The Second Interrupted Revolution. Juan Guzmán and the case of foot-and-mouth disease. A German photographer in the middle of the war in the Mexican countryside.

Through the photographs of foot-and-mouth disease in Mexico, taken by the photojournalist Hans Gütman/ Juan Guzmán in 1947, this terrible pandemic and the inhumane handling it was given are analyzed. The study of this series of images, from the perspective of visual anthropology, reveals interesting contradictions in the development version of the Mexican government, which for the same reason published them in the magazine Mañana up to 5 years after the photographs were taken. Said “official” version defined foot-and-mouth disease as “an evil ghost” that took over the national cattle, “reason why it had to be exterminated” in order to lead Mexico “into economic and social progress”, a version that is tendentious and contrary to reality of the process revealed by these images.

Photography as a tool for sociocultural analysis. Visual approaches in Latin America.

Photography goes far beyond just shutting down any device that captures an image. Since its creation at the beginning of the 19th century, different uses and meanings have been attributed to it; from art, information, archives and of course as a cultural product. However, in addition to these functionalities, in this article we propose photography as a useful instrument for socio-cultural interpretation. For this, a map of contemporary photographic projects in Latin America is presented that we consider disruptive, novel and that contribute to the understanding of current debates in the social sciences.

Writing and translating: the place of images in ethnography.

In this article I intend to debate the place that images occupy in ethnographic research and their methodological interest, which characterizes the conditions for the insertion of a visual character in the ethnographic narrative. According to Novaes (2014), images communicate and, even in silence, it is necessary to take into account what they have to say, especially in empirical work. In this way, the article will focus on photography as an instrument that opens in gestures and expressions for field research, to think about its use as a production technology for the construction of a visual ethnographic narrative, such as the experience of ethnographic cinema, which will be presented shortly. The hypothesis to be developed here is whether photography can operate as a translation of knowledge gathered in the field. For this, it is important to highlight the methodological interest in the use of the image from the researcher-photographer to the researcher-filmmaker and, as an example, the ethnographic film Les Maîtres fous (The Crazy Teachers), by Jean Rouch (1954) is analyzed.

“These murals give life”: revalorization of public space, history and identity in mural art, Martín Fierro Festival, San Martín, Argentina.

The purpose of this article is to analyze a muralism festival organized by the municipality of San Martin, based on the theme of Martin Fierro and the notion of “Encounters at the border”. This study is based on qualitative research carried out between 2017 and 2020. We seek to understand the ways in which the themes of the Muralism festival are interpreted and resignified by Latin American artists. We also examine how these artistic practices transform a deteriorated public space, and how the Muralism festival, which is part of the Program San Martin Pinta Bien, constitutes a vehicle to de-stigmatize the neighborhoods, and generate a positive identification with the history and memories of the space.

The Pillar of Autonomy, Los Tercios Compas and Zapatista Filmmaking.

The present work describes how video production has integrated within zapatista life and practice as a tool to communicate everyday information among the members of a given community and between geographically distant communities, to protect themselves from structural oppression, to self-present themselves to external audiences, and also to continue developing their autonomous modes of knowledge production. The text focuses on the film The Pillar of Autonomy and the Life of the Partisans (2018), and contextualizes it within the larger framework of political documentary and experimental cinema through the zapatista concept of video-machete.

“Only Versace”: Knock-Offs, Ostentation, and Desire amid the Mexican War on Drugs.

ince the war on drugs began in 2007, Mexico has accumulated more than 250,000 murders and 70,000 disappearances. A complex landscape of criminal organisations has been shaping the violent conditions in the country, accompanied by an imaginary that projects their presence in multiple forms. We can identify a dire example with the bodies found in mass graves that are still wearing their clothes, often designer knock-offs inspired by the wardrobes of drug lords. In this scenario, I argue that an overlap exists between two underground economies: drug trafficking and counterfeit clothing. To understand this relation and its connection to criminal power, my analysis focuses on one of the basic aspects of organised crime: governance, especially its symbolic vein as well as its interpretation and dissemination through media outlets. The names of my interlocutors have been changed in order to protect their security.

Visualizing Development. A visual narrative in photo albums.

Development Projects and programs have frequently appeal to images and in particular to photography in diverse textual registers and virtual spaces: technical reports, illustrating NGOs websites, passbooks and report cover, brochures for donors, among other things. If in some of this registers images appear subsidized to a main text, in other they occupy a prominent place in development narrations. It was this aspect precisely that called my attention to examine a photographic corpus arranged in albums that register the implementation process of a development program intended for indigenous people in northern Argentina: to find out in its pages a development visual narrative. The photo albums under analysis were produced during the implementation of “Componente de Attention a la Población Indígena” between 1999 and 2005. The photographic images appear with all their creative potential and load with an interpretation about the development world. They invite us to reflect upon the marginal place of photography in the development field.

Between the concept of archive and the photographic status. Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, some relations for the analysis of contemporary artistic practices.

This paper propose to relate writings by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, in order to review some considerations on the archive paradigm in conjunction with the photographic status. Propose to rethink these notions and open some problems for the analysis of contemporary artistic practices that use photographic archives as a strategy for the appropriation and rereading of representations, experiences and historical meanings. Finally, there are also some intersections between these reflections and a series of Latin American contemporary projects that propose creating collections based on domestic archives photographs.

Heterotopias and heterochronies: the challenges of the ethnography of duration in Brazilian cities (dialogues with Michel Foucault)

The article talks about the “heterotopias” and “heterochronias” based on studies of ethnography of duration (Eckert & Rocha, 2013b) in the context of large Brazilian metropolises. We propose a reflection especially in relation to the work Des espaces autres (1967) by Michel Foucault (1984) in which the author criticizes the cumulative conception of time for the understanding of the contemporary world. According to the author, the current epoch is more related to space than to the accumulation of time, because the experiences of juxtaposition and simultaneity are opposed to the experiences of linear and progressive time proposed by the modern epistème. In opposition to the use of heterotopias as a way of neglecting the importance of “heterochronias”, this writing proposes a critical incorporation of Foucault's heterotopology into the studies of the ethnography of duration in contemporary urban spaces

Art, film and political action. Brief historiographic review of the ideas of Bolshevik filmmakers: Dziga Vertov and D’Alexandre Medvedkine.

This article is an approach to the experiences of two Bolshevik filmmakers: Dziga Vertov and D’Alexandre Medvedkine. It is a first, historiographic study that is woven, in the first place, with the primary sources of the films and the published testimonies of both filmmakers, to read them from some of the most important references that I located. They are germinal experiences that were forged at the time of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, sometimes it is necessary to bring them back to account and review them again, to understand some keys about trends and expressions that are observed in contemporary audiovisual proposals.