Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Mar 2021)
Spectral remains: residual materialities and representation of the territory in Latin American documentaries
Abstract
Garbage –thought as something to be eliminated and rejected– is originally contrary to any notion of merchandise, since it has neither use value nor exchange value. However, from the 20th century on, for reasons both economic and environmental, garbage became not only sustenance for the dispossessed and marginalized of the economic system, but also raw material for the elaboration of other material objects. In this article I propose to explore the spectral reappearances of waste in the territory in some Latin American documentaries in the 20th and 21st centuries in which what was discarded returns as a spectrum that refuses to disappear, finding new forms of circulation, either in the consumption circuit, in the daily use of transport as a work tool, or in the art space. The impact of waste in the territory causes transformations that the documentary records, generating changes of scale in the interaction between technical matter and the environment or territory. From the present, these reappearances must be reviewed in the light of notions such as the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, which prefigure a future territory stripped of the human.
