Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction
... Although important ruptures are evident when focusing on the concrete local histories, these two projects highlight the continuum of violence inherent in the "frontierization" process. It is implicitly violent as it normalizes violence as a code of conduct: Its enactment legitimizes the systematic extermination of indigenous peoples as a consistent and long-lasting policy in Latin American frontiers, the eradication of species and ecosystems that accompany the ideology of mass destruction, and the establishment of private property and labor regimes that enable dispossession and abuse 22 The State in these territories has tended to delegate key functions of government such as . 22 A particularly telling example of this process of "savage capitalism" is the case of Michoacán that demonstrates "the formation of a political economy of rural violence whose changing forms have reached our times through militarization, drug trafficking and violence" (Maldonado 2010: 30). ...
... It is implicitly violent as it normalizes violence as a code of conduct: Its enactment legitimizes the systematic extermination of indigenous peoples as a consistent and long-lasting policy in Latin American frontiers, the eradication of species and ecosystems that accompany the ideology of mass destruction, and the establishment of private property and labor regimes that enable dispossession and abuse 22 The State in these territories has tended to delegate key functions of government such as . 22 A particularly telling example of this process of "savage capitalism" is the case of Michoacán that demonstrates "the formation of a political economy of rural violence whose changing forms have reached our times through militarization, drug trafficking and violence" (Maldonado 2010: 30). "civilization," development, security, and in particular the regulation of the ways in which capital circulates to missionary institutions and religious corporations, private firms, and business associations who act as sovereign powers, often in alliance with public forces and militias and, more recently, with private security companies. ...
... Not surprisingly, under the specter of the frontier, huge illegal economies such as cocaine, gold mining, or people traffic are thriving to this day. The layers of rubble left in the wake of these colonial/capitalist enterprises: overgrown Jesuit missions, abandoned oil wells and pump jacks, stranded steam ships and flying boats, razed forests, and mass graves, stand as a testimony of their destruction and violence (Gordillo 2014). ...
This paper is concerned with frontiers as spaces of disputed, ceded, suspended, or imposed forms of rule, that challenge the integrity of bounded territorial polities and their jigsaw puzzle-limits. In recent decades, frontiers have received increased attention, perhaps due to the growing importance “marginal” and “ungoverned spaces” have acquired within the global economy. In spite of their enormous diversity of climates, landscapes and societies, frontiers in Latin America have historically been described and intervened in surprisingly similar ways. The ‘idea’ of the frontier is here so intertwined with the reality of these places, that they have become indistinguishable. This article explores the production of frontiers, more than as a type of space, as an object of common sense and intervention. From an ontological point of view, its aim is to problematize the way frontiers are produced and enacted as an object, constituted and enacted in practice, by dissecting its constitutive practices: what is categorized as a frontier, how is it categorized; and its constitutive relations: the conditions and possibilities created by the frontier that empower certain groups and create new systems of access and control of land and resources.
... Scholarship on the subject has observed ruins in myriad and sometimes contradictory ways, as symbols of absences, erasures, and abandonment that haunt objects and places (DeSilvey and Edensor 2013;Edensor 2005;Gordillo 2014;Lucas 2013;Tsing 2015); as monuments or fetishes of a past whose memories are shaped by the presence of the ruin itself (Benjamin [1955] 2019; Dawney 2020; Lefebvre [1974Lefebvre [ ] 1991; and as composites of decay and fragmentation (Edensor 2001;2005;Gordillo 2014;O'Callaghan 2017;Pohl 2021). This last approach comes close to the distinction stablished by Gastón Gordillo between ruins and rubble. ...
... Scholarship on the subject has observed ruins in myriad and sometimes contradictory ways, as symbols of absences, erasures, and abandonment that haunt objects and places (DeSilvey and Edensor 2013;Edensor 2005;Gordillo 2014;Lucas 2013;Tsing 2015); as monuments or fetishes of a past whose memories are shaped by the presence of the ruin itself (Benjamin [1955] 2019; Dawney 2020; Lefebvre [1974Lefebvre [ ] 1991; and as composites of decay and fragmentation (Edensor 2001;2005;Gordillo 2014;O'Callaghan 2017;Pohl 2021). This last approach comes close to the distinction stablished by Gastón Gordillo between ruins and rubble. ...
... This last approach comes close to the distinction stablished by Gastón Gordillo between ruins and rubble. Rubble refers not only to a disintegrating materiality but also to objects with the capacity to undermine − through their crumbling qualities − the fantasy of history as a seamless whole (Gordillo 2014). Rubble is "the uncoded debris" (O'Callaghan 2017, 7) that ruins the ruin as an object of contemplation, rubble is an affective reminder of the incomplete and quite not totally absent. ...
This article proposes the use of ruins and rubble as entry points to the study ofagrarian change. Drawing from peasants’collective memories of the so-called“abandonment of the banana company”in Palmar Sur, Costa Rica and theobservation of ruined spaces and objects, this article argues that ruins andrubble allow us to see the spatial simultaneity of different temporalities inprocesses of agrarian change, aspects often obscured in linear transitionnarratives. This approach uses ruins and ruination as a lens for asking adifferent type of agrarian question: What does agrarian change look like aftercapitalist destruction has already taken place? In ruined spaces and objectswefind both the materiality of crisis and oblivion as well as places ofreappropriation and autonomy that guide the political possibilities formaking ruined spaces livable.
... 12] acompaña el patrimonio ferrocarrilero y marca el centro de gran parte de las actividades políticas y culturales que suceden en Matías Romero. De este modo, la ciudad ferrocarrilera, signada por las "ruinas del progreso" (Gordillo, 2014) se niega a perder su epíteto. ¿Pero qué nos dicen las constantes alegorías al ferrocarril y la nostalgia por la vuelta de los trenes de pasajeros sobre la construcción del actual proyecto de desarrollo para el istmo de Tehuantepec y las diversas formas en que el ferrocarril ha marcado márgenes y relaciones desiguales en el territorio? ...
... Estas distinciones constructivas relacionadas con clases sociales y diferencias étnicas muestran, en sintonía con las ideas de Adam Morton La centralidad del ferrocarril como vehículo del progreso y la expansión-transformación del modelo capitalista aparece en los diferentes cambios que vivió la pequeña urbe que comenzó como una ranchería. Después pasó a ser centro de la economía en el istmo oaxaqueño y devino, con la transformación neoliberal del país, en una ciudad marcada por ruinas del progreso (Gordillo, 2014) -entendidas como vestigios de proyectos construidos en nombre de la modernidad y el desarrollo-, la violencia y la (in)seguridad. En ese año todavía era el pueblo de Rincón Antonio Nuevo, por eso los sucesos se conocen como la huelga de Rincón Antonio. ...
... Un día que caminaba con Estela Vélez, ayuuk y socia fundadora de Nääxwiin, por el sendero que va hacia la comunidad de Mogoñé 41 Categoría con la que suele ser caracterizada, popularmente, la ciudad de Juchitán. (Gordillo, 2014). ...
La presente investigación aborda el tema de la relación Estado-desarrollo en el istmo de Tehuantepec a partir de infraestructuras de comunicación y transporte (como el ferrocarril) que están dentro del Programa para el Desarrollo del Istmo de Tehuantepec (PDIT). Desde la etnografía me ubico para hacer un análisis del desarrollo como mito político encarnado en los territorios mediante relaciones afectivas, étnicas, de género, políticas y mecanismos de securitización que permiten deshilar las abigarradas conexiones que son tejidas con la implementación de programas de desarrollo. De ahí que el análisis tuvo como eje una pregunta de investigación que me permitiera explicar las diversas formas en que un proyecto de desarrollo puede entenderse desde una manifestación en lo local del Estado: ¿cómo un proyecto de desarrollo y de nación en el istmo de Tehuantepec es representado, asumido, disputado y desvela márgenes del Estado en escenarios locales que constituyen estos “campos sociales minados”?
La presencia en lo local del Estado la analizo sobre todo a través de prácticas centradas en el desarrollo como legitimador de un sistema de gobierno, que justifica la securitización y la instalación de megaproyectos dentro de un programa dirigido hacia zonas representadas como atrasadas en una región geoestratégica para el comercio transnacional.
El trabajo de campo que sustenta la investigación lo realicé durante el 2019 y 2020, fundamentalmente, en comunidades indígenas del municipio San Juan Guichicovi, Oaxaca, y en la ciudad de Matías Romero. A partir de entrevistas, conversaciones informales, la observación participación y el trabajo de co-labor con las mujeres que conforman la asociación civil Nääxwwin me adentré en una análisis de relaciones políticas marcadas por el clientelismo, el indigenismo, la violencia y la representación del istmo como una ruta aprovechable para conectar el océano Pacífico y el Atlántico.
... (Chamosa 2008, 79). The Northwestern Criollo identity became celebrated as 'quintessentially Argentine' in the folkloric canon, even as its Indigenous racial heritage was carefully edited out (Chamosa 2008, 75;Gordillo 2014). Despite this, Criollos remained a subaltern category and 'to be recognized as 'criollo' meant, between the end of the 19 th and the beginning of the 20 th century, to have a status higher than the Indian, but considerably inferior to the country's other social categories' (Concha Merlo 2021a, 5). ...
... The Argentine whitening project was never fully completed. In the 2000s, Criollos in the Chaco still routinely acknowledged their Indigenous ancestry (Gordillo 2009(Gordillo , 2014. Policies of Indigenous recognition and laws facilitating access to land titles for Indigenous groups in Argentina in fact caused a number of Criollos to resuscitate claims of Indigeneity. ...
... En este contexto, nos parecen relevantes las aportaciones de Svetlana Boym (2015) y Gastón Gordillo (2014). La teórica rusa-estadounidense describe la conformación de la historia de la modernidad a través de la articulación de la nostalgia y una serie de influjos de la memoria, por cierto, tiene muy en consideración los planteamientos de Walter Benjamin. ...
... Los objetos están cada vez más diferenciados, nuestros gestos cada vez menos"(Baudrillard, 2004, p. 62). el papel de lo queGordillo (2014) distingue como objeto brillante, vale decir, aquellos elementos que generan atracción debido a su relación con otros y, por lo tanto, tienden a convertirse en el nodo principal de una cadena mayor.La presencia del objeto brillante puede observarse en D'Halmar (1924) cuando Pedro Miguel da un recorrido a Deusto por Sevilla. Nos referimos al momento en que el chico decide mostrarle el Patio de los Naranjos y la Puerta de las Cuatro Virtudes Cardinales. ...
El espacio y los objetos distribuidos en él condicionan las acciones de ciertos personajes con lo cual forman constelaciones (Gordillo, 2014), que conllevan una carga ideológica. Este trabajo pretende analizar cómo algunos objetos pertenecientes a la religión católica condicionan las acciones de los personajes, tanto apóstatas como practicantes dentro de la diégesis, y cómo actúan alegorizandosituaciones de caos, violencia y desesperación (Avelar, 2000). Este artículo se ocupa de evidenciar este proceso en las novelas Pasión y muerte del cura Deusto (1924) de Augusto D’Halmar, Coronación (1957) de José Donoso, Cristianas viejas y limpias de Enrique Lafourcade (1997), Cuándo éramos inmortales (1998) de Arturo Fontaine y Ruido (2012) de Álvaro Bisama.
... In current social theorising on human ecologies and the exploitation of land and people, there is a burgeoning interest in the 'afterlife of destruction' (Gordillo, 2014), with scholars wrestling with the question of what happens to life when extractive industries come to an end. Various authors in this debate have made the case for studying the empirical characteristics and political potentialities of people and places that are situated 'after capitalism' , 'after dispossession' , or in 'capitalist ruins' (Morton, 2010;Salemink and Rasmussen, 2016;Tsing, 2015). ...
... In other words, miners who were extracting in the present nevertheless experienced and described their work through tropes of anteriority (of being stuck in an earlier time) and posteriority (of being stuck after history). As such, rather than following the scholarly convention of using time as an analytic to describe harm inflicted on vulnerable populations-as 'slow violence' (Nixon, 2011), 'a state of uneventfulness' (Hetherington, 2020, 37), or surely, as 'afterlife' (Gordillo, 2014)-our analysis seeks to foreground, as Chloe Ahmann (2018, 144) puts it, 'how affected groups work time to emphasize their vulnerability' . While the muddled temporalities we describe are by no means a monopoly of informal mining zones, we consider that they are especially pronounced there. ...
... In this age of fallout, past emissions accumulate in the air and in rivers, as bodies accumulate toxins (Masco 2015;Murphy 2015). Industries and cities clog landscapes, their excesses embedded well into the future (Stoler 2013;Gordillo 2014). In addition to the excesses of emission ousting and poisoning, the globe also sustains a biodiversity implosion and the disappearance of ecosystems or landscapes (see, e.g., Kolbert 2014;Hallmann et al. 2017)-in short, the thinning of life. ...
... Lévi-Strauss's (2012) haunting Tristes Tropiques is emblematic in combining such an approach with cultural critique. While these studies were literally working against the loss of Culture in its capitalized form, pre sent studies rather attempt to make sense of the ways people live through decaying material environments (Stoler 2013;Gordillo 2014) or how absent things, places, or people are rendered pre sent in practice (Bille, Hastrup, and Sorensen 2010;Meyer 2012). ...
... En ese sentido, el silencio es considerado una producción desde los grupos hegemónicos (Pollak, 2006;Gordillo, 2008). Asimismo, esta entextualización amerita una concepción de "las ruinas", en el sentido que propone Gordillo (2014;, como estructura material con un potencial semántico inestable y abierto que, como mencionamos, en contraposición a la idea de "lugar de la memoria" de Nora (2008), las ruinas representan un espacio de la memoria de los subalternos (Gordillo, 2010). Las autoras afirman que la posibilidad de construir una narrativa histórica subalterna desde los subalternos implica asumir una lectura bajo borradura (Derrida, 1997, citado en Ramos, Crespo y Tozzini, 2016, es decir, intentar leer eso que fue borrado o tachado. ...
... Aunque pareciera una debilidad no indagar la memoria totémica (Nora, 2008) consideramos que esta solo es viable en los términos que lo hicieron Lazzari y Lenton (2018) sobre las memorias del olvido indígena en la Argentina. O mediante la noción de ruinas como lo propone Gordillo (2014; si nuestro interés es analizar la espacialización de la memoria. ...
Este escrito representa una revisión teórica y bibliográfica sobre el enfoque de las memorias aplicado al análisis de representaciones del pasado en comunidades indígenas. Para ello, revisitamos los presupuestos epistemológicos de los paradigmas de la memoria para reflexionar sobre los “pasados presentes” de estas comunidades. Concluimos que muchas categorizaciones, construidas a partir de experiencias de sujetos con otras historias, más allá de su reificación y abstracción, limitan el análisis de las memorias indígenas en general. Asimismo, consideramos que, para el caso de Santiago del Estero, dada su particular formación de alteridades provinciales, es crucial resistir a la idea de etnificar las memorias indígenas y abordarlas, en primeras aproximaciones, como práctica política y como generadora de grupalidad.
... El corpus y la semiosis como estrategias de agrupación y lectura 12 La tarea de hallar la relación dialéctica entre lo-que-ha-sido y el ahora, una imagen donde el pasado y el presente se unen y aparecen juntos en una constelación (Benjamin, 1999, p. 462) no es nada sencilla. Para el caso del Chaco al menos, existen trabajos donde las relaciones entre el pasado y el presente no son unilineales, sino más bien circulares o estrelladas (Gordillo, 2004(Gordillo, , 2014. Traigo el ejemplo de Gordillo porque es interesante ver allí cómo los conjuntos de ruinas se solapan en el espacio y el tiempo y se arreglan o desajustan en relación con los presentes (personas y períodos) que les otorgan sentidos. ...
... analizamos documentos exclusivamente y por distintos motivos no trabajamos con grupos sociales en el presente. Lo que busco es una manera de intentar una cronología no del todo completa, como aparece en Gordillo (2014), que intente vincular los eventos de forma significativa antes que cronológica. ¿De qué manera creamos estos lazos o estas constelaciones entre documentos, textos, objetos? ...
Los desafíos en las lecturas de fuentes documentales aparecen de modo frecuente en los cruces entre antropología e historia. Tanto desde la antropología histórica como desde la etnohistoria —campos de interacción difusos y a veces superpuestos, en ambos casos la búsqueda de información cualitativa sobre grupos sociales del pasado proviene del estudio de fuentes documentales— han surgido metáforas útiles que se convirtieron en verdaderas metodologías: lectura a contrapelo, against the grain, along the grain, entre líneas, etc. Menos se ha discutido sobre la composición del corpus y la periodización que las investigadoras hacemos o replicamos al abordar nuestros trabajos. Siguiendo a Walter Mignolo (1995) y otros, me interesa discutir la articulación de un corpus históricamente diverso a partir de la noción de “semiosis colonial”. De acuerdo con esta idea, los distintos tipos de fuentes se vinculan por el referente que comparten, la situación colonial, sean o no producidas durante el período colonial. A partir del caso de una serie de documentos escogidos para la primera mitad del siglo XX en Argentina, sugiero que el estudio de las continuidades y rupturas se beneficia de un corpus que no suele ser considerado por los estudios coloniales. Para el caso de los imaginarios sobre los grupos indígenas del Chaco, señalo algunos beneficios y desafíos en tomar dos tipos de fuentes distintas en su intención, producción y circulación (informes ministeriales e historiografía oficial) para dar cuenta de su relación con un período anterior. Considero que tal ejercicio, lejos de restar especificidad a nuestra tarea, contribuye con una comprensión más compleja del período colonial y con la posibilidad de una mejor comunicación des-disciplinaria.
... Heritagized ruins can also result from the annihilation and waste of specific pasts and ways of life. As poignantly observed by Gordillo (2014), who quotes Taussig, Machu-Picchu's ruins were crafted and shaped as archaeological relics by the sweat and blood of indigenous workers exploited by Spanish colonial archaeological missions. ...
Ruins, rubble and decaying material can foster a more layered theory of time, change and memory. The seven ethnographic case studies in Haunting Ruins trace human engagements with the temporal forces of ruins, which can trace the past and transform the present. Conjuring environmental humanities, the anthropology of history, memory and archaeology, this book delves into the complex influence of the past on the present and the future and urges scholars to consider ruins as things to think with.
... Part of what commoning draws together will always be an uncontrolled excess, what Blaser and de la Cadena (2017) refer to as 'the uncommons'. The idea of uncommons gestures toward an endlessly proliferating excess that arises through involvement in more-than-human relations, as well as, crucially, the excess that occurs despite, alongside, and below such efforts, such as the liveliness in ruins and rubble (Gordillo 2014;Ogden 2021) or the equivocations that mark all engagements across difference (Viveiros de Castro 2004). It includes the stuff created by the unpredictable and creative subversions of people in response to ordering projects (see Bond, Dewan, Campbell, this issue) and the hybridity that proliferates from efforts at purification (Latour 1991; see also Nustad, this issue). ...
This introduction outlines an approach to commons that captures and responds to intersecting social, environmental, and political complications. The extractive power of states and corporations has long threatened the lives and livelihoods of the poor. However, contemporary local struggles are not adequately understood by frameworks that rest exclusively on social and political power. Climate change and the lingering effects of colonial and industrial extraction multiply the threats to the wider ecologies on which human lives depend. Debates on the commons have addressed such struggles, but without sufficient attention to the diverse bioethical regimes that underpin conventional commons. We propose that such attention can inform analyses by moving beyond the narrow singularities of modern categories. Our introduction lays the groundwork for an approach to the commons that pays attention to multiple and intersecting modes of dispossession, while also looking at convening or ‘commoning’ practices that are oriented toward building alternative relational worlds.
... Locals were avoiding it: it was a space produced next to what used to be a stadium, orchards, a hotel. The ruins -or rather the absence of what used to be -generated strong affective response (Navaro-Yashin, 2009, 2012Gordillo, 2014). I was under the impression that it was the absence of things that were no more, rather than new becomings -such as that of the tomato gardenthat was governing the gaze of the villagers. ...
In this text I address relationships between humans, places, and plants in a valley of the French Alps before and following a disastrous climate event. In three movements I look at spatial and temporal transformations, reverberations, and the way new entanglements emerge and take shape. I investigate processes of making, unmaking, and co-constitution of locus (site), which I define as heterotopian, in order to see what-if any-potentiality the climate disaster might hold.
... As Dzenovska and Knight (2020: np) have put it, "[i]n such conditions there is rubble rather than ruins" (cf. Gordillo 2014). ...
... Put another way, rhythm is a blind spot when it comes to the modern representation of space as a succession of uniform planes (Lefebvre 1974: 235-38), whether it is in the "idiorrhythmic" of nevertheless "coordinated" bodies (Barthes 2002; Gan and Tsing 2018), the seasonality of societies (Wengrow and Graeber 2015;after Mauss andBeuchat 1904-1905), or the sequentiality of history (Gordillo 2014;Schnapp 2020). Moreover, in that it differs from measure, rhythm is also expressive. ...
Revivals of public interest in the Neolithic Near East have generally coincided with the emergence of powerful imagery, such as the discovery of Çatalhöyük’s striking wall paintings in the 1960s. Now, sixty years later, the sculptures of Göbekli Tepe are ensuring the period’s widespread appeal. The capacity of these well-preserved buildings to carry such imagery until today has made them, in turn, an image of the supposed achievements of Neolithic sedentism. But the popularity of these images depends on their decontextualization. This modernist notion that permanent architecture represents the conquest of spatial forms over time is in contradiction with the early Neolithic experience of settled life, which had more to do with the unstable duration of places than with an emancipation from motion. This essay explores the Neolithic preference for earth architecture over more stable construction materials such as stone, its influence on visual culture, and how it contributed to building new living relations to the inhabited landscape. Instead of the sense of fixity and completeness that we, moderns, desperately seek in plans, reconstructions, and monumentality, it is the very transience, repetitiveness, and cumulativeness of earth that determined the transformations of the archaeological record. In other words, rhythms are key to understanding Neolithic sedentism in ways that differ wildly from the static images we have substituted for it.
... For instance, as Gordillo (2014) shows, a deliberate neglect of the material remnants of a colonial past may constitute a way for post-colonial legatee communities to deal with experiences of violence and oppression. In a similar vein, changes to legal ownership, institutional neglect, and limited financial capacities can hinder timely preservation and speed up the disappearance of certain sites (Reichert-Schick and Eberle 2011). ...
Despite the ongoing efforts towards Cold War heritage-making in Europe, the ambiguities in meaning and the cultural status of certain materialities from the second half of the 20th century across different national contexts highlight a heritage dissonance at play. Focusing on the case of the Baltic states, we analyse the engagements with Soviet military remnants since the early 1990s in the context of changing political regimes. We approach the prevailing practices of disinheritance along the same conceptual lines as heritage-making and highlight how disinheritance has contributed to shaping national identities and future-oriented landscape relations. We argue that disinheritance can be a legitimate alternative strategy for dealing with difficult legacies. In addition, we shed light on how the fragmented attempts to preserve and re-narrativize certain Soviet military remnants reflect the constrained relations between the political agendas of post-1990s nationalism and European integration.
... In thinking about the repercussions of the earthquake, and how different people experienced and understood them, this article draws on G. Gordillo's (2014) ideas about rubble and ruins. Gordillo's concepts are laid out in his ethnography of the relationship between the inhabitants of the Chaco region of northern Argentina and the many sites of colonial and neocolonial ruins spread across the landscape, some destroyed by earthquakes or rebellions, others abandoned and left to deteriorate, their structures mined for stones. ...
The 1927 Jericho earthquake caused widespread damage across Palestine and Transjordan, both ruled at the time by Britain. The worst-hit city was Nablus, where the Old City’s historic buildings became a field for conflict. Drawing on G. Gordillo’s differentiation between ruins and rubble and his analysis of colonial anxiety, power, and oppression, this article considers local and colonial reactions and competition over the material heritage of Nablus, particularly in the city’s Samaritan Quarter and the Crusader wall of the Great Mosque. Entangled in these are definitions of antiquity and ideas of archaeological value for the Ottoman and British rulers of Palestine. Decisions made and contested in Nablus and Jerusalem highlight the fine line between ruin and rubble, the mechanisms by which the mandatory administration sought to tame the built environment and indigenous communities of Nablus, and the way their confrontations reverberated in the city’s rebellious history and insurrectionary future.
... L'ús de l'adjectiu territorial reforça, per tant, una manera particular d'endinsar-se a les capes del paisatge, i s'alinea amb la crida d'alguns autors que reclamen la necessitat imperativa de retornar a la noció de territori davant la proliferació d'aproximacions paisatgístiques (McCall, 2016). Aquest reclam, sustentat per la rellevància de poder copsar com «una societat o unes entitats polítiques modelen, influeixen i controlen activitats socials i l'accés als recursos» (McCall, 2016, p. 60), enllaça amb la definició de l'ambient des de l'àmbit de l'ecologia política com «el camp en què diferents actors socials competeixen per l'accés i el control dels recursos naturals per mitjà de relacions asimètriques de poder» (Vaccaro, Beltran i Paquet, 2013, p. 255 (Gordillo, 2014). El repte d'ensenyar les runes se sustenta en la seva capacitat per evocar connexions entre els paisatges pretèrits, actuals i futurs, i per estimular el coneixement de les capes superposades i dels processos de producció, sovint conflictius i ambivalents, dels paisatges. ...
Resum Les runes perviuen en el temps i l’espai, com el temps i l’espai semblen perviure en les runes. No es tracta, però, d’una pervivència estàtica ni unívoca. La presència de runes sempre evoca transformacions paisatgístiques, percebudes, representades i valorades de manera canviant segons les vivències i els records que n’emanen. Centrant-se en les restes d’una infraestructura d’explotació forestal massiva de principis del segle XX (la Matussière, Pallars Sobirà), i en la construcció de grans pantans a Catalunya a mitjan segle passat i que ara amb prou feines s’omplen durant una part de l’any (pantà de Sau, Osona), aquest article posa en valor la capacitat heurística de les runes dins de l’Antropocè per a l’anàlisi del nou marc mental i econòmic de gestió capitalista dels boscos i de l’aigua. La visibilització i la invisibilització de les runes ens permet copsar allò que roman i esdevé visible en el paisatge, però també allò que s’esvaeix o emergeix, i que esdevé invisible o paulatinament visible. Les runes ens parlen, en definitiva, de les ressignificacions i dotacions de valor de les transformacions paisatgístiques, passades i futures, en el marc de l’explotació capitalista dels recursos naturals.
... Afinal, armazéns, arrimos e aterros fizeram parte do enquadramento dos contornos da ilha. Os escombros, topografia e pós vida das destruições (Gordillo, 2014), e atualmente os artefatos mais corriqueiros do planeta (Shanks;Platt;Rathje;2004), agora são o próprio solo (Florence, 2018) -não estão na ilha; são a ilha (Figura 8). Emergiram dali ecologias instáveis que combinam ações humanas e não-humanas que narram sujeitos, práticas e coisas que povoam a Ilha (Chelcea, 2015). ...
Este texto explora caminhos para arqueologias do racismo à brasileira a partir de um olhar microhistórico. Propõe uma arqueologia negra que é letramento racial e que amarra sociologia ambiental, antropologia e história sociais à ginga arqueológica sob perspectivas ancestrais. Analisa as práticas materiais que deram base aos constrangimentos estruturais a que foi submetido um guarda portuário, Antônio Luiz Aguapio (1904-1985), focando em sua trajetória entre territórios negros e racializados, e em seu trabalho na Ilha do Braço Forte, Rio de Janeiro. Conclui que sua jornada conecta ruínas, criminalização e destruição, e pondera como as encruzilhadas de sua vida são exemplos de uma arqueologia que pensa racismo, capitalismo e excessos materiais da modernidade
... There are plans for a by-pass highway around Castro, a project that may help redirect these kinds of large investments away from the historic city centre, currently where the main highway passes as the only link between the northern and southern parts of the main island of the archipelago. With a view to the critical heritage studies literature, this research is also weary of relying too heavily on "expert" opinions that overshadow other concerns that may exhibit a different relationship to so-called heritage assets (Gordillo 2014)the UNESCO World Heritage church, in this case. Yet it seemed like this distrust of experts was also already being deployed in the controversy itself, as a pro-mall discourse emerged that accused the critics of being "outsiders" and not "real" Chilotes (see Miller 2018aMiller , 2019. ...
Spectacle, once a key term for critical theories, has had limited theoretical development in recent decades. To make sure the concept remains relevant today, this paper turns to actor-network theory (ANT) and assemblage theories to reconceptualize what the spectacle is and how it operates today. Working with a case study of a controversial urban spectacle in southern Chile – a new shopping mall, the “Mall Paseo Chiloé” – this paper explores a set of findings that illustrate what these approaches have to offer. First, in viewing the spectacle as a hybrid entity, we uncover vital forces inside what might at first appear to be irrelevant features of the building's architectural design. At the same time, this approach includes the forces of ambivalent desire and fluidity that reveal the dynamics of resistance inside that same design. As such, this paper focuses on a specific aspect of this building that makes it a unique form of counter-spectacle.
... We therefore suggest that bringing together relevant socio-cultural theorisations of industrial change (e.g. Gordillo 2014;Strangleman and Rhodes, 2014;High 2018;Emery, 2020) with analyses of the relationship between present and past, and how this creates different horizons of expectation (Koselleck, 2004) that can help uncover the complex and multifaceted ways in which temporal processes (e.g. cultural representations of the past vs representations of anticipated futures) mediate the interaction between decarbonisation, place and work. ...
Deep decarbonisation of extractive and foundational industries will involve widespread social and economic change. Research on previous industrial restructuring has demonstrated that resultant changes will be geographically uneven, especially without countervailing state intervention. Such change has been shown to matter for both the nature and location of work in those industries as well as for the wider wellbeing of places. Concentrations of economic activity create place-based economic and sociocultural dependencies. As such industries and industrial work often become entwined with workers' and communities' cultural identities. It is important to understand implications of industrial change for work, for place, and-as we argue here-relations between work and place. Building from a semi-systematic review of existing literature on industrial decarbonisation, work and place, we extend prevailing political economic approaches to economic change, to also set out an original approach to decarbonising extractive and foundational industries, which we term 'places-of-work'. This approach is embedded in acknowledgement of the deep economic and cultural relations between work and place, which also plays out in processes of industrial decarbonisation. The approach builds from cultural and feminist approaches to economic change to emphasise sets of interrelations important to study of industrial decarbonisation as geographic phenomenon. Such an approach means extending the role of the state not as solely, or even primarily, focused on provision of training or employment opportunities, but as requiring adoption of a place-based approach to remaking economic and cultural characteristics of a location and its people. In setting out our alternative agenda, we seek to develop new insights that enable us to understand how industrial transitions potentially act within, and impact upon, places and their cultural identities, and the role of the state in reinforcing and disrupting these to support just transitions.
... The ongoing mixes of the anthroposea do not provide a different set of promissory notes or alternative futures to which cities in the sea can be moored. Instead, the anthroposea is held together by the fraught ways of "being alive" in the ongoing present (Ingold, 2021), amidst the detritus-filled aftermaths of modern urban infrastructures (Benjamin, 2002;Gordillo, 2014). ...
In this article, I describe Mumbai's sea as an "anthroposea"-a sea made with ongoing anthro-pogenic processes across landwaters-to draw attention to the ways in which it troubles both urban planning and the making of environmental futures. I focus on three moments in which Mumbai's more-than-human life now emerges in the anthroposea. First, I describe the surprising proliferations of lobsters, gulls, and fishers in a sewage outfall. Second, I draw attention to the city's flourishing flamingo population amidst industrial effluents in the city's industrial zone. Finally, the article floats towards a popular city beach where citizen scientists at Marine Life of Mumbai show the ways in which the city's phenomenal biodiversity is making homes in and with the city's plastic waste. I argue that these ongoing and dynamic relations between urban waste and more-than-human life make unstable and tenuous the modernist distinctions of nature/culture on which environmental and urban projects depend. The anthroposea does not easily permit the making of near futures. Instead, by crossing spatial scales and epistemological boundaries, the anthroposea holds the city and its citizens in the muddy materialities of an ongoing present; a present in which the vitalities of waste are intransigent, permanent, and generate life in the city's landwaters.
... Political ecologists in particular have underscored the specificities of the infrastructures and architectures of resource extraction, which contribute to the production of extractive enclaves and semi-permanent frontiers (Appel 2012;Rasmussen and Lund 2018). I bring all these ideas into conversation with critical reflections on ruins and ruination, which are broadly concerned with how the physical remains of the past continue to impinge on contemporary politics and everyday practices (Stoler 2013;Gordillo 2014;Chari 2013). What happens when the architectures of extraction, once intimately constituted by capitalist and racial forms of exclusion, begin to rot? ...
What happens when the architectures of extraction, once intimately constituted by capitalist and racial forms of exclusion, begin to rot? Focusing on a Bolivian tin mine, this paper examines the social effects of deteriorating “architectures of extraction,” a category that includes both aboveground infrastructures and belowground networks of tunnels and scaffolding. First, I argue that when Llallagua’s extractive architecture was built, it helped shore up a connection between tin mining, working-class identity, and revolutionary nationalism – which in turn became bound up with mestizaje, an ideology of racial and cultural whitening. Second, I argue that the ruination of this extractive architecture has had ambivalent implications for the racial politics of contemporary small-scale mining operations that continue to operate inside the mountain. On the one hand, the rotting structures reinforce regional racial hierarchies in a variety of ways, but on the other hand, the slow degradation of the physical structures has made the corresponding social structures more porous, if not fully permeable, to members of regional Indigenous ayllus. While access to the financial benefits of mining is far from unambiguously liberatory, this paper nevertheless suggests that the political possibilities contained within the ruins of extractive architectures are not uniformly adverse.
... Such processes are complex and unfinished: temporal trajectories that continue to unfurl. They are not discrete from the present but act on it, leaving vibrant traces and becoming entangled with and intrinsic to the character of contemporary places and communities (Navaro-Yashin 2009;Gordillo 2014). In her work on 'imperial durabilities', Ann Stoler has powerfully examined how the past endures, shaping what comes next in ways that must be reckoned with by future generations. ...
... It provides a vital node in a circular economy, between those who create environmental debris and those who repair and recycle it. For example, Gastón Gordillo (2014) argues that rubble is not simply a figure of negativity but the afterlife of ruins and destruction. At this naka, rubble signals myriad forms of construction rather than destruction. ...
I decouple the commonly discussed ecological destruction and unsustainability wrought by cars from a discussion of what life lived and sustained around automobiles looks like. Through fieldwork with hereditary Muslim taxi drivers in Mumbai, I look at urban ecological relations with those who work in what I call sensate ecologies. A sensate-ecologies approach connects labor and urban ecology and argues for a collective rather than an individual subject of urban theory. What I describe here as drivers’ sensate ecological relations with a difficult city—a condition that is usually considered ecologically and infrastructurally unsustainable—calls into question assumptions about ecological damage and precarious urban life. By analyzing taxi driving as relational, sensate work. rather than as precarious labor, I argue that urban sensate ecologies produce expertise for hereditary drivers that sustain over generations. I conclude that even unsustainable ecological onslaughts of automobility produce coexistence and sustainable social and sensate relations.
... The daily interaction with industrial spaces and objects in the public environment allows us to discuss how these vestiges assume a social role in constructing individual and collective memory (Huyssen 2016) (Figure 8). Industrial heritage enables a rethinking of local communities' social and political relationships, simultaneously with its fetishised ruins (Pohl 2021) or its material 'rubble' (Gordillo 2014). It thus offers the material and historical depth to assess the impacts that mining expansion has imposed on this northern region of Chile. ...
The Antofagasta region, now part of northern Chile, belonged to Bolivia until the so-called War of the Pacific (1879-1883). Since the end of the nineteenth century, with the irruption of foreign and national capitals, the area witnessed intense industrialisation and mining expansion. Industrial mining modified local communities' livelihoods, social practices, landscapes , and ecologies. Gatico (coast) and Ollagüe (highlands) were two mining centres that agglutinated a significant migrant workforce to produce copper and sulphur, respectively. Now dismantled, both peripheric extractive spaces form an 'industrial topology' structured outside the national margins. Abandoned industrial infrastructures and the chemical debris of mining activities reconfigure the current geopolitics of memory among local communities. Tensions and dissonances emerge from the touristic and economic 'museumification' of these sacrifice zones and their industrial ruins. ARTICLE HISTORY
Yangambi, a small town about 100km west of Kisangani, DR Congo, used to be the quintessence of colonial agro-scientific capitalism, a world-renowned research institute that served agricultural productivity and exports. Today, in the midst of agricultural factories shutting down, decrepit colonial buildings and decaying cash crop plantations that conservation-development projects attempt to restore, heterogeneous and unruly forms of human and vegetal (after)lives and relations have (re-)emerged spontaneously. This chapter argues that post-agroindustrial ruins and their restoration act as material and symbolic sites of struggle between the compressed spatio-temporal frame of rational ecomodernization and the extended cyclical spatio-temporality of shifting cultivation. The low-wage, labour-intensive cultivation of short-cycle commercial food crops and export tree crops on permanent land plots owned by wealthier farmers, cause a rupture in communities' long-term reciprocal relations with both forests and kin. Yet, in this same seemingly dystopian landscape, the sequence from field to fallow and from the forest to the field to the slow growing, slowly harvested crops eaten locally, coincides with reciprocal labour systems, allowing the reproduction of the nonhuman world-such as weeds and forests-and of relations with living and non-living kin. This chapter suggests that thinking with such ambivalence and with contrasting but entangled types of human-plant encounters and their spatial-temporalities opens infinite possibilities to imagine alternative non-linear, non-binary futures.
A partir de la categoría “ruina”, este artículo problematiza la relación de la ciudad de Córdoba (Argentina) con los vestigios materiales de su pasado, tomando como caso de análisis lo acontecido con un antiguo edificio que funcionó como cárcel de encausados por más de setenta años y fue desalojada a comienzos de este siglo, iniciando, entonces, un proceso de desgaste, obsolescencia y decadencia material. Su emplazamiento en un barrio que experimenta, desde hace décadas, procesos de transformación urbana pone de relieve contrastes incómodos en la trama urbana. A partir de notas publicadas en la prensa local y normativas municipales se revisan las intervenciones de distintos actores sociales que valoraron de maneras disímiles esta construcción y, en consecuencia, sugirieron diferentes destinos para la misma.
How do the marginalized middle-lower-class residents of a neighborhood yearn for and participate in gentrification? In Istanbul, the low-quality building stock and risk of earthquakes intensifies the need for urban transformation, making it seem inevitable and desirable. This article focuses on the experience of gentrification in the Hasanpaşa neighborhood of Istanbul, using an intersectional lens to discuss how the locals, who cultivate a reorienting agency, give consent and aspire for urban change. A form of aspirational normativity emerges among the locals, driving the positive affect around the ideal and materiality of renewal-exemplified by the transformation of an abandoned power plant into a cultural complex. The case of Hasanpaşa shows that we need to take into account the different starting points, multiple contextual features, and intersecting social positions in order to have a more complete understanding of the landscapes of urban change.
Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched the war ondrugs in 2006 as a strategy to dismantle vast drug trafficking networks. That war has cost the lives of thousands of people, many of whom are buried in mass graves. By focusing on a single day in the search for bodies, this ethnography describes and analyzes one of the brutal aftereffects of this security strategy. One key topic is the different ways in which actors stake out the rights of the lifeless bodies in these graves, from the mothers who dig into the earth to find tesoros(treasures) to the state apparatus that attempts to control the process.
Heritage processes are today increasingly entangled with multiple forms and discourses of creativity. Connections between creativity and heritage form part of a new consensual authorised discourse, where creativity and (heritage) entrepreneurship are projected as mutually beneficial in a win-win scenario, while co-existing with ever-more visible practices of destruction and loss. Challenging the celebratory narrative, the article unpacks the less visible political, economic, cultural and social processes underpinning the heritage–creativity nexus. This is necessary in order to confront and analyse the domination of space, place and history in the context of depoliticised neoliberal forms of governance. Juxtaposing the contradictions of authorised heritage discourse within the hegemonic politics and profitability in the neoliberal creative economy, we propose a critical anthropological approach centred around the decreativity of contemporary practice.
Este artigo discute duas disputas técnicas entre engenheiros da Secretaria de Viação,Transporte e Obras Públicas e arquitetos do Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e ArtísticoNacional, durante as obras de abertura da Avenida Presidente Vargas (1937-1945).São elas: a discussão sobre o traçado retilíneo da avenida e a ameaça de demolição dequatro bens tombados, entre os quais duas igrejas de arquitetura colonial, e a propostade transladação monolítica da Igreja de São Pedro dos Clérigos. Exploramos a ideiade que as demolições são boas para pensar processos de consagração e dessagraçãodo patrimônio. Argumentamos que a ameaça de decomposição da unidade dos benstombados, especialmente os religiosos, permite discutir o valor das coisas sagradas.
This article examines the caretaking practices of vacant domestic spaces amid a migratory crisis and generalized collapse. Caracas is conceptualized as a 'city of aftermath', where the material residues of modernity are reconfigured in response to the logic of crisis and the needs of migrants, re-signifying spaces and extending their life beyond the conditions of their production. The text is centered on the figure of the caretaker. Based on interviews, site visits, and photography, the article examines the daily routines of Carlos, who looks after more than twenty apartments in Caracas. His work is entwined with migrants’ trajectories and local needs, generating new economies and support networks around the maintenance and adaptation of vacant spaces. In this way, caretaking practices offer clues for a reading of the city that transcends progress/decline oppositions and their respective imaginaries: the new and the ruin.
Despite China's leading role in the construction of infrastructure over the past decades, the most influential paradigms for the study of infrastructure in the social sciences originate from research conducted elsewhere. This introduction to the special section “Chinese Infrastructure: Techno-politics, Materialities, Legacies” seeks to address this apparent gap, and contributes to building an innovative research agenda for an infrastructural approach in the China studies field. To do so, it pushes forward an understanding of infrastructure as both an empirically rich material object of research and an analytical strategy for framing research questions. We draw from two strands of inquiry: recent efforts to rethink the materiality of infrastructures not as an inert or stable basis upon which more dynamic social processes emerge, but rather as unstable assemblages of human and non-human agencies; and scholarship that explores the often hidden (techno-)political dimensions of infrastructures, through which certain intended and unintended outcomes emerge less from the realms of policy and implementation and more from the material dispositions and effects of infrastructural formations. These strands of inquiry are brought together as part of our effort to recognize that the infrastructural basis of China's approach to development and statecraft deserves a more concerted theorizing of infrastructure than we have seen thus far.
This article offers a different way to understand the heritage of extractive industries by exploring the material afterlives of what has been termed the “ancillary impacts of resource development”—a variety of quarries, forest cuts, transportation corridors, and power lines that surround industrial operations, especially those created in areas distant from established industrial population centers. To study this, the article expands upon the concept of “vestige” to explore the landscapes around two single-industry mining towns in Kola Peninsula, Russia, and in Labrador, Canada, by specifically focusing on two abandoned quarries located in each. The results highlight the need to explore developments that trail behind industrial settlement of colonial hinterlands. By focusing specifically on the afterlives of such developments, the article demonstrates how chronological and geographical boundaries of resource extraction are blurred over time, creating a deep, unruly, self-perpetuating set of legacies.
This article presents a preliminary, revised life history of Punta Laguna, Yucatan, Mexico, and considers in detail the site's relationship to nearby communities. More specifically, this article presents the results of a type-variety analysis of the cumulative palimpsest of ceramics excavated at the site between 2017 and 2022. Unlike initial studies conducted in the 1980s, the current study suggests that Maya peoples occupied Punta Laguna continuously or recurringly from 600/300 b.c. through a.d. 1500/1550. Punta Laguna is therefore usefully understood as a persistent place. By offering a composite life history of Punta Laguna, this article aims to augment current understandings of the complex social, political, and economic landscape of the northeastern Yucatan Peninsula. It also considers the utility of archaeological studies of persistent places to scholarship on urban sustainability and suggests that research investigating the connections between early occupation and site longevity may prove a fruitful avenue of study. Finally, this article argues that investigations of persistent places may provide a counterweight to the more common focus on collapse and thereby offer a more comprehensive understanding of the Maya past—one that emphasizes the vitality of the Maya present.
Cultural landscapes, which in the field of heritage studies and practice relates to caring for and safeguarding heritage landscapes, is a concept embedded in contemporary conservation. Heritage conservation has shifted from an historical focus on buildings, city centres, and archaeological sites to encompass progressively more diverse forms of heritage and increasingly larger geographic areas, embracing both rural and urban landscapes. While the origin of the idea of cultural landscapes can be traced to the late-19th century Euro-American scholarship, it came to global attention after 1992 following its adoption as a category of ‘site’ by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. Today, cultural landscape practice has become increasingly complex given the expansion of the values and meanings of heritage, the influence of environmental challenges such as human induced climate change, technological advancements, and the need to better understand and interpret human connections to place and landscapes.
The aim of this handbook is to strike a balance between theory and practice, which we see as inseparable, while also seeking to achieve a geographical spread, disciplinary diversity and perspectives, and a mix of authors from academic, practitioner, management, and community backgrounds.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315203119/routledge-handbook-cultural-landscape-practice-cari-goetcheus-steve-brown?refId=4dc82b18-4556-4188-908a-865612445f73&context=ubx
The article explores the relationship between waste and city through the prism of urban infrastructures and proposes the concept of “residual infrastructure” as a strategy to analyze the residual, not hegemonic, dimension that constitutes waste management systems, focusing on processes of change that reconfigure the infrastructure that operates the exclusion of elements considered to be at the margins, despite their centrality in practice. The ethnographic focus is on the “closure” of the Jardim Gramacho landfill, in metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, considered as an “infrastructural event”, which mobilizes a contentious arena between different actors and technological repertoires, thus configuring a waste politics. The notion of “people as embodied infrastructures” qualifies the pickers (catadores) of recyclable material as socio-technical systems and reveals the persistence of colonialisms in modern waste management systems, which continue to shape urban geographies and (re)produce racialized structures of inequality. Catador politics are then considered as a popular socio-environmentalism capable of forging models of citizenship and alternative projects for the city.
O artigo explora a relação entre resíduos e cidade a partir do prisma das infraestruturas urbanas e propõe o conceito de “infraestruturas residuais” como estratégia para analisar a dimensão residual, não hegemônica, que se constitui nos sistemas de gestão, enfocando processos de mudança que reconfiguram a infraestrutura operando a exclusão de elementos considerados à margem, apesar de sua centralidade prática. O foco etnográfico se volta para o “fechamento” do aterro de Jardim Gramacho, no Rio metropolitano, pensado como um “evento infraestrutural”, que mobiliza uma arena de disputa entre distintos atores e repertórios tecnológicos, configurando uma política dos resíduos. A noção de “pessoas como infraestruturas corporificadas” qualifica os catadores como sistemas sociotécnicos e descortina a persistência de colonialismos nos sistemas de gestão de resíduos modernos, que continuam moldando as geografias urbanas e (re)produzindo estruturas racializadas de desigualdade. A política catadora é então pensada como um socioambientalismo popular capaz de forjar modelos de cidadania e projetos de cidade alternativos.
Desde una mirada socioantropológica, esta obra ofrece nuevas herramientas y perspectivas teórico-metodológicas para discutir problemáticas vinculadas a los procesos de organización y subjetivación indígenas, así como para analizar procesos de memorias colectivas en contextos diversos. Se trata de indagaciones que buscan comprender la materialidad del mundo desde las formas de ser, habitar y recordar de grupos subordinados y alterizados, fundamentalmente, de la Patagonia argentina. De este modo, pampas, ceremoniales, cuerpos, volcanes, taperas, plantas medicinales, restos humanos, así como relatos y discursos, son recorridos en estas páginas a partir de diversas memorias para hacer posibles aproximaciones a la producción de disensos ontológicos y a la participación de lo tangible en nuestras formas de ser juntos.
In this chapter, the authors introduce policies relating to cultural landscapes in Latin America and the Caribbean. They present five case studies – all World Heritage listed properties – which together illustrate some of the diversity of approaches and challenges to identifying, caring for, and safeguarding landscapes in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the World Heritage system, this cultural landscape is classified as a ‘relict or fossil landscape’ and is representative of the memory of slavery in the Americas. The influence of Franco-Haitian culture persists in the toponymy, music, and traditions of eastern Cuba. The future focus of the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia (CCLC) is in four major areas: education for competitiveness and strengthening of entrepreneurship in line with the values of the CCLC; promotion of tourism and community-based initiatives; financing for environmental sustainability; and the formulation of public policy for the construction, improvement, and conservation of housing using traditional techniques.
The Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017 is popularly associated with a litany of failures: political, structural, moral, material. But while the official inquiry has sought to frame the fire as a discrete event, for local residents it is inextricable from accumulated histories of injustice and inequality. Years on, the fire still reverberates, its afterlife constellating with new narratives and politics. Drawing on literature on ruination and remains, as well as methodological theory, this essay examines how the form of failure is never pre‐known but must be made to appear. Through diverse encounters with the tower's debris – material and conceptual – failure is made to matter, acting both backwards and forwards in time. Reflecting on remainders and erasures at the tower site, as well as debates about the parameters of the inquiry, I explore how failure is continually recomposed, becoming both an object of knowledge and an instrument for its formation. Après Grenfell : accumulation, débris et formation de l’échec à Londres Résumé Dans l'opinion publique, l'incendie de la tour Grenfell à Londres, en 2017, est associée à une litanie de faillites : politique, structurelle, morale, matérielle. Bien que l'enquête officielle ait tenté de le présenter comme un événement clairement délimité, le sinistre est inextricablement lié, pour les habitants, à des récits accumulés d'injustice et d'inégalités. Des années plus tard, les échos de l'incendie retentissent encore et se nuancent de nouvelles approches narratives et politiques. Inspirée par la littérature sur la ruine et les vestiges et s'appuyant sur les théories des méthodes, l'autrice examine la manière dont la forme de l’échec n'est jamais connue d'avance mais doit être révélée. À travers diverses rencontres avec les débris, matériels et conceptuels, de la tour, elle lui fait prendre corps, aussi bien rétrospectivement que prospectivement. Réfléchissant à ce qui reste et ce qui a été effacé sur le site de la tour et aux débats sur les paramètres de l'enquête, elle explore la façon dont l’échec est en constante recomposition, devenant à la fois un objet de connaissance et un instrument de son acquisition.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.