Rubble, debris and ashes in the end of the Argentinean North Patagonian landscape.

A material analysis by Los muertos dos de Manque La Banca and Puyehue by Victoria Sayago and Bruno Stecconi

Abstract

In this paper we are interested in observing how two contemporary audiovisual works converse with materials present in the Argentinean North Patagonian territory. To do so, we will work from the philosophical perspective of the new materialisms, who put in crisis the modern epistemology, based on a binarism between the human and the non-human, between what is considered living and the inert, and propose us, instead, to take non-human materials as living beings, actants -in Bruno Latour's terms- with whom we can converse. In this sense, Jens Andermann (2018) proposes to think the end of landscape, since this concept presupposes an "objectification of the world, spiritualization of the observing subject." If the division between or among subject/object, activity/passivity enter into crisis, so does the landscape, as it has been understood from Western culture.

In the chosen audiovisuals, certain material features of the territory gain special prominence: in the hybrid work Los muertos dos (2016) by Manque la Banca, the spaces on the edge of the tourist landscape of the city of Bariloche, with its debris and waste, are recorded. And in the documentary Puyehue (2011) by Bruno Stecconi and Victoria Sayago, the protagonists are the ashes caused by the explosion of the Puyehue volcano that generated a socio-natural disaster in the region of northern Argentina in 2011. We will try to think about the relationship of these two films with a change in the contemporary aesthetic imaginary, which, as proposed by the researchers Paola Cortés Rocca and Luz Horne, is called the "material imagination" (2021).