Terror and Awe

In Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz(2010), the relatives of those imprisoned and disappeared in Chile’s Atacama desert search for the bodies of their loved ones. Simultaneously, archaeologists examine traces of the pre-Columbian societies that inhabited the area and astronomers explore the origins of the universe by analyzing light emitted from distant stars. Moving through these diverse regions of the past, the film variously captures anthropological, archaeological, geological, and cosmological durations. In contrast to interpretations which propose that this depiction of temporality allows for healing following Chile’s brutal dictatorship, this chapter employs Henri Bergson’s conception of time, Greg Hainge’s ontology of noise, and Jane Bennett’s conception of enchanted materialism to propose that Guzman’s film transmits awe and terror to the audience in an embodied manner. Reflecting on the religious connotations of Guzmán’s film in the light of the work of León Rozitchner and Gustavo Gutiérrez, the chapter proposes that the film is underpinned by the logic of the felix culpa and becomes an act of communion designed to reactivate past political struggles. This is to say that, at once scientific and theological, Nostalgia de la luz establishes the foundation for an immanent posthuman politics.

Introduction

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that a critical perspective anchored in conflict and multiplicity at the edge of what is termed “human” can generate fresh assessments of the ways in which Latin American cultural production has confronted historical, ethical, political, and economic processes. Such cultural production at the edge of the human promotes awareness of the ways in which the decentering of the human subject, now so often invoked as a means of encouraging radical equality across species lines, has also been used as an instrument of oppression and exclusion across history. Our principal argument is that a conceptual focus on “limits” as figures of human-nonhuman relations allows for the opening up of new dimensions to longstanding debates around identity and difference, the local and the global, and coloniality and power in Latin American culture.

Photography as Anthropotechnique and the Legacy of Canudos

This chapter explores the ways in which Flávio de Barros’s photographic documentation of the war in Canudos (1896–1897) has become a conceptual prism through which to consider the role of photography in both the maintenance and contestation of biopolitical control in Brazil. The photobook Desterro (2014), a creative archive of a “fictional ethnographic” expedition to the site of the war led by artist Ícaro Lira, sets up a dialogue with De Barros’s photographs and their role in the violent foundations of the Brazilian Republic at the end of the nineteenth century. By incorporating these photographs into an assemblage of texts, objects, and images that includes narrative, photographs of the desert landscape surrounding Canudos as well as rocks gathered during the expedition, Desterro shifts the focus from photography as a biopolitical technology to its role in the displacement of anthropocentrism in favor of a perspective that privileges the human’s constitutive entanglements with the nonhuman. As well as an engagement with the legacy of De Barros’s photography, Desterro is also a meditation on the artist’s book itself, a form that draws on a number of photo-textual traditions (including ethnographic photography and traveller-artists’ books), in order to intervene into changing conceptions of the human.

Tomás Saraceno and the Ethics of the Sublime in the Aerocene

This essay approaches a number of key works by the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno (currently resident in Berlin) through the paradox of the sublime, which points simultaneously to the limits of the human and to the power of humans to overcome those limits. In Saraceno’s spiderweb exhibits and arachno concerts, we are offered both a perspective that suggests human transcendence and an experience of our perpetual entanglement with nature. Many of them are also transspecies cocreations, demonstrating the potential for multispecies sociality and aesthetic coproduction. Saraceno’s exploration of sensory worlds and his construction of foam-like architectures are discussed in the light of the work of Jakob von Uexküll and Peter Sloterdijk, respectively, which invite us to consider how human and nonhuman worlds are bound together in heterarchical and co-fragile relationships. In Saraceno’s work, it is our human capacity to reflect on the structure of the universe that reveals to us our indivisibility from it; equally paradoxically, it is human dominion over nature by means of scientific knowledge, technological inventiveness, and artistic expression that returns us to an experience of the interdependence that binds humans and nonhumans, and that suggests new possibilities for a future life-in-common.

Permeable Bodies

This chapter proposes a comparative analysis of the artworks Vaporización (2002) and En el aire (2003) by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, and Aliento (1995) and Lacrimarios (2000-2001) by Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz. The changeable and fading materiality of these artworks problematizes hierarchical anthropocentric relations between human and matter. I propose that, through the use of water, charcoal, and vapor as medium, the installations facilitate intrusive and morbid encounters between the dead victims of state-sponsored narco-violence and the living, the contemporary spectators of these artworks. The analysis recognizes the precariousness of life for victims in Colombia and Mexico, and proposes that, by reading these installations as a locus where the material and the spectral converge, it is possible to reimagine the role of the living in the remembrance and commemoration of the dead in the aftermath of violence.

Forensic Fictions

Taking as its point of departure the contemporary crisis of testimonio and the recent works by Eyal Weizman, who has suggested in his book Mengele’s Skull that we have now entered an era where subjective testimony has been supplanted by object-oriented modes of witnessing, this chapter introduces the category of forensic fictions as a way of categorizing and thinking through recent Latin American literature, art, and film. Analyzing how the figure of the archive and its ruins is represented as well as presented throughout recent Latin American cultural production—in a series of works ranging from Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 all the way to the forensic sculptures of Teresa Margolles—the article explores the possibility of a mode of witnessing that goes beyond the humanist notion of the subjective voice of the witness. In dialogue with contemporary debates concerning post-memory, it proposes that the image of the ruinous archive as a metonym for thinking through the possibility historicity in a world devoid of the foundational myths which had until then functioned as the basis of historical meaning.

Feminine Objects, Embodied Subjects

In 1960s Rio de Janeiro, a multidisciplinary group of artists dedicated themselves to making art that invited active, sensory engagement from audience participants. This neoconcrete group theorized the art object as participatory and relational. The theoretical consequences of this approach to art-making included an expansion of the object’s agency. No longer a static wall-hung work of art, the object was now capable of shaping the engagement of its human participants. Conversely, these participants would share in the object-like qualities of the artwork, merging with it in a relational exchange in which both the human and the nonhuman contributed to the constitution of the work. However, changes to this paradigm arise when the subject (or object) in question is not an abstract participant untethered to notions of gender identity. In Lygia Pape’s work, objects are embodied and bodies are objectified, but, as she shows, this exchange cannot be separated from gender. This essay examines key works by Lygia Pape, including the Neoconcrete Ballet, Divisor, and Eat Me, and argues that her embodied aesthetics, rooted in twentieth century Brazilian art, chart new horizons for feminist posthumanism today.

Communicating beyond the Human

Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente (2015) pushes at the limits of the human in several ways. It addresses the genocidal consequences of extractive capitalism, the transcendent promise of both shamanism and religious fanaticism, and communication between humans, animals, and plants, especially via the use of hallucinogenic plants such as ayahuasca. Set in a similar upper Amazon context to Eduardo Kohn’s acclaimed work of posthuman theory How Forests Think, the film dramatizes aspects of his theorization of nonhuman semiosis. In its plot and visual language, El abrazo draws heavily on the writing and photography of Richard Evans Schultes, the ethnobotanist whose work overlapped with that of counter cultural icon Timothy Leary. In this chapter I suggest that Guerra’s dramatization of interspecies communication also speaks to a less academically respected but nonetheless less posthuman line of thought: the counter cultural movement that advocates consumption of hallucinogenic Amazonian plants. In reading El abrazo as the meeting point of the posthuman thinking of Kohn and the neo-ayahasqueros I ask what the similarities are between the two.

Displacing Drug War Violence onto Nonhuman Imaginaries

This chapter broaches the limits of the human from two entwined angles, examining the intersection of necropolitical violence and nonhuman animal tropes in Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos’s 2010 novella Fiesta en la madriguera. Villalobos’s novella is an influential text from the emerging narconarrative corpus in Mexico. The novella has received criticism from prominent critics and writers such as Oswaldo Zavala and Jorge Volpi who have charged that the text inflates the myths surrounding organized crime groups that have been perpetuated by the Mexican state. Drawing on previously unexplored influences from Latin American literary history, and marshalling theories of bio- and necropolitics, postcolonialism, and critical animal studies, this chapter advances a different reading of Villalobos’s text, averring that the author mobilizes the severed head of a highly symbolic animal (the hippopotamus) to launch a nuanced deconstruction of the figure of the drug lord and to recontextualize drug war violence by calling attention to the ways it is immanent to the drive of capitalism and (biopolitical) modernity (rather than outside of these broader processes).

“La trama apocalíptica del Antropoceno”

This chapter examines figurations of a plant-animal-human-digital continuum in the novel Las constelaciones oscuras by contemporary Argentine author Pola Oloixarac. The novel connects three different eras: the nineteenth century, on the cusp between Michel Foucault’s observed transition between the “classic” and the “modern” eras; the 1980s and 1990s representing the origins of the internet and activities of nascent communities of hackers; and the year 2025 when the biopolitical drive of states and corporations to know peoples’ locations at any given moment, based on DNA tracking, comes close to being realized. The findings of the nineteenth century botanist Niklas Bruun defy gradualist theories of evolution and set the stage for the examination of multispecies relationships, carried out away from the prying eyes of humans. The chapter argues that Oloixarac “speculatively fabulates” how our understanding of the “trama apocalíptica del antropoceno” might be different, were animals able to speak, and were we fully able to appreciate our biological plurality (and thus the concrete dependence on the ecosystem we are destroying). I argue that an underlying focus on astrologically unifying factors draws us away from arbitrarily defined national borders to appreciate the challenges we face at a planetary level.