Research - The Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies

HIS
STORY
TORY AN
AND
D TH E ORY OF ARCH ITE
I TE C TURE RE SE ARCH SE M I NAR
Tuesday, 21 January 2014, 17:30 -19:00
Board Room, Department of Architecture, 1-5 Scroope Terrace, Cambridge CB2 1PX
In preparation for the talk, we will be screening the film Elefante Blanco on Thursday, 16 Januar y at 17:00 in the Board Room
Image: Elefante Blanco building with Villa 15 shantytown; Villa Lugano, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Geo f f rey Kanta r i s
‘The White Elephant of Populist Reason’
The film Elefante Blanco (dir. Pablo Trapero, 2012) is set in Ciudad Oculta, a notorious villa (shanty town) in the south west
of Buenos Aires, and casts several of the slum’s residents in supporting roles alongside a trio of professional lead actors.
But its distinctive feature is its translation and framing of populist political ideology via a series of powerful tropes of
abandonment, sublimation and affective capture. The trope of abandonment is condensed in the “White Elephant”, a
populist project to build the largest hospital in Latin America in the 1930s. Never completed, the huge abandoned
building provides the symbolic carcass in the ruins of which the inhabitants of the villa continue to live out their lives,
not figuring in official maps and not counted in any census. The trope of sublimation, which connects to both the
Kantian and the postmodern sublime, is suggested via the contemporary work in the villa of a group of priests
belonging at least in spirit to the erstwhile Movement of Priests for the Third World, led by the charismatic Carlos Mugica
before he was assassinated by the Triple A in 1974. Via a reading of the film that places it in dialogue with the ideas of
the Argentine political philosopher Ernesto Laclau, I argue that the building becomes a condensed metaphor for the
failed populist projects of Church and State, together with an obstinate materiality–both lack and excess–which blocks
the affective, political, and indeed filmic capture of these marginalized populations.
GEOFFREY KANTARIS is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College. He was Director of the Centre
of Latin American Studies from 2005–10 and is currently the Cultural Studies editor of the Bulletin of Latin American Research. He has worked on
contemporary urban cinema from Argentina, Colombia and Mexico, and has published several articles and book chapters in this area. He has also
worked and published extensively on women’s writing and dictatorship in Argentina and Uruguay, and on Latin American Popular Culture. He is author of
The Subversive Psyche (Oxford University Press, 1996) and co-editor of Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect (Boydell and Brewer, 2013)
Optional but recommended reading will be made available in advance of the talk, please email [email protected] to request it.
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