CEUR   20898
CENTRO DE ESTUDIOS URBANOS Y REGIONALES
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
The Spatiality of Desire in Martin Oesterheld?s La multitud and Luis Ortega?s Dromómanos
Autor/es:
ADRIANA LAURA MASSIDDA; NIALL H D GERAGHTY
Lugar:
Londres
Reunión:
Congreso; Creative Spaces: Urban Culture and Marginality in Latin America; 2016
Institución organizadora:
Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Resumen:
Drawing on the traditions of cinema vérite and direct cinema, Martin Oesterheld?s La multitud (2014) is an observational documentary that depicts various urban typologies of the south of Buenos Aires. The film deploys exquisite cinematography and progresses with an ethereal lethargy as it follows various residents in the area as the wander through the spaces depicted. In contrast, Dromómanos by Luis Ortega (2014) is an uncomfortable hybrid production which blends documentary and fiction utilising locations split between the city centre and a deprived neighbourhood at the urban fringe of Buenos Aires. In sharp contrast to La multitud, the aesthetics of Dromómanos are purposely ugly.     In this paper we will reconceptualise urban marginality through the Deleuzian framework of desiring-production as it is explored in La multitud and Dromómanos. Unlike the psychoanalytic or other models which conceptualise desire around the idea of lack, for Deleuze and Guattari desire is the constant and basic unit for the positive affirmation of productive energy. Crucially, they also contend that society?s fundamental task is to constrain desire. This paper will first spatialise Deleuze and Guattari?s concept of desiring-production through an analysis of La multitud which connects it to the idea of smooth/striated spaces explored in A Thousand Plateaus. This investigation will posit the urban margins as a repository for a form of desire that runs contrary to state and control. In turn, it will be shown that Dromómanos depicts a range of marginal conditions with a spatial element that goes beyond the economic. Nonetheless, by drawing on Guy Debord and the Situationists? concept of psychogeography, it will be argued that Dromómanos reveals what becomes of the libterated form of desire when it is utilised as an affective war-machine directed against the form of thought that sustains the state.