / dis-
commodes life’s / silence, the sleep, the body”).2 Life is both heavy and
prickly, both sharp and soft, it slices and seeps into other lives and into
itself. Or life has no “itself” and thus also no other, and is at once inside
and outside (as is the river in relation to the city). Life (human life, city
life) is never alone; it always vibrates with the foreign bodies it carries
within itself—migrant, animal, vegetal, bacterial, mineral bodies—lives
the river carries in and out of the city and which also wash through and
across a variety of bodies. Life inhabits us the way a stray dog inhabits

239
240 ❘ Coda

the street: “A cidade é passada pelo rio / como uma rua / é passada
por um cachorro” (“The city is entered by the river / the way a street /
is entered by a mongrel”).3 But then there is also no vantage point,
no “poetic I” capable of surveying this mesh of organic and inorganic
matter from the safely detached preserve of the mind. Because of life’s
viscous, heavy stickiness, every “in itself” of beings and objects imme-
diately unleashes and turns into the affect that “goes into” something
else, in an unending series of interminglings with no unifying princi-
ple—no “Mother Nature”—other than this very contingency. This is
also why, in Cabral’s poème-fleuve, there is no landscape, at least not in
the conventional sense of the sensory perception of an exterior, mate-
rial universe (Umwelt) on behalf of a subject of cognition that is there-
fore at least partially removed from this same plane of objectuality and
materiality. Even though, nominally, the poem alternates between the
“landscape of the Capibaribe” and the “discourse of the Capibaribe”—
cinematographically speaking, between shots of the river from the city
and reverse shots of the city from the river—in reality these games of
perspective never really take hold because both river and city are bod-
ies without organs. Neither is capable of “beholding” the other except
through their mutual overspill into one another, their becoming city and
becoming river. Instead of a landscape, predicated on the possibility of
distinguishing a subject of perception from the thing it perceives, what
we get in Cabral’s poem is more akin to a material assemblage of the
kind new materialist thinker Jane Bennett has in mind, in which “each
member and proto-member . . . has a certain vital force, but there is
also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the
assemblage.”4
In this book I have explored the notion of trance as an aesthetic
relationship in which agent and object become intermingled, confused,
to the point of indiscernibility. Trance is the harbinger of a world re-
lationship where, instead of the detachment separating viewer from
landscape, a suspension of boundaries takes place between bodies and
minds allowing for mutual visitations, possessions, alliances, and con-
tagions among living forms and their constituent materialities. Trance
is a threshold ushering in what Michael Taussig calls “a yielding rela-
tion to the world, a mastery of non-mastery.”5 It is not an easy or pas-
sive attitude but, as in the Ciudad Abierta of Amereida’s “return to not
knowing,” one that requires effort, patience, and discipline: “Mastery
of non-mastery is built on resistance to abstraction and tilts towards
sensuous knowledge which perforce includes desublimation of the con-
 Coda ❘ 241

cept into body and image.” It requires, as Taussig suggests quoting from
Hegel’s Phenomenology, “yielding to the very life of the object.”6
Entranced Earth has interrogated Latin American aesthetic produc-
tion of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries based on two as-
sumptions: one, that decolonization in the arts, literature, and film, has
come about as a moving away from landscape, in its character as an im-
perial and extractive form of relating to earth and the living, and a mov-
ing toward multiple “yieldings to the world” by way of the entrancement
of aesthetic experience, in the course of which the latter and its bearer
turn unspecific. And, second, that entrancement and unspecificity in the
realm of the aesthetic also emerge as modes of addressing what I have
been calling the inmundo—the real and ongoing event of unworlding
that extractive-colonial capitalism has unleashed on the web of life and
whose effects are most keenly felt in the “zone of submergence”:7 the
strip-mined, deforested, pesticide-sprayed, megadammed, precariously
housed, and monocrop-planted extractive frontiers of the Global South.
By unspecificity, I am not referring only to the kinds of transdisciplinary
practice employing and cross-fertilizing different kinds of aesthetic ex-
pression (such as theater and cinema, or poetry and photography) that
have recently proliferated in Latin American art practice but which, as
we have seen in chapters 3 and 4, have also been an important aspect
of the process at least since the late 1960s. Rather, I am interested in
the way these “transgressions and expansions of a variety of media and
supports,” as Florencia Garramuño puts it, “imagine diverse forms of
inhabiting the world.”8 How, I have been asking, does unspecificity call
into question the exclusively human purchase on aesthetic experience?
Indeed, as I have discussed in the final sections of chapter 4, in the
inmundo the human is itself but a standing reserve, a form of extract-
ible work-energy, but this downgrading—which, as postextractivist
critiques and Capitalocene theory alike remind us, has already been
at work from the very onset of modern-colonial expansion—also has
the unintended side effect of “enabling entanglements,” in Anna Tsing’s
intriguing formulation.9 Because (certain kinds of) humans partake in
precarity as an earthwide condition, they also have no choice but to
enter into novel kinds of alliances of survival with other forms of living
and nonliving matter, which, as we have examined in Davi Kopenawa’s
and Bruce Albert’s powerful memory work, draw on but also depart
from, traditional Indigenous, Maroon, or peasant worldmakings. Ex-
tractivism’s creative destruction leaves behind abandoned asset fields—
yet “these places can be lively despite announcements of their death;
242 ❘ Coda

abandoned asset fields sometimes yield new multispecies and multicul-

tural life.”10
The point Entranced Earth has been making is that such entangle-
ments always contain an aesthetic dimension. Aesthetics derives from
the Greek αἰσθάνομαι (aisthanomai: “I perceive, feel, sense”)—that is,
from a relation in which selfness is always already bound with, indeed
indiscernible from, the sensory experience of others. Aesthetic produc-
tion is always relational and even symbiotic, as Donna Haraway has
forcefully argued. Poiesis, the aesthetic function, she says, is never au-
topoietic or self-centered but rather “symchthonic, sympoietic, always
partnered all the way down, with no starting and subsequently inter-
acting ‘units’”11—which is why Cabral’s The Dog without Feather, like
all great poems, is also at heart a reflection about poetry itself. What
I am saying is that the arts can tell us a great deal about sympoietic
worldmakings—not because they are removed from these, which would
make it possible for us to grasp their structuring protocols from a posi-
tion of critical exteriority, or at least the language games at play in our
own (mis)understandings of them, as hermeneutic, poststructural, and
deconstructive approaches have variously told us. My point has been
exactly the opposite: because worldmakings are themselves sympoietic,
each and every aesthetic event is also a worldmaking project—especially
so whenever it allows itself to be entranced and to become unspecific, to
enter into a yielding relation to the world.
This is what, in radically different ways, the transspecies free indi-
rect speech of Horacio Quiroga and Graciliano Ramos and the “blind
listening” of Francisco López’s La Selva, the phalènes of the Amereida,
and the ballast gardens of Maria Thereza Alves, are after: unspecificity
is the forging of sympoietic worldings, regardless of whether it draws
on a single mode of aesthetic expression or combines multiple media
and forms of support. Indeed, unspecificity as yielding to the very life
of the object can also stem from an effort of working at the very core
of an aesthetic form such as poetic language, when words, prosody, and
rhythm themselves turn into living matter. Let me explain this point by
briefly returning to João Cabral, and by comparing his work to that
of another great Latin American poet similarly obsessed with rivers as
poetic earth beings, the Argentine Juan L. Ortiz.
Unlike Cabral, whose poetic engagements with the earthly and
aquatic matter of Pernambuco over the course of a long diplomatic
career were almost entirely written from afar, Ortiz only left his na-
tive Entre Ríos—a small Argentine province north of Buenos Aires,
 Coda ❘ 243

whose name derives from its geographical position squeezed between

the Paraná and Uruguay rivers—for a short escape to France, just be-
fore the outbreak of World War I, and for a trip to China in 1957, the
landscape art and poetry of which he profoundly admired. Except for a
series of short impressions from his Chinese journey, Ortiz’s entire po-
etic oeuvre could be read—just as Cabral’s—as a single, uninterrupted
meditation on the interplay of time, matter, and perception as man-
ifest in the tension between river and earth, flow and place. Like the
Capibaribe in its passage from the arid backlands of Pernambuco to the
Atlantic coast for Cabral, the innumerable rivers and streams that cross
Entre Ríos’s estuarine landscape for Ortiz sustain a materialistic idea of
language as itself alternating between the liquid and the solid, between
flow and assertion, between vocals and consonants. A centerpiece of his
oeuvre—just as the Capibaribe trilogy is for Cabral—is the long poem
“El Gualeguay,” first published in 1971 as part of the collection En el
aura del sauce (In the aura of the willow tree), which made the reclusive
poet’s work up until that point available to a national audience and
immediately established him as a leading voice of literary modernity in
the region as well as of the Spanish language tout court.
The Gualeguay River, on the shores of which Ortiz was born and
where he lived until moving to the provincial capital of Paraná in 1942,
is an affluent of the Paraná River that runs across the entire territory
of Entre Ríos from its northeastern to its southwestern limit, receiving,
in the course of its trajectory, a host of minor affluents cutting through
the cuchillas (rolling hills) that together form the geomorphology of
the province. It is, indeed, a minor river—literally speaking, an entre
ríos, a river between rivers—yet also a main axis of the network of
water and sedimented earth that constantly makes and unmakes the
space of Entre Ríos. Different from its more powerful neighbors, the
Uruguay and the Paraná, which transcend the boundaries of nation and
continent in their course from rainforest to ocean, the Gualeguay is an
“intimate river,”12 one that is born and dies (as, by implication, will its
author and companion) within the province’s confines. On one of its
many levels, “El Gualeguay”—the first poem in Ortiz’s work to address
the river by name—is the writing of a “natural history” of Entre Ríos
from its remote geological origins to a vaguely defined point in the final
decades of the nineteenth century—that is, just before Ortiz’s own birth
in 1896, which is the moment the writing is striving toward, marked by
the note “continua” (continues) added in parenthesis after the last line
(the last word of which is “destino” [destiny]). The final parenthesis, in
244 ❘ Coda

turn, refers us back to the one at the beginning of the text, immediately
following the title: “Fragmento” (fragment). Like the river (which is
born from the convergence of two minor affluents and merges into the
Paraná Delta) the poem is open at both ends: of the announced but
never completed continuation only a single line survives: “cuando el río
me ahogue” (when the river shall drown me).13 The impossible limit that
writing is moving toward is the becoming one of the river and of the
poet’s own lifetime—or, better, of the river’s material storyings of Entre
Ríos through the ages and the time of its song, the moment when the
latter will be submerged, drowned, to join the forward-moving stream.
It is not so much death, or silence, the poetic voice longs for but must
defer beyond the limits of the text but, rather, the becoming matter of
language itself as it joins the lived manifestations of time as chronicled
by the river. As Cabral puts it, in almost identical terms, in “Os rios de
um dia” (The rivers of a single day): “a vida mais definida e clara / . . .
é viver com a língua da água” (“the clearest, most well-defined life / . . .
means to live with its watery tongue”).14
The river is for both authors not just a body of water but a being
of and in time, and even the foundation of time: “El río era el tiempo,
todo . . .” (The river was time, everything . . .).15 It comprises all the sin-
gular, lived temporalities that converge on it, being at one and the same
time sustained by the river in their living substance and reflected by the
aquatic surface. The river is the common measure of all things: “Mas
su divagar, al fin / sólo, sólo podía ser el del espejo que se corre frente a
todas las escenas” (But its ramblings, finally / only, only could be those
of a mirror moving in front of all the scenes).16 Thus, in “El Gualeguay”
we see rising before us, as does the river, the trees, birds, reptiles, and
mammals, including the human inhabitants of Entre Ríos, each in their
own time of lived experience (of growth, decay, movement, and still-
ness). The river is not just a metaphor for time as flow but the very ele-
ment that contains all temporal forms of life and even the nonliving in
their singular modes of duration or ephemerality: “Todo nacía de él, o
venía evangélicamente / a él” (everything was born from him, or strove
evangelically / toward him).17 Yet it does not subsume these singularities
into a greater whole, as this verse—quoted on its own—might suggest:
neither river nor poem make any effort to suture the particularities of
lived times into a single, abstract progression. Rather, poetic language
takes shape as the always peculiar coagentiality that each of them es-
tablishes with the river and its song, just as every sentence, verse, and
figure also has its own rhythm and duration in space and time, which
 Coda ❘ 245

the poem admits into its own course without forcing them to adhere to
any overarching structure of rhyme, prosody, or strophe.
Indeed, when we are only three strophes into the poem, Ortiz has
already impressed on us a highly complex system of images and analo-
gies binding language to matter and vice versa, where the “arpa ciega”
(blind harp) of the rain—but also of poetry—is linked first to “jun-
cos de vidrio” (reeds of glass) and then to the “ramillas rápidas” (swift
branches) of “un ligero árbol de plata . . . ahogado de cortinas” (a light
silvery tree . . . drowned by curtains)—that is, to the willow tree, el
sauce, which at the same time mirrors in its shape the entire arborescent
system of streams forming the Gualeguay’s own basin, from which the
tree has grown. Just as rain and river materialize (and are themselves
refigured) in the tree’s growth, and as the latter secures the sedimenta-
tion of earth that shapes the river’s course, so does poetic language at
once sing and emerge from this configuration as yet another of its ema-
nations: the harp’s vibrating strings are both the willow’s branches and
the watery arteries striating the land because both of these are already
in a resonant, signifying relationship with one another.
Addressed alternately in the second- and third-person singular, as a
listener and witness to the poetic voice and at the same time as the “mir-
ror” that sees, hears, and dreams with the “tintilaciones”—the titilla-
tions or ticklings—it receives from the embodied materialities and living
forms converging on it, the river encounters history itself as one more
“rumor” ruffling its surface: “Mas la ‘historia,’ lo advertía nuevamente,
tenía sus caminos, / y él, otra vez, latiría bajo ellos” (But “history,” he
realized once more, had its ways / and he would, yet again, throb below
them).18 Unlike in Pablo Neruda’s Canto general (1950), where even
the “coming of the rivers” never suspends the top-down view from
mountainous or even stellar heights onto earthly becomings, in what
amounts to a cosmic, providential idea of history, here, by contrast, the
vantage point is a doubly “minor” one. History is encountered here at
once from below (from “la hondonada” [the riverbed]) and from within
(from the province or the interior). As poet and critic Sergio Delgado
observes, “the landscape program of ‘El Gualeguay’ is at the antipodes
of a project such as Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, which originates as
a ‘Canto de Chile’ only to be projected onto a continental scale . . . ‘El
Gualeguay’ can be thought of as an anticanto general or, more prop-
erly, as a ‘canto particular.’”19 In “El Gualeguay,” the relation between
geography and history is not, as in Canto general, an allegorical one,
in which the continent’s revolutionary future is already forecast in the
246 ❘ Coda

landscape’s natural sublime. Rather, human history itself is grounded,

humiliated, on becoming the object of a bodily kind of perception—
the river’s—which, counter to the visual purchase of colonial-capitalist
landscaping, comes from within and from below and is constantly in
flux, being the nonplace of an incessant becoming. In the “palpitations”
throbbing underneath the “ways of history,” the river senses a string
of lowly forces struggling for recognition and survival to which it is
drawn as if by “natural” proximity and identification: in this way we
witness the struggles not only of Native Americans, gauchos, and anar-
chist landless workers but also of nonhuman forms and forces threat-
ened by extractivism in its subsequent iterations from colony to nation.
Although “El Gualeguay” is thus one of the greatest historical poems in
Argentine literature, the river is to human history, first and foremost, an
antiepic impulse, a constant becoming minor that reopens the historical
record toward its implicit virtualities, toward what might have been or
has been omitted. Throughout the text, Ortiz engages in a radical cri-
tique of the noun as a weapon of the oppressor, using quotation marks
not just for toponyms, animal and plant names, and markers of social or
class identity, which are thus forced to reveal their subservient relation
to power, but also for numerous popular expressions and even some
verbs and adverbs, as if to question the ability of any kind of language
to get hold of the thing or action it refers to. Poetic language, as one that
becomes itself minor and strives to converge with the river’s sensual and
embodied perception becomes a virtualizing force that swaps historical
fact for rumor, possibility, palpitation: indeed, for the very kind of enig-
matic interpellation that we have only recently learned to associate with
the irruptions of Gaia or the hyperobject.
In Cabral, relations between history and nature likewise provide the
founding tension of his poetry, alternating between the liquid and the
solid as it sings the Capibaribe’s course through Pernambuco, first rap-
idly as it descends from the arid sertão, and then slowly as it meanders
through the lowland cane fields before reaching the sea through the
mudflats around Recife, where thousands of mocambo (slum) dwellers
have been forced to seek refuge. In O rio (The river, 1954) and Morte e
vida Severina (Death and life of Severino, 1954), this journey downriver
is told twice: first in the river’s own voice who, as a distant, first-person
narrator, describes with “simpatia calada” (“mute sympathy”) the so-
cial worlds it traverses,20 and then in a multiplicity of voices, featuring
a variety of verse types all inspired in the traditional Iberian redondilla,
representing the rural migrant Severino’s successive interlocutors on his
 Coda ❘ 247

ultimately deadly journey to the coast. Here, but especially in The Dog
without Feather, the trilogy’s first part, the river’s song is at the same
time a poetological reflection on movement and stasis, fluidity and pet-
rification, in language, a reflection that also extends to other parts of
Cabral’s oeuvre such as “O poema e a água” (Water and the poem) or
“Pequena ode mineral” (Little mineral ode). For Cabral, poetic labor
is the search for the word as pure object stripped of all lyricism, akin
to the thing in its mineral essence: “São minerais / as flores e as plantas
/ as frutas, os bichos / quando em estado de palavra” (“Mineral / the
flowers and plants, / fruits and animals, / when in the state of words”).21
But poetry cannot but string these word objects back into the fluid-
ity of the “rio-discurso de água” (“river discourse of water”).22 Poetry
surges in a tension between the solidity of words and the liquidity of
the sentence, it resembles “a rocky path” of word stones washed over
by the waters of syntax and verse.23 Conversely, the flow of verse also
thickens on encountering the word, to the point of turning itself into
an object: it is remarkable how prominently the word “pedra” (stone)
features among “as mesmas vintes palavras” (“always the same twenty
words”)24 to which the poet, according to his own confession, returns
again and again. In Portuguese and in Spanish, “p(i)edra” is a word that
in its own phonetic (a vowel forcing the tongue to get caught in between
consonants, to be eventually released into an exhaled “a”) performs the
thickening, the “becoming mineral” of language that is also its referent.
“Pedra” is itself a threshold of “becoming thing,”25 which puts in rela-
tion body and landscape, air and anatomy; it is language “procura[ndo]
a ordem / que ves na pedra” (“search[ing] for the order / you see in a
stone”).26 The Capibaribe itself is water-discourse confronted, at op-
posite ends of its course, with different modes of becoming mineral:
from the drought-stricken, dusty world of the sertão in its upper course
where “a água se quebra em pedaços / em poços de água, em água
paralítica” (“cut, the water breaks into pieces / into pools of water, par-
alyzed water”) to the swamps surrounding the river mouth where, with
“fecundidade pobre / grávido de terra negra” (“poor fertility / pregnant
with black earth”), the agonizing river crawls toward the ocean.27
This tension between syntactic liquidity and lexical minerality is also
indicative of how poetry inscribes the environment in the body and vice
versa: poetic language, indeed, is one of the dimensions of coagentiality
between these two. Just as for Ortiz, poetry for Cabral is a way of “go-
ing into,” and in-between, the two histories between which, as Isabelle
Stengers asserts, we all now live suspended: between the intraspecies
248 ❘ Coda

history of humans, which the news cycle insists is the only one that
matters, and another, more ominous one that “could be called distinct
with regard to what is in the process of happening, but it is obscure with
regard to what it requires, the response to give to what is in the process
of happening.”28 In Cabral’s work, the tension between the liquid and
the solid, the watery and the mineral, which underpins the “river dis-
course,” also reflects the struggles of the migrant population that moves
along the river’s margins, from slaves escaping to the sertão from the
lowland plantations to the rural retirantes (peasants migrating to the
cities) fleeing the “grande sede sem fundo” (“great, bottomless thirst”)
of the drought and heading for a life of hardship “no nivel da lama e de
água” (“at the level of mud and water”).29 Mineral scarcity and muddy
thickness: between these “two waters,” in which the plight of humans
and nonhumans becomes enmeshed, Cabral’s “negative poetics” plays
out (Dúas águas [Two waters] was the title of an anthology of Cabral’s
work released in 1956 by the publisher José Olympo, prior to which it
had only been available in artisanal, self-published editions).30
The “rio-discurso de água,” the river discourse of water, we might
conclude, is what embodies, with the contribution of multiple lifetimes
and languages converging on it, this intercourse of histories. River time,
in Cabral and in Ortiz, brings the time of human history to the level
of matter where it intersects and clashes with other temporalities in a
dense mesh, the thickening of which is akin to that of the river itself:
“Como todo o real / é espesso. / Aquele rio / é espesso e real” (“The way
everything real / is heavy. / That river / is heavy and real”).31 “Discurso
do Capibaribe” (Discourse of the Capibaribe), the fourth canto of The
Dog without Feather with which I began these final reflections, is itself
a dense, thick text with its recurrence of the adjective “espesso,” which,
just as the mud that adheres to huts, feet, oars and fishing nets in the
mocambos, spills out across every verse and sticks to multiple word
objects (“man,” “dog,” “apple,” “blood,” “dream”) and even to reality
itself. “The concept of ‘espesso,’” as literary critic Solange Rebuzzi ob-
serves, “is used to the extreme in this poem, where it also functions as
a way of awakening the reader’s sensorial perception.”32 Just as in Eu-
genio Dittborn’s oil stain in the desert analyzed in chapter 3, the thick of
the real in Cabral’s and Ortiz’s poetry forces our senses aground, from
the detachment of visual landscape to the haptic, olfactory, and audi-
tive involvement with an Umwelt, an environment, no longer separate
from us but rather enmeshed, stringed together, with our own stories.
Poetry is a way of making the rumors and titillations of this living mesh
 Coda ❘ 249

heard, of giving them a name, at the same time as this “speaking of the
rumor” corrodes the fixity of nomenclatures and makes language itself
fluid. This book, however hesitantly, has been trying something similar
in the realm of concepts: to name the vibrations, impulses, and rumors
unleashed in various kinds of artworks as these enter a state of enmesh-
ment, of trance, with the worlds they are involved in making. To name
not in the sense of pointing to an inner truth but, as Isabelle Stengers
signals, to make a call for an action: “To name is not to say what is true
but to confer on what is named the power to make us feel and think in
the mode that the name calls for.”33 To call life “heavy” does not in this
sense oppose, contain, or qualify the supposed lightness of entrance-
ment but rather names its very condition. Trance itself is the becoming
heavy of the senses with contested experience but also with possibility:
“Espesso / porque é mais espessa / a vida que se luta / cada dia, / o
dia que se adquire / cada dia / (como uma ave/ que vai cada segundo /
conquistando seu vôo)” (“Heavy, / because heavier is / the life which is
fought / every day, / the life which is gained / every day / [the way a bird
is / striving every second / to conquer its flight”]).34
Notes

In trodu c tion
1. G1 Minas Gerais, “Brumadinho: Sobe para 242 o número de mortos
identificados em rompimento de barragem da Vale,” G1 Minas Gerais, May
25, 2019, https://g1.globo.com/mg/minas-gerais/noticia/2019/05/25/brumadin
ho-sobe-para-242-o-numero-de-mortos-identificados-no-rompimento-de-barr
agem-da-vale.ghtml.
2. Leonardo Fernandes, Lu Sodré, and Rute Pina, “Beyond Mariana
and Brumadinho: Vale’s Long History of Violations,” Brasil de Fato, Febru-
ary 1, 2019, https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2019/02/01/beyond-mariana-and-
brumadinho-vales-long-history-of-violations.
3. Shasta Darlington and Manuela Andreoni, “A Tidal Wave,” New York
Times, February 9, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/09
/world/americas/brazil-dam-collapse.html.
4. Camila Costa, “Brumadinho: Brasil tem mais de 300 barragens de miner-
ação que ainda não foram fiscalizadas e 200 com alto potencial de estrago,” BBC
Brasil, January 31, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-47056259.
5. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime
(Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2017), 112.
6. Steve Lerner, Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Expo-
sure in the United States (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
7. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On
the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2015), 23.
8. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave, 1983), 96.

251
252 ❘ Notes to Introduction

9. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumu-
lation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015), 170.
10. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End
of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 99.
11. Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barba-
rism (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 53.
12. For a short documentary video of Sonic Pavilion created by the artist,
visit https://vimeo.com/152320997.
13. Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 15.
14. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2005), 60.
15. Alain Roger, Court traité du paysage (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 18. Italics
in original.
16. Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 2.
17. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1976), 300.
18. Casid, Sowing Empire, 191.
19. Moore, Capitalism, 280.
20. Jennifer Wenzel, “Afterword: Improvement and Overburden,” Postmod-
ern Culture 26, no. 2 (January 2016), doi:10.1353/pmc.2016.0003.
21. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New
York: Picador, 2007), 355; Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on
Tim, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1991), 187.
22. Justin McBrien, “Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in
the Necrocene,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the
Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 116.
23. Tsing, The Mushroom, 28.
24. Tsing, The Mushroom, 29.
25. Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 53.
26. T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of
Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 101.
27. Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the
World, trans. Rodrigo Nunes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 107.
28. Roger Bastide, Le Candomblé de Bahia: Transe et possession du rite du
Candomblé (Brésil) (Paris: Plon, 2000), 220.
29. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (London: Athlone, 1989), 222.
30. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 22–24.
31. Maristella Svampa, Neo-Extractivism in Latin America: Socio-
Environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 7.
32. Juan L. Ortiz, Una poesía del futuro: Conversaciones con Juan L. Ortiz
(Buenos Aires: Mansalva, 2008).
33. Ortiz, Una poesía del futuro, 45.
 Notes to Chapter 1 ❘ 253

34. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthu-
lucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 55.
35. McBrien, “Accumulating Extinction,” 116.
36. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 153.
37. Nixon, Slow Violence, 165.
38. Nixon, Slow Violence, 14.
39. Ericka Beckman, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Ex-
port Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 16.
40. Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 107.
41. Michael Taussig, The Corn Wolf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2015), 141.
42. Tsing, The Mushroom, 21.
43. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 140.
44. Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative
Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 28.
45. Florencia Garramuño, Mundos en común: Ensayos sobre la inespecifici-
dad en el arte (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015), 38.
46. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 20.

C ha pter 1
1. INPE (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais), “Programa Queima-
das,” 2019, http://queimadas.dgi.inpe.br/queimadas/portal. Forest management
by fire, as anthropologists Anna Tsing and Gastón Gordillo have pointed out,
has been a common feature of the symbiotic relationship between Indigenous
and peasant populations and the forest’s more-than-human commonwealth of
vegetable and animal lives. Examples include the ponderosa forests of Oregon’s
eastern Cascades (most of which have disappeared since the forced displace-
ment of the native Klamath Tribes) or the Pilcomayo grasslands in northern
Argentina maintained, until the arrival of white colonists in the early twenti-
eth century, by Indigenous Wichí-Toba fire management. Indeed, archaeological
finds of Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE) have shown how preconquest native
foresters used controlled fires to produce nutrient-rich soils. Yet to therefore
take native fire regimes as forerunners to present-day agro-industrial slash-
and-burn practices, as “climate skeptics” and agro-lobbyists like to do, is as
preposterous as it is factually wrong. See Tsing, The Mushroom, 95–197; and
Gastón Gordillo, Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the
Argentinean Chaco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 21–23. See
also Science Daily, “Ancient Farmers Transformed Amazon and Left and Left
an Enduring Legacy on the Rainforest,” July 23, 2018, https://www.sciencedaily
.com/releases/2018/07/180723142845.htm.
2. Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecology and Deco-
lonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 6.
3. Global Witness, At What Cost? Irresponsible Business and the Murder of
Land and Environmental Defenders in 2017 (London: Global Witness, 2018), 8.
254 ❘ Notes to Chapter 1

4. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, Vol-

ume 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Ed-
mund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392.
5. Ismail Xavier, “Iracema: O Cinema-Verdade vai ao Teatro,” Devires 2,
no. 1 (2004): 72.
6. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, Ends of the World, 14.
7. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, Ends of the World, 68. Italics in original.
8. Ángel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (Buenos Aires:
El Andariego, 2007), 87.
9. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Un-
thinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 17, 56.
10. Antonio E. Brailovsky and Dina Foguelman, Memoria verde: Historia
ecológica de la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1991), 185.
11. José Eustasio Rivera, The Vortex: A Novel, trans. John Charles Chasteen
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 148.
12. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 15.
13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical
Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 212.
14. Tsing, The Mushroom, 21.
15. Published in English as Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandi-
nista, trans. Kathleen Weaver (New York: New American Library, 1986), which
is the edition I will be quoting from.
16. Cabezas, Fire from the Mountain, 121.
17. Cabezas, Fire from the Mountain, 126–27.
18. Rómulo Gallegos, Canaima, critical edition, coordinated by Michael J.
Doudoroff, trans. Will Kirkland (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1996), 218–19.
19. Gallegos, Canaima, 253.
20. Ana Pizarro, Amazonía: El río tiene voces (Santiago: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2009), 75.
21. Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Run-
ner (1492–2019) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 73.
22. Charlotte Rogers, Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism
in the Contemporary American Tropics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2019), 27–30.
23. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 108.
24. Rivera, The Vortex, 153.
25. Londa Schiebinger, “Prospecting for Drugs: European Naturalists in the
West Indies,” in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early
Modern World, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 119–33.
26. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy
Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 50.
27. Fernando Aínsa, Los buscadores de la utopía (Caracas: Monte Ávila,
1977), 90–91.
 Notes to Chapter 1 ❘ 255

28. Roberto González Echevarría, Mito y archivo: Una teoría de la narrativa

latinoamericana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 23.
29. Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, trans. Harriet de Onís (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 205.
30. Carpentier, The Lost Steps, 277.
31. Rivera, The Vortex, 154.
32. Lesley Wylie, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the
Tropics in the Novela de la Selva (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009),
3.
33. Lúcia Sá, Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American
Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 39–40.
34. Raúl Antelo, “La aporía amazónica,” in La naturaleza en disputa: Retóri-
cas del cuerpo y el paisaje en América Latina, ed. Gabriela Nouzeilles (Buenos
Aires: Paidós, 2002), 127.
35. Gallegos, Canaima, 196.
36. Beckman, Capital Fictions, 17.
37. Juan Duchesne Winter, La guerrilla narrada: Acción, acontecimiento, su-
jeto (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2010), 38–39. Italics in the original.
38. Ernesto Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (Melbourne: Ocean Press/Cen-
tro de Estudios Che Guevara, 2006), 14, 51.
39. Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, 20, 26.
40. Duchesne Winter, La guerrilla narrada, 145–46.
41. Guatemala’s first guerrillas had been organized in the early 1960s by for-
mer military officers loyal to the constitutional government of Jacobo Arbenz,
overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954. Under the impact of the revolu-
tion’s triumph in Cuba, they attempted to put into practice the “focus theory”
advanced by Che Guevara and later systematized by Régis Debray in his Revo-
lución en la revolución (1967). After the defeat of this first wave of armed resis-
tance and the assassination of its leaders, some of the survivors exiled in Mexico
and other Central American countries would reorganize, the most important
of the new groups being the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP)—under
the command of Ricardo Ramírez, a.k.a. Comandante Rolando Morán, who
would also write the prologue to Los días de la selva—and the Organización
del Pueblo en Armas (Organization of the People in Arms [ORPA]) under the
lead of Rodrigo Asturias, who adopted as his nom de guerre a literary character
from his father’s, the novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias, work: Gaspar Ilom. Both
groups, offshoots from the more orthodox Marxist-Leninist Fuerzas Armadas
Rebeldes (Rebel Armed Forces [FAR]) under Jorge Soto, a.k.a. Comandante
Pablo Monsanto, which would spend most of the 1970s in “tactical retreat”
before taking up arms again in 1978, sought to construct a base of support
among Indigenous and peasant communities: the EGP in the northern area of
Ixcán and the ORPA in the volcanic highlands of San Marcos, Quetzaltenango,
Sololá, and Chimaltenango. From the outset, both groups ran into tensions with
parallel projects of peasant organization in the area sponsored by Catholic and
Protestant missionary organizations, which also came to bear the brunt of the
genocidal counterinsurgency war waged by the national army. For a detailed
analysis of the Guatemalan civil war, see Yvon Le Bot, La guerra en tierras ma-
256 ❘ Notes to Chapter 1

yas: Comunidad, violencia y modernidad en Guatemala 1970–1992 (Mexico

City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996); and Santiago Santa Cruz Mendoza,
Insurgentes: Guatemala, la paz arrancada (Santiago: Ediciones LOM, 2004).
42. See, for instance, his books Latitud de la flor y el granizo (1991) and
Poemas de la zona reina (1997). In Los fusiles de octubre (1991), a collec-
tion of “military essays” written after his break-up with the EGP, Payeras him-
self would offer a more critical view of the “prolonged popular war” he still
staunchly defended in Days of the Jungle.
43. Mario Payeras, Days of the Jungle: The Testimony of a Guatemalan
Guerrillero, 1972–1976, introduction by George Black (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1983), 23.
44. Ricardo Roque-Baldovinos, “Prohibido decir ‘yo’: Los días de la selva y
la voz de la vanguardia revolucionaria,” Istmo 16 (July–December 2008), http://
istmo.denison.edu/n16/articulos/roque.html.
45. Payeras, Days of the Jungle, 46–47.
46. Duchesne Winter, La guerrilla narrada, 96.
47. Payeras, Days of the Jungle, 71.
48. Payeras, Days of the Jungle, 70.
49. Duchesne Winter, La guerrilla narrada, 108.
50. Payeras, Days of the Jungle, 69.
51. Payeras, Days of the Jungle, 49.
52. Cabezas, Fire from the Mountain, 84.
53. Cabezas, Fire from the Mountain, 85–87.
54. Cortázar in Cabezas, Fire from the Mountain, back cover.
55. Coronel Urtecho quoted in Jorge Narváez, Esencia del testimonio en el
sistema literario nacional: 1972–1982 (Santiago: Ceneca, 1982), 194.
56. Cabezas, Fire from the Mountain, 221.
57. Cabezas, Fire from the Mountain, 218.
58. Aínsa, Los buscadores, 269. Italic in the original.
59. Sylvia Molloy, “Contagio narrativo y gesticulación retórica en La vorá-
gine,” Revista iberoamericana 53, no. 141 (1987): 489.
60. Horacio Quiroga, Todos los cuentos (Madrid: Colección Archivos, 1993),
367–68.
61. Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 613.
62. Esposito, Bios, 85–93.
63. Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 358.
64. Horacio Quiroga, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories, selected
and trans. Margaret S. Peden, introduction by George D. Schade (Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas Press, 1984), 141.
65. Baccino Ponce de León in Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 357.
66. Jennifer French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism and the Spanish American Re-
gional Writers (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2005), 52.
67. Quiroga, The Decapitated Chicken, 119.
68. Quiroga, The Decapitated Chicken, 137.
69. Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 609.
70. J. David Danielson’s English translation, published under the same title—
The Exiles and Other Stories (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987)—contains
 Notes to Chapter 1 ❘ 257

only a small selection of stories from Quiroga’s 1926 volume and does not
preserve the original order (incredibly it also does not include “The Return of
Anaconda”). The effect is, unfortunately, representative of Quiroga’s only be-
lated and partial reception in the Anglosphere as a minor forerunner of magic
realism, which is a grotesque misconception. Not only does the rearrangement
of the stories destroy their unity of time and place (or rather, out of time and
place) signaled by the appearance of one story’s protagonists as minor char-
acters in another. It also dispenses altogether with their shared relation of an-
tagonism towards the more-than-human assemblage of forces in “The Return
of Anaconda,” which had framed the original’s frontier chronotope within the
wider one of the living forest.
71. Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 611.
72. French, Nature, 67.
73. Moore, Capitalism, 53.
74. Quiroga, Todos los cuentos, 619.
75. Gabriel Giorgi, Formas communes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica
(Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2014), 55, 58.
76. Latour, Facing Gaia, 58.
77. Tsing, The Mushroom, 23.
78. Graciliano Ramos, Barren Lives, trans. and with an intro. byRalph Ed-
ward Dimmick (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 109.
79. Horacio Quiroga, Tales of Love of Madness and of Death / Cuentos de
Amor de Locura y de Muerte, trans. Daniel Bernardo (Middletown, NY: So-
journer Books, 2019), 155–56.
80. Ramos, Barren Lives, 6.
81. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 2003), 8.
82. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond
the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 16–17.
83. Quiroga, Tales of Love, 155.
84. Another drought story, Colombian novelist Manuel Mejía Vallejo’s “Ti-
empo de sequía” (Times of drought, 1960), in which a campesino sacrifices his
beloved dog to provide food to his famished family (all the while pretending to
his wife that he has successfully shot a hare) is a different version of this plot
of violent breakup of the more-than-human “family” in the zone of emergency,
with the dog’s death representing the ultimate act of sacrificial love. See Man-
uel Mejía Vallejo, Tiempo de sequía (Bogotá: Ediciones Nuevo Mundo, 1960),
37–48.
85. Quiroga, Tales of Love, 159.
86. Quiroga, Tales of Love, 159
87. Chakrabarty, “The Climate,” 212.
88. Ramos, Barren Lives, 86.
89. Agamben, The Open, 108.
90. See José Luis Romero, Latinoamérica: Las ciudades y las ideas (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976); Rama, Transculturación narrativa;
and Afrânio Coutinho, “O regionalismo na ficção,” in A literatura no Brasil (Rio
de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1986), 234–312.
91. Beckman, Capital Fictions, 158–59.
258 ❘ Notes to Chapter 1

92. Raúl Alen Lascano, El obraje (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América
Latina, 1972), 81.
93. Brailovsky and Foguelman, Memoria verde, 180.
94. Tsing, The Mushroom, 190.
95. Although droughts had been a cyclical phenomenon in many of Central
and South America’s arid zones since precolonial times, their impact steadily
increased with an extraction-based postconquest regime of production, popula-
tion, and land tenancy. See, for the case of Mexico, Enrique Florescano, Breve
historia de la sequía en México (Mexico City: Conaculta, 2000); and for that
of Brazil, Durval Muniz de Albuquerque, The Invention of the Brazilian North-
east, trans. Jerry Dennis Metz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). San-
tiago del Estero’s 1937 drought met with considerable repercussions in political
and cultural milieus in Buenos Aires, part of a wider debate that questioned
export-led modernization and eventually contributed to the rise of Peronism
in the following decade. On representations of the drought in the literary jour-
nalism of the 1930s, including chronicles by Roberto Arlt, Homero Manzi, and
Ernesto Giúdici, see Jens Andermann, “El infierno santiagueño: Sequía, paisaje
y escritura en el Noroeste argentino,” Iberoamericana 12, no. 45 (2012): 23–43.
96. Bernardo Canal Feijóo, Ensayo sobre la expresión popular artística en
Santiago (Buenos Aires: Compañía Impresora, 1937), 11.
97. Canal Feijóo, Ensayo, 11. Italics in the original.
98. Canal Feijóo, Ensayo, 16.
99. Canal Feijóo, Ensayo, 14.
100. Beatriz Ocampo, La nación interior: Canal Feijóo, Di Lullo y los her-
manos Wagner (Buenos Aires: Editorial Antropofagía, 2004), 74–75; Ana Teresa
Martínez, “‘La Brasa,’ un ‘precipitado del ambiente’: Leer, escribir, publicar, entre
la provincia y el pago,” Políticas de la Memoria 14 (Summer 2013/14): 110–12.
101. Orestes Di Lullo, “Grandeza y decadencia de Santiago del Estero,” Bo-
letín del Museo de la Provincia 10 (1959): 3–4.
102. Orestes Di Lullo, El bosque sin leyenda: Ensayo económico-social (San-
tiago del Estero: Tipografía Arcuri & Caro, 1937), 56.
103. Di Lullo, El bosque, 11.
104. Di Lullo, El bosque, 34.
105. Di Lullo, El bosque, 62.
106. Di Lullo, El bosque, 62.
107. Di Lullo, El bosque, 14.
108. Di Lullo, El bosque, 33.
109. Di Lullo, El bosque, 15.
110. Di Lullo, El bosque, 21.
111. Adrián Gorelik, “Mapas de identidad: La imaginación territorial en el
ensayo de interpretación nacional, de Ezequiel Martínez Estrada a Bernardo
Canal Feijóo,” in Miradas sobre Buenos Aires: Historia cultural y crítica urbana
(Buenos Aires: Ariel, 2004), 67.
112. Bernardo Canal Feijóo, “El paisaje y el alma,” Ñan: Revista de Santiago
1 (1932): 10.
113. Canal Feijóo, “El paisaje,” 20.
114. Canal Feijóo, “El paisaje,” 24.
115. Canal Feijóo, “El paisaje,” 22.
 Notes to Chapter 2 ❘ 259

116. Bernardo Canal Feijóo, “El rapto del ferrocarril,” Ñan: Revista de
Santiago 2 (1934): 59–60; “El asalto de la selva,” Ñan: Revista de Santiago 2
(1934): 60–61; and “La destrucción del paisaje,” Ñan: Revista de Santiago 2
(1934): 61, respectively.
117. Canal Feijóo, “El asalto,” 60.
118. Canal Feijóo, “La destrucción,” 61–62.
119. Bernardo Canal Feijóo, De la estructura mediterránea argentina (Bue-
nos Aires: López, 1948), 20.
120. Canal Feijóo, De la estructura mediterránea, 12.
121. Canal Feijóo, De la estructura mediterránea, 113.
122. Canal Feijóo, De la estructura mediterránea, 81.
123. Canal Feijóo, De la estructura mediterránea, 142–43.
124. Canal Feijóo, De la estructura mediterránea, 142.
125. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010), viii.
126. Héctor Hoyos, Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and
the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2019), 4.

C ha pter 2
1. Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City
Planning: With an American Prologue, a Brazilian Corollary Followed by the
Temperature of Paris and the Atmosphere of Moscow, trans. Edith Schreiber
Aujame (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 142–43.
2. Le Corbusier, Precisions, 143.
3. Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, trans. Eleanor Levieux (New York: Orion
Press, 1964), 223.
4. Graciela Silvestri, El lugar común: Una historia de las figuras del paisaje
en el Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2011), 281.
5. Le Corbusier, Precisions, 5.
6. Le Corbusier, Precisions, 245. Italics in the original.
7. Beckman, Capital Fictions, 42.
8. Amereida: Volumen primero (Santiago: Editorial Cooperativa Lambda,
1967), 23.
9. Valerie Fraser, “Cannibalizing Le Corbusier: The MES Gardens of Ro-
berto Burle Marx,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59, no. 2
(2000): 187–90.
10. Eduardo Caballero Calderón, Caminos subterráneos: Ensayo de inter-
pretación del paisaje (Bogotá: Editorial Santafé, 1936), 29.
11. Calderón, Caminos, 29.
12. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of
Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2014), 31.
13. Calderón, Caminos, 34–35.
14. Calderón, Caminos, 35.
15. Juan Carlos Dávalos, Obras completas, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Senado de
la Nación, 1996), 175.
260 ❘ Notes to Chapter 2

16. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia II, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 353.
17. Fernando J. Rosenberg, The Avant-garde and Geopolitics in Latin Amer-
ica (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 2.
18. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London: Routledge, 1992), 4.
19. See Joel Wolfe, Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 34.
20. César Bátiz, La desgracia de ayer: Los primeros accidentes del automov-
ilismo en Venezuela (Caracas: Fundación Empresas Pomar, 2007), 74.
21. Costa quoted in Carlos Eduardo Comas, “O passado mora ao lado: Lúcio
Costa e o projeto do Grand Hotel de Ouro Preto, 1938/40,” Arquitextos 11, 122
(2010), https://www.vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/arquitextos/11.122/3486.
22. Dean McCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New
York: Schocken, 1976), 44–45.
23. The first car to arrive in Latin America was a 3.5-horsepower Peugeot
brought in 1891 to São Paulo from Paris by Henrique Santos Dumont (brother
of Alfredo, the famous aviator). Almost simultaneously, Álvaro Fernandes da
Costa Brava, a Rio de Janeiro chocolatier, had a 6-horsepower Benz shipped
to Rio de Janeiro as a way of promoting and delivering his sweet produce. In
Argentina, the first import was a Benz Victoria shipped to Buenos Aires in 1895
by Delmiro Varela Castex, earning his owner the nickname “Señor Cacerola”
(Mister Frying Pan). Uruguay saw the arrival of its first engine-powered tricycle
in 1900, and Venezuela that of its first car—a Cadillac Ávila—in April 1904.
24. Álvaro Casal Tetlock, El automóvil en América del Sur: Orígenes, Ar-
gentina, Brasil, Paraguay, Uruguay (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Ori-
ental, 1996), 20, 92; Melina Piglia, Autos, rutas y turismo: El Automóvil Club
Argentino y el Estado (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2014), 17; Wolfe, Autos and
Progress, 16, 26.
25. Paulo Cézar de Azevedo and Vladimir Sacchetta, O século do automóvel
no Brasil (São Caetano do Sul: Brasinca, 1989).
26. Ada María Elflein, Por campos históricos: Impresiones de viaje (Buenos
Aires: Talleres Gráficos Argentinos L. Rosso, 1926), 60.
27. Piglia, Autos, rutas y turismo, 185; Wolfe, Autos and Progress, 97.
28. Rosenberg, The Avant-garde, 78.
29. Esther Gabara, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico
and Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 40.
30. Roberto Arlt, “Horizontes ribereños,” Aguafuertes fluviales, El Mundo,
August 14, 1933.
31. Roberto Arlt, En el país del viento: Viaje a la Patagonia (Buenos Aires:
Simurg, 1997), 57.
32. Mário de Andrade, O turista aprendiz (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1983),
227.
33. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 229.
34. Roberto Arlt, “Camino a Resistencia,” El Mundo, September 4, 1933.
35. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 299.
36. Antelo, “La aporía amazónica,” 118–19.
 Notes to Chapter 2 ❘ 261

37. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 182.

38. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 151.
39. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 151–52.
40. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 299–300.
41. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 306.
42. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 294.
43. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 295.
44. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 290.
45. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 290.
46. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 292.
47. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 299.
48. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 291.
49. Alberto Prebisch, “‘Precisiones de Le Corbusier,” Sur 1, no. 1 (Summer
1931): 181.
50. Alberto Prebisch, “Una ciudad de América,” Sur 1, no. 2 (Fall 1931):
218–20.
51. Rego quoted in Alberto Xavier, Arquitetura moderna brasileira: Depoi-
mento de uma geração (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 1987), 179.
52. Philip L. Goodwin, Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652–1942
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943), 102.
53. Valerie Fraser, Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architec-
ture of Latin America, 1930–1960 (London: Verso, 2000), 253.
54. Warchavchik quoted in Guilherme Mazza Dourado, Modernidade verde:
Jardins de Burle Marx (São Paulo: Senac/Edusp, 2009), 53.
55. José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition, trans. and an-
notated by Didier T. Jaén, afterword by Joseba Gabilondo (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997), 24.
56. Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, 24.
57. Casid, Sowing Empire, 51.
58. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 131, 140.
59. Ocampo quoted in Jorge Francisco Liernur and Pablo Pschepiurca, La
red austral: Obras y proyectos de Le Corbusier y sus discípulos en la Argentina,
1924–1965 (Bernal: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes/Prometeo, 2008), 67.
60. Victoria Ocampo, “La aventura del mueble,” Sur 1, no. 1 (Summer 1931):
171.
61. Ocampo, “La aventura,” 173–74.
62. Ocampo quoted in Sonia Berjman, La Victoria de los jardines: El paisaje
en Victoria Ocampo (Buenos Aires: Papers, 2008), 242.
63. Berjman, La Victoria de los jardines, 60.
64. Beatriz Sarlo, La máquina cultural: Maestras, traductoras y vanguardis-
tas (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1998), 185.
65. Robinson, the editor of the journal The Wild Garden and a friend of
John Ruskin, was an early promoter of the use of vernacular, habitat-specific
plants and environmental coherence in the garden; Jekyll, also a painter and
photographer, was the author of Colour in the Flower Garden (1903), a central
reference, among others, for the Jugendstil gardens of Josef Maria Olbrich in
Germany and those of André Véra in France.
262 ❘ Notes to Chapter 2

66. Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst (Tagore’s personal secretary and friend
who had accompanied him on his South American journey in 1924) purchased
the medieval mansion at Dartington, Devon, in 1925 and, with the help of
landscape architects Beatrix Farrand and Percy Cane, redeveloped the grounds
in accordance with the principles of modern wildlife gardening. The house and
gardens, which also featured an important collection of modernist sculpture
including works by Henry Moore and Wilhelm Soukop, from 1928 onward be-
came home to Dartington Hall School, a progressive education institution that
counted the painter Lucien Freud and the actor Igor Moffat among its alumni.
Victoria Ocampo, whose library included a copy of Dorothy Elmhirst’s The
Gardens of Dartington Hall, only visited the grounds herself in the 1960s; an
essay of hers, “Dartington Hall,” appeared in La Prensa in 1968.
67. Grementieri quoted in Berjman, La Victoria de los jardines, 171.
68. Victoria Ocampo, Testimonios: Tercera serie (Buenos Aires: Sudameri-
cana, 1963), 162.
69. Victoria Ocampo, Testimonios: Sexta a décima serie (Buenos Aires: Su-
damericana, 1963), 52–53.
70. Ocampo, Testimonios: Tercera serie, 56.
71. Victoria Ocampo, Testimonios: Sexta serie (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1946),
188–89.
72. Ocampo, Testimonios: Sexta serie, 188.
73. Julio Herrera y Reissig, Poesía completa y prosa selecta (Caracas: Biblio-
teca Ayacucho, 1978), 41.
74. Leopoldo Lugones, Los crepúsculos del jardín (Buenos Aires: Centro Ed-
itor de América Latina, 1982), 10.
75. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1990), 1:84.
76. Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo, This America of Ours: The Let-
ters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Horan
and Doris Meyer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 209.
77. Mistral and Ocampo, This America of Ours, 209.
78. Mistral and Ocampo, This America of Ours, 212–13.
79. Roberto Burle Marx, Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art
and Urbanism (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2020), 88.
80. Roberto Burle Marx, Arte e paisagem: Conferências escolhidas (Rio de
Janeiro: Nobel, 1987), 25.
81. Burle Marx, Arte e paisagem, 87.
82. Jacques Leenhardt, Nos jardins de Burle Marx (São Paulo: Perspectiva,
2000), 23.
83. Vera Beatriz Siqueira, Burle Marx (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2001), 7.
84. Burle Marx, Roberto Burle Marx Lectures, 136.
85. Emmanuele Coccia, La vida de las plantas: Una metafísica de la mixtura,
trans. Gabriela Milone (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2017), 58–59.
86. Burle Marx, Roberto Burle Marx Lectures, 140.
87. Casid, Sowing Empire, 64.
88. Burle Marx, Roberto Burle Marx Lectures, 143.
89. Anita Berrizbeitia, “Roberto Burle Marx and the Parque del Este, Ca-
racas,” in Roberto Burle Marx Landscapes Reflected, ed. Rossana Vaccarino
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 236.
 Notes to Chapter 2 ❘ 263

90. Rossana Vaccarino, “The Inclusion of Modernism: Brasilidade and the

Garden,” in The Architecture of Landscape, 1940–1960, ed. Marc Treib (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 228.
91. Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 47.
92. Dimensión was an offspring of the regionalist literary and artistic move-
ment from the 1930s and 1940s as well as an early gathering point for the rad-
ical leftists who would go on to form the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP)
a decade later. The homonymous journal, directed by Francisco René Santucho
between 1956 and 1962, included collaborations from the likes of Bernardo
Canal Feijóo and Orestes Di Lullo as well as younger santiagueño intellectuals
such as Mario Roberto Santucho and Ana María Villareal, future members of
the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (PRT) and cofounders of ERP. Alberto Alba’s
La casa de la poesía, published in 1990, offers a roman à clef of the group’s
convulsive history.
93. Amereida: Volumen segundo (Viña del Mar: Escuela de Arquitectura de
la Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, 1986), 189.
94. Amereida: Volumen segundo, 217.
95. Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian, The Road That Is Not a Road and the Open
City, Ritoque, Chile (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 49.
96. Iommi quoted in Margarita Serrano, “Godofredo Iommi: La vida peli-
grosa,” Mundo 105 (1991): 11.
97. Pendleton-Jullian, The Road That Is Not a Road, 89.
98. The dérive was an experimental, poetic exploration into urban space
developed by the Situationist International (1957–72), in particular by Guy
Debord and Asger Jorn, who collaborated on a “psychogeographical guide to
Paris” in 1957. Around this same time, Iommi and his group of French and
Latin American artists also staged their phalène outings into the Parisian sub-
urbs and to small towns of the French countryside. On Situationism and the
dérive, see Carl Lavery, “Rethinking the Dérive: Drifting and Theatricality in
Theatre and Performance Studies,” Performance Research 23, no. 7 (2018): 1–
15; and also Greil Marcus’s superb Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); on Iom-
mi’s time in Paris, Javier Correa’s film Amereida: Sólo las huellas descubren el
mar (Amereida: Only the Footprints Discover the Sea, 2017) offers a spectacu-
lar selection of rare archival footage.
99. Pendleton-Jullian, The Road That Is Not a Road, 71. Italics in original.
100. Javier Correa and Victoria Jolly, Amereida: La invención de un mar
(Barcelona: Polígrafa, 2019), 10.
101. Correa and Jolly, Amereida, 12.
102. Amereida: Volumen primero, 78.
103. Amereida: Volumen primero, 78.
104. For reasons of clarity, I shall write “Amereida” in italics whenever I refer
to the homonymous poem and without italics when referring to the 1965 journey.
105. In 1991 the university’s School of Architecture—successor to the
institute—published a further volume collecting the visual and written accounts
of other travesías carried out between 1984 and 1988.
106. Pages hereafter cited in text and refer to Amereida: Volumen primero.
264 ❘ Notes to Chapter 2

107. Inspired by Mexican philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman’s provocative

thesis about the colonial “invention of America” and Chilean historian Mario
Góngora’s ideas about postcolonial America’s lack of a foundation myth, the
Amereida’s navigators playfully cast themselves as reenacting the foundational
epic of Greco-Roman antiquity. Indeed, just as Virgil’s Aeneid had provided
imperial Rome with a poetic origin of its own by anchoring it in Homeric
mythology at the same time as it rewrote the latter, the Amereida would force
out the New World’s poetic nature by both re- and unwriting the annals of
colonial discovery. See Enrique O’Gorman, La invención de América: Inves-
tigación acerca de la estructura histórica del Nuevo Mundo y de su sentido y
devenir (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958); and Mario Gón-
gora, Los grupos de conquistadores en tierra firme (1509–1530): Fisonomía
histórico-social de un tipo de conquista (Santiago: Editorial Universidad de
Chile, 1962).
108. Godofredo Iommi, Los actos poéticos de apertura de los terrenos (Cor-
poración Cultural Abierta, Ritoque: Biblioteca de Amereida, ca. 1971), 7. Avail-
able at http://amereida.cl/Apertura_de_Terrenos.
109. Iommi, Los actos poéticos, 23–24.
110. Iommi, Los actos poéticos, 19.
111. Iommi, Los actos poéticos, 20.
112. Iommi, Los actos poéticos, 17.
113. Enrique Browne, “La Ciudad Abierta en Valparaíso,” Summa 214 (July
1985): 76.
114. Browne, “La Ciudad Abierta,” 76.
115. An up-to-date list of buildings and other works constructed at the
Open City, some including photographs and short historical reviews, is avail-
able on the Corporación Cultural Amereida’s website: http://www.amereida.
cl/obras.
116. Pendleton-Jullian, The Road That Is Not a Road, 7. Italics in original.
117. Iommi, Los actos poéticos, 43.
118. Iommi, Los actos poéticos, 40–41.
119. Iommi, Los actos poéticos, 17.
120. Iommi, Los actos poéticos, 32
121. Godofredo Iommi, “Notas sobre la Ciudad Abierta: Agora—Hospital-
idad—Riqueza—Bottega—Gerencia,” undated manuscript, ca. 1971, tome 1,
p. 4, Corporación Cultural Amereida, Biblioteca de Amereida.
122. Godofredo Iommi, Notas a propósito de vida, trabajo y estudio y el
real sentido contemporáneo de la hospitalidad como forma de vida cotidiana
en la Ciudad Abierta (Corporación Cultural Amereida: Archivo Hospedería de
la Entrada, February 5, 1971), http://amereida.cl/Notas_a_propósito_de_vida,_
trabajo_y_estudio_y_el_real_sentido_contemporáneo_de_la_hospitalidad_
como_forma_de_vida_cotidiana_en_la_Ciudad_Abierta.
123. Browne, “La Ciudad Abierta,” 76.
124. Ana María León, “Prisoners of Ritoque: The Open City and the Ri-
toque Concentration Camp,” Journal of Architectural Education 66, no. 1
(2012): 90–91.
125. Pendleton-Jullian, The Road That Is Not a Road, 87.
 Notes to Chapter 3 ❘ 265

C ha pter 3
1. Mário Pedrosa, “Arte ambiental, arte pós-moderna, Hélio Oiticica,” in
Dos murais de Portinari aos espaços de Brasília, ed. Aracy A. Amaral (São
Paulo: Perspectiva, 1981), 205, 207.
2. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring
1979): 31.
3. Kynaston L. McShine, “Essay,” in Information, ed. Kynaston L. McShine
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 138.
4. Nelly Richard, Márgenes e institución: Arte en Chile desde 1973 / Margins
and Institutions: Art in Chile Since 1973 (Melbourne: Experimental Art Foun-
dation, 1986), 53.
5. Richard, Márgenes, 18.
6. Richard, Márgenes, 68–69
7. Richard, Márgenes, 53.
8. Richard, Márgenes, 54.
9. Richard, Márgenes, 54.
10. Pablo Oyarzún, “Sobre el libro Márgenes e instituciones de Nelly Rich-
ard,” in Arte en Chile desde 1973: Escena de avanzada y sociedad, ed. Nelly
Richard (Santiago: FLACSO, 1987), 50.
11. Oyarzún, “Sobre el libro Márgenes e instituciones,” 49.
12. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 10.
13. Ana Longoni, “El mito de Tucumán Arde,” Artelogie 6 (June 2014),
http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?article308.
14. Quoted in Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán
Arde”: Vanguardia artística y política en el 68 argentino (Buenos Aires: Eudeba,
2008), 201.
15. María Teresa Gramuglio and Nicolás Rosa, “Tucumán Arde,” manifesto,
mimeograph (1968), International Center for the Arts of the Americas, Museum
of Fine Arts, Houston, http://icaadocs.mfah.org.
16. Gramuglio and Rosa, “Tucumán Arde.”
17. Sarlo, La máquina cultural, 239.
18. Insightful readings of Tucumán Arde, apart from Mariano Mestman and
Ana Longoni’s seminal and well-documented book-length study, also include
John King’s groundbreaking history of Argentina’s neo-avantgarde El Di Tella
y el desarrollo cultural argentino en la década del sesenta (Buenos Aires: Gagli-
anone, 1985), as well as more recent contributions in Sol Arrese, ed., Tucumán
Arde: Eine Erfahrung; Aus dem Archiv von Graciela Carnevale (Berlin: B
Books, 2004); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics
of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012); and Claudia Kozak, Contra la pared:
Sobre graffitis, pintadas y otras intervenciones urbanas (Buenos Aires: Libros
del Rojas, 2004), among others.
19. Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Lib-
eration (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 44.
20. Roger, Court traité du paysage, 16.
21. Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking With Eyes and
Hands,” Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 7.
266 ❘ Notes to Chapter 3

22. Casid, Sowing Empire, 95.

23. Longoni and Mestman, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde,” 209.
24. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23–24.
25. Hoyos, Things with a History, 4.
26. Quoted in Clarissa Spigiorin Campomizzi, “Arte, guerrilha e experiência:
Frederico Morais e suas propostas em Do corpo à terra,” paper presented at the
XXVIII Simpósio Nacional de Historia (Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, 2015),
http://www.snh2015.anpuh.org.
27. Sean Nesselrode, “Defining the Aesthetic(s) of Negation in El Techo de
la Ballena,” Caiana: Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual del Centro
Argentino de Investigadores de Arte (CAIA) 4 (2014), http://caiana.caia.org.ar
/template/caiana.p hp?pag=articles/article_2.php&obj=153&vo l=4.
28. Quoted in Juan Calzadilla, El Techo de la Ballena: Antología 1961–1969
(Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, 2008), 3.
29. Jessica Lack, Why Are We “Artists”? 100 Art Manifestos (Harmond-
sworth, UK: Penguin, 2017), 9. I quote from Lack’s published English transla-
tion despite some inaccuracies: “lujuria” does not mean “luxury” in Spanish but
rather “lust,” and “una tela al pie de un volcán” should be rendered as “a canvas
at the foot of a volcano” rather than just “a piece of fabric.”
30. Beckman, Capital Fictions, 4.
31. Sophie Halart, “Cogs and Clogs: Sabotage as Noise in Post-1960s Chil-
ean and Argentine Art and Art History,” in Sabotage Art. Politics and Icono-
clasm in Contemporary Latin America, ed. Sophie Halart and Mara Polgovsky
Ezcurra (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 116.
32. As Gustavo Buntinx explains, the acronym was simultaneously an inside
joke referring to the cooperatives set up during the progressive military ad-
ministration of General Velasco Alvarado (1968–75), known as “Empresas de
Propiedad Social” (Socially-Owned Enterprises [E. P. S.]). See Buntinx, “Estudio
introductorio,” in E. P. S. Huayco: Documentos, ed. Gustavo Buntinx (Lima:
MALI/Institut Français d’Études Andines, 2017), 101.
33. Arte al paso (1981), Mariotti’s own video balance of E. P. S. Huayco’s
activities made in collaboration with Lorenzo Bianda is available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke16GYqF14s&list=PLbo3q_6y7AywyL
retbFLkV0yb2c8HKmRQ&index=3&t=273s.
34. Quotations from CADA’s own literature produced on occasion of their
interventions (leaflets, videos, and magazine ads) are taken from the CADA
collection accessible at New York University’s Hemispheric Institute Digital Li-
brary, http://hidvl.nyu.edu.
35. Rodrigo Cánovas, “Llamado a la tradición, mirada hacia el futuro o
parodia del presente,” in Arte en Chile desde 1973, 21.
36. Richard, Márgenes, 53.
37. Verónica Gago, La razón neoliberal: Economías barrocas y pragmática
popular (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2014), 31.
38. Francesco Mariotti, personal communication, June 15, 2020.
39. Mirko Lauer, “Arte al paso: Tome uno,” exhibition flyer (Lima: Galería
Fórum, 1980), n.p.
40. Mirko Lauer, “Opina Mirko Lauer,” in E. P. S. Huayco: Arte al paso, ed.
Francesco Mariotti (Locarno: Edizioni Flaviana, 1981), n.p.
 Notes to Chapter 3 ❘ 267

41. Buntinx, “Estudio introductorio,” 104.

42. Richard, Márgenes, 54.
43. A short video made by Mariotti of a visit to Sarita in 1999, almost
twenty years after its installation, shows the image to have deteriorated (in part
due to rust and in part to cans having been removed) but also surrounded by
small altars and offerings from traveling pilgrims. Apart from the cacti planted
in the shape of Sarita’s name, a more recent addition on an adjacent hillside—
dwarfing the Sarita memorial—is the giant logo of a paramilitary force used,
during the Fujimori regime, to combat the insurgent Sendero Luminoso (Shin-
ing Path) movement, and responding to the latter’s campaign of terror with
even more widespread human rights abuses. See Francesco Mariotti, Sarita,
20 años después, Micromuseo Perú, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=Kgk1nacyHbE&list=PLbo3q_6y7AywyLretbFLkV0yb2c8HKmRQ
&index=6&t=5s.
44. Ligia Canongia, Artur Barrio (Rio de Janeiro: Modo Edições, 2002),
145.
45. Canongia, Artur Barrio, 196.
46. Claudia Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Ar-
tur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 87.
47. Canongia, Artur Barrio, 145.
48. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Seuil,
1980), 12.
49. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 4–5.
50. Hélio Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, ed. Luciano Figueiredo, Lygia
Pape, and Waly Salomão (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986), 115.
51. Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 130.
52. Guy Brett, Brasil experimental: Arte/vida, proposições e paradoxos (Rio
de Janeiro: Contracapa, 2005), 71.
53. Brett, Brasil experimental, 34.
54. César Oiticica Filho, Hélio Oiticica: Encontros (Rio de Janeiro: Azou-
gue, 2010), 231.
55. Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 114–15.
56. Hélio Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” manuscript, July 21, 1973, 11, Pro-
grama Hélio Oiticica, http://54.232.114.233/extranet/enciclopedia/ho/home
/dsp_home.cfm.
57. Hélio Oiticica, “Barracão,” manuscript, August 19, 1969, 1, Programa
Hélio Oiticica, http://54.232.114.233/extranet/enciclopedia/ho/home/dsp_ho
me.cfm.
58. Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 125.
59. Roberto Schwarz, in an article first published in French in Jean-Paul
Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes, was among the first to discuss Tropicalis-
mo’s stance as a countercultural response to dictatorship. See Schwarz, “Cultura
e política, 1964–1969,” in As ideias fora do lugar: Ensaios selecionados (São
Paulo: Penguin / Companhia das Letras, 2014). For an insightful overview of
the cultural politics of Tropicalismo in late 1960s Brazil, see also Christopher
Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counter-
culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
60. Oiticica, Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 120.
268 ❘ Notes to Chapter 3

61. Mari Carmen Ramirez, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour (London:
Tate Publishing, 2007), 18.
62. Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” 10.
63. In a 1978 interview, Oiticica also described the conglomerate as his way
of working through the layers of his previous work, as an archival production
of self: “In the Seventies, in Brazil, I was producing a lot and I felt the need for
giving a sense of direction to all this. This ordering of ideas, the Conglomerado,
has as its general title Newyorkaises and it is divided into blocos.” Paula Beren-
stein Jacques, Estética da ginga: A arquitetura das favelas através da obra de
Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro: Casa da Palabra, 2003), 127.
64. Oiticica Filho, Hélio Oiticica, 170.
65. Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” 4.
66. Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” 2.
67. Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” 4.
68. Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” 5.
69. Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” 2.
70. Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” 3.
71. Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” 6.
72. Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” 3.
73. Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” 7.
74. Oiticica, “Mundo-abrigo,” 7. Italics in original.
75. Hélio Oiticica, “Ready-Constructible,” manuscript, August 21, 1978,
199, Programa Hélio Oiticica, http://54.232.114.233/extranet/enciclopedia/ho
/home/dsp_home.cfm.
76. Oiticica, “Ready-Constructible,” 201.
77. Cauê Alves, “Cosmococa, programa in progress e cinema: A instauração
do artista trágico nietzscheano,” Aurora 3 (2008): 49.
78. Richard, Márgenes, 53.
79. Hélio Oiticica, “Acontecimento poético-urbano,” manuscript, undated
(1979), n.p, Programa Hélio Oiticica, http://54.232.114.233/extranet/enciclo
pedia/ho/home/dsp_home.cfm.
80. Mendieta quoted in Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Fem-
inine Avant-Garde (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 100.
81. Jane Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 73.
82. Luis Camnitzer, “Ana Mendieta,” Third Text 3, no. 7 (1989): 48.
83. Best, Visualizing Feeling, 75.
84. Anne Raine, “Embodied Geographies: Subjectivity and Materiality in the
Work of Ana Mendieta,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts:
Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London: Routledge, 2009), 239.
85. Best, Visualizing Feeling, 74.
86. Raine, “Embodied Geographies,” 244.
87. Mendieta quoted in Petra Barreras del Río and John Perreault, Ana
Mendieta: A Retrospective (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art,
1987), 10.
88. Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta?, 58.
 Notes to Chapter 3 ❘ 269

89. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 40.
90. Jill H. Casid, “Necrolandscaping,” in Natura: Environmental Aesthetics
after Landscape, ed. Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, and Dayron Carrillo
Morell (Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2018), 245.
91. Casid, “Necrolandscaping,” 245.
92. Luis Fernando Benedit, Plant-en dierhabitaten (Antwerp: Internationaal
Cultureel Centrum, 1976), 20.
93. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the
Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948).
94. Daniel López del Rincón, Bioarte: Arte y vida en la era de la biotec-
nología (Madrid: Akal, 2015), 17–20.
95. Eduardo Kac, “Art That Looks You in the Eye: Hybrids, Clones, Mu-
tants, Synthetics, and Transgenics,” in Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, ed.
Eduardo Kac (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 18.
96. W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Repro-
duction,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 3 (September 2003): 481.
97. Morton, Hyperobjects, 129.
98. Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruc-
tion, Deconstruction, trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2009).
99. Kac, “Art That Looks You in the Eye,” 18.
100. Kac, “Art That Looks You in the Eye,” 19.
101. Louise Ganz, Imaginários da terra: Ensaios sobre natureza e arte na
contemporaneidade (Rio de Janeiro: Quartet, 2015), 24.
102. Eduardo Kac, Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits,
and Robots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 222.
103. Kac, Telepresence and Bio Art, 254.
104. Kac quoted in Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi, “We Are Never
Alone: A Conversation on Bio Art with Eduardo Kac,” Journal of Latin Ameri-
can Cultural Studies 26, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 282.
105. Kac, Telepresence and Bio Art, 276.
106. Nicole Anderson, “(Auto)Immunity: The Deconstruction and Politics of
‘Bio-art’ and Criticism,” Parallax 16, no. 4 (2010): 105.
107. Anderson, “(Auto)Immunity,” 106.
108. Kohn, How Forests Think, 71.
109. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2, 117.
110. Maria Thereza Alves, “Wake for Berlin, 1999–2001,” project notes,
http://www.mariatherezaalves.org/works/wake-for-berlin?c=.
111. Maria Thereza Alves, “Wake in Guangzhou: The History of the Earth,”
Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 7, no. 2 (Summer 2017):
10–11.
112. Jill H. Casid, “Doing Things with Being Undone,” Journal of Visual
Culture 18, no. 1 (April 2019): 37.
113. Tsing, The Mushroom, 23.
114. Casid, Sowing Empire, 191.
270 ❘ Notes to Chapter 4

115. Kester, The One and the Many, 141.

116. López del Rincón, Bioarte, 25, 27.
117. Karla Jasso, “Autosustentabilidad energética y vida simbiótica: Plantas-
en-nomadismo,” Plantas nómadas (February 2010), http://www.plantasnoma
das.com.
118. Wiener, Cybernetics, 1.
119. Emmanuele Coccia, “The Cosmic Garden,” in Andermann, Blackmore,
and Carrillo Morell, Natura, 19–20.
120. Iván Henriques, Repaisagem-Relandscaping (Rio de Janeiro: Centro
Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica, 2016), exhibition flyer.
121. José Albelda and Serena Pisano, “Bioarte: Entre el deslumbramiento
tecnológico y la mirada crítica,” Arte y políticas de identidad, 10–11 (July–
December 2014): 121.
122. Demos, Decolonizing Nature, 149.
123. Demos, Decolonizing Nature, 101.
124. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Con-
tingency (London: Continuum, 2010), 4.
125. Morton, Hyperobjects, 133.

C ha pter 4
1. Tsing, The Mushroom, 4, 21.
2. McBrien, “Accumulating Extinction,” 116.
3. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 69.
4. Ursula K. Heise, Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kul-
tur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 19.
5. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 69.
6. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 187.
7. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 187.
8. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 183.
9. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 186.
10. Bryson, Vision and Painting, 93.
11. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
12. Moore, Capitalism, 141.
13. The key reference here is from the Homilies on the Gospel of John (fifth
century): “Si delectat te mundus, semper vis esse immundus; si autem iam non te
delectat hic mundus, iam tu es mundus,” translated by Edmund Hill as “If you
set your heart on the world, that means you want to remain unclean forever;
but if you no longer set your heart on this world, you are already clean.” Allan
D. Fitzgerald, ed., The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st
Century, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park: New York City Press, 2009), 597.
14. Hortense Spillers, Black, White and in Color (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009), 309.
15. Jörg Dünne, “Unwelt (mundus immundus),” in Welt-Komposita: Ein
Lexikon, ed. Thomas Ertel and Robert Stockhammer (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2019), 242.
 Notes to Chapter 4 ❘ 271

16. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, Ends of the World, 104.

17. Jean Clair, De immundo (Paris: Galilée, 2004).
18. Francisco López, “Blind Listening,” in The Book of Music and Nature,
ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press, 2013), 163.
19. López quoted in Makis Solomos, “A Phenomenological Experience of
Sound: Notes on Francisco López,” Contemporary Music Review 38, nos. 1–2
(2019): 99.
20. Alexander von Humboldt, Views of Nature; or, Contemplations on the
Sublime Phenomena of Creation, With Scientific Illustrations, trans. E. C. Otté
and Henry G. Bohn (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850), 199.
21. Oliver Lubrich, “Humboldtian Landscapes,” in Andermann, Blackmore,
and Carrillo Morell, Natura, 96.
22. Humboldt, Views of Nature, 201.
23. Lubrich, “Humboldtian Landscapes,” 97. Italics in the original.
24. Humboldt, Views of Nature, 192.
25. Humboldt, Views of Nature, 192
26. Humboldt, Views of Nature, 192.
27. Humboldt, Views of Nature, 192.
28. Mário de Andrade, Ensaio sobre a música brasileira, ed. Telê Porto An-
cona Lopez (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Martins, 1972), 16.
29. Andrade, Ensaio, 24.
30. Andrade, Ensaio, 18.
31. Andrade, Ensaio, 24.
32. Andrade, Ensaio, 16.
33. Maria Alice Volpe, “Indianismo and Landscape in the Brazilian Age of
Progress: Art Music from Carlos Gomes to Villa-Lobos, 1870s–1930s” (PhD
diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2001), 305.
34. Jonathan Gilmurray, introduction to Environmental Sound Artists: In
Their Own Words, ed. Frederick Bianchi and V. J. Manzo (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016), xxv.
35. David Monacchi and Bernie Krause, “Ecoacoustics and Its Expression
through the Voice of the Arts: An Essay,” in Ecoacoustics: The Ecological Role
of Sounds (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2017), 298–99.
36. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 18.
37. Francisco López, “Environmental Sound Matter,” liner notes, in La Selva:
Sound Environments from a Neotropical Rain Forests (Hilversum: V2 Records,
1998), 1.
38. López, “Environmental Sound Matter,” 2.
39. Solomos, “A Phenomenological Experience,” 95–96. Italics in the original.
40. Marie Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic
Moralism (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 88.
41. See Pierre Schaeffer, Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay Across Disci-
plines, trans. Christine North and John Dack (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2017).
42. Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound, 87.
272 ❘ Notes to Chapter 4

43. Kohn, How Forests Think, 167.

44. Kohn, How Forests Think, 182.
45. López, “Environmental Sound Matter,” 2.
46. López, “Environmental Sound Matter,” 2. Italics in the original.
47. López quoted in Solomos, “A Phenomenological Experience,” 98. Italics
in the original.
48. Chion, Voice in Cinema, 24.
49. Chion, Voice in Cinema, 22–23.
50. Chion, Voice in Cinema, 24. Italics in the original.
51. Moore, Capitalism, 13.
52. Kaitlin M. Murphy, “Memory Mapping: Affect, Place, and Testimony in
El lugar más pequeño,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 25, no. 4
(Winter 2016): 580–81.
53. Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 8.
54. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 69.
55. Consuelo Lins and Cláudia Mesquita, Filmar o real: Sobre o docu-
mentário brasileiro contemporâneo (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2008), 74.
56. Tonacci quoted in Daniel Caetano, ed., Serras da desordem (Rio de Ja-
neiro: Boca do Azougue, 2008), 120.
57. Ivone Margulies, “El actor (de lo) real: Reescenificación y transmisión en
S21 y Serras da desordem,” in La escena y la pantalla: Cine contemporáneo y
el retorno de lo real, ed. Jens Andermann and Álvaro Fernández Bravo (Buenos
Aires: Colihue, 2013), 151.
58. Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 2007), 1.
59. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no.
3 (1975): 6–18.
60. Martin Lefebvre, “Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema,” in
Landscape and Film, ed. Martin Lefebvre (London: Routledge, 2006), 29.
61. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 189.
62. Tsing, The Mushroom, 4.
63. Tsing, The Mushroom, 29.
64. Tsing, The Mushroom, 6.
65. Gastón Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2014), 81.
66. Gordillo, Rubble, 81.
67. Moore, Capitalism, 41, 45.
68. Tsing, The Mushroom, 4.
69. Moore, Capitalism, 41.
70. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 3.
71. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience,
trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 48.
72. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
(London: Athlone, 1986), 123–24.
73. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 60.
74. Giorgi, Formas communes, 1.
 Notes to Chapter 4 ❘ 273

75. Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami
Shaman, trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 2013), 61.
76. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 65.
77. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 305.
78. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 313.
79. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 32.
80. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 393.
81. Peter Gow, “‘Listen to Me, Listen to Me, Listen to Me, Listen to Me . . .’:
A Brief Commentary on The Falling Sky by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert,”
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 2 (2014): 305.
82. Idelber Avelar, “Amerindian Perspectivism and Non-human Rights,” alter/
nativas 1 (Fall 2013), https://alternativas.osu.edu/en/issues/autumn-2013.html.
83. For a critical assessment of the Pink Tide, its prospects, and legacies,
see Patrick Iber, “After the Pink Tide,” Dissent (Winter 2019), https://www.dis-
sentmagazine.org/article/after-the-pink-tide; and also the contributions by Ticio
Escobar, Alejandro Kaufman, Ivana Bentes, and Javier Trímboli in the dossier
“Turn of the Tide? Cultural Critique and the New Right,” ed. Jens Andermann,
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 27, no. 1 (2018): 1–81.
84. Povinelli, Geontologies, 41.
85. Povinelli, Geontologies, 35.
86. CEPAL (Comisión Económica para América Latina), Panorama de la
inserción internacional de América Latina y el Caribe, 2009–2010 (Santiago:
CEPAL, 2010).
87. Thea Riofrancos, “Extractivismo Unearthed: A Genealogy of Radical
Discourse,” Cultural Studies 31, nos. 2–3 (2017): 278.
88. Alberto Acosta, “Post-Extractivism: From Discourse to Practice—
Reflections for Action,” International Development Policy 9 (2017): 79.
89. Echeverría cited in Acosta, “Post-Extractivism,” 81–82.
90. Catherine Walsh, “Human Development and Buen Vivir: Interview
with Catherine Walsh,” DevelopmentPlus (blog), 2010, https://www.sidint.net
/content/human-development-and-buen-vivir-interview-catherine-walsh.
91. Moore, Capitalism, 26. Italics in original.
92. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2.
93. Retort (Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Waters),
Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London: Verso,
2005), 31.
94. Nixon, Slow Violence, 151.
95. Nixon, Slow Violence, 153.
96. Povinelli, Geontopower, 35.
97. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 259.
98. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 259.
99. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 281. Italics in the original.
100. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 291.
101. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 291.
102. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 291–92
103. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 293.
274 ❘ Notes to Coda

104. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontol-
ogy of Amazonian Spirits,” Inner Asia 9, no. 2 (2007): 160.
105. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 299.
106. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 300.
107. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 307.
108. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 308.
109. Rama, Transculturación narrativa, 83–84.
110. Viveiros de Castro, “The Crystal Forest,” 154–55.
111. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 447.
112. Gow, “Listen to Me,” 304.
113. Pilar Calveiro, Poder y desaparición: los campos de concentración en
Argentina (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2006), 25.
114. Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 282–83.
115. Tsing, The Mushroom, 24.
116. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 55.
117. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 55.
118. Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes,
trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 4.
119. Nancy, After Fukushima, 28.
120. Nancy, After Fukushima, 8.
121. Nancy, After Fukushima, 5.
122. Nancy, After Fukushima, 32.
123. Nancy, After Fukushima, 12.
124. Nancy, After Fukushima, 21.
125. Morton, Hyperobjects, 101.
126. Morton, Hyperobjects, 108.
127. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 103.
128. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, Ends of the World, 108.
129. Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 155.

C oda
1. João Cabral de Melo Neto, The Dog without Feather, trans. Thomas Col-
chie, Hudson Review 24, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 33. The original Portuguese reads
“O que vive é espesso / como um cão, como um homem, / como aquele rio. //
Como todo o real / é espesso.” See João Cabral de Melo Neto, Poesia completa
e prosa (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 2008), 91. Hereafter I will quote the
Portuguese original from Poesia completa, followed in parenthesis by Colchie’s
translation for The Dog without Feather, and by Richard Zenith’s translation
published in Education by Stone: Selected Poems (New York: Archipelago
Books, 2005) for all other poems.
2. Neto, Poesia completa, 91.
3. Neto, Poesia completa, 81.
4. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 24.
5. Taussig, The Corn Wolf, 141.
6. Taussig, The Corn Wolf, 145.
7. Nixon, Slow Violence, 160.
 Notes to Coda ❘ 275

8. Florencia Garramuño, Mundos en común: Ensayos sobre la inespecifici-

dad en el arte (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015), 14.
9. Tsing, The Mushroom, vii.
10. Tsing, The Mushroom, 6.
11. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 33.
12. Juan L. Ortiz, Obra completa (Santa Fe: Universidad Nacional del Lito-
ral, 1996), 1016. English translations in parentheses are mine.
13. Ortiz, Obra completa, 927.
14. Neto, Poesia completa, 326.
15. Ortiz, Obra completa, 665. Ellipsis in original.
16. Ortiz, Obra completa, 719. Ellipsis in original.
17. Ortiz, Obra completa, 665.
18. Ortiz, Obra completa, 687.
19. Sergio Delgado, “El río interior (estudio preliminar),” in Juan L. Ortiz, El
Gualeguay (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2004), 29–30.
20. Neto, Poesia completa, 118.
21. Neto, Poesia completa, 2.
22. Neto, Poesia completa, 324.
23. Solange Rebuzzi, O idioma pedra de João Cabral (São Paulo: Perspectiva,
2010), 29.
24. Neto, Poesia completa, 287.
25. Marta Peixoto, Poesia com coisas (São Paulo: Iluminuras, 1997), 120.
26. Neto, Poesia completa, 59.
27. Neto, Poesia completa, 324.
28. Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 17.
29. Neto, Poesia completa, 118.
30. Modesto Carone, A poética do silêncio: João Cabral de Melo Neto e Paul
Celan (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979), 64.
31. Neto, Poesia completa, 91.
32. Rebuzzi, O idioma pedra, 47.
33. Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 43.
34. Neto, Poesia completa, 92.
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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures

abandonment, 19, 53, 58, 122 aesthetics, 242; catastrophe and,

abject, the, 159–60, 194 22; extractivism and, 17–18;
abstract expressionism, 4 functionality and, 100; garden
abstraction, 4–5, 10, 13, 77, 114, aesthetic, 10, 19–20, 103 (see also
167; “biomorphic,” 4 landscape architecture); gardening
abstractionism, 78–79, 109 aesthetics, 19–20; instrumentality
abyss, 96 and, 17; life and, 177–78;
acceleration, 19 modernist, 19–20; politics and, 23;
accident, the, 79–96 safety and, 16–17; self-reflexivity
accidental journey, 79–96, 81 and, 17
“accidented” movement, 19 Africans, 193, 194
accumulation, 22 Afro-Brazilian music, 200
acousmatics, 21, 194–208, 202, 205; Afro-descendants, 11, 47, 59, 194
acousmatic zone, 205–6, 207–8; afterlife, 209; of assemblage(s), 157;
sound-image relations and, 213 of landscape(s), 4, 5–6, 191
acousmêtre, 205–6 “after nature,” 178
acoustic ecology, 194–95, 201–2, Agamben, Giorgio, 30, 217
202 “age of biocybernetic reproduction,”
Acre, 93 178, 180
action, call for, 249 ágoras, 132
action-image, 211 agribusiness, murders linked to, 27–
activism, 185, 189, 227–28, 231–33, 28
249 agro-pharmaceutical companies,
Adorno, Theodor, 179 185
aesthetic modernity, 4–5, 14–15. See Aínsa, Fernando, 35–36, 47
also modernity Aitken, Doug, 11, 12, 13; Sonic
aesthetic production, as relational, Pavilion, 8
242 Alagoas, Brazil, 94

293
294 ❘ Index

Ala Plástica collective, 184–85, 186; music), 199–200; Great Western—

AA Project, 185; Jardinagem: R. G. do Norte, 14- XII- 28.
Territorialidade (Gardening: Pessoal do trem numa parada
Territoriality), 185; Junco/Especies onde tem água, se atira para
emergentes (Reed/Emergent beber, 91; Macunaíma, 93; “O
species), 185 turista aprendiz” (The apprentice
Alba, Alberto, 115, 116–17, 116, tourist), 90; Paulicéia desvairada
117, 121, 263n92 (Hallucinated city), 82; “Quê dê
Albert, Bruce, 21, 223, 227, 229, 231, o poeta?” (Where’s the poet?),
233, 237, 241 88, 89; “Viagem etnográfica” (An
Alencar, José de, 200; Iracema, 26–27 ethnographic journey), 94
alienation, 30, 156 Andrade, Oswald de, 82;
allegory, 25–26, 28 Anthropophagic Manifesto, 87
Allende, Salvador, 133, 151 Angola, 3
alliances, 78, 140animal, 48–58; animals, 222–23. See also specific
immunitary, 35, 58; transspecies, animals; animal alliance, 48–58;
48–58, 78 animal bodies, 222–23; animal
Almeida, José Américo de, A voices, 202–3 (see also birdsong);
bagaceira (Trash), 30 human-animal relations, 219
alter-globalization movements, 179 Antelo, Raúl, 37, 93
Alto Xingú, 225 Anthropocene, 7, 21, 234
Álvarez, Antenor, 59 anthropogenic sound, 206
Alves, Maria Thereza, 21, 183, 185, anti-GMO groups, 185
189, 242; Seeds of Change, 183– antitouristic travel, 121–22
84; Seeds of Change: New York— antitravel, 92–93
a Botany of Colonization, 184–85; Apocalipopótese, 168
Wake, 183 Araxá complex, 109–10
Amado, Jorge, Cacau (Cocoa), 29 architectural modernism, 97–115
Amantaní, isle of, 133 architecture, 73, 99–100, 130–31;
Amaral, Cristina, Já visto jamais visto modernist aesthetics in, 19–20, 97–
(Seen once seen never, 2013), 209 115; poetry and, 118–20, 121–22,
amateurism, 186 129; sculpture and, 137
Amazonia, 25–27, 30, 33–34, 200, archive, 35, 37
224 Argentina, 21, 48, 184–85. See also
Amazon River, 93 specific locations; automobiles in,
Amereida, 15, 20, 115–34, 116, 242, 84, 85, 87; dictatorships in, 232;
264n107 Le Corbusier in, 74–75; modernism
Amereida (poem), 75–76, 76, 122– in, 101
29, 127, 133–34, 240 Argentine cosmopolitan avant-garde,
American Gothic, 34 19–20
Amunátegui, Ximena, 117 Argentine Northwest, 19, 59–78, 64
anacondas, 50–53 Arlt, Roberto, 88, 90–92
Anderson, Nicole, 182 ars vitae, 179
Andes, 80, 85, 149, 224 art. See also aesthetics; specific
Andrade, Mário de, 81, 88, 90, 92– media, genres, movements, and
96, 201; Ensaio sobre a música artists: autonomy of, 157–58;
brasileira (Essay on Brazilian environment and, 60–63; “ignorant
 Index ❘ 295

art,” 18; “information art,” 144; autopoiesis, 177–78

as Kippfigur, 182; living, 180– Auto-Propulsão, 85
82; politics and, 23, 179–80, Auto-Sport, 85
189–90; public, 151; science avant-garde, 137, 141–46; Argentine,
and, 179–80, 180–82, 183, 185, 19–20; assemblage(s) and, 146–47;
189–90; technology and, 186–87; automobiilty and, 79–96; avant-
unspecificity and, 136–40, 189–90 garde journals, 84–85; avant-garde
art actions, 140–60 travelogues, 96; collectives, 148–
Artaud, Antonin, 121 60 (see also specific collectives);
arte ambiental (environmental art), landscape(s) and, 97–115;
137, 146–49 modernism and, 80–81; technology
artistic music, 200 and, 79–96
artist(s): as guerrilla fighter, 146–47; Avelar, Idelber, 224
role of, 146–47. See also specific azulejos, 10
artists
Asociación Amigos del Arte Babich, Silvina, 184–85
(Association of Friends of the Babylonests, 162–63
Arts), 100 Baccino Ponce de León, Napoléon,
Asociación Cultural La Brasa (Ember 51
Cultural Association), 62 bacteria, 180–82
assemblage(s), 14, 16, 18–19, 21, 27– Baeza, Arturo, 117
28, 50, 76, 140, 145–46, 184, 189, Bairro Taquara, 185
194, 222; afterlives of, 157; avant- Balcells, Fernando, 149
garde and, 146–47; body-affect, ballast flora, 183–84
146–49; habitat-building, 21; “Banco de sementes crioulas” (Creole
interspecies, 180; living, 177–79; seed bank), 185
material, 78; more-than-human, Baroque, 10, 82
28, 70, 176–80, 238, 257n70; Barragán, Luis, 99
nonhuman lives in, 176–77; Barreto, Henrique, 109, 110
techno-organic, 179 Barrett, Rafael, El dolor paraguayo
Atacama Desert, 133 (The suffering of Paraguay), 29
Aterro do Flamengo, 168 Barrio, Artur, 20, 138, 157–58,
Augustine, 193 158–59, 159–60; in Do corpo à
Auschwitz, 236, 237 terra (From body to earth), 158–
authority, 183 59; Situação . . . ORHHH . . .
authorship, 135, 183 ou . . . 5.000 . . . T. E . . . . EM . . .
autobiography, 103–4, 233–34. See N. Y . . . . City . . . 1969—
also testimonios approximately “Situation . . .
automobiles. See also automobility: ARGHHH . . . or . . . 5.000 . . .
arrival in Latin America, 84, B. B . . . . IN . . . N. Y . . . City . . .
260n23; automobile clubs, 82, 87– 1969,” 157–58, 159
88; automobile industry, 82 Barros de Chungara, Domitila, 233
automobility, 19, 79–96; Bastide, Roger, 15
abstractionism and, 78–79; space BBC, 4
and, 84–85 Beckman, Ericka, 59, 75
Automovilismo, 85 Bedel, Jacques, 177
autonomy, 180, 183 Belém, Brazil, 133
296 ❘ Index

Bellalta, Jaime, 117 body, the, 146–47, 169–72, 170–

Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 71, 197; bodily materiality vs.
3, 109, 158, 159 expressive gesture, 137–39;
Belo Monte project, 225 body-affect assemblages, 146–49;
Benedit, Luis Fernando, 21, 175– bodyscape, 160–75; female, 25–26,
77, 178, 179; Biotrón, 177–78; 38, 170–71; garden and, 105–6; as
Microzoo, 175; Projects and medium, 146; migrant, 174–75; as
Labyrinths, 175–76; Prototipo: object of expression, 146; poetry
Habitat-laberinto para cucarachas and, 129, 247–48. See also earth-
(Prototype: Habitat-Labyrinth for body works
Cockroaches), 176 Bohn, Henry G., 195
Benjamin, Walter: angel of history Bolivia, 27, 93, 117, 129, 213, 224
and, 28; “The Artwork in the Age Bolsonaro, Jair, 22, 227
of Mechanical Reproduction,” 23, Borchardt, Rudolf, The Passionate
189 Gardener, 114–15
Bennett, Jane, 71, 140, 145–46, 240 Borges, Jorge Luis, 106
Bento, Antonio, 94 Bororó Indians, 87, 87
Berlin, Germany, 183 Boulting, Jonathan, 121
Bernardes, Iracema, 185 Brancusi, Constantin, 137
Berni, Antonio, 60, 60; Sin título Brasília, Brazil, 82, 98, 108
(Untitled), 60 Brazil, 3–5, 15–16, 21, 48, 81, 82,
Berrizbeitia, Anita, 113 99, 111, 185, 225. architectural
Best, Susan, 171, 172–73 modernism in, 97–98; automobiles
bioacoustic production, 21 in, 84, 85, 87–88; coup in, 157;
bioart, 21, 175–90 dictatorship in, 157, 158, 162, 225,
biocontact zone, 35, 58, 98 231–32, 233; fascism in, 22; forest
biocybernetics, 186–89 fires in, 27; human rights violations
biodegradation, 187 in, 225; Institutional Act, 162;
biodiversity, 14, 191, 234 landscape architecture in, 107–
biomedial art, 178, 181 9; landscape designers in, 99; Le
biometric curves, 109, 112, 114 Corbusier in, 74–75, 98; murders
biophony, 201–2 of environmental activists in, 27–
biopolitics, 29, 31, 47, 50, 54, 225 28; national integration and, 90;
biopotentiality, 35, 50, 54, 71 Northeast of, 90, 91, 92, 94–96;
biopower, 174, 225 politics of cultural modernization
biorobotic art, 186–87, 186–89 in, 77; Trans-Amazonian highway
bios, 35 in, 25–26. See also specific
“biothematic art,” 178, 181 locations
Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 101 Brazilian modernism, 81
birdsong, 200–201 Brazilian popular music, 199–200
“blind listening,” 21, 242 Bressane, Júlio, 168
Blocker, Jane, 171, 173 Brett, Guy, 161
blocos (“building blocks”), 164, Bristol, England, 183, 184
167–68 Brown, Bill, 160
Bloomsbury group, 102, 103 Browne, Enrique, 132
Bodanzky, Jorge, 25, 96; Iracema, uma Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil,
transa amazônica, 25–28, 27, 29 3–5, 4, 7–8, 12, 14
 Index ❘ 297

Brumadinho dam collapse, 3, 4, 12, 70; “El paisaje santiagueño” (The

14 landscape of Santiago), 67; Ensayo
Bryson, Norman, 6 sobre la expresión popular artística
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 19–20, 48, en Santiago (Essay on popular
60, 97, 100, 101, 106, 143, 144, artistic expression in Santiago),
175, 177, 219 60–62; “Imagen de Santiago:
buen vivir, 22, 224 Reconocimiento de una provincia
building, process of, 130 desconocida” (Image of Santiago:
built environment, poetry and, 118– Survey of an unknown province),
20 68–71; “Los éxodos rurales”
Buntinx, Gustavo, 155–56 (Rural exodus), 69; Ñan (“path”
Burle Marx, Guilherme, 111 in Quichua), 67–68; “Sociología
Burle Marx, Roberto, 20, 77, 97, Mediterránea Argentina”
99, 107–9, 111–12, 114–15, 157; (Sociology of inland Argentina),
collaboration with Mello Barreto, 69–70
109–10; experimentation with Candomblé, 15
“biometric curve,” 109, 112, 114; Canongia, Lígia, 158
garden design for Grande Hotel, Cánovas, Rodrigo, 151
110; Parque del Este, 112–14, 113; Cape Froward, 133
plant sociability and, 109–12 Cape Verde, 193
Bustillo, Alejandro, 101 Capibaribe river, 246, 247
capital, malignant idealism of, 7
Caballero Calderón, Eduardo, 78–79 capital cities, interior and, 75
Cabezas, Omar, La montaña es algo capitalism, 8, 30–31, 225; as
más de una inmensa estepa verde anesthetic, 16–17; colonialism and,
(Fire from the Mountain: The 146; “destructive production” and,
Making of a Sandinista), 31–33, 214–15; “disaster capitalism,” 13;
40, 44–47, 48 extractive, 4, 12–14, 14–15, 16–
CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de 17, 27–28, 58–59, 146, 226, 232;
Arte—Art Actions Collective), 20, fossil, 5; landscape as ideological
140, 148–49, 150–51, 156–57, appartus of, 9; late, 13; nature(s)
158, 159, 166; ¡Ay Sudamérica! and, 206, 215–16; ruins of, 5–6
149; Inversión de escena (Scene Capitalocene, 6, 26, 234;
inversion), 148–49, 151–52, Capitalocene theory, 226, 241;
152; No+, 149; Para no morir de natural history of, 54–58, 58–71
hambre en el arte (For not dying Caracas, Venezuela, 82; park designs
of starvation in art), 148–49, in, 108; Parque del Este, 112–14,
150, 156; Residuos americanos 113
(American residues), 149 Carapiru, 209–10, 210, 221
Calveiro, Pilar, 232 Cardoso, Iván, 161, 168
Camnitzer, Luis, 144, 171 Carneiro, César, 158–59
Campo Grande, Brazil, 85 Carnival, 167
Camus, Albert, 102 Carpentier, Alejo, 42; Los pasos
Canal Feijóo, Bernardo, 70, 71, perdidos (The Lost Steps, 1953),
192–93, 263n92; De la estructura 35, 36, 38
mediterránea argentina (On the Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, 63
structure of inland Argentina), 69– Casid, Jill, 9, 175, 184
298 ❘ Index

Cássia, Edna de, 27 clandestinity, 20

Castillo, Juan, 149 class struggle, 57
Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de, 14, 28, climate change, 19, 21, 22, 29, 70,
229, 231, 23 189, 225
Castro, Ferreira de, A selva (The coagentiality, 182–83
Jungle), 29, 30 co-agitatio, 178, 181–82
Castro, Fidel, 34 coauthorship, 182–83
Castro, Óscar, 133 Cobra group, 4
catastrophe, 22, 234–36 Coccia, Emmanuele, 112, 188
Cazarré, Juliano, 217–19, 218 coevolution, 7, 203–4
Cendrars, Blaise, 81, 82, 121 Colchie, Thomas, 239
Centro de Arte y Comunicación Cold War, proxy effects of, 227
(Center of arts and communication Coletivo Municipal, 185
[CAyC]), 177 collective memory, 196–97
Centro Imagen art gallery, 150, 152 collectives, 20, 148–49. See also
CGT de los Argentinos (CGTA), specific collectives
140–42, 141 Colombia, forest fires in, 27
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 31, 57, 193 colonialism, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20, 33,
Chile, 20, 21, 213–16; collectives 42, 59, 61, 70–71, 183–84, 193–
in, 148–49; coup in, 132–33; 94, 237; capitalism and, 146;
dictatorship in, 21–22, 149, 150– extraction and, 10; extractive
51, 159, 232; landscape designers capitalism and, 241; extractivism
in, 99; post-coup art practices in, and, 144–45, 146; “first encounter”
138–39 of, 11; Indigenous communities
chimeras, 180 and, 27–28; landscape(s) and, 9 76,
China, 226 99, 145; necropolitical machine of,
Chion, Michel, 205–6 15; novela de la selva (jungle novel)
Church, 8 and, 37–38; plants and, 183–84;
Cibernética y arte (Cybernetics and travel and, 93
art), 177 commodities, 148–59, 226
Cinema Novo, 15–16, 218–19 commons, expropriation and
Cinquera, 206–8 enclosure of, 8
circuito sobreinformacional (super- communication. See also
information circuit), 143 communications technology;
Citarella, Laura, 21; La mujer de los language, interspecies channels of,
perros (Dog Lady), 219–22, 220 197–98
city/cities, 119. See also specific cities; communications technology, 19, 78,
built space of, 97; country and, 80
73–134; ecological milieu of, 19; communitas, 35, 47, 49–50, 52, 53,
Le Corbusier on, 74–75; modernist 54, 56, 58, 71; (bio)politics of, 19;
aesthetics of, 58; as organism, 74– transspecies, 49–50
75; postcolonial, 19 community, 29, 54, 112. See also
Ciudad Abierta de Amereida (Open communitas; novel forms beyond
City of Amereida), 20, 116, 119, the human, 18; reenactment of,
120, 121–22, 128, 129–33, 131, 222
240 community organizing, 179
civil war, 21–22 computing, 179, 180
 Index ❘ 299

Comuna La Granja, 150 Curitiba, Brazil, 185

Conglomerado (conglomerate), 164, Cuzco, 150
167–68 cybernetics, 177, 188
Conley, Tom, 211
Conselheiro, Antônio, 218 d’Alessio, Carlos, 138
consumption, 148–59 Dam I, 3, 12
contact zones, 81, 87 dams, 3–4, 12
Contagem, Brazil, 212 Danowski, Déborah, 14, 28, 237
contagion, 29, 48, 56 Dartington Hall, 103, 262n66
contamination, 14, 56, 210 Dávalos, Juan Carlos, 80
conviviality, 19, 62, 81, 107–8, 115, dealienation, 156
132, 194 death, 21
Córdoba, Argentina, 144, 185, 212 Debord, Guy, 263n98
Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine, Debret, Jean-Baptiste, 10
collapse of Dam I at, 3, 12 decolonization, 184–85, 241
“correlationism,” 189 deforestation, 19, 25–30, 59–78, 64,
Cortázar, Julio, 45 237
Cosgrove, Denis, 8 Deguy, Michel, 117–18, 120, 121
cosmopolitanism, vs. nativism, 107–8 Deleuze, Gilles, 15–16, 55, 80, 145,
cosmopoliteia, 28, 31, 223, 232 211, 217, 219
Costa, Lúcio, 77, 82–83 Delgado, Sergio, 245
Costa Rica, 194–95, 204 Demos, T. J., 189
“countercolonial landscapes,” 9 dépaysement (estrangement), 192–93
counterinsurgency wars, 224, 231– dérive (drift), the, 119, 263n98
32, 234, 237. See also guerrilla Descola, Philippe, 17
warfare desert, 48–49
“counter-pastoral,” 9 desertification, 29–30
country, city and, 73–134 despaisamiento (unlandscaping), 18,
Courteville, Marthe-Emma, 85 68–69, 70, 71, 192–93
Courteville, Roger, 86, 87; La “destructive production,” 214–15
première traversée de l’Amérique detention camps, 232
du Sud en automobile, 85–87, 86, Diamantina, Brazil, 82
87 Diário Nacional, 90
Coutinho, Afrânio, 58 Días, Cícero, 94
Cova, Arturo, The Vortex, 35 diaspora, 183, 183–84
“creative destruction,” 71, 241–42 dictatorships, 20, 146, 149, 159, 224,
crelazer (creation-leisure), 161–62 231–32, 233, 237; in Argentina,
critical consciousness, 17 143, 232; in Brazil, 157, 158, 162,
Crown, 8 225, 231–32, 233; in Chile, 21–22,
Cruz, Alberto, 117, 119, 121 150–51, 232
Cruz, Fabio, 116–17, 118, 121, 122, Di Lullo, Orestes, 70, 71, 263n92;
128, 129 El bosque sin leyenda: Ensayo
Cruz-Diez, Carlos, 147 económico-social (The forest
Cuba, 19, 169–70, 171 without legend: Economic-social
Cuban Revolution, 19, 34, 38, 39–40 essay), 62–67, 70; El folclore de
culture, nature and, 60–63, 66–67, Santiago del Estero (Folklore of
137 Santiago del Estero), 62–63; La
300 ❘ Index

Di Lullo, Orestes (continued) E. coli bacteria, 180–82

alimentación popular (Popular ecological sculpture, 21
nutrition), 62; La medicina popular ecology. See acoustic ecology;
en Santiago del Estero (Popular ecological sculpture
medicine in Santiago del Estero), 62 ecstasy, 15
Dimensión, 263n92 Ecuador, 224
Direct Cinema, 158 Edison, Thomas, 197
disappearance, political memories of, Edwardian garden aesthetics, 103
21–22 Eisenstein, Sergei, Qué viva México,
“disaster capitalism,” 13 81
discovery, colonial trope of, 20 Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres
disease, 57, 62, 224, 228–29, 230 (EGP— the “Guerrilla Army of the
disjunctive synthesis, 229–30 Poor”), 40, 41–43
displacement, 21, 106, 160–75, 166. ekphrasis, 196, 197, 202, 205
See also exile El Dorado, 33–34
Dittborn, Eugenio, 248; Historia de Elflein, Ada, 85, 86
la física (History of physics), 135– El Hogar, 87–88
37, 136 Eliasson, Olafur, 7
Do corpo à terra (From body to Elmhirst, Dorothy, 262n66
earth), 158–59 Elmhirst, Leonard, 262n66
documentary: allegory and, 25– El Mundo, 90
26, 28 (see also regionalismo); El Salvador, 21, 206
documentary film, 21, 209–10, El Techo de la Ballena (The whale’s
213–14 (see also specific films); roof), 147, 157; Homenaje
fiction and, 210 a la necrofi lia (Homage to
dogs, 215–16, 219–22 necrophilia), 148; “Para la
Domínguez, Crisanto, Tannino restitución del magma” (For the
(Tannine), 29, 30 restitution of the magma), 147–48;
Do-Mi-Sol Indians, 93 Rayado sobre el techo, 147–48
do Rio, João, 84 Eltit, Diamela, 149
drafting, 9 El Zanjón, 115, 116, 121
drought, 29–30, 70, 257n84, 258n95 emptiness, 17
Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, end of the human, 236
“Viagem de Sabará” (Journey to end of the world, 191–92, 209, 236
Sabará), 81 English gardeners, 102
Duchamp, Marcel, Readymade, 168 entrancement, 126
Duchesne Winter, Juan, 39, 40, 42 Entre Ríos, Argentina, 242–43
Dunkirk, France, 183 environment, art and, 60–63
environmental acousmatics, 202
earth, aestheticization of, 9 environmental activists, murder of,
earth-body works, 21, 169–75 27–28
Easter Island, 133 environmental art, 146–49
Echeverría, Bolívar, 226 environmental determinism, 67–68
eclecticism, 97 environmental humanities, 22
ecoacoustic recording, 202, 203, 204 environmental movements, 179
ecoacoustics, 202, 203, 204, 206 environmental turn, 20–21, 137, 148,
ecoart, 21, 175–90, 180 169, 189
 Index ❘ 301

epic, the, 66 asset fields of, 6; abject matter

E. P. S. Huayco collective, 20, of, 148; aesthetic modernity and,
156–57, 158, 166; Arte al paso 4–5; aesthetics and, 4–5, 17–18;
(Takeout art) (Salchipapas), 148– boom-and-bust dynamics of, 30,
49, 150, 152–55; “Estética de 59–78; colonialism and, 144–45,
Proyección Social” (approximately, 146; commodity production and,
socially conscious aesthetics), 149– 148–58; consumption and, 148–
50; Sarita Colonia shrine painting, 58; “creative destruction” and,
148–49, 150, 154–57, 155, 266– 241–42; critiques of, 22, 225–26,
67n43 232–33; Marxist critique of, 146;
Escena de avanzada (“scene of matter and, 222–38; memory
advance”), 138, 149 and, 22, 222–38, 224, 226–27;
Esparza, Gilberto, 21, 188, 189; objectifying discourse of, 31;
Plantas nómadas (Nomadic regionalism and, 75; representation
plants), 186, 186 and, 227; sacrifice zones of, 54–55,
espesso, 239 58; violence of, 15, 226–27
Esposito, Roberto, 31, 35, 50, 54 Eyquém, Miguel, 117
Esquenta pro Carnaval, 168
essay, as form of reflexivity, 179 famine, 60
Estado Novo, 77 fascism, 22, 23
estrangement, 9, 192–93, 212 Federal Roads Law, 82
ethnocide, bacteriological, 22 Fédier, François, 116, 118, 121
exchange, vs. use, 10 female body, 25–26, 170–71
Exeter-Topsham, England, 183 fiction, documentary and, 210. See
exile, 160–75 183 also specific genres and authors
expressive gesture, vs. bodily film, 219; acousmatics in,
materiality, 137–39 205; documentary film, 21;
exteriority, 183 neoregionalist cinema, 211–22. See
external space, interiors and, 100 also specific autors
extinction, 191–92, 209, 224, 226–27 “First Biennale of Avant-Garde Art,”
extraction, 12–14, 227; abstraction 140–42
and, 10; colonialism and, 10; flight, technology of, 73–74
“extractive eye,” 12–13; extractive Fon-Fon, 84–85
modernization, 19; sites of, 7–8 food production, commodity chain
extractive capitalism, 4, 12–17, 58– of, 150–53
59, 146, 226, 232; colonialism forest fires, 25–26, 27, 253n1
and, 241; “creative destruction” forests, 25–28, 31, 54, 59–78, 194–
and, 71; discarded and abjected 95, 222–23; forest management,
materialities of, 148–59, 159– 253n1; form and, 203–4; as
60; human labor and, 65–66; nonplace, 38–39; as pharmakon,
Indigenous communities and, 27– 31–48; as protagonist, 40;
28; as suicide, 65–66 soundscape of, 202–4; in Western
extractive zone, 29–30, 31, 55–59 literary tradition, 34–35. See also
extractivism, 12–13, 18–19, 21, deforestation; rainforests; specific
29–30, 33–34, 61, 111, 148–60, forests
185, 193–94, 212–13. See also form: forest and, 203–4; nature(s)
extractive capitalism; abandoned and, 73–78
302 ❘ Index

fossil capitalism, 5 genetics, 179; genetic engineering,

founding perception, 6, 7 21; genetic modifications, 226–27;
Fraser, Valerie, 77, 98 genome, 180
freedom, 166 genocide, 15, 227
French, Jennifer, 51 geontology, 226, 227, 229, 233–34
Frente Sandinista, 32, 45 geontopower, 175, 225
Fukushima nuclear disaster, 236, geophony, 201–2
237 Ghosh, Amitav, 29
FUNAI, 209, 228, 230 Gil, Gilberto, 161, 162
functionalism, 98, 99 Giorgi, Gabriel, 54, 222
functionality, beauty and, 100 Girola, Claudio, 116–17, 117, 121,
futurism, 19, 81 122
Girondo, Oliverio, “El tren expreso”
Gabara, Esther, 88 (Express train), 81
Gago, Verónica, 152 Global South, 7, 193, 227, 237
Gaia, 12; intrusion of, 14; irruptions Glusberg, Jorge, 177
of, 7, 237, 246 Godínez, Carlos, 186
Galería Bonino, 177 Gomes, Antônio Carlos, Il Guarany,
Galería Forum, 153 200
Galería Rubbers, 175 Gómez, Juan Vicente, 82
Gallegos, Rómulo, Canaima, 32–33, Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 27
37, 38 Góngora, Mario, 264n107
Ganz, Louise, 179–80 González, Daniel, 148; Rescatador
García Márquez, Gabriel, 42 de tuberías muertas (Dead pipeline
garden aesthetic, 10, 19–20, 103. See rescuer), 148; Tótem de Petróleo
also landscape architecture (Petrol totem), 148
gardening: autobiography and, 103– Goodwin, Philip L., 98
4; memory and, 103–4; modernist Gordillo, Gastón, 214–15, 253n1
aesthetics in, 19–20; self-fashioning Gorelik, Adrián, 66
and, 103–4 Gow, Peter, 223, 231
garden(s), 183–85, 185; assemblage- grafting, 9
gathering, community- forging Gramineae, 186
potential of, 185; the body and, Great Drought, 60
105–6; as contact zone, 19; “great partition” in Western thought,
displacement of, 106; as interface 17
between self and world, 19–20; Great Western Express, 90, 91
journey and, 111; memory and, Greene, Graham, 102
106; as modern-colonial apparatus, Grementieri, Fabio, 103
185; modernism and, 97–115; Grippo, Víctor, 177, 178, 187;
poetry and, 105–6; space and, Analogía I, 177
114–15; space and time of, 108– “Grupo de los Trece” (Group of
9; as space of transculturation, Thirteen), 177; Arte de sistemas
98; writing and, 105–6. See also (Art of systems), 177; Cibernética y
garden aesthetic arte [Cybernetics and art]), 177
Garramuño, Florencia, 18, 241 Gruzinski, Serge, 33
gas prospecting, 224, 237 Gschwendtner, Gitta, 184
generic hybridity, 179–80 Gualeguay River, 243
 Index ❘ 303

Guanabara Bay, 77 Holocene, 191–92

Guatemala, 19, 255–56n41 Homalomena plant, 187–88
Guatemalan Revolution, 40, 41–44, hombre nuevo (revolutionary new
80, 145 man), 39, 45, 47, 48
Guattari, Félix, 55 homophia, 22
“guerrilla” strategies, 20 Hospedería del Pan, 131
guerrilla warfare, 19, 233. See also hospederías (guesthouses), 131, 132
counterinsurgency wars; narratives hospitality, 132, 133
of, 32–33, 34, 35, 38, 39–48 Houston, Elsie, 200
Guevara, Ernesto Che, 117; Hoy, 150
manual of guerrilla warfare, 39; Hoyos, Héctor, 71, 146
Motorcycle Diaries, 47; Pasajes de Hudson Review, 239
la guerra revolucionaria (Episodes Huezo, Tatiana, 21; El lugar más
of the Cuban Revolutionary War), pequeño (The smallest place), 21,
38, 39–41 206–8, 210, 212, 213
Guévrékian, Gabriel, 101 Huidobro, Vicente, 117; “Aviso a los
turistas” (A warning to tourists),
Hanono, Julieta, 232 81
happenings, 20, 168, 184 human-animal relations, 219
Haraway, Donna, 191, 220, 234, human rights, 22, 59, 237; memory
236–37, 242 and, 224–25, 226–27; violations
Harrison, Robert Pogue, 115 of, 225
Forests, 34–35 Humboldt, Alexander von, 201, 202,
Harvey, David, 214 203, 205, 205–6; Ansichten der
Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology, 241 Natur (Views of Nature), 195,
Henriques, Iván, 21, 187–88, 189; 196, 197–99; “Das nächtliche
Jurema Action Plant, 187, 188; Thierleben im Urwalde” (The
Plants & Machines, 187; Prototype nocturnal life of animals in the
for a New Bio-Machine, 187–88; jungle), 21, 195–99, 203, 208
Repaisagem, 189 hybridity, 180, 186–89, 199
Herrera y Reissig, Julio, Los parques hydroelectric megadams, 224, 225
abandonados (The abandoned hyperobjects, 6–7
parks), 105
High Line, 184 Iglesias, Cristina, Vegetation Room,
Hiroshima, 236 8
Hirschhorn, Thomas, 7 images, the matter with, 135–90
historians, 19 imago veritatis, 178
historical catastrophes, natural imitatio, 177, 178, 179
disasters and, 234–35 imitatio vitae, 178
history, 246, 248–49; historical immersiveness, 61
materialism, 146; nature(s) and, l’immonde, 192, 193
246–47, 248–49 immunitary alliance, 35, 58
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 129 immunitas, 52
Hollanda, Heloisa Buarque de, 168 immunity, 52–53
“holobiomes,” 191 Indigenous languages, 197–98, 199
holobiontic relationships, 192, 220– Indigenous life, 212
21 Indigenous music, 200–201
304 ❘ Index

Indigenous peoples, 27–28, 47, 59, journeys, 19, 111

60–61, 160–61, 194, 195–97, 225, Joyce, James, 165
233, 237–38. See also specific juego integral (integral pattern), 70
groups jungles, 35–36, 45–46, 48–50. See
Indigenous storytelling, 237–38 also forests; novela de la selva
Indigenous women, 11 (jungle novel)
Indigenous worldmakings, 241 Jutila, Heli, 183–84
industrial modernity, 8, 98
infancy, 217, 221 Kac, Eduardo, 21, 178, 179, 180–
Inhotim Contemporary Art Institute 83, 182–83, 189; The Eighth
and Botanic Garden, 7–9, 10, 12, Day, 181; Genesis, 180–81;
13, 163 GFP Bunny, 180; Oblivion,
inmundo, 13–16, 18, 21, 192, 193, 181; Specimen of Secrecy about
194, 209, 211–13, 217, 219, 241 Marvelous Discoveries, 181, 181;
Institute of Architecture, 117, 118 Teleporting an Unknown State,
instrumentality, 10, 17, 180 180; “telepresence” work, 180;
interiors: capital cities and, 75; transgenic art and, 180–82
external space and, 100 Kant, Immanuel, 189
intermingling, 14 Kapoor, Anish, 7
International Congress of Modern Kenny, Mary, 85
Architecture, 99 kin, 236–37
International Style, 82, 98 kinetic art, 137, 188
interspecies communication, 31, 55, kinetic sculpture, 147
197–98, 219 Kippfigur, 182
interspecies free indirect speech, 55, Klaxón, 85
242 Klee, Paul, 168
interspecies solidarity, 31 Klein, Naomi, 13
intertextuality, 36, 37 Kohn, Eduardo, 203–4
Inversión de escena (inverted scene), Kopenawa, Davi, 22, 241; The
140 Falling Sky, 21, 222–38
Iommi, Godofredo, 117, 118, 119, Kotzent, Júlo, 85
120–22, 129, 130–31 Krauss, Rosalind, 137, 138
Iracema, uma transa amazônica Kristeva, Julia, 159–60
(“Iracema, an Amazonian fuck”), Kubitschek, Juscelino, 109
25–28, 27, 29
Itaú (bank),3 labor, extractive capitalism and, 65–
66
Jagger, Mick, 165 laboratory, 180, 186–87
labyrinths, 175–77, 179
Jasso, Karla, 187 Lajo, Manuel, 153
Jeanneret, Charles-Édouard (Le Lake Titcaca, 133
Corbusier), 73. See also Le land: aestheticization of, 9; “double
Corbusier artialization” of, 9; land grabs,
Jekyll, Gertrude, 102, 261n65 224; landscapes and, 8–9;
Jorn, Asger, 263n98 reciprocity and, 10
Jornal do Brasil, 164 land art, 137, 161
journals, 84–85 land objects, 21
 Index ❘ 305

landscape architecture, 8, 9, 12, 20, (The Radiant City), 73–74; Poème

77, 97–115 de l’angle droit (Poem of the Right
landscape designers, 99–100 Angle), 118; Précisions, 97, 100; in
landscape(s), 9; abstract, 13 (see South America, 74–75, 97, 98
also abstraction); afterlives of, Leenhardt, Jacques, 110
4, 5–6, 191; avant-garde and, Lefebvre, Martin, 211–12, 213
97–115; cinematic, 211–12; Léger, Fernand, 108
colonialism and, 76, 99, 145; Leirias, Gabriela, 185
critique of, 12–13; decolonization Lerner, Steve, 6
and, 241; end of, 6–9, 13, 14–15, Lesdain, Pierre, 85
17–18; estrangement and, 192– Lichtenstein, Roy, 153
93; exhaustion of the form, 18; life, aesthetics and, 21, 177–78
figurative, 13; as framework, 81; as Lima, Peru, 85, 86, 150, 152–54
ideological apparatus of capitalism liquidity, solidity and, 247–48
and colonialism, 9; land and, 8– literary rainforest writing, 19
9; land object and, 21; narrative literary realism, climate change and,
space and, 211–12; place and, 29
212; precarity and, 212; sculpture literature. See specific genres and
and, 137; spatial relations and, authors
19; subversive and oppositional Liverpool, England, 183
deployments of, 9–10; unworlding Llinás, Verónica, 21
and, 192–93; in visu vs. in situ, 9, La mujer de los perros (Dog Lady),
10, 76, 78, 97, 112; worldmakings 219–22
and, 192–93 localization, 131
language, 198, 217, 219. See also locomotion, 19
specific languages; Indigenous logging industry, 28, 29, 30, 59–78,
languages, 197–98; lack of verbal, 64
217; poetic, 246; sense and, 197; London, England, 160–61, 162, 175
sound and, 198–200 Longoni, Ana, 142, 265n18
la planificación integral (integral López, Francisco, 202; American
planning), 70 Trilogy series, 202; Belle Confusion
La Prensa, 85 966, 204; Buildings (New York),
La Scala, 200 202; La Selva (The Forest), 21,
late liberalism, 214–16, 224 194–95, 202–5, 242; Untitled 308,
Latin American studies, 22 204; Wind (Patagonia), 202
Latour, Bruno, 4–5 López del Rincón, Daniel, 178, 186–
Lauer, Mirko, 150; “Arte al paso: 87
Tome uno” (Takeout art: Help López y Fuentes, Gregorio, Huasteca,
yourself to one), 153–54 29
Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Lovelock, James, 7
Lucien Ducasse), 120 Lubrich, Oliver, 196
Lawner, Miguel, 133, 232 Lugones, Leopoldo, Los crepúsculos
Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard del jardín (The garden’s twilights),
Jeanneret), 19, 73, 73–76, 77, 78, 106
97–98, 100, 101; on cities, 74–75; Luís, Washington, 82
La loi du méandre (The law of the Luque, Ángel, 147
meander), 74; La ville radieuse Luy, María, 150, 153
306 ❘ Index

Lyotard, Jean-François, 13, 192, 193, Meillassoux, Quentin, 189

212, 236 Meireles, Cildo, 7, 157
Meitín, Alejandro, 184–85
machines, 204–5, 206. See also Mejía Vallejo, Manuel, 257n84;
technology “Tiempo de sequía” (Times of
Madeira, 193 drought), 30
Madeira-Mamoré railroad, 93 memory, 206–7, 232–33, 237–38;
magazines, 85 collective, 196–97; extractivism
Magellan, Ferdinand, 126 and, 22, 222–38, 226–27; garden
Maiolino, Ana Maria, 168 and, 106; human rights and, 224–
making oddkin, 236–37 25, 226–27; memory work, 241;
Malabou, Catherine, 179 politics and, 231, 237–38; politics
Malevich, Kazimir, 167 of, 223–38, 231; postdictatorship,
Mallea, Eduardo, Todo verdor 233
perecerá (All greenery will perish), Menchú, Rigoberta, 233
30 Méndez, Francisco, 117
Manco Cápac, 153 Mendieta, Ana, 162, 169–75;
Mangueira, Brazil, 166, 167 Corazón de roca con sangre (Rock
Mangueira, Miro da, 168 heart with blood), 172–73; exile of,
Manuel, Antonio, 157 171; Isla, 170–71, 170; in Mexico,
Marcos, Subcomandante, 47 171; psychoanalytic vs. Gaia-
Margulis, Lynn, 7, 220 feminist readings of, 173; reception
Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 3, 4, of her work, 173; Repestrian
82 Sculptures, 169–70; Silueta Series,
Marighella, Carlos, Minimanual of 21, 162, 170–75, 170, 171
the Urban Guerrilla, 146 Mendonça, Vinícius, 12
Mariotti, Francesco, 149–50, 153, Meseu do Açude, 163
266–67 Mestman, Mariano, 265n18
Maroon worldmakings, 241 Mexico, 171, 206; automobiles in,
Marseilles, France, 183 84; landscape designers in, 99
Martner, Carlos, 99 Michaux, Henri, 121
Marx, Karl, 235 microclimates, 112
Mascaro, Gabriel, 21; Boi Neón microscopy, 175
(Neon Bull), 217–19, 218 microzoos, 176–77
Massey, Doreen, 18, 100 Middle Passage, 15
materialism(s), 71, 146 migration, 21, 160–75, 162–63, 183
materialities, 130, 140–60, 146–47, milk, 149, 150–52, 156
148, 197–98, 222–38 mimesis, 178–79. See also imitatio
Matto Grosso, 85 Mimosa pudica, 187
Maturana, Humberto, 177 Minas Gerais, Brazil, 3–5, 10, 81,
McBrien, Justin, 14 109, 163
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding mining industry, 3–5, 10, 12–13, 22,
Media, 165 27–28, 224, 225, 237. See also
McShine, Kynaston, 138 extraction
media, materiality of, 146 mining towns, 81
medical conditions, 226–27 “minor intellectuals,” 19
medical scholars, 19 Minujin, Marta, 138
 Index ❘ 307

Miraflores, 150 movement, 19

Miranda, Sonia, 168 Movimento de Boas Estradas (Good
Misiones, Argentina, 48–49, 51, 56 roads movement), 82
misogyny, 22 Mozambique, 3
missionaries, 228 Mulvey, Laura, 211
Mistral, Gabriela, Poema de Chile mundus-immundus tropology, 193
(Poem of Chile), 106–7 Murphy, Kaitlyn, 206
mobility, 188–89 Museum of Modern Art (MAM) (Rio
modernism, 10, 19–20, 58, 77, 88, de Janeiro, Brazil), 157, 160
100; architectural, 74–75, 97–115; music, 199–200
in Argentina, 101; avant-garde and, musical forms, hybridity of, 199
80–81; Brazilian, 81; “errant,” 88; musuranas, 50–53
European, 81, 102; gardens and, mutation, 29
97–115; Latin American, 75–76 mutuality, 231–32
(see also modernismo); modernist myth, 35–36, 37, 200
travel, 96, 121; place and, 100
modernismo, 105, 106 Ñan (“path” in Quichua), 67–68
modernity, 4–5, 10, 14–15, 70, 84, Nancy, Jean-Luc, 9, 12
86, 183; destruction and, 62; After Fukushima: The Equivalence of
industrial, 98; national, 75, more?; Catastrophes, 234–36
novela de la selva (jungle novel) Naranjo, Rubén, 143
and, 37–38; “primitive,” 86–87 narrative contagion, 48
modernization, 34, 36, 77; narrative discourse, 35–36
destruction and, 62; extractive, 19 narrative space, landscape(s) and,
Molloy, Sylvia, 48 211–12
MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, Nascimento, Abdias do, 117
New York), 98, 138 National Museum of Fine Arts
Mondrian, Piet, 163 (Santiago de Chile), 151, 152
Monsanto, 185 national musical expression, 200
Montaigne, Michel de, 179 national-popular developmentalism,
Montevideo, Uruguay, 84 225
monumentalization, 224. See also National University (Caracas), School
memory of Architecture and Urbanism, 148
Moore, Henry, 137 nativism, vs. cosmopolitanism, 107–8
Moore, Jason, 6, 12, 206, 215–16 natural disasters, 234–36; historical
Morães, Gerardo Mello, 117 catastrophes and, 234–35;
Morais, Frederico, 146–47, 158; technology and, 234–35
“Against Affluent Art: The Body as “naturalism,” cinematic, 217, 219
Motor of the Work,” 146–47 natural resources, 148–57;
more-than-human, the, 21, 31, 57, renationalizing of, 225–26
63, 107, 137, 186, 208–22, 223, “nature recordings,” anthropogenic
224, 227 sound in, 206
Morton, Timothy, 7, 236 nature(s): capitalism and, 206, 215–
Motor, 85 16; culture and, 60–63, 66–67,
Mourão, Patrícia, Já visto jamais 137; form and, 73–78; history and,
visto (Seen once seen never), 209 246–47, 248–49; immanence of,
mourning, 237–38 74; insurgent, 18, 25–71; leisurely
308 ❘ Index

nature(s): capitalism and (continued) Noailles, Charles and Marie-Laure

enjoyment of, 87–88; tropical, 25– de, 101
26, 33, 99 nonhuman environment, soundscape
Naturgefühl, 197 and, 21
Nehring, Pedro, 8 nonhumans, 14, 16, 17, 31, 48–58,
neo–avant-gardes, 137 71, 191, 197–98; coagentiality of,
neo-Baroque, 99 182–83; power of, 31–48
neocolonialism, 76 nonworld, 13–14, 15
Neoconcretists, 161 Noriega, Charo, 150, 153
neodevelopmentalism, 226 nostalgia, 9
neoextractivism, 16, 21, 22, 212–13, Nova objetividade (New objectivity)
225 exhibition, 175
neoliberalism, 22, 146, 150, 151, novela de la selva (jungle novel), 29,
213, 224–25 32–33, 35–38, 44, 78. See also
neorealism, 217 specific novels; specific works
neoregionalist cinema, 211–22, 217, novela de la tierra (land novel), 29.
219 See also specific works
Neruda, Pablo, Canto general, 245– Núñez, José, Biotrón, 177–78
46
Netherlands, 187 Ocampo, Silvina, 101, 104; Sonetos
Neto, João Cabral de Melo, 242, del jardín (Garden sonnets), 104
243, 244, 246–48; “Discurso do Ocampo, Victoria, 19–20, 100, 101,
Capibaribe” (Discourse of the 102–3, 102, 105, 106–7, 115;
Capibaribe), 248 Autobiografías, 103; foreword
Dúas águas (Two waters), 248; to Thorlichen’s book on San
Morte e vida Severina (Death and Isidro, 105; gardening and,
life of Severino), 246–47; O cão 103–4; gardens of, 102–4, 114;
sem plumas” (The Dog without “La aventura del mueble” (The
Feather), 239–40, 242, 247, 248; adventure of furniture), 100;
“O poema e a água” (Water and Testimonios, 103
the poem), 247; O rio (The river, October, 137
1954), 246–47; “Pequena de oddkin, 236–37
mineral” (Little mineral ode), 247; O’Gorman, Edmundo, 264n107
“rio-discurso de água” (the river oil industry, 82
discourse of water), 248–49 oil prospecting, 29, 224, 237
neuroscience, 179 Oiticica, Hélio, 21, 137, 138, 160–63,
New Latin American Cinema, 28 174, 267–68n63; Acontecimentos
new materialisms, 146 poético-urbanos (urban-poetic
new regionalisms, 21, 208–22. See events), 166–69; Barracão, 163–
also neoregionalist cinema 64, 165, 166; Block- Experiments
New York, 162–63, 183, 184–85 in Cosmococa, 163; the bólide
NGO Global Witness, 27–28 (fireball), 161, 166, 167, 168;
Nicaragua, 19 “Cajú Manifesto,” 169; the
Nicaraguan Revolution, 31–32, 40, Conglomerado (conglomerate),
44 163, 164, 167–68; crelazer
Niemeyer, Oscar, 82–83, 109 (creation-leisure), 161–62, 166;
Nixon, Rob, 17, 226–27 Devolver a terra à terra Returning
 Index ❘ 309

the soil to the earth”), 166–67; Palermo Chico, Buenos Aires,

Éden, 160–61, 175; Esquenta pro Argentina, 100, 101
Carnaval (Warm-up for Carnival), pampa, the, 133
166; exiled in New York, 162–63, Pape, Lygia, 168
164; Heliotapes, 163; “Mundo- Paraguay, 48, 75; forest fires in, 27;
Abrigo” (World- Shelter), 164–66, Le Corbusier in, 74–75
169; Parangolé- Situations, 163; Paraíba, Brazil, 94
Programa in Progress Cajú and, Paraná, Argentina, 243
166, 168–69; programa pra vida Paraná River, 73, 90, 133, 243–44
and, 163; Ready Constructible, Paraopeba River, 3
167–68, 167; return to Brazil, Pareci myth, 200
163, 164, 166–67; Subterranean Pareci ritual chants, 200
Tropicalia Projects, 163; Paris, France, 100
“Subterrânia” (“Underground Parque de Barranco, 153
Earth”), 162; Tropicália, 8, 160, Parque del Este, 112–14, 113
161, 165, 175; “Whitechapel Parque do Barreiro, 109
Experience,” 160–61, 162 Parque Universitario, 150
Oliver, María Rosa, 101 pastoral, the, 65–66
Olympo, José, 248 Patagonia, 85, 90, 92
“Operativo Independencia” Payeras, Mario, Los días de la selva
(Operation Independence), 141 (Days of the Jungle), 40–44, 45, 47
“Operativo Tucumán,” 141–46 Paz, Bernardo de Mello, 7, 10
ophidic species, 50–51 Pedrosa, Mário, 20, 137, 146, 166
origin, 166–67 Pendleton-Jullian, Ann M., 118–19
origin narratives, 42, 47 Pereio, Paulo César, 25
Orinoco Delta, 195 Pereira, Abigail, 218
Orsini, Luiz Carlos, 8 Pérez Roman, Jorge, 118, 121
Ortiz, Juan L., 16, 242–43, 247, 248; Pernambuco, Brazil, 94, 108, 239,
“El Gualeguay,” 243–46; En el 246
aura del sauce (In the aura of the Peru, 3; collectives in, 148, 149;
willow tree), 243 forest fires in, 27; nutritional
Osnovicoff, Iván, 21, 213–14; The emergency in, 153
Death of Pinochet, 213–14; Los Perut, Bettina, 21, 213–14; The
Reyes, 213–16, 221; Surire, 213– Death of Pinochet, 213–14; Los
16 Reyes, 213–16, 221; Surire, 213–
Otté, Elise, 195 16
Ouro Preto, Brazil, 82–83, 83, 88, Peruvian iconography, 153
110 Petrobrás, 3
Ouro Preto Grande Hotel, 82–83, Phalène de la electricidad. Pozos
88, 110 de luz (Electric phalène. Wells of
overburden, 13–14 light), 120
Ovid, Metamorphosis, 34 phalènes, 118–21, 120, 122, 129,
Óvalo Balta de El Calloa, 150 130, 132, 133, 242
Oyarzun, Pablo, 139–40 pharmaceutical industry, 225
pharmakon, 31–48, 52
Pachacámac, Peru, 155 phytocoenosis, 112
Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 106 Pigafetta, Antonio, 126
310 ❘ Index

Pink Tide, 225–26 postextractivist critiques, 226, 241

Pinochet, Augusto, 21–22, 133, 149, postmodernity, 137
159, 232 “postnatural condition,” 14–15
Piquero, José, 85 postnatural world, 56
Pizarro, Ana, 33 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 174, 225
place, 128, 129; affective relationship Prado, Paulo, 82
with, 114; as destiny, 131–32; Prado Júnior, Antonio, 82
landscape(s) and, 212; modernism Pratt, Mary Louise, 81, 208
and, 100; placemaking, 133; poetry Prebisch, Alberto, 97, 100, 101
and, 120, 121–22 precarity, 14, 191–92, 212, 213, 215–
planetary crisis, discourses of, 194 16, 219, 241
plantations, 9, 29, 193 programa ambiental (environmental
Plantationocene, 194 program), 161
plant-machines, mobile, 186–89 Programa in Progress Cajú, 166,
plants: “action potential of,” 187; 168–69
ballast flora, 183–84; colonialism protest, 185. See also activism
and, 183–84; dissemination and proximity, 55
germination of, 183; mobile “psychogeography,” 119
plant-machines, 186–89; plant public space, 108; art in, 151;
physiology, 114; plant sociability, automobiles in, 84–85; gardens,
109–12, 112; potential of, 184–85; 114–15
semiaquatic, 185 Puerto Natales, 121
plasticity, 179 Puesto Amaranto encampment, 185
poetry, 248–49; architecture and, Punta Arenas, 121
118–20, 121–22, 129; the Punta Lara, 185
body and, 129, 247–48; built
environment and, 118–20; as Queiroz, Rachel de, O quinze (The
collective experience, 120–21; Year 1915), 30
garden and, 105; journey and, Quichua, 67
120–21; place and, 120, 121–22; Quiroga, Horacio, 18–19, 48, 70,
poetic language, 246; space and, 96, 242, 256–57n70; “El regreso
120, 244–45; time and, 120, 244– de Anaconda” (The return of
45 Anaconda), 49–54, 57–58; “El
poiesis, 242 Simún, 48–49; Los desterrado, 52;
politics, 179; art and, 23, 179–80, “Los desterrados” (The exiles), 52;
189–90; materiality and, 140–60; Un drama en la selva” (A jungle
memory and, 223–38; violence drama), 50–52, 58; “Yaguaí,” 54–
and, 9 58
Pollock, Jackson, 135
pollution, 227 racism, 22, 227
Pontés, Júlia, 4–6, 7, 13; Ó Minas Raine, Anne, 172, 173
Gerais / My Land Our Landscape, rainforest, 194–95
5 rainforests, 49–50, 52, 56
pop art, 153 Rama, Ángel, 28–29, 58, 230–31
Portugal, Carnation Revolution, 157 Ramos, Graciliano, 18–19, 56, 242;
postcolonialism, 78 Vidas secas (Barren Lives), 30, 54–
postdictatorship, 22 58, 57
 Index ❘ 311

rape, 11 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 73–74, 77, 84,

Rayado sobre el techo, 147–48 85, 110, 157, 158, 160, 163, 166,
reason, abstract, 73–74 167, 175; Centennial Exhibition,
Rebolledo, Carlos, Pozo muerto 99; Ministry of Education and
(Dead well), 148 Health building, 77, 78, 97–
Rebuzzi, Solange, 248 98, 109; park designs in, 108;
Recife, Brazil, 108, 212, 239 Programa in Progress Cajú in, 166,
recording technology, 197, 204–5 168–6
recycling, 154, 155–56 “rio-discurso de água” (the river
Reed Hook Pioneer Works, 184 discourse of water), 248–49
reembodiment, 21 Rio Grande do Norte, 94
reemplacement, 162 Ritoque, 129, 133
reenactment, 208–22, 222 ritual chants, 200
reflexivity, 90, 179. See also self- Rivera, José Eustasio, La vorágine
reflexivity (The Vortex), 30, 35, 36
regionalism, 18, 19, 28–29, 31–78, River Plate, 185
75; literary, 28–31, 31–78, 35, 75, rivers, 246; river discourse of water,
212–13, 263n92 (see also specific 248–49; time and, 244–45, 248–49
works); new, 21, 208–22, 211–13, roadbuilding, 25–26, 28
211–22 (see also neoregionalist Robinson, William, 102, 261n65
cinema); political, 75; regionalist Robinson Crusoe island, 133
essayism, 62–78; turn towards Rocha, Glauber, 15–16; Barravento
nature, 59–78 (The turning wind), 15–16; Deus
Rego, José Lins do, 97–98, 99 e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black
relandscaping, 9 God, White Devil), 218; Terra em
religious fundamentalism, 22 Transe (Entranced Earth), 15–16
Renaissance, 193 Rodríguez Ángeles, Alejandro, 186
Reposaari, 183 Roger, Alain, 9
representation. See also mimesis: Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter,”
extractivism and, 227; modernist 165, 166
critique of, 10; of violence, 227 Romero, José Luis, 58
“reprimarización,” 226 Roque-Baldovino, Ricardo, 41
reproductive technology, 78, Roquette-Pinto, Edgar, 200
178–79 Roraima gold rush, 229
Residência Odette Monteiro, 110 Rosario, Argentina, 140–46
resistance, 237–38. See also activism Rosenberg, Fernando, 80–81, 88
Resistencia, Chaco, 91, 92 Rosenfeld, Lotty, 149
“return of the repressed,” 12 Roundup herbicide, 185
Revista de Antropofagia, 199 Rousseff, Dilma, 225
revolution: language of, 46; “rubber cycle,” 29
temporality and, 41–42 rubber tapping, 29
Richard, Nelly, 156; catalog essay Rugendas, Johann Moritz, 10
for Art in Chile: An Audiovisual Rulfo, Juan, Pedro Páramo, 207, 212
Documentation, 138–40; “Margins
and Institutions,” 138–40 Sá, Lúcia, 37
Rimbaud, Arthur, 181 Sackville-West, Vita, 102
Rio Capibaribe, 239 safety, aesthetics and, 16–17
312 ❘ Index

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine, 73 self, loss of, 205–6

Salão da Bússola (Compass salon), self-absorption, 61
157 self-alienation, of fascism, 23
Salazar, Juan Javier, 150, 153 self-analysis, 163
Salazar Herrera, Carlos, “La sequía” self-reflexivity, 10, 17, 88, 90, 96,
(The drought), 30 180, 182
Salcedo, Doris, 7 Senna, Orlando, 96; Iracema, uma
Salomão, Jorge, 168 transa amazônica, 25–28, 27, 29;
Sandino, Augusto, 46–47 Xana, 25–26, 26
San Isidro, 101, 102, 102, 103–4, sense, language and, 197
105, 106, 114 serpents, 50–53
San Luis, Argentina, 212 Serra dos Órgãos region, 110
Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, 117, shamanic forest memory, 22, 222–38
118, 133 shock, 20
Santa Fe, Argentina, 144 Sierra Maestra, 34, 38, 39
Santiago, Chile, 150–52, 156, Silvestri, Graciela, 74
213–16 Simons, Edison, 118, 121
Santiago del Estero, Argentina, 59– Siqueira, Vera, 111
78, 115–16 Sistema Nacional de Movilización
Santo Antônio da Bica, 111 Social (National System of Social
Santos, Rafael, 184–85 Mobilization, SINAMOS), 150
São João del Rei, Brazil, 82 Situationism, 119, 263n98
São Paulo, Brazil, 81, 82, 84, 90; Sixth Extinction Event, 191–92
“Modern Arts Week,” 199; Praça slavery, 193
da República, 163 slave trade, 183–84
São Tomé, 193 slow violence, 226–27, 234, 238
Sarlo, Beatriz, 101, 143 Smithson, Robert, Pours series, 135
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 267n49 social exteriority, 156, 169
scarcity, 56–57. See also famine social relations, violent and uneven, 9
scatological, the, 194 social reproduction, 13
Schaeffer, Pierre, 202, 203 “Society of Friends of the Historical
Schafer, R. Murray, 205; “The New Monuments of Brazil,” 82
Soundscape,” 201; The Turning of soil erosion, 19
the World, 201 solidarity, 231–32
Schillinger, Josef, 201 solidity, liquidity and, 247–48
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 78 Soprole dairy company, 151–52, 156
Schwarz, Roberto, 267n49 sound. See also acousmatics; acoustic
Schwitters, Kurt,163 ecology; sound art; soundscape:
science, 179 language and, 198–200; sound
art and, 179–82, 185, 189–90 matter, 194–208; vs. vision, 198–
scientists, 19 99
sculpture, 21, 148; kinetic, 147; sound art, 21, 194–208
postrepresentational practices and, soundscape, 21, 194–208, 206
137 soundwords, 195–96
“Sea Within,” 20, 132, 133–44 Southern Cross, 131
“Second Discovery of Brazil,” 81 sovereignty, 35, 37, 76, 78, 105, 175,
seed banks, 185 225, 226, 227, 229
 Index ❘ 313

space, 80, 83, 87, 90–91, 100, Taliesin West, Arizona, 129
128, 129; automobility and, Tarapacá desert, Chile, 135
84–85, 88; built space of cities, Tarija, 117
97; discontinuity in, 209; of the Taussig, Michael, 17–18, 240–41
garden, 108–9; gardens and, techno-graphic writing, 87
114–15; internal vs. external, technology, 19, 78, 81, 178–79, 206;
100; poetry and, 120, 244–45; art and, 186–87; automobility,
public space, 84–85, 108; spatial 79–96; avant-garde and, 79–96;
organization, 114–15; spatial communications technology, 80;
relations, 19; urban, 119 (see also computing technology, 180; of
city/cities) flight, 73–74; natural disasters and,
species history of the human, as 234–35; recording technology, 197,
geological force, 59 204–5; transport technology, 90; of
spectatorship, 183, 211–12, 214; co- vision, 82
agitatio and, 181–82; critical, 181; temporality, 40, 41–42, 52–53, 80–
loss of self and, 205–6 81, 83, 219. See also time
spectrality, 17 territorial accumulation, 88
speed, 19, 40, 79, 80–82, 90–91 terrorism. See state terrorism
Spruce, Richard, 200–201 Terzelli, Faetusa, 185
state terrorism, 159, 224, 234 Testa, Clorindo, 177
Stengers, Isabelle, 7, 237, 238, 249 testimonios, 19, 32–35, 38, 39–48,
Stieglitz, Alfred, 100, 101 206–7, 224, 231–34
Stoler, Ann, 214 testimony, 206, 210–11, 231–32, 238.
storytelling, 231, 232, 237; embodied, See also testimonios
222; Indigenous, 237–38 Thorlichen, Gustav, 105
Stravinsky, Igor, 102 Tierra del Fuego, 118, 126, 129
Strejlevich, Nora, Una sola muerte time, 80, 90–91, 100; automobility
numerosa (A single multiple death, and, 88; discontinuity in, 209; of
1997), 232 the garden, 108–9; poetry and,
strip mining, 3–5, 4–5 120, 244–45; rivers and, 244–45,
studio, 180, 186–87 248–49
sugar industry, 141, 142, 144, 145, time-image, 211
149 Tiradentes, Brazil, 82
Sur, 97, 100, 101, 107 Tonacci, Andrea, 21; Já visto jamais
survival, 14, 191–92, 209, 213, 21; visto (Seen once seen never), 209;
alliances, 194, 222; sympoietics of, Serras da desordem (The hills of
211 disorder), 209–11, 210, 213, 216,
Svampa, Maristella, 16 219, 221
symbolon, 170–71 tourism, 79–96
sympoiesis, 222, 234; sympoietic trance, 15–16, 17–18, 126, 194, 249;
relationships, 191, 220–21; as aesthetic relationship, 240–41;
of survival, 211; sympoietic shamanic, 223, 237
worldings, 242 Trans-Amazonian highway, 25–26
syncopation, 80 Transamazônica, 96
transculturation, 98, 102, 233
Tagore, Rabindranath, 102, 103 transgenic art, 180–82, 183
tailings dams, 3–4 transgenic seeds, 185
314 ❘ Index

translation: cultural, 229–31, 233; urbanization, 75

translational activism, 227–28, 233 Urtecho, José Coronel, 46
transport technology, 19, 78, 81, 90 Uruguay, 48, 84
transspecies alliances, 48–58 use, vs. exchange, 10
transspecies perspective, 55–56
trauma, earthly, 191–92 Vaccarino, Rossana, 114
travel: colonialism and, 93; Vale S. A. (formerly Vale do Rio
modernist, 96, 121 Doce), 3, 12–13
traveling artists, accidental journey Vallejo, César, 153
of, 79–96 Valparaíso, Chile, 116, 118, 119,
travelogues, 79–96, 115–34; avant- 120–21, 122, 128, 133
garde rewritings of, 96 Varejão, Adriana, 10, 13; Filho
travesía de Amereida, 20, 116, 118, bastardo (Bastard Child), 11;
121–22 Filho bastardo II: Cena de interior
travesías, 133 (Bastard Child II: Indoor Scene),
TripAdvisor, 7 11; Mapa de Lopo Homem (Lopo
Tronquoy, Henri, 118, 121, 129 Homem’s Map), 10–11; Paisagens
Tropicalismo, 267n49 (Landscapes), 10, 11, 11, 12
tropical nature, 25–26, 33, 99 Varela, Francisco, 177
Trump, Donald, 22 Vasconcelos, José, 99
Tsing, Anna, 6, 14, 18, 59, 184, 191, Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 150
213, 234, 241, 253n1 Veloso, Caetano, 161, 162
Tucumán Arde, 20, 141–46, 141, Venezuela, 82, 112–13, 147. See also
148, 149, 265n18; 1968 manifesto, specific locations
146; as assemblage, 145–46 Venezuelan Automobile Club, 82
verbal communication, lack of, 217
Umwelt, 240, 248 Vial, José, 117
Unidad Popular, 151 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 200–201, 202,
unimagination, 16–17 205; Alvorada na fl oresta tropical
Union of the Indigenous Nations, 230 (Dawn in a tropical rainforest),
United Nations’ Economic 201; Amazonas, 200; Canções
Commission for Latin America típicas brasileiras (Typical songs
(CEPAL), 150 of Brazil), 200; Erosão (Origem
United States, fascism in, 22 do Amazonas) (Erosion: Origin
Universidad Católica Valparaíso, 122, of the Amazon), 201; Melodia da
129, 133 montanha (Mountain melody),
University of Iowa, 171 201; New York Skyline Melody,
unsettlement, 9 201; Saudades das selvas brasileiras
unspecificity, 18, 20, 136–38, (Longing for the Brazilian forests),
175–90, 241, 242; art and, 136– 200; Sobre a linha das montanhas
40, 179, 180, 189–90; generic, do Brasil (On the outline of
189unworlding, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, the mountains of Brazil), 201;
21, 192, 192–93, 211, 212, 217, “Trenzinho do Caipira” (The little
238, 241 train of the Caipira), 81; Uirapuru:
Urban Improvement Agency, 133 The Enchanted Bird, 200
urbanism, 19 Villa Ocampo, 102, 106, 114
 Index ❘ 315

Villa Stein-de Monzie, 100 Williams, Raymond, 9

violence, 11, 15, 159–60, 224, 225, witnessing, 208, 210–11, 224, 231–
231–32, 232, 232–33, 237–38; of 32, 238. See also testimonios
extractivism, 15, 226–27; politics worldings, reenactment of, 209–10
and, 9; representation of, 227; worldmakings, 192–93, 241, 242
slow, 226–27, 234, 238 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 129
Virgil, Aeneid, 121, 264n107 writing, 198. See also specific genres;
vision: vs. sound, 198–99; autobiographical, 233–34 (see also
technologies of, 82 testimonios); garden and, 105–
visual pleasure, 9 6; literary rainforest writing, 19;
“vital materialism,” 71, 146 techno-graphic writing, 87
Volpe, Maria Alice, 200 Wylie, Lesley, 36–37
Vozes, 147
“Xangô,” 200
Warchavchik, Grigorij, 99
Warhol, Andy, 172 Yanomami, 222–38, 229–30, 237
wars, 224. See also specific conflicts Yanomami epistemology, 232
and kinds of conflict Yanomami language, 231
Washington Consensus, 225 Yi-Fu Tuan, 208
weed, the, 78, 97–115
Weeksville Heritage Center, 184 Zapatistas, 47
welfare state, 13 Zevallos, Mariela, 150, 153
Wenzel, Jennifer, 13 zoé, 35
Western art, 4–5 “zona tropical” (tropical zone), 54
Whitechapel Gallery, 160–61, 162, “zone of submergence,” 241
175 zoos, 175
Wiener, Norbert, 177, 188 Zurita, Raúl, 149
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