• The Reappropriation of Poverty and the Art of “Making Do” in Contemporary Argentine Cultural Productions

    Author(s):
    Victor Goldgel-Carballo (see profile)
    Date:
    2014
    Group(s):
    LLC 20th- and 21st-Century Latin American
    Subject(s):
    Culture--Study and teaching, Latin America, History, Latin American literature
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    argentina, film, global south, postcolonial exotic, Cultural studies, Latin American history
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M61P4V
    Abstract:
    Through an analysis of two post-crisis films (Estrellas, Federico León and Marcos Martínez, 2007; El nexo, Sebastián Antico, 2005) shot in the largest slum in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this essay sketches the terms for conceptualizing a cultural dimension of the Global South marked by the aesthetic reappropriation of poverty. Working against what has been called Latin America’s persistent “melodrama of poverty,” and avoiding the type of cinematic representation that depicts the slum in terms of violence and uncertainty, the directors of these films highlight the fact that the reappropriation of poverty is often at the base of alternative forms of social and artistic agency. While the ability to work under conditions of material lack has long been an important dimension of Argentine artistic production, their films flaunt deprivation in order to transform precarity into an ideological and aesthetic weapon, re-staging social inequality in a spectacular fashion and advancing inventive modes of action. In this way, they argue that “making do” can also become the basis for an alternative creative paradigm. In their exploration of this paradigm, which allows slum inhabitants to build a house in two minutes and create a spaceship out of junk, both films pose far-reaching questions: who has a right to perform? What roles are available for the people of the slum? And, what are the conditions for having artistic and social agency in economically deprived areas?
    Metadata:
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    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Publisher:
    Indiana University Press
    Pub. Date:
    Spring 2014
    Journal:
    The Global South
    Volume:
    8
    Issue:
    1
    Page Range:
    112 - 127
    ISSN:
    19328648
    Status:
    Published
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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