Putrid precarious landscapes

ÁLVARO FERNÁNDEZ BRAVO

Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape

Diaphanes

Lugar: Zurich; Año: 2018; p. 199 - 222

Since the decade of the 1990s, Latin American nations have experienced Neoliberal economic reforms, with a high impact on job destruction, de-industrialization, privatization of public services and a general precarization of the living conditions of the population. Although mass migration movements from rural areas into the cities had been already happening for many decades, they increased dramatically in the 1990s, part of a global phenomenon. The process took shape at different speeds, earlier in Chile, but in Argentina and Brazil, it accelerated during the decade of 1990, when the two main objects of this paper, poems and a film were produced. Most of the population arriving into large cities concentrated on peripheral areas and ended up locating in slums, in conditions of poverty, living precarious lives related with a landscape both provincial and putrid, full of ruins and garbage. This transition took shape in a contact zone where urban and rural worlds intersect and where a provincial domain becomes more visible.