ARCHITECTURES IN THE TEMPORALITIES OF THE COMMUNITIES OF NAZARENO (SALTA, ARGENTINA)

VELIZ, NATALIA SOLEDAD

London

Congreso; Anthropology and conservation.; 2021

Royal Antrhropological Intitute of Great Britain and Ireland

This work presents a possible understanding and assessment of architecture based on temporality. From an ethnographic approach, an approach is proposed to the multiple dimensions of time in the production of domestic architecture in a series of communities in northern Argentina.The study area is the Nazareno communities and they are located in the northwest of the province of Salta, in the north of Argentina.The place is a subtropical mountainous environment, located between the high plateau of the Puna and the Subandias mountains. What gives it the particularity of forming a place where you can find several ecological floors. The region is dominated by mountain ranges oriented from north to south, which decreases in height as it advances towards the east. These important mountain ranges are the Eastern Cordillera and the Sub-Andean Sierras, in the middle of these mountain ranges steep slopes and deep valleys are formed.The work that we present here is part of a doctoral research thesis and its objective is to show the value and understanding of architecture from the understanding of temporality. A temporality that is not only historical, but also understood from the temporal scales of the moment, the everyday, the seasonal and the generational, in the inhabiting and producing of architectures. These are constitutive not only of materialities, but also of the subjects that produce, inhabit and carry meaning from their complex relationships.Temporality as an experience of time, chronicity as the understanding of history, the pendulum movement and the relationship of the environment with social life, and rites and festivities as temporary cuts, are some of the ways from which architecture will be understood from the concept of temporality.That is, to understand it as a thing and not as an object, such that the thing takes on agency from the moment the subject makes use of the object and from that practice the thing takes on representation. That is to say that, although the spatial conformations linked to their material conformation will be analyzed, the relationship with their inhabitation is not neglected, such that these objects construct in their relationship with people, different meanings which are at the same time dynamic. Where this materiality must be understood as flows, in this way it makes it possible to conceive of 'the thing' as something dynamic.