Politics of the Dunes: Poetry, Architecture, and Coloniality at the Open City 9781789209020

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Politics of the Dunes

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Politics of the Dunes: Poetry, Architecture, and Coloniality at the Open City Maxwell Woods

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Politics of the Dunes Poetry, Architecture, and Coloniality at the Open City

[• • ] Maxwell Woods

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Maxwell Woods

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Woods, Maxwell, author. Title: Politics of the Dunes: Poetry, Architecture, and Coloniality at the Open City / Maxwell Woods. Description: New York: Berghahn, 2021. | Series: Space and Place; volume 19 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020040908 (print) | LCCN 2020040909 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789209013 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789209020 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ciudad Abierta (Experimental community) | Visionary architecture—Chile—Ritoque. | Imperialism and architecture—Chile—Ritoque. Classification: LCC NA209.5 .W66 2021 (print) | LCC NA209.5 (ebook) | DDC 720.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040908 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040909

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78920-901-3 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78920-902-0 ebook

Contents Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. On So-Called Nonpolitical Urban Environmentalism: The Architecture of the Open City, Politics, and the Political

10

Chapter 2. Refashioning Latin Americanism: The Foundations of the Environmental Urbanism of the Open City

39

Chapter 3. The Eruption of the Political? Politics, the Political, Hospitality, and the Foundation of the Open City

73

Chapter 4. Thinking Otherwise: Keeping the Open City Open in the Dictatorship

99

Chapter 5. On Subaltern Historiography: Thinking the Open City Historically

128

Chapter 6. Towards a Decolonial Environmentalism: The Limits and Openings of the Open City’s Environmental Urbanisms

158

Conclusion. Socialities, New Openings, and the Lingering Question of Capital

187

References

198

Index

223

Figures follow p. 190

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the time, support,

generosity, and hospitality of those at the Open City. In no particular order, this includes (but is by no means limited to): David Jolly Monge, Victoria Jolly Mujica, Patricio Cáraves Silva, Javier Correa Vergara, Marcelo Alejandro Araya Aravena, Sebastián de Larraechea, Carlos Covarrubias Fernández, Sergio Elórtegui Francioli, Olivia Calderón, Iván Ivelic Yanes, Claudia Porzio, Sonia Heimpell, Francisca Silva, Jorge Álvarez, Miguel Eyquem, Jaime Gil Reyes, Alejandro Garretón, Mónica Parker Bunster, David Luza, Juan Carlos Jeldes Pontio, Juan Purcell, Ana María Ruz, Herbert Spencer, Jorge Ferrada, Michele Wilkomirsky, Nico Ibaceta, Silvia Reyes Gomez, Andrés Garcés, Eugenia Aguirre, Bruno Marambio Márquez, Hans Bremer, Costanza Neira Ortega, Canepa Fuenzaleda, Emilio Perez, and Katherine Piñones. I have never been so certain that a list of acknowledgements is incomplete, and I preemptively ask forgiveness from all who I have not but should have included in this list. Additional specific thanks must go to Sergio Elórtegui, Ana Paz Yanes, Isabel Margarita Reyes, and Manuel Sanfuentes for reading and commenting on early drafts of sections of this book, as well as Jaime Reyes, Adolfo Espinoza Bernal, and the rest of the team at the José Vial Archivo Histórico for aiding me in my search for appropriate images and granting me permission to use those images in this book. I would also like to thank specifically all who lived with me during my time at the Hospedería Rosa de los Vientos: Bruno Marambio Márquez, Costanza Neira Ortega, Emilio Perez, Hans Bremer, Katherine Piñones, Johannes Haase, and César Henríquez. There are four people who were fundamental to my understanding of the Open City who need to be specifically acknowledged: Boris Ivelic Kusanovic, Ana Paz Yanes, Isabel Margarita Reyes, and Manuel Sanfuentes. Boris and Ana Paz were generous enough to have sat with me on four separate occasions to conduct extremely long and protracted formal conversations about their lives at the Open City (in addition to dozens of informal conversations). These conversations were central to reworking many of the official and academic histories I had heard about the group in addition to reframing my own understanding of the collective life of the City. Similarly, Isabel Margarita Reyes was gener-

Acknowledgments vii

ous enough to have donated hours and days of her time to sit down for conversations with me, not only explaining her history with the Open City but engaging in thrilling discussions about architectural theory and the significance of the work of Godofredo Iommi, Alberto Cruz, and others. Lastly, any thanks and acknowledgement I give to Manuel Sanfuentes is insufficient. Not only did he respond to and welcome the (in retrospect likely ignorant) questions of a young PhD student who he had only briefly met once, but he went above and beyond to greet me with hospitality at the Open City, welcoming me with open arms. It should be insisted that any acknowledgement of the significance of Sanfuentes in the creation of this book is not enough. I find myself without words to express adequate gratitude to his support, hospitality, and critique. Any and all celebration of this book should fall directly on the shoulders of the Open City whereas any and all critique should be visited solely upon myself. I would in addition like to thank all of the faculty, staff, and graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez with whom I have conversed on various elements of this book or who have helped my research in some way: Hans Adler, Frederic Neyrat, Marcelo Pellegrini, Mary Layoun, Sarah Wells, Chance McMahon, Joelle Tybon, Diane Bollant, and many others. I would particularly like to thank Hans Adler, who sat with me for countless hours as I tried to resolve many of my ideas surrounding the Open City, and Frederic Neyrat, both of whose mentorship for my seven years at UW-Madison were absolutely essential. Though I have never personally met any of them, I would like to send my deepest personal thanks to the various scholars, poets, and architects who have paved the way for the current discussion of the Open City. Particular acknowledgment must be given to Ann PendletonJullian, Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, Fernando Pérez Oyarzún, and Ana María León. Though individual critiques of their work are presented in Chapter 5, these critical interventions are based on a fundamental respect of and debt to their work. Indeed, Politics of the Dunes would have been impossible without their incredible work prior to mine. Thanks must also be given to the “Fifth International Colloquium of Comparative Literature: Dynamics of Space: Reflexions from Latin America,” held at the Universidad Católica Argentina in June 2018, where I initially presented some ideas from Chapter 2. In addition, thanks are owed to Cultural Politics, where my article, “Hospitality, or a Critique of Un/Inhabitability” was published in July 2019. Some of the ideas presented in Chapter 3 were initially worked out in this article. Although these ideas serve radically different ends in this regard (the con-

viii

Acknowledgments

cerns in the Cultural Politics article are not the concerns of this book), there is a connection between these two works. Lastly, I must acknowledge my article, “The Present, the Modern, and Modernization: Reexamining Latin American Modernity in the Writing of Alberto Cruz,” in Modernism/Modernity. It is here that I initially started working through ideas of decoloniality, architecture, and the Open City, even if my analysis was devoted to the investigation of Alberto Cruz’s architecture from almost two decades before the City’s founding. As one charitable referee put it, “it seems to me that the author is someone who is approaching this topic (architecture) from an outsider’s perspective and, because of this, the author is able to look in a critical and methodical way at the problematics established by historians (willingly or unwillingly, of course).” I hope that the reader finds the interdisciplinarity of Politics of the Dunes productive in the same way. The team at Berghahn Books has been an incredible help throughout this entire process. Without the help and insight of Sulaiman Ahmad, Tom Bonnington, and Amanda Horn, this book would not have been possible. This book would also not have been possible without the generous critiques by the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript: though I do not know you, thank you for your time, effort, and recommendations. Lastly, I would like to extend my thanks to my family and friends for indulging and being patient with me over the past five years as I traveled between the United States and Chile. Special thanks are particularly owed to my loving partner, Leslie Alfaro. She never expected to be in a relationship with someone who was simply gone to another country; I cannot express adequately the gratitude and love for someone who is such an incredible and central part of my life. In addition, I would like to thank her for what have been extremely challenging questions of my work. During my doctoral program, I had for the most part accepted the various postmodern critiques of the high/low culture division. Discussions with Leslie, however, made it extremely clear: academia may have internally deconstructed this division, but that does not mean it is no longer operational. One conversation in particular sticks in my mind. Leslie has been involved in punk for much of her life. At one point, she purchased an academic book on the history of women in punk, looking forward to deepening her knowledge. She found the book unapproachable. Even further, it appeared that the book had taken a beloved and intimate part of her life and made it alien to her, cloaked punk in the vestments of academia—that elite world that would likely scorn the very people who had invented the cultural field in which it now had a vested interest. Is the implication that punk only becomes acceptable in academia when translated into academic discourse, never able to cross the

Acknowledgments  ix

threshold of the lettered world as itself? What would a university press have said in the late 1970s, for instance, to a theoretical examination of punk by the high-school dropout and slumdweller-turned-squatter John Lydon (better known as Johnny Rotten)? In the end, Leslie and I disagreed about the relationship between academia and punk (i.e., I myself have written academic articles on punk), yet she made me face difficult facts: the lettered city and the notion of “high culture” are still very much operational today (even if we academics read about their supposed decline and fall). I am very much positioned within that world, and it is my responsibility to figure out what I’m going to do about that positionality. I cannot occupy her position and I cannot represent the experience of seeing an intimate part of my life, for which I had spent over a decade developing an intimate knowledge, ripped out of my hands by an “expert” academic who may likely dismiss me if we were to meet in real life. Yet I hope that I have heard her as much as my love seeks to hear her. I hope that this work successfully deconstructs my way of knowing, my way of speaking, my way of listening in such a way that I might more lovingly hear her voice, her silences, and her gestures. I fear that this book in many ways reproduces the very same academic prose which she finds so alienating, but the methods behind it are in many ways a labor of our love. For that, I cannot thank her enough. All translations from the original Spanish are by the author unless otherwise noted or cited.

Introduction

The central thesis of this book is that the work of the Open City of

Ritoque presents a “decolonial option” (Mignolo 2011) for environmental urbanism and architecture through the embrace of a poetic foundation for architectural thought and praxis, where the poetic is defined as the hospitable discursive space in which to hear the other. More abstractly, this work is concerned with the decolonization of Eurocentric epistemologies that perceive subaltern subjects and environmental phenomena as stable objects of knowledge to be dominated and conquered (rather than heard as intellectual agents or, to use Bruno Latour’s term, as actants) through accurate and univocal representation by a (Eurocentric) agent who perceives their own “superior” knowledge as universally applicable. While this in many ways repeats the basic thesis of Aníbal Quijano’s conception of the coloniality of power, though with an additional environmentalist turn demonstrating how coloniality also pertains to a particular environmental domination, this work emphasizes that poetry as theorized at the Open City reveals a potential decolonial intellectual space within Western epistemologies. The concern of this work, then, is not the demonstration of how colonial social relations are dependent on a hierarchization of epistemologies in which “Western” and “modern” ways of knowing are deemed superior to others—a thesis that at this point has been thoroughly demonstrated by Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Enrique Dussel, Catherine Walsh, and many others—but to delve into the treacherous waters of identifying tools at our disposal within such modern Western epistemologies to decolonize our modes of inhabiting the earth, that is, to imagine a decolonial option for modern architecture and urbanism. This book started out with the goal of getting the story of the Open City right by providing an accurate representation of the group and its past. This initial goal arose due to what I perceived as inaccuracies in academic histories of the collective. Reflecting on the work of the Open City, however, I soon came to the conclusion that such a research goal was counterproductive insofar as such a foreclosed representation was an inherently colonial process.1 Did my preoccupation that the Open

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Politics of the Dunes

City had been treated as a unified community with a singular voice, rather than a pluralistic but nonetheless harmonious collective with internal differences, not testify precisely to the impossibility of trying to contain the City within a univocal representation? Indeed, it quickly became apparent that the very purpose of this book was, following Gayatri Spivak’s arguments from Critique of Postcolonial Reason, to problematize and question the ways that we think about representation. The Open City’s insistence that we “hear the other” quickly came to signify not an attempt to represent that other—to paternalistically and colonially “speak for those who have no voice”—but to deconstruct epistemological frameworks that preclude hearing the other. While such an effort of course is not a strictly decolonial operation—Did Georg Büchner not already have Danton saying in 1835 that to know each other we would have to “break open our skulls and pull each other’s thoughts out of the brain fibers” (1989: 9)?—when put into the context of the relationship between Eurocentric settlers, Black arrivants, and Indigenous communities in Abya Yala and Latin America, it can come to acquire this significance.2 Such a rethinking of a relationship with another, not to know them through representation but to comprehend their position by deconstructing epistemic and representational frameworks, lies at the core of this work. This leads to one other clarification of what this book is not: this book does not represent the Open City as essentially a collective of decolonial activists. First and foremost, I am not trying to make any definitive representation of the “essence” of the Open City. For those interested in such a representation, I recommend that you instead simply read the central literary works of the group—Amereida, Amereida II, and “Opening of the Terrains” (with the understanding that any list of the “central” works is always incomplete)—and view the architectural works of the Open City yourself on the Open City’s website.3 Second, as we will see in Chapters 3 and 4, the Open City explicitly and intentionally distances itself from political activism, seeking ways other than politics and activism to engage its concern for the structuration of sociality. Third, I repeatedly emphasize in this book that the City’s own positionality within a colonial matrix of power distinguishes it from those subaltern intellectual agents from whom decoloniality initially emerged with “a sense of political urgency” tied to processes of decolonization (Rivera Cusicanqui 2012: 98). Decoloniality, it must be remembered, emerged through the praxis and theory of colonized subaltern subjects; that is, not elite intellectuals like those at the Open City. Following the logic that “not all the projects of the multitude are decolonial—only those whose agents are the damnés” (Mignolo 2005a: 392), it is (at best) inappropriate to re-

Introduction 3

fer to the Open City as agents of decolonization. To see this distinction, one can make a basic comparison between the Open City and Franz Fanon’s texts, Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth. As I repeat throughout this book, the Open City, insofar as it maintains a close connection to the dominant culture of colonialism, is not a subaltern collective (just as Spivak insists that she also is not a subaltern subject). Although this book is founded on (and assumes the reader has a familiarity with) the intellectual, political, and social work of decolonial theorists and political agents (Fanon, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Eve Tuck, Fausto Reinaga, Guaman Poma de Ayala, Albert Memmi, Ranajit Guha, Édouard Glissant, Gloria Anzaldúa, and so on), it is, following Priyamvada Gopal (2019), more precisely examining how their decolonial theory and praxis “not only contributed to their own liberation but also put pressure on and reshaped” some elite Latin American ideas about habitation, modern architecture, and poetry.4 Against any attempt to form a definitive representation, Politics of the Dunes instead seeks to stage a productive conversation between the Open City, decoloniality, and environmental studies. This way of reading is nothing new to the world of literary studies. For instance, Joshua Schuster’s The Ecology of Modernism (2015) conducts an ecocritical reading of Gertrude Stein, yet this reading does not signify that Stein is essentially concerned with the environment and that the various other ways of reading (for instance, those that focus on her understanding of gender) are mistaken; saying that Gertrude Stein has a particular vision of the environment is not equivalent to saying that she is concerned only with forming an environmental vision. Similarly, as I argue in Chapter 5, my comments on the relationship between the Open City, decoloniality, and environmental studies are not meant to negate the wonderful work that has been published about the group—there are multiple ways of reading the Open City of which this is only one—but are an attempt to “know more” about the group rather than “know better” (de la Cadena 2015).5 This book seeks to move away from attempting to define the Open City, instead asking what the Open City can teach us about decoloniality and environmental studies and what decoloniality and environmental studies can teach us about the Open City. This leads to the Open City’s ambiguous relationship with decoloniality. Although I have at other moments fiercely critiqued Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo’s thinking6—specifically their vision of communality and their relationship towards hegemony (a critique that is tacitly implied within this book as well)—their recent On Decoloniality (2018) has proven to be an invaluable research tool while completing this book. Their conceptualization of decoloniality not only as “the emphatic

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no understood as defensive opposition—a social, cultural, and political reaction against” (33), but in addition “a propositional and insurgent offensive for that challenges and constructs” (33)—is a guiding notion of Politics of the Dunes. As they summarize in a phrasing that will be repeated throughout this book, “insurgency here denotes the act-action of creation, construction, and intervention that aims towards an otherwise” (34). It is the central argument of this book that the Open City pursues such a mode of living in common otherwise than the politics of the colonial nation-state. Yet the Open City is in an ambiguous position insofar as the “emphatic no” that forms the foundation of decoloniality is issued from a positionality exterior to colonial epistemologies in Indigenous and Black reasons (Domingues 2009; Mbembe 2017). The Open City asks what it means to be within a dominant culture and social structure and attempt to enunciate that “no.” It is for this reason that this work also heavily turns to Gayatri Spivak’s (1999: 191) theorization of deconstruction, which is based on saying “no” to a cultural landscape that one “inhabits intimately.” This decolonial “thinking otherwise” is similarly reflected by a questioning of the position of the State as the “proper” field for structuring sociality. Politics of the Dunes follows Laurent Dubreuil’s (2016: 4) call to move towards a “non-political elsewhere” in order to construct a more livable life in common. Even further, this book is concerned with a more precise conceptual division of how sociality is variously structured, seeing the politics of the liberal State as one option among many. As such, throughout the work one will see distinctions between: politics, the political, political nonpolitics, poetic political nonpolitics, apolitics, postpolitics, depoliticization, and so forth. Following José Rabasa (2001: 197), I am interested in how these fields affirmatively conceptualize their own modes of sociality, refusing to insist that one of them is uniquely a “more mature” mode of structuring a life in common. This book is interested in exploring how the Open City’s focus on constructing a poetic mode of living in common is dedicated to a thinking other than politics, demonstrating that there are multiple modes of engaging sociality and not just the one concerned with intervening in State apparatuses. Poetics at the Open City becomes a political nonpolitics concerned with an alternative vision of organizing a life in common. Such a conceptualization is of course limited insofar as it accepts a division between poetics and politics as it appears at the Open City. I do not deny that this vision of the autonomy of the poetic has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a veiled expression of a bourgeois will to universality and, in the case of Latin American poetics during the Cold War, an ideological means of imagining a theoretical space free from the influence of the Soviet Union and the United States (Franco 2002).

Introduction 5

Moreover, that such a strict division between the poetic and the political cannot account for works like Bertolt Brecht’s, which operate in a space between politically committed works of art and avant-garde aesthetic experimentation, demonstrates its limited functionality when expanded beyond the boundaries of the Open City. Even further, Godofredo Iommi’s critique of Breton as a compromised poet during his interaction with communism during the 1920s and 1930s (see Chapter 1) seems to ignore the complex relationship between Marxism, surrealism, and the politics of the French Communist Party (PCF), not to mention internal strife within surrealism itself (Rose 1991). Indeed, if one tries to understand many of the claims of the Open City as analytical conclusions mirroring North-Atlantic academic epistemologies, some may appear to be somewhat dubious. I think, for instance, of frequent claims made at the Open City of Ancient Greece being the beginning of Western Civilization, a convenient myth invented during the Romantic era to justify Eurocentric supremacy (Dussel 2000), and of appeals to Rimbaud’s phrase that in Ancient Greece “the word rhymes with action,” a phonocentrism that required a power-driven discriminatory logic of whose orality counted as a voice, since in Ancient Greece, “multiple voices [were] legitimate and praiseworthy when, and only when, they [were] authorized by a divine figure such as Zeus or Apollo” (Too 1998: 23). (Not to mention that such a positive vision of Greece seems to gloss over the slavery and patriarchy on which that society rested.) I would like to encourage the reader to see these not as truth claims within the discursive and epistemological structures of the North Atlantic academy, although the Open City is connected to this world, but rather as means to think through their poetic vision. In this way, their idea of the poetic should not be used as a conceptual tool with which to judge other poetries or as positivist interpretations of poetics and architecture, but rather as an exploration of what poetry can offer for thinking through an urban mode of living in common other than that of politics. That is, prior to putting the Open City in dialogue with academic questions of the limits of such a theorization of the poetic, Politics of the Dunes calls on us to understand what this vision has to offer. In the end, I argue that the urban and architectural form the Open City ultimately arrives to is characterized by a poetic hospitality. This dedication to hospitality, defined as deprivileging social space so that all residents are categorized as guests living in an urban space rather than owners of a plot of land or of a house, requires a constant decentering of urban subjectivity, positionality, and structure. As such, this book makes a distinction between this poetic method—the act of hospitably hearing the other in their otherness—and poetic works—architectural, sculp-

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Politics of the Dunes

tural, or literary products that are a consequence of this hospitality that often fall short of their methodological aims. I therefore follow Chela Sandoval’s (2000) insightful against-the-grain reading of Roland Barthes as a decolonial theorist by investigating how the Open City’s poetic foundation leads to a specific decolonial architecture and urbanism that calls for rethinking how we relate to the earth and to one another. As such, Politics of the Dunes is a highly theoretical book, exploring principally the written works of various members of the Open City using the tools of literary, environmental, and architectural studies. I would like to end here by citing one extremely helpful source that goes unmentioned in the body of this book: Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008). In her own narrative retelling of the Aeneid, Le Guin has the first-person narrator, Lavinia, the wife of Aeneas who never speaks in the Vergil’s original epic, ponder to herself, “How is it that you understand me, who lived twenty-five or thirty centuries ago? Do you know Latin? But then I think no, it has nothing to do with being dead, it’s not death that allows us to understand one another, but poetry” (5). This significance that Lavinia ascribes to poetry as the discursive space to hear the other would apparently be contradicted by Lavinia herself who claims that Vergil, “slighted my life, in his poem” (3). Yet Lavinia also insists, “without him would I even have a name? I have never blamed him. Even a poet cannot get everything right” (262). Le Guin’s vision of poetry as the discursive space in which to hear the other, in addition to her embrace and celebration of Vergil at the same time that she notes moments where he fell short, is in many ways a guiding light for this current book. Indeed, in her afterword Le Guin claims that her desire “was to follow Vergil, not to improve or reprove him” (275) and calls his poetry “profoundly musical, its beauty is so intrinsic to the sound and order of the words, that it is essentially untranslatable” (273). If Le Guin is critical at moments, it is a critique based in a fundamental love of Vergil’s poetry—a surprising conclusion for a work that might otherwise be considered a feminist retelling of the Aeneid. Even further, Lavinia’s final claim about a poet “getting everything right,” speaks to another element: there is a poetic methodology in which one can make errors. In other words, at the same time that one celebrates the poetry of Vergil (following him rather than improving or reproving him), one can outline missteps of his along the way while simultaneously resisting the temptation to insist on a singularly correct historical and nonpoetic mode of representing reality. I aim in the following pages to outline the poetic methodology of the Open City, the value of such a methodology for architecture and urbanism, and, in select moments, to speculate about a few instances in which members of the City did not “get everything right” according to this methodology.

Introduction 7

A Note on Terminology The careful reader will note two changes of institutional names that are not fully discussed in this work: the change of the Catholic University of Valparaíso (UCV) to the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (PUCV) and the change of the Amereida Cooperative to the Amereida Cultural Corporation. First, Pope John Paul II gave the title of “pontifical” to the university and it was adopted officially in 2003. For simplicity’s sake, I will consistently refer to the university as “PUCV” throughout this book, recognizing that there was this change in the institutional name. Second, the shift from the Amereida Cooperative to the Amereida Cultural Corporation in the 1990s was a logistical issue resulting, I have been told, from the weakening of the laws surrounding Cooperatives during the 1980s as well as a desire to reinforce the collective nature of the terrains of the Open City. While an interesting case study from the perspective of those interested in designing a collective similar to the Open City and in the various legal and policy tools available to accomplish this task, it is largely inconsequential to the themes and topics of Politics of the Dunes.

Methodology and Outline Research for this work was conducted via three routes. First, research in the archives of the Open City was conducted on three different occasions: a week-long visit in January 2016, a week-long visit in November 2016, and a year-and-a-half stay between October 2017 and January 2019. During this time, I examined various unpublished documents of the Open City from the time of its foundation as well as various documents from the 1980s that have not been widely circulated, in addition to reading the numerous documents publicly available on the PUCV School of Architecture’s Casiopea website. Second, I lived at the Open City in the Hospedería Rosa de los Vientos, also referred to as the “Cells.” My time in the Cells allowed me not only to witness everyday life at the Open City but to experience it. Third, I conducted a series of both informal and formal interviews with residents at the Open City in addition to attending various tours conducted by Open City residents, in which they explained the history of both the larger site and individual constructions to visitors. Seeking a plurality of stories turned out to be of the utmost significance since various citizens have differing accounts of the past and present of the Open City. For instance, I have heard four different versions of the history of the construction of the Palace of Dawn and Dusk.

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Politics of the Dunes

Any history of the Open City that takes into account only a few perspectives misses this multiplicity underpinning its sociality. This book proceeds through six chapters. In Chapter 1, I outline the key theoretical conclusions that will be taken up through my analysis of the Open City. Here I make two key arguments. First, I decouple concern for the structuration of a life in common from politics and political theory, thereby making the claim that other fields such as poetry can act as theoretical foundations for alternative socialities. Second, I argue that discussions of decoloniality require an epistemic reconstitution of our ways of knowing the earth. To decolonize not only requires the expulsion of dominating foreign powers and the dehierarchization of epistemic frameworks but also a reconsideration of terrestrial knowledges. What goes unexamined in this chapter, since it is largely a question of the Open City itself to be explored in the body of the book and not linked to broader theoretical questions, is that Open City’s poetic mode of living in common which “delinks” (Mignolo 2007) from the Chilean nation-state is a decolonial urban structure. In Chapter 2, I engage in a literary analysis of Amereida, the epic poem that would subsequently become the intellectual foundation for the Open City. Against common interpretations of the Open City as largely engaging European aesthetic, artistic, poetic, and architectural trends, I argue that Amereida follows a long genealogy of Latin Americanist texts examining what Iommi would later identify as “the only thing that [is] really American”: asking what it means to be American (Iommi 2018: 211). My thesis is that Amereida outlines an American identity dedicated to unsettling and decentering colonial European settler epistemologies when put into contact with Indigenous Abya Yalan socioecological systems. Even further, the work identifies the space of the poetic as a discursive field in which it is possible for those coming from a settler positionality to hear the other decolonially. The poetic, in short, becomes a way for Amereida to decolonize Latin Americanism. In Chapters 3 and 4, I argue that the Open City’s poetic foundation serves to think through questions of the structuration of an urban life in common otherwise than that of the nation-state and politics. This appeal to a poetic urbanism subsequently serves as a means to delink from the coloniality of the Chilean nation-state and as a theoretical foundation for a robust critique of the Pinochet regime. It is in these chapters where I theoretically outline what the Open City’s poetic political nonpolitics concretely signifies. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the theoretical consequences of putting the Open City into dialogue with subaltern studies. If Chapter 5 reflects on the consequences for historiography, Chapter 6 examines the recent

Introduction 9

engagements by some at the Open City with the anthropization of the earth. The central conclusions of these chapters are that the Open City refuses to speak for the subaltern or from a subaltern positionality. Indeed, any such conceit would be more accurately an appropriation of that position for their own services. What they are interested in, however, is how such subaltern experiences and epistemologies require a reorientation of their own ways of thinking, creating, and living. Notes 1. Throughout this book I use the term “foreclosed” and “foreclosure” as developed by Gayatri Spivak (1999: 6) referring to the process through which “the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with the affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all.” Foreclosure refers to rhetorical exclusion of the other through casual dismissal, a rhetorical conceit that is central to coloniality. 2. The term “arrivant” is from Kamau Brathwaite (1973). For a full genealogy of the term “arrivant” see De Line and O’Shaugnessy (2018). 3. As with any list (much less a list of only three titles), this one is incomplete. For a full list of significant texts from the foundation of the Open City, see Cáraves (2007: 68). In addition, the reader is recommended to follow the edited volumes (there will be six in total) of Godofredo Iommi’s writing currently being edited by Manuel Florencio Sanfuentes Vio and published by Ediciones Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseño PUCV. 4. I would like to reemphasize this point: this book is founded on an assumed familiarity with decolonial politics and theory. The Open City should not be perceived as being on the front lines of decoloniality. It must always be recognized that that work is being conducted from the position of the colonized. 5. This is especially important in considering the transnational character of the Open City. This book’s focus on the Open City’s Latin Americanism should not be seen as a denial of the transnational character of the group. As Jahan Ramazani (2009: 36) argues in his powerful theorization of transnational poetics, there is a problematic tendency to assume “that in the formation of a poet’s sensibility, the essential ingredients are mother tongue and familial, religious, and educational background; and the frequent corollary is that no amount of geographic, cultural, or linguistic displacement can alter these fundamentals. While these views have some validity, they can easily be taken too far, neutralizing the often transformative, or at least defamiliarizing, effects of migration from an ‘original’ to an ‘adopted’ home or language or religious outlook, of being smitten by literary and artistic works across national boundaries.” For wonderful work on the transnational character of the Open City see Correa (2017) and Pendleton-Jullian (1996). My work seeks to complement these understandings, not replace them. 6. My critiques are largely contained in two articles, “Decoloniality, Communality, and Anti-Semitism” and “Punk Urbanism” (both in press).

[• Chapter 1 •]

On So-Called Nonpolitical Urban Environmentalism The Architecture of the Open City, Politics, and the Political

When I arrived at the Open City for the first time in 2014, my impres-

sion of the site mirrored the image that has been circulated throughout the world over the past five decades. More precisely, the Open City has come to receive international recognition as a Chilean architectural collective living together in a landscape of radical architectonic, aesthetic, and poetic experimentation. Located on the Pacific Coast about twenty miles north of Valparaíso, Chile, this collective has linked together poetry and architecture in a unique style and mode of building that is found in no other place in the world. Indeed, its world-wide acclaim is quickly justified through a personal tour of the site. Upon arrival to the Open City, the visitor is greeted by the sight of the Hospedería de la Entrada, a boat-like structure raised off the ground by wooden pillars, appearing as if it has terraced the very air it sits upon. Continuing through the landscape, the visitor will then likely be astonished by the City’s architectural masterpieces, sculptural works of art that accentuate the terrestrial qualities of the place, and the cultivation of the natural properties of the dune landscape. Following both critical conclusions and a walking tour of the space, one cannot help but conclude that the Open City is home to one of the most unique architectural and artistic experiments anywhere on the globe, a modern wonder of the world populated by an avant-garde and enchanting style of architecture. My initial experiences at the Open City would seemingly confirm this basic narrative. Following a series of short visits between 2014–16, I arrived at the Open City on 1 October 2017 for a year-long stay as a

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resident in the Hospedería Rosa de los Vientos, commonly referred to by Open City residents as “the Cells.” My arrival date was serendipitous, aligning with what I was told was a major event of the Open City set to occur on 7 October 2017: the secularized celebration of the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, in which the Open City played host to nearly five hundred people—students, faculty, and alumni of the School of Architecture and Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso as well as Open City residents, family, and invited guests from across the country. This festivity would come to embody my initial impression of the Open City: a close interrelationship between architecture, urbanism, and poetry; a collaborative link between the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso (PUCV) and the Open City that was often impossible to define; a group of artists, poets, and architects that, although intimately involved in one another’s lives, could not really be described as a “neo-tribal” (Maffesoli 1996) community (indeed, not every resident of the Open City participated in the event and some might argue that it was an event of the School of Architecture and not of the Open City); a place-based relationship with the environment; and, most significantly, a unique mode of social interaction and organization. The impetus behind the celebration at the Open City was simple: St. Francis of Assisi is the patron saint of PUCV, and the PUCV School of Architecture and Design (EAD) celebrates his feast day at the Open City every year. Despite its connection to a religious holiday, the event is largely secular, celebrating St. Francis’s accomplishments as a poet rather than as a saint of the Catholic Church. This focus on poetry was evident throughout the day. The festivities began at one of the Open City’s agoras—outdoor public spaces where common matters of the City are openly discussed and resolved, where major events like the celebration of St. Francis are held, and which were some of the first constructions at the Open City. Here, students, faculty, many residents of the Open City, and other invited guests participated in a specially designed game of telephone: a central circular wall separated those who repeated a single word into one cup from those on the other side of the wall receiving those words in a different cup tied to the first cup with a string. The words spoken and received during this game were fully improvised; although the outlines of the specially designed game were planned and prepared prior to the event, the words spoken and received during the game were spontaneously made up in the moment. These words subsequently provided the vocabulary for a semi-improvised poem that was repeatedly recited at different sites across the Open City alongside the poetry of St. Francis. After the creation of the poem through the game of telephone, a procession proceeded from the agora down a ravine (quebrada) into the

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Open City’s amphitheater, a public performance space that is built into the ravine, working with the landscape to accentuate the natural properties of the space rather than dominating or flattening it. The procession then continued up the ravine, with the improvised poem and the poetry of St. Francis being recited at various sites along the way. Finally, the party arrived at an open-air theater where another poem was recited and a series of dance performances concluded the event. Poetry, dance, and architecture had been collaboratively designed, with semi-spontaneous improvisation lying at the foundations, to produce an interactive celebration of St. Francis as a poet. Following this celebration, the procession moved back to the agora where everything started for food and drink that had been uniquely prepared for the event.1 After an hour of the celebration in the agora, many moved to the Hospedería Rosa de los Vientos—a living space with four bedrooms, a bathroom, and a common kitchen/dining room that is reserved as temporary housing (I was told residents are often expected to live in the space for no more than two to three years) for architects, artists, poets, and scholars engaging in a specific project at the Open City. For instance, during my time living in the Cells—named as such, one rumor has it, since each person is perceived as a monk living in their individual “cell”—fellow celdistas, the name given to those living in the Cells, were teaching assistants (profesores ayudantes) whose classes gathered at the Open City, students at PUCV whose final thesis was based at the Open City, and (for a very brief moment) a German violinist. In addition to invited guests, many of the residents of the Open City came to conclude the celebration of St. Francis in the Cells. Conversations at the Cells varied: students discussed classes and their daily lives; professors talked about work; dialogues were organized around the historical development of Valparaíso and its architecture (including a lively discussion regarding the history of the modernization of this port city between 1910–18); and the ever-present question, “How am I going to get back to Viña del Mar or Valparaíso?,” was constantly being circulated—buses stop running from the Open City around 10:00 p.m., and the amount of people at the event with cars was limited. In short, the celebration spoke to the double character of the Open City as an artistic community—a close-knit group of people organized around a shared drive to imagine the relationship between poetry, art, design, and architecture through a place-based relationship to their environment—and an urban space, where there is a sense of anonymity, multiplicity, and a separation of residents’ activities. For those who have investigated or heard about the Open City or the PUCV School of Architecture, often referred to as the Valparaíso School,

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my impression above should not be in the least bit surprising: it fits in neatly with previous descriptions of their activity. An image of the Open City has been cast throughout the world, largely by third-party observers, of a landscape of nonpolitical aesthetic experimentation most notable for its unique architectural works, its improvisatory and hands-on mode of building, and the way residents link poetry and architecture. Despite this critical activity, little has been examined about the history of this group. Furthermore, as has been recently noted in scholarship, little attention has been paid to the fact that some of the early years of the Open City were situated in a context of authoritarianism. A series of questions about the Open City remains unanswered: How did this group come to be? How did residents arrive at the conclusion that poetry and architecture are intimately related? What is the intellectual lineage of this group? How did and do they relate to the broader historical and political context of Chile? What I would find, and what is the central argument of this book, is that the foundation of the Open City is not merely architectural exploration but is in addition a poetic mode of organizing a life in common. In other words, scholarship has largely focused on the architectural, aesthetic, and poetic products of the Open City—like the Hospedería de la Entrada and the celebration of the feast day of St. Francis—without noting that these products are linked to a particular poetic sociality. The architecture of the Open City, Politics of the Dunes argues, is an element of a larger structuration of social life. The history of this group is not only the history of architectural works but is also the history of poetic social formations, critiques of private property, and confrontations with the difficulty of forming a noncolonial Latin American cultural identity. For this reason, I focus in this book on the poetic, theoretical, and philosophical documents of the Open City that have received rather scant critical attention instead of their architectural works which have now been widely discussed and analyzed (Pendleton-Jullian 1996; Pérez de Arce, Pérez Oyarzún, and Rispa 2003).

A Political History of the Open City? The basic outlines of the prehistory of the Open City are well known. In 1952 a group of architects, poets, and artists moved to Valparaíso, Chile to join the faculty of the School of Architecture at the Catholic University of Valparaíso. The new Jesuit rector of the school, Jorge González, initially hired only Alberto Cruz, who had recently gained a reputation in Chile for his innovative ideas. Cruz accepted on the condition that

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they also hire a group of his colleagues. The first, and most significant, addition to the faculty was the Argentinian poet, Godofredo Iommi. After meeting, Iommi and Cruz would remain extremely close lifelong friends and collaborators. In addition to Iommi, Cruz brought along Francisco Méndez, Arturo Baeza, Jaime Bellalta, Fabio Cruz, Miguel Eyquem, and José Vial. It was the beginning of what today is often referred to as the Valparaíso School.2 This group would immediately start implementing their novel architectural ideas. In 1954, they made a proposal for the design of Achupallas, an inland community of the Valparaíso/Viña del Mar metropolitan region, a plan that is usually ascribed to Alberto Cruz but was likely a collective project (Pérez de Arce, Pérez Oyarzún, and Rispa 2003: 11). With their plan containing ideas such as, “the urbanist discovers the destiny of the city and locates it in space so that the city and its inhabitants live this destiny” (UCV 1971: “Achupallas”), the group was embarking on a unique architectural trajectory that still acts as their intellectual foundation today. For instance, the idea of discovering the destiny of a city would eventually become part of the conceptual framework with which they would found the Open City. Destiny in both the Achupallas project and later at the Open City is understood as the underlying character of a location that is revealed through a place-based interaction with that location’s social and terrestrial qualities. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, this focus on the destiny of a terrain would then be linked to the poetic act: an improvised, oral, and collective poetic creation that is intimately linked to the place in which it is created. In other words, starting in the late 1950s and early 1960s this group understood the revelation of the destiny of a place and of a city as the revelation of the poetic foundation of that space to which architecture subsequently gives form. As we will see in Chapter 3, this idea of the poetic act and its link to urbanism and the destiny of the city would become part of the intellectual foundation of the Open City. Already in 1954, as we see in the Achupallas project’s discussion of the destiny of the city, the architects of PUCV’s School of Architecture were laying the theoretical foundations on which poetry and architecture would be related at the Open City over a decade later.3 If one can therefore locate the beginnings of the Open City in this move to Valparaíso in 1952—and some go even further back to the 1940s when Godofredo Iommi cofounded the artistic and poetic collective, the Holy Brotherhood of the Orchid, and when Alberto Cruz began teaching at the Catholic University in Santiago—its full intellectual foundation does not appear until 1965. In this year, a group of ten persons including not only faculty from the School of Architecture, but poets, artists, philosophers, and architects from around the world went

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on a voyage (travesía) from near the southernmost tip of South America to what they identified as the poetic capital of America: Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia. This group—Alberto Cruz, Godofredo Iommi, Claudio Girola, Fabio Cruz, Jorge Pérez Román, Edison Simons, Jonathan Boulting, Michel Deguy, Henry Tronquoy, and François Fédier—had arrived at the conclusion that Santa Cruz was the poetic capital of the continent by taking the Southern Cross, the constellation that guided direction and provided orientation to travelers in the southern hemisphere as the north star did in the northern hemisphere, and lowering it onto the American continent, territorializing this celestial guide. Santa Cruz, they discovered, was located at the crux of this constellation lowered onto the continent. In addition, as Isabel Margarita Reyes argued in her 2018 lectures at EAD, this group conceptualized Santa Cruz as the poetic capital of America due to the particular geography of this area in the South American continent—it is the meeting point of various landscape types—as well as its relationship to the Spanish conquistador, Ñuflo de Chávez, who founded the town in 1561. With this 1965 voyage, the group hoped to reveal the poetic destiny of the American continent, free from the definitions, terms, and conditions assigned to it by a dominant and colonial north, who refused to accept the alternative reality of this new world. This journey was to reveal the independent, autochthonous poetic reality of the American continent. This group would subsequently write an avant-garde epic poem, Amereida, that detailed their conclusions derived from this voyage and was published in 1967. A portmanteau of “America” and “Eneida” (the Spanish title for the Roman epic, The Aeneid), this work was to be the foundational myth of the American continent. In other words, Amereida was an epic poem outlining a theory not only for the construction of an autonomous American culture but for inhabiting the American continent; Amereida was the poetic realization of the encounter with the autonomous destiny of the American continent. Although the epic would be collectively written by not only members of this journey but others as well, it is largely agreed by both scholarly sources and residents at the Open City that Iommi was its lead author.4 Subsequently, the Open City was founded between 1968–71 as the attempt to realize Amereida’s conclusions in an urban space. The ideas that lie at the foundation of the activity at the Open City were functionally laid down as early as 1967. Following these well-known broad strokes leading up to its foundation, the history of the Open City remains in a fog. Anyone interested in this history is forced to piece together facts and stories from a wide swath of books on the City and EAD.5 Despite the now uncountable number of secondary sources discussing the Open City, no strict history

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Politics of the Dunes

of the City discussing its intellectual genealogy, its formation, the processes that led a group of architects and poets to actually found a city, and the difficulties and tensions embedded therein has ever been told. All that is usually explained in terms of the history of the site is what appears above: a group of architects, poets, and artists moved to PUCV in 1952, wrote a poem called Amereida in 1967, founded the Open City in 1970 or 1971, and the work of this group has been a static operation within these foundational limits ever since. When the historical and political context of Chile is mentioned in discussions of the Open City, it is usually done to discuss how the Open City is a fundamentally apolitical entity that never discusses the broader political reality of Chile, Latin America, or the world. Indeed, the 1982 text by Godofredo Iommi, “Hay que ser absolutamente moderno,” seems to confirm this apoliticism, with Iommi criticizing Andre Breton’s “compromised poetry” after he joined the Communist Party and praising Gottfried Benn’s rejection of any attempt to “change the world,” leaving that task to “bureaucrats and soldiers. [Poetry, in contrast to this,] possesses at its foundation a collection of experiences radically different to those of bureaucrats and soldiers, and it instead demands other conclusions than that of mere practical efficacy or service to progress” (2016 [1982]: 104–5). This apoliticism of the Open City is particularly notable given that soon after its foundation, Chile experienced one of the most traumatic episodes in its national history: the military coup of 11 September 1973 and the brutal repressions under Augusto Pinochet that followed. Ana María León’s groundbreaking 2012 article, “Prisoners of Ritoque” (León 2016 [2012]), makes this claim most polemically, arguing that the Open City’s ignoring of the wider political and historical reality of Chile during the 1970s and 1980s represents a “voluntary imprisonment,” in which they turned a blind eye to the torture and political detention under Pinochet, some of which was happening only a few kilometers away at the Ritoque concentration camp, in order to continue their aesthetic and pedagogical experimentation.6 León’s article leads the way in current shifts in discussions about the Open City, which had previously existed to a large extent within a vacuum, ignoring political, social, and historical context. For instance, Ann Pendleton-Jullian’s still foundational 1996 work on the Open City, The Road That Is Not a Road, never once mentions the dictatorship, despite the majority of the life of the Open City at this time having existed under Pinochet. Alfredo L. Jocelyn-Holt’s 2012 discussion of the relationship between politics and the Open City takes a different direction. Instead of accepting the nonpolitical appearance of the Open City, he argues that this apolitical surface is in fact a right-wing, if not fascist, political position.

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His analysis notes the homological relationship between the so-called apoliticism found in the Open City and the nondemocratic stance of a particular mode of conservative politics found in Chile in the twentieth century, I think that the apoliticism that, it seems to me, you all profess [here at the Open City] exposes you and makes you summarily vulnerable . . . [This] apoliticism is confused with the gremialismo of the 60s and 70s, and we know that their apoliticism and non-ideological stance was anything but. It was more accurately an imposture, a false consciousness that permitted and ended up legitimating a brutal and repressive military dictatorship in this country causing so much human and institutional pain. (27)

Indeed, in the same 1982 article cited in the previous paragraph, Iommi celebrates that Martin Heidegger stayed in Germany during World War II in order to continue practicing philosophy, a strange intellectual alignment given Heidegger’s infamous participation in the early years of the National Socialist regime and his anti-Semitism in the Black Notebooks of the 1930s (2016 [1982]: 105).7 The apoliticism of the Open City seems to align itself at times with a fascist ideology. At a glance, Jocelyn-Holt seems to be correct: the Open City appears to be a conservative reaction to the progressive politics of Chile from the 1930s to 1973 when a series of Chilean administrations developed a strong “interventionist” State in which social tensions and relations were resolved through “the establishment and expansion of various new State institutions” (Taylor 2006: 16; Bernedo 2013: 31). The general outlines of this state-driven political economy were therefore double. First, it embodied a combination of Fordism and Keynsianism: the State would arrive at “a set of scientific managerial strategies and state powers [to] stabilize capitalism,” while social movements and organized interests would operate within this bureaucracy in order to “swap” real material gains for cooperation in “disciplining” members to the political-economic system (Harvey 1990: 129, 134; Tironi 1990). Second, specifically in Chile these various organized interests would petition the interventionist State to satisfy their demands, thus leading to a “profoundly uneven” development of “welfare institutions” based on “the ability for social movements to voice their demands” (Taylor 2006: 17). For instance, dictatorship-era feminist scholars noted that women’s issues in Chile were largely ignored after the culmination of the women’s suffrage movement obtaining the right to vote in 1949 due to the collapse of organized social movements built around issues of gender equality (Kirkwood 1986). Between 1938

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and 1973, Chile was marked by the growing presence of a strong interventionist State in which welfare provisions were acquired through the organization of social movements that could directly pressure that State. A chief consequence of this developmentalist State formation was the focus on internal economic development and “protect[ing] domestic industries” with the Chilean government, for instance, implementing “tariffs and quotas” in 1938 to regulate and limit imported goods (Taylor 2006: 15). This desire for the internal development of the nation’s industrial economy was reflected in the writing of Chilean history during the period. Luis Vitale’s Interpretación Marxista de la Historia de Chile (2011: 299), for instance, emphasized how the export-based economy built in the nineteenth century using foreign capital was in fact the establishment of a form of semi-colonialism.8 Embedded in this history, then, is the political demand for the development of an internal and diversified economy. In the years leading up to the foundation of the Open City, Chile came to focus on State-driven national development of industry that rejected (neocolonial) foreign influence. Alongside this apparently national political-economic project of mostly left-wing or left-leaning governments in Chile between 1938 and 1973, a conservative strain of thought emerged arguing that Chile was “a nation alienated from its Hispanic identity and true national destiny” (Cristi and Ruiz 1990: 43). According to this strand of conservative thought, if the left-wing projects of Chile seemed to nurture national industrial development, they failed to nurture its national soul. This conservativism would eventually be synthesized in the thought of Mario Góngora. Góngora has come to be a divisive figure within Chilean historiography: previously criticizing the Allende government and celebrating the 1973 coup, he famously broke with Pinochet in his 1981 work, Essay on the Notion of the Chilean State in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Ensayo histórico sobre la noción de Estado en Chile en los siglos XIX y XX). Regardless, Góngora is still seen as one of the most significant Chilean historians of the twentieth century, and he was particularly influential on the Open City: he and Alberto Cruz were close friends and Góngora visited the Open City immediately after its founding before the coup. Although we will see how the Open City departs from Góngora’s conservatism, it is still worth noting his vision due to his connection. Góngora’s thought operates in an intellectual space that at moments seems simultaneously far right and far left. For instance, although Góngora celebrates the “more organic” industrialization of the country between 1938 and 1970 under left-wing governments, he critiques the antinationalism of Marxist politics and the United Nations (1981: 121–23). Indeed, Góngora celebrated President Eduardo Frei’s nationalization of the Chilean mining industry

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(or, as Frei called it in order to emphasize his communitarian rather than Marxist orientation, “Chileanization”) and at the same time critiqued the “leftist politics that arrived from Europe and the United States” that eventually led to the success of “international Marxism” with the election of Salvador Allende (129–30). For Góngora, the expansion of the national developmentalist State was two-faced. On the one hand, he celebrates the potential for the nationalization of Chile’s political economy to create a coherent national culture. In other words, as he argues in his central theoretical claim, “the State is the matrix of nationality: the nation would not exist without the State” (5). On the other hand, Góngora worries that the expansion of the State was being encouraged for merely “tactical” reasons rather than for the formation of a national community (130–31). For Góngora, the developmentalist State threatened to become a technicaleconomic apparatus without a soul. Góngora’s conservatism would seem to be reflected within the ideas of the Open City. In a 1971 Open City text written by Iommi after the election of Salvador Allende, for instance, he wonders, “One would have to ask with more care if that which is called ‘the ascent of the masses’ and that which is called today ‘the global opinion’ does not have an almost direct relation with the peculiar development of the Technical,” thereby apparently mirroring Góngora’s own preoccupations with the instrumentalization of the State. Moreover, these ideas were already appearing in Amereida in 1967. After mentioning that those in Latin America learn that the “sin of alienation . . . of the economic process to which [M]arx referred” is the worst possible sin one can commit, Amereida identifies a more significant alienation: the alienation of the “divinatory powers of poetry” (Amereida Group 1991a [1967]: 166–67). According to this text, these divinatory powers include the power of the poet to hold “the essence of human history inside of which are elaborated destinies” (164). Amereida is therefore positioned similarly to Góngora, although its focus is shifted to the formation of a continental American culture rather than a national Chilean culture (a significant departure from Góngora’s nationalism that should not be minimized): while recognizing the effect of economic alienation, it warns of “another alienation” in which the destiny and essence of the American continent is lost. This 1967 epic’s development of the idea of discovering the destiny of the American continent, as was already being elaborated in the 1954 plan for Achupallas, seems to reflect a conservative tendency in that it claims that the focus on national economic development ignores the deeper problem of the development of the collective soul. This apparently conservative focus on the poetic revelation of the significance of the American continent and the definition of a coherent

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American identity and culture becomes a central concern of Amereida. For instance, in what has possibly become the most oft-cited section of the text there is a discussion of how the American continent has never been encountered: Columbus never came to america he sought india in the midst of his effort this land burst in as a gift merely the gift emerges

vexing his intents oblivious to hope it carries with it its donation its terms its borders

Instead of accepting what America’s “donation,” “terms,” and “borders” have to offer, settlers have only landed on, passed through, and traveled over the continent. Throughout Amereida the continent of America appears as the land that is hidden, concealed, and unknown. The underlying need, according to the text, is therefore to find (hallar) the destiny and essence of America, to accept its epiphany. Despite this homology between Amereida and a strand of Chilean conservatism, the text also potentially aligns itself with a conflicting intellectual tradition. Namely, the section of Amereida quoted above in reference to “alienation” positions the epic closer to the writings of Marx than any conservative Chilean text of the twentieth century. This passage is particularly difficult to interpret as it is the only instance in which Marx appears in the epic, and the claim that “there is another alienation” makes it unclear if the authors are rejecting or developing a

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Marxist mode of thought. At the very least, it can be said that Amereida does not reject “international Marxism” as polemically as Góngora; at the very most, it could be said that Amereida’s project was a sublation or development of a strand of Marxist thought—the poetic appropriation and refashioning of the Marxist idea of alienation. Indeed, Amereida’s apparent connection to the conservative intellectual tradition of Chile might just as easily be framed as an embrace of the political and cultural landscape of Latin America created in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. As Mariano Siskind (2014: 85–86) summarizes, “During the 1960s, and to a large extent in dialogue with the anti-imperialist content of the events taking place in Cuba, the literary field was dominated by discourses expressing the desire to achieve a self-determined Latin American identity, to engage in a process of modernization while remaining faithful to the cultural particularities of the region.” Amereida’s discussion of poetic alienation might therefore be said to complement Marxist discourse; if magical realism was “received as the perfect answer to these cultural and political dilemmas” (Siskind 2014: 86) raised by the Cuban Revolution, it could easily be argued that Amereida and later the Open City represent an alternative solution. The unclear relationship with Marx leaves Amereida outside the limits of conservative Chilean thought. It is for these reasons that those aligned with Amereida at the Open City can rightly claim that they are not engaged with politics—the text is not aligned with any partisan political project or movement fighting for power within the State—while also being targeted by both the right and the left as antagonistic to their respective positions. The space of the Open City appears to be a living contradiction, founded on a text that is: simultaneously apolitical and writing about political and economic alienation; simultaneously right- and left-wing; simultaneously Marxist and anti-Marxist. Vicenzo Latronico (2014) notes this contradiction, reflecting on how some activists refer to the Open City’s founders as “right-wing anarchists.” He summarizes this contradiction in a reflection on his conversation with his tour guide through the Open City, Maria Pilar Pinchart, “Pilar resisted my attempts at pigeonholing what we had just seen as either side of a dichotomized political schema [of right and left]. ‘It’s probably both,’ she said, ‘or has been, at different times.’ This strikes me as true, if paradoxical.” A central thesis of Politics of the Dunes is that such contradictions are resolved the moment one stops trying to understand the Open City according to the lexicon of politics (“neoconservative,” “leftist,” etc.) and instead tries to understand the City as a poetic mode of living in common. In other words, it will be argued throughout this book that the Open City is highly interested in

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the structuration of sociality (that field often perceived as the domain proper to politics and political theory), but that they reject the primacy of politics for thinking through social problems, instead seeing poetry as an alternative theoretical foundation. In other words, if the Open City has recently come under fire for its supposed apoliticism, this book argues that this is not entirely accurate. Its rejection of participating in struggles for power within the nation-state and of aligning with social and political movements does not signify either a conservative political orientation or a rejection of thinking about questions of structuring a life in common. Instead, in a phrase developed by Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo (2018) that will reappear throughout this book, their poetic organization constitutes a mode of living in common “otherwise” than that organized by and around the State, what I call a poetic political nonpolitics, where political nonpolitics refers to that intellectual and practical space that is concerned with social structuration but decoupled from the State. Even further, their decoupling of questions of sociality from questions of politics functionally challenges the category of socially dedicated architecture, art, and literature. The Open City’s refusal to engage in Chilean politics has been criticized as resignation in the face of the atrocities of the Chilean dictatorship. Such a thesis, however, assumes a singular mode of resistance: direct action against bodies of State power. Such a claim largely ignores Chilean reality in which postmodern and avantgarde poetry during the dictatorship is often celebrated as a literary form of resistance. For instance, the famous “anti-dictatorship” works by authors like Raúl Zurita, Eugenio Dittborn, and others rarely directly mention Chilean politics or the dictatorship: their literary production was what might be called a political nonpolitics insofar as they were highly concerned with the Chilean social landscape but did not directly engage the State. In her summary of these authors, Nelly Richard (1994: 65–66) argues, “in opposition to how the culture of the political left mostly continued a devotion to a critical model based on a monolithic representation of power, governed by the image of a fixed centrality derived from the reference of the state . . . [these authors] sought to elaborate interstitial tactics of subverting the patterns of authority, multiplying small margins of the insubordination of signs inside of the system of repressive punctuation.” An experimental form of literature, not directly concerned with politics, proved to be a powerful mode of resistance. This lengthy discussion of the prehistory and early investigation into the political history of the Open City has served to complicate any categorization of the Open City’s political orientation. This complication of the City’s political orientation will be the central axis of this book’s investigation, arguing that the group’s so-called apoliticism is in fact what I

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will call a poetic political nonpolitics. In other words, this book has four related theoretical intentions: 1.) to decouple politics—the struggle to gain power within the State—from the struggle over the structuration of social life; 2.) to investigate what social commitment signifies in connection with the fields of architecture, art, and literature; 3.) synthesizing the previous two conclusions, to argue against the thesis that socially committed art, literature, and architecture must target specific political bodies and be organized around the central referent of the State9; and 4.) a thesis that is unexplored in this chapter but will reappear in Chapters 2, 3, and 5, to argue that the Western Westphalian nation-state often functions as a colonial institution, and one decolonial option is to delink from that State, transforming what from the outside may appear to be apoliticism into an act of decoloniality.10 The Open City’s poetic activity thereby provides a possible solution to central questions plaguing many intellectuals today. With the rise of right-wing politics in the 2010s throughout (at the very least) Europe and the Americas, many have been concerned with a fairly simple question: what does it mean to think of emancipatory social formations today? For instance, Slavoj Zizek in a 2017 interview, after critiquing an Antifa member for punching the United States alt-right spokesman, Richard Spencer, stated, “The only way to really beat [United States’ President] Trump is to radically rethink what does the left mean today.” This position was more thoroughly fleshed out a year earlier by Erik Swyngedouw (2016), who writes, “The key task, therefore, is to stop and think, to think communism again, to think through the communist hypothesis and its actual meaning for a twenty-first century emancipatory, free, and egalitarian politics” (135). Swyngedouw’s and Zizek’s claims, however, maintain a dedication to “the left” and “the communist hypothesis,” never questioning why these are still seen as the exclusive domains for positing alternatives to “the right.” It appears that Swyngedouw’s and Zizek’s questioning of the intellectual foundations of resistance against the right leaves unchallenged the binaries of right/left, communism/capitalism. They never ask: is it possible to imagine an emancipatory or liberatory spatialization that does not operate within the traditions of right or left, a sociality without the State, or a nonpolitical, yet still emancipatory, mode of living in common? Politics of the Dunes examines how the Open City’s poetic political nonpolitics is itself dedicated to the spatialization of a social order that moves beyond the binaries of right vs. left, communism vs. capitalism, the politics of the State vs. apathy. More precisely, this work argues that the engagement with apparently “apolitical” artistic, literary, and historical thought of the twentieth century—which lies at the core of the

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Open City’s foundational poetic work, Amereida—produced a sociality dedicated to democratization, pluralism, and beauty that was maintained through, as well as providing the foundation for a critique of, the Chilean dictatorship that was based on repression, authoritarianism, and a “cultural blackout.” Or, to return to Iommi’s own citation of Gottfried Benn: “I have here today, the present, take it, look at it, love it. This teaching seems to me much more radical [than changing the world], because it has a more profound knowledge, a continuity much deeper and richer of every hope for happiness than those which political parties propose” (2016: 106). In effect, this book argues that the Open City erects a mode of living in common founded on a poetic political nonpolitics that thinks the structuration of urban sociality otherwise than that of the nation-state.

Architecture, Ecology, and Decoloniality A second running dialogue within Politics of the Dunes is the relationship between coloniality, ecology, and politics. The work of the Open City, both poetic and architectural, has long been recognized to be indebted to avant-garde and modernist architecture, literature, and art from Europe, with the stated influences of this group including Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, French surrealism, Le Corbusier, and Friedrich Hölderlin, among many others. Since the 1960s, however, a basic environmentalist narrative has emerged arguing that avantgardes’ embrace of what has been termed modernity—the period of world history noted for the arrival of a capitalist economy and mode of production, the dominance of scientific reason and Enlightenment thought, large-scale industrialization, political democratization, and the favoring of technical rationality over a kinship with nature—acts as an ideological support for and an aestheticization of the destruction of a premodern kinship between humanity and the earth.11 Arturo Escobar (2018) has even argued that modernist design has been fundamental in the systematic creation of environmental unsustainability. Taking a brief glance, this environmentalist critique of avant-garde architecture, art, and literature seems to be confirmed: early twentieth-century avantgarde artists across the world seem to wholeheartedly embrace a complete, modern separation from nature. To give just a few examples: Wassily Kandinsky: [T]he aims (and hence the resources too) of nature and of art were fundamentally, organically, and by the very nature of the world different—and equally great, which also means equally powerful (1982: 360).

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Vicente Huidobro: Art is one thing and Nature another. I love art and I love Nature. If you accept human representations of Nature, it proves that you love neither Nature nor Art (1963: 681). Piet Mondrian: [Art] increasingly interiorised natural externality in its plastic until, in Neo-plasticism, nature actually no longer dominates (quoted in Tafuri 1976: 36). Le Corbusier: Architecture is the first manifestation of man creating his own universe, creating it in the image of nature, submitting to the laws of nature, the laws which govern our own nature, our universe (1963: 69–70). Tristan Tzara: The new painter creates a world, the elements of which are also its implements, a sober, definite work without argument. The new artist protests: he no longer paints (symbolic and illusionist reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, boulders— locomotive organisms capable of being turned in all directions by the limpid wind of momentary sensation (Ades 2006: 38). Kazimir Malevich: The artist can be a creator only when the forms in his picture have nothing in common with nature (1968: 24).

The avant-gardes seem to fully distance themselves from a concern for nature, focusing instead on creating a modernized, distinct, and alternative world. At moments, as I argue elsewhere (Woods 2018b), this indifference towards the natural world even turns into a violent rejection of it. For instance, in a 1941 interview Chilean avant-garde poet, Vicente Huidobro, says: the only true contact of man with nature is the contact of fighting with her and of dominating her . . . The true contact is the creator-contact, it is that of the man that passionately assaults the bowels of the earth and takes tons of foreign materials and fabricates a new monster . . . The true contact is that of the poet or artist that shouts at nature with his large voice of a rebel angel: Non serviam. No, no I will not serve you. You will serve me. (1975: 94)

Here, the interweaving of power and violence against nature in the poet’s creative voice is laid bare. Huidobro creates a “non-natural” entity from fragments (he fabricates a “new monster”), yet this is done through the authoritarian voice of the poet or artist who violently dominates a

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feminine nature; the “raw materials” of creation are not simply appropriated, they are taken in an assault of the bowels of the earth that shows the link between modernity, anti-environmental thought, and violence against women (Merchant 1980). Within this lens, it might therefore be expected that the Open City’s embrace of modernism and the avantgarde would generate a troubling relationship with the environment. Seeking an alternative to this avant-garde embrace of modernity’s decoupling from nature, a recent trend within architecture, art, and literature has sought to link itself to the science of ecology in order to construct a new environmental consciousness. For instance, the field of ecocriticism, the area of literary studies focusing on the construction of an environmental imagination that counters environmental exploitation and degradation, has garnered support throughout the world since its formation in the 1990s. Central to this field of study has been the question of how to relate the science of ecology with the humanities perspective of literature.12 Lawrence Buell (1995: 180) summarizes this narrative in which a new ecologically-oriented literary criticism displaces the environmentallyblind avant-garde, arguing that the premodern kinship between humans and nature “withered in the last half of the 19th century; high modernism announced its death; [but] modern ecologism has brought it back.”13 In the field of architecture, this postwar, environmentallyfocused connection of the humanities with the science of ecology was pioneered in the United States by Ian McHarg in his 1969 treatise, Design with Nature.14 Since the publication of this work, others have continued to seek to understand how landscape architecture can utilize tools developed by the science of ecology to construct more sustainable architecture and urban and regional plans (Whiston Spirn 1984, 1998; Hough 1984; Mostafavi and Doherty 2010). If the scientific discipline of ecology addresses the environmental issues of modernity and the avant-gardes, it is often riddled by a problematic antidemocratic—and, as we will see shortly, colonial—politics. As Bruno Latour demonstrates in Politics of Nature (2004 [1999]), modern science founds itself on a strict distinction between fact and value. Latour stretches this distinction back to today’s “trivialized” reading of Plato’s myth of the cave (2004 [1999]: 252). A quick summary of the trivialized version of the myth: Prisoners are chained to the wall of a cave only able to see what is immediately in front of them. A fire burns far above and behind them, and a parade of humans travels between the prisoners and the fire, producing a shadow play on the wall of the cave. The prisoners then deduce “laws of nature” from watching these shadows. One prisoner, however, manages to break their chains, walk out of the cave, see the “true” world, and descend back into the cave to

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inform the prisoners of this truth. In the trivialized versions of this myth discussed by Latour, the prisoner who breaks free and sees the truth is perceived as the scientist, and those prisoners responding to the truth, still stuck in the cave are perceived as politicians. Science deals with natural truth, whereas politics deals with the human rabble. A problem with this structure, as Latour points out, is its antidemocratic stance, “In short, these few elect [the scientists], as they themselves see it, are endowed with the most fabulous political capacity ever invented: They can make the mute world speak, tell the truth without being challenged, put an end to the interminable arguments through an incontestable form of authority that would stem from things themselves” (2004 [1999]: 14). In this schema, the only persons who have a say in environmental policy are the “enlightened” ecological scientists who have access to truth—the others are expected to follow their authoritative dictates. Such antidemocratic tendencies in some embraces of ecology are already visible in Ian McHarg’s work where he argues that it is science and its representatives that should be granted the privileged position of representing the natural world, “We will agree that science is not the only mode of perception—that the poet, painter, playwright and author can often reveal in metaphor that which science is unable to demonstrate. But, if we seek a workman’s creed which approximates reality and can be used as a model of the world and ourselves, then science does provide the best evidence” (1969: 29). Just as Latour’s theory anticipates, McHarg bases his privileging of ecological science on its claim that it provides better access to “the facts” than any other discipline. If the antidemocratic and technocratic leanings of ecology remain subdued in McHarg, they come to be explicit in perspectives of environmental scientists like James Lovelock, who claimed in 2010 in regards to global climate change, “It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while” (Hickman 2010). There is a tendency within some visions of ecology to produce a technocratic and antidemocratic political orientation in which scientists are viewed as sovereign managers of the earth. In this narrative, scientists position themselves as “guides” for humans who are “deficient” in the reason necessary to inhabit the earth sustainably (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016: 65).15 The question therefore becomes: Is a modern architecture possible that is simultaneously environmentally conscious and not antidemocratic? Or is such a proposition inherently contradictory? Within this light, Kenneth Frampton’s discussion of critical regionalism becomes a powerful tool for resolving this problematic of the interrelationship between modern architecture, ecology, and politics.16 Frampton’s 1983 article, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture

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of Resistance,” argues for the synthesis of “universal civilization” and “locally inflected culture,” seeing the latter as a means of resisting modernist homogenization without fully rejecting the benefits it has to offer.17 More specifically, Frampton (1983: 26) calls for a particular relationship between modernity, avant-garde architecture, and nature: whereas avant-garde architecture usually embraces modernity’s predilection for erasing the place-specific environmental characteristics of a site, Frampton’s critical regionalism outlines an indigenization of avant-garde architecture that works with place.18 As a result, Frampton advocates the cultivation of sites and natural landscapes, like the terracing of hills, which found their architectural practices in local knowledges of the territory. It would therefore appear that Frampton’s critical regionalism, consciously or not, synthesizes the various strands of thought discussed thus far in this section: an avant-garde architecture with a deep environmental consciousness that departs from the antidemocratic politics of much environmental planning and architecture.19 For instance, he celebrates the “regional inflection” inherent in how “in certain climates the glazed aperture is advanced, while in others it is recessed behind masonry facade (or, alternatively, shielded by adjustable sun breakers). The way in which such openings provide for appropriate ventilation also constitutes an unsentimental element reflecting the nature of local culture” (27). On the one hand, Frampton is rejecting modernity’s decoupling from nature that is embodied in practices like climate control and air conditioning that erase “rooted culture” by being applied “in all times and in all places, irrespective of the local climatic conditions which have a capacity to express the specific place and the seasonal variations of its climate” (27). On the other hand, and this goes without explicit acknowledgment in his article, he celebrates local cultures’ non-ecological modes of interacting with and knowing the environment. Within this framework, he is thereby rejecting ecology’s own manner of erasing “rooted culture.” For instance, if such localized ventilation schemas proved to be damaging in an ecological sense, ecological planning would summarily erase them in the name of proper expert management. Embedded in critical regionalism’s rejection of antidemocratic ecological planning is therefore an (unacknowledged) critique of what has been termed by Aníbal Quijano (1992, 2000) as the coloniality of power. Through this concept, Quijano effectively distinguishes between coloniality—the epistemological hierarchization in which modern/scientific/ Western/European ways of knowing are deemed superior to those of “premodern”/“primitive”/“mythical”/non-Western ways of knowing— and colonization—the geopolitical domination and control of a territory by a foreign power that is legitimized by coloniality. Quijano’s

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work effectively demonstrates that declarations of independence from colonizing political bodies are not sufficient in and of themselves for decoloniality; one needs to address the continuing function of epistemological domination, in which modern ways of knowing are determined to be “superior” to “premodern” Indigenous ones and subsequently instituted within colonized lands in order to justify colonialism. In this way, modernity and coloniality “are intimately, intricately, explicitly, and complicitly entwined” (Walsh and Mignolo 2018: 4). As such, as Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo (2018: 227) emphasize, an “epistemic reconstitution,” in which one’s way of thinking “delinks” from the epistemologies tied to colonial/modern domination and “re-exists” according to new epistemic foundations, is necessary in addition to geopolitical decolonization. Critical regionalism’s implicit critique of ecological planning can therefore be extended into a critique of the coloniality of ecological planning today. For instance, environmental criticism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has demonstrated how the science of ecology has at times come to be an intellectual technology of (neo-)colonialism used to erase Indigenous relationships with the land. As William Adams and Martin Mulligan (2003: 9) note, “even when [environmental] conservation action has involved resistance to imperial, utilitarian views of nature, it has rarely been sensitive to local human needs and a diversity of world views. It has often been imposed like a version of the imperial endeavour itself: alien and arbitrary, barring people from their lands and denying their understanding of non-human nature.” In one particularly notable instance of such colonial ecological planning, conservationists lobbied “the International Whaling Commission to prevent Inuit hunting” of whales (Langton 2003: 80). By imagining through critical regionalism a mode of architecture in which localized knowledges determine socioenvironmental arrangements of a place, Frampton thereby rejects both the environmentally blind aesthetics of the avant-gardes as well as the coloniality of ecological planning. Embedded within Frampton’s argument is the subtle construction of a noncolonial, environmentally-conscious modern architecture: an embrace of avant-garde architecture without decoupling from nature, a rejection of antidemocratic and colonial ecological planning, and an empowerment of Indigenous knowledges. In the 1983 article, however, the absence of a sustained discussion of these decolonial consequences of critical regionalism is a rather glaring omission. More specifically, in his discussion of universal civilization versus locally inflected culture, empire and coloniality are never mentioned despite being an implicit foundation for Frampton’s theorization. That is, rather than framing the conflict critical regionalism resolves

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as that between universal civilization and locally inflected culture, one might just as easily frame it as that between the modernizing imperial metropole and the colonized periphery.20 That is, Frampton reproduces the Eurocentric ideology in which the local provincial history and culture of modern Europe is confused with an abstract “universal civilization” that is then installed through “concrete world hegemony” (Dussel 2000: 471; Siskind 2014: 25; Mignolo 2007).21 In other words, Frampton fails to analyze how his vision of a “universal civilization” of modernity is connected to colonialism as well as how avant-garde architecture has participated in aestheticizing colonization by embracing modernization.22 In this sense, the relationship between modernity and the earth created through the cultivation of site can also be identified as a nexus of (de)colonial struggle, a conclusion that is never reached in Frampton’s text. This absence of empire is particularly notable in Frampton’s citation of Paul Ricoeur, “No one can say what will become of our civilization when it has really met different civilizations by means other than the shock of conquest and domination. But we have to admit that this encounter has not yet taken place at the level of an authentic dialogue” (quoted in Frampton 1983: 21–22, emphasis mine). Expanding Frampton’s argument, this idea of the encounter through the shock of conquest and domination has a double character within critical regionalism: modern(ist) universal civilization encountering and dominating the earth and locally inflected culture. Frampton is arguing that the idea of cultivating a site is a mode of such an encounter that is not based on domination: an avant-garde symbiotically linked with the natural properties of place and a locally inflected culture and knowledge. What goes unsaid in Frampton’s argument is that this encounter based on domination has a material manifestation: the European encounter, followed by the invasion, conquest, and colonization of the Americas.23 In other words, if the history of the European encounter with the American continent has been a history of bloodshed, slavery, genocide, and misery, the question becomes, what is a decolonial encounter with the American continent not based on domination? What is, in other words, a decolonial modern architecture of Latin America that is also environmentally conscious? One can therefore expand on Frampton’s thought in order to reframe his critical regionalism as a call for a decolonial turn on the European encounter with the Americas: a rethinking of the encounter in which the imperial relationship between the European metropole and the American (neo-)colony, between modernization and the earth is exchanged for one that takes place “at the level of an authentic dialogue.”24 In other words, underlying Frampton’s critical regionalism is a potential deco-

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lonial environmentalist architecture: the meeting of modern European cultural frameworks with another context that opens up the possibility for horizontal dialogue.25 What this decolonial reading of Frampton illuminates is that decoloniality requires an epistemic reconstitution of the manner in which we (those of us arriving from a formation within modern Western epistemology) know the earth (Walsh and Mignolo 2018: 153–76). Indeed, colonization required and requires an epistemology built for the purposes of exploiting the earth through resource extraction, “The monarchies of Europe, supported by rapidly growing organizational sophistication, economic resources, and military strength, saw the New World as a source of riches to be ruthlessly exploited. Gold and silver, human labor, timber, fertile lands, and new plants could all be put to the service of the state at home” (Richards 2003: 309). Colonization required not only the hierarchization of modern European ways of knowing as superior to all others, but a specific knowledge of New World natures as “a source of riches to be ruthlessly exploited.” Even further, the logic of colonization was in part dependent upon the perception of these New World natures as spaces undeveloped by Indigenous communities, thereby justifying the robbery of land under the logic that European settlers had a superior knowledge of the earth and could make better use of it.26 In other words, one part of the epistemic foundation of colonization was the logic that the earth was to be used and developed, and therefore whoever could best use and develop that terrain was its proper steward (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014: 45–46). Delinking from coloniality requires an epistemic reconstitution of modern ways of thinking about nonhuman natures. The conclusion thereby illuminated by this reading of Frampton is that a decolonial critical regionalism offers the opportunity not only to decolonize modern architecture, urban design, and urban planning in Abya Yala but to produce an urban environmentalism that moves beyond the colonial and antidemocratic cultural politics of much environmental planning as well as avant-garde architecture’s disregard for the natural environment. The argument of this book is that the Open City is a site where such an urban environmentalism is actualized. Underlying the project of the Open City is a rethinking of the European encounter with the Americas, an attempt to reopen the possibility for interepistemic dialogue with(in) Abya Yala following imperial conquest and to decolonize modern architecture and urbanism in order to use it to construct a liberatory urban order highly aware of the terrestrial qualities of its particular environmental place. Against strict adherence to European modernization and avant-gardes, against the problematic antidemocratic and colonial politics of some environmental planning, and

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against a colonial relationship with the American continent, the Open City is an affirmative attempt to construct a noncolonial urban space highly concerned with its terrestrial quality. Recent architectural theorizations, it may be critiqued, have challenged Frampton’s frame for critical regionalism. Most significantly, many working within the lens of landscape urbanism (see Chapter 6) have effectively deconstructed the nature/culture dichotomy that underlies Frampton’s vision of the architect approaching and designing with nature (Corner 1999; Waldheim 2002, 2006, 2016). David Leatherbarrow (1999, 2000; Leatherbarrow and Wesley 2018), for instance, has re-examined the relationship between architecture and nature in terms of “topography”: a “field thinking” (2000: 90) in which an architectural work is not put into cohesive relation with a regional context, but rather it “articulates” space in a particular way that brings to light certain oft forgotten elements of a site (a mode of architectural production that in many ways mirrors Isabel Margarita Reyes’s theory explored in Chapter 4). In this way, architecture’s concern is not the production of works but the managing of the space used “between the interiors and the surroundings,” an assemblage of space that manages “ensembles” of situations, objects, and sites in order to articulate that space in a particular way. This requires that the architectural work be understood as “integrated into a field of relationships or terrain of practical affairs” (Leatherbarrow 2000: 90), far from Frampton’s theory of the architect with “universal civilization” approaching the regional “site” with its local culture and particular nature. Leatherbarrow’s approach therefore seeks a totalizing knowledge in which an overarching topography encompasses the ensembles articulated within a site. More polemically, he seems to ignore that an architecture’s particular topographic articulation of a site requires the silencing of other possible articulations. That is, accepting his claim that the work of architectural articulation is to “sustain typical dwelling practices” (155), Leatherbarrow misses, for instance, that the colonial rearticulation of domestic interiors in Peru during the sixteenth century silenced an Indigenous Andean architectural form (cancha) used to sustain their communal systems (ayllus) (Cummins 2002). The question to be addressed, therefore, is not just what is a modern architecture that does not destroy nonhuman natures—a question to which, as Leatherbarrow shows, the regionalist discourse of “cohesion” is a sorry response—but what is a modern architecture and epistemology that does not silence other architectures, epistemologies, and nonhuman natures? Despite its limitations, Frampton’s vision of critical regionalism contains just a possibility for this inter-epistemological and inter-

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architectural dialogue. That is, Frampton’s approach, to the contrary of many later reworkings and critiques of critical regionalism, allows us to perceive the architectural site as a space of de/colonial struggle between differing ways of knowing that site. In other words, Frampton’s critical regionalism illuminates that the implicit foundational act of architecture is the act of determining whose knowledge of the site has the power to become articulated—an epistemological conflict that will, in the case of the Open City, be embodied in the “poetic act” (see Chapter 3). It is this question between decolonial environmentalism in Latin America, epistemological struggles, and modern(ist) architecture that I argue the Open City functionally addresses.

Conclusion This chapter has introduced the two central theoretical claims that will appear throughout this book: 1.) The Open City attempts to organize a poetic mode of living in common otherwise than that organized by the nation-state (i.e., decoupling politics and concerns over the structuration of sociality). 2.) Decoloniality requires a rethinking of how we relate to nonmodern epistemologies and how we know the earth. Looking forward, this book will synthesize these two claims by making the argument that the Open City presents one option for a noncolonial environmentally-conscious mode of living in common by structuring itself around a poetic foundation, where “the poetic” is understood as the discursive hospitable space in which to hear the other. Such poetic hearing of the other requires that one de- and re-constructs one’s own epistemic and representational frameworks in order to hear the other’s ways of knowing and that one rejects a dominating and colonial mode of knowing the earth. In addition, we will see how (at least some at) the Open City have distinguished this vision of the poetic from the domain of the nation-state, arguing that the poetic provides a means of delinking from the (Eurocentric) nation-state and its coloniality, providing a discursive space in which to enter into noncolonial relation with others. It will therefore be part of this book to show how the Open City develops a poetic mode of knowing the earth (Chapters 2, 3), how this poetic epistemology adapts to the era of human-induced transformations of the earth (Chapter 6), how this poetic foundation requires a delinking from the colonial and authoritarian nation-state (Chapters 3, 4), and how this activity of the Open City requires a rethinking of how we engage in theoretical and historical research of architecture (Chapter 5).

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Notes 1. For more on this idea of the design of celebration, in addition to the specific design of the 2017 celebration of St. Francis, see Lang (2018). 2. This prehistory is taken from Pérez de Arce, Pérez Oyarzún, and Rispa (2003) and Pendleton-Jullian (1996: especially 15–16). 3. This idea of the “destiny of the city” is not necessarily an esoteric phrasing of the Open City and the PUCV School of Architecture. Aldo Rossi, for instance, in his introduction to the American edition of The Architecture of the City claims, “there is ultimately a relationship between any single architectural project and the destiny of the city” (1982: 18). Although Rossi’s project is distinct from that of the Open City, this citation demonstrates that the idea of the “destiny of the city” is not limited exclusively to the Open City. 4. This is not to claim that Iommi is the sole author. As Patricio Cáraves (2007: 61) summarizes, “Amereida is the text made amongst various artists and which the poet, Godofredo Iommi Marini, organized [conformó] into a poem. They are therefore a plurality of voices.” The formal analysis of the poem that appears in Chapter 3 therefore leaves room for development of an analysis of this transnational dialogue (something that is unfortunately outside of the scope of this present work). 5. To date, there are a variety of books on the Open City—Crispiani (2010); Pérez de Arce, Pérez Oyarzún, and Rispa (2003); Pendleton-Jullian (1996); Torrent, Crispiani, and Moya (2002); Alfieri (2000)—and even more academic articles and book chapters—Gutiérrez (1998); Pérez Oyarzun (1993); Pérez de Arce (2005); Pérez Oyarzun, Pérez de Arce, Torrent, and Quantrill (2010); Mihalache (2006, 2010); Godoy Arcaya (2001); Jocelyn-Holt (2012); León (2016 [2012]); Hermansen Cordua, Jolly Monge, and Hensel (2015); Espósito (2013); Andrade Castro and Reyes Gil (2016); Segre (2011)—in addition to countless nonacademic magazine articles as well as PhD and Masters theses. Also of importance is Javier Correa’s recent documentary, Amereida: solo las huellas descubren el mar (2017). 6. Unacknowledged in León’s article, however, is that culturally and historically traumatic moments have a tendency to be only rarely (and then only obliquely) represented (see, for instance, Whelan 2002). As we will see in Chapter 4, at least Iommi engaged in just such an oblique representation of the dictatorship. 7. It should be noted that François Fédier, who participated in the 1965 travesía, is one of the foremost Heidegger apologists in the world. See Fédier (1988, 2007). 8. The first three volumes of this work were initially published in 1971. This excerpt from the fourth volume was published in 1975, delayed due to the need to be published in Germany owing to the coup in 1973. 9. This argument is following the ideas of others working in the field of environmental justice. David Pellow in What Is Critical Environmental Justice?

On So-Called Nonpolitical Urban Environmentalism

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

35

(2018: 13) argues, “if we take a different approach to social change we might find that many communities seek to walk away from the state rather than towards it. In other words, why can’t we imagine that some communities want to be left alone and enjoy their autonomy as a means to social change?” As such, he concludes, “my argument is that environmental justice movements would be better off seeking social change through institutions and practices that rely less on the state in order to achieve their goals” (23). My arguments in Chapters 2, 3, and 5 are based on readings of John Beverley and South Asian subaltern studies’ scholars. For an examination of the coloniality of the nation-state by an Aymara intellectual, see Félix Patzi Paco (2009). My discussion of the State in this book is an examination of the colonial Westphalian nation-state installed through European invasion. I briefly discuss in Chapter 2 the valid critique that such a clean distinction of colonial nation-state versus colonized Indigenous nations often breaks down, as was the case in Bolivia with the election of Evo Morales as the first Aymara president of the country. This is an environmentalist narrative and a definition among many. Departing from this critique of modernity, for instance, Dave Foreman has argued that it is humans, regardless of the period, that have destroyed the environment, “After leaving Africa, populations of Homo Sapiens entered other parts of the world at different times during the last 40,000 years. Invariably, extinction of other species, particularly megafauna, coincided” (2004: 35). For a more detailed discussion of the difficulties of defining modernity, especially in a global context, see Gaonkar (1999) and Stanford Friedman (2015). The two classic texts in this field are The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Fromm 1996) and Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995). More recently, Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016) have demonstrated that this narrative—concern for the environment disappeared with the onset of modernity and only returned after the second world war—is far from accurate: concern for the environment has always been present in modernity, it has just been summarily ignored. This ecologically-focused narrative is being cited here not as truth, but as one popular narrative. As critics like Kiran Asher (2009, 2017) have elegantly demonstrated, the narrative that environmentally-conscious urbanism and planning began in the United States and Europe and was subsequently disseminated throughout the globe is, at best, a misrepresentation—women in the so-called Global South have been practicing environmental planning for centuries— and, at worst, a reproduction of a logic of coloniality. This discussion is also indebted to the work of Erik Swyngedouw and his discussion of politics, post-politics, and sustainability (Swyngedouw 2007, 2014; Wilson and Swyngedouw 2014). He is not alone in this regard. The problem of political ecology—the need for a political imagination that is

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simultaneously environmentally conscious and democratic—has recently risen to central importance. Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (2014), for instance, argues for a grassroots politics based on an international alignment with First Nations in the Americas that parlays the fight against environmental degradation as a means to erect a more democratic society. Similarly, Jedediah Purdy in After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015: 256) argues that it is precisely radical democratization that must be the “fulcrum” of contemporary responses to environmental destruction. Further to the left, many have recently been using the unequal distribution of the harms of global climate change as a means to highlight how environmental degradation and its inequitable distribution is a consequence of a capitalist political economy (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016; Malm 2015; Hornborg and Malm 2014; Moore 2015). 16. This is not to comment on internal debates about the meaning of critical regionalism between, for instance, Frampton (1983), Fredric Jameson (1994), and Tzonis and Lefaivre (1990, 2003). For a summary of these debates, see Hartoonian (2014). Furthermore, it will be noted that the concept of critical regionalism has been rethought within Latin Americanism (Moreiras 2001), and Frampton’s particular mode of critical regionalism has been critiqued by architectural historians in Latin America for its tendency to essentialize and oversimplify local architectural cultures, overlooking the internal differences at those sites, “The core of Frampton’s argument was sound, but as many in Latin America would point out, it has been misused to promote a few handpicked architects as personifying critical regionalism and elevating them to the status of cultural representatives” (Carranza and Lara 2014: 309). 17. Frampton’s idea here is reflected in recent research regarding cosmopolitanism. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (1997) ideas of “rooted cosmopolitanism” and “cosmopolitan patriotism” as well as Homi Bhabha’s (1996) “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” for instance, reflect Frampton’s ideas of a rooted universality. Within the context of Latin America, this is also similar to Néstor García Canclini’s (1989) theorization of hybrid modernities and Dussel’s more recent idea of transmodernity, “This ‘trans’-modernity should adopt the best that the modern technological revolution has to offer—discarding antiecological and exclusively Western aspects—and put it at the service of differentiated valorized worlds, ancient and actualized, with their own traditions and ignored creativity” (2002: 236). 18. Frampton’s argument here is particularly North Atlantic-centric. Although this chapter is focused on how Frampton’s argument misses how modernity is experienced in Abya Yala, alternative experiences of modernity are not limited to this continent. John Phillips (2005), for instance, has argued that what is often described by European critics as the tabula rasa destruction and re-creation that characterizes Singapore’s urban space is more aptly identified as the wiping away of a particular permutation of the realization of a site’s particular character so that a new permutation might be realized.

On So-Called Nonpolitical Urban Environmentalism

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

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Frampton’s description of modernity ignores how it is experienced elsewhere in the world. This theorization of a form of environmentally-friendly modern architecture has been more recently supported in the historical work of the reexamination of Bauhaus by Anker (2010). In his 2013 follow-up to his article on critical regionalism, Frampton would seemingly recognize this power dynamic inherent in his argument, “The hegemonic power of the ‘universal’ West is such that there seems to be no other model than the profligate project of Americanising the entire world, the limitless consumerist dream by which all are equally mesmerised—the symbol and instrument of which is the automobile.” Nonetheless, the figure of empire is never named in his writing. Walter Mignolo’s idea is expanded in two of his books (2000, 2011). For a critique of this link Mignolo forges between coloniality and modernization, see Domingues (2009) and Rivera Cusicanqui (2012). Others have argued that the goal of an “alternative modernity” is to formulate an “independent path” from colonial domination to a ‘modern’ society and to reimagine what ‘modern’ means outside of Europe (Tanoukhi 2008: 608–9; Kaup 2006). For more on these various understandings of the relationship between decoloniality and modernity see Woods (“The Present, the Modern, and Modernization,” in press) and Asher (2013). For more on this relationship between avant-garde architectural production, its embrace of modernization, and the relationship between modernization and coloniality in Latin America see Woods (2018b, “The Present, the Modern, and Modernization”). This is not to claim that this is the only source. Modern empire is a global phenomenon and not limited to the American continent. The central argument here is that Frampton is reproducing the problematic tendency for US-based scholarship to perceive “the South” as only “the repository of an ethnographic ‘cultural difference’” (Spivak 1999: 388). Frampton’s framework is one of (North Atlantic) universality versus a total, undifferentiated, “local difference.” This focus on the particular event of the European-American encounter would necessarily take a different form in different contact zones. This idea of an “authentic dialogue” has been defined decolonially as “border thinking” by Mignolo (2000) and “transmodernity” by Dussel (2002). This argument of the Politics of the Dunes—the Open City functionally provides an image of a noncolonial urban environmentalism—builds off the work of many contemporary theorizations of postcolonial and decolonial environmentalisms (Mukherjee 2010; Nixon 2011; Asher 2009, 2017). Similar to this current book, these theorizations develop earlier critiques of the coloniality of many environmentalisms (Ramachandra Guha 1989; Griffiths and Robin 1997; Grove 1995; Adams and Mulligan 2003) while simultaneously arguing that these early critiques of the coloniality of environmentalism are founded on the tendency to identify a particular environmentalism of the North Atlantic (e.g., deep ecology) as the only form of environmen-

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talism and in the process ignore the multiple environmentalisms erected outside of this region. 26. For more on this contradictory European view of the New World as “undeveloped wilderness,” see Dunbar-Ortiz’s note that not only were the Americas highly developed by Indigenous peoples, but that colonization by European invaders was only possible as a result of this development, “Many have noted that had North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived” (2014: 46).

[• Chapter 2 •]

Refashioning Latin Americanism The Foundations of the Environmental Urbanism of the Open City

If the story of the Open City arguably begins in 1952 with the group

headed by Alberto Cruz and Godofredo Iommi moving to the School of Architecture at the Catholic University of Valparaíso, the distilled embodiment of their thought does not appear until the period of 1965–67. In 1965, a group of ten architects, poets, and artists—only four of whom (Godofredo Iommi, Alberto Cruz, Fabio Cruz, and Claudio Girola) were faculty members of the School of Architecture—departed on a voyage through South America to discover the poetic destiny of the American continent.1 Reflections on this journey would be collected and organized into an avant-garde epic poem, Amereida, published in 1967.2 This epic in many ways repeated ideas that had appeared years before in their work and others’: the drive to reveal the destiny of the continent, Joaquín Torres-García’s inverted map of America, the idea of inhabiting a place based on the poetic discovery of its particular characteristics, and so on. Nonetheless, this 1967 poem synthesized these ideas, in addition to integrating some new ones such as Edmundo O’Gorman’s rethinking of the significance of the European-American encounter in The Invention of America, into a literary form that would become the keystone text for the thought of the Open City. Amereida has often suffered from a dual problem of interpretation. First, it has almost exclusively been read as a poetic manifesto for an architectural group that would later found the Open City. Although true—with the caveat that such a reading is teleological since between 1965–67 there were as of yet no concrete plans to found the Open City—that the Open City was and is still also populated by poets and that Amereida is itself a literary text and not just a poetic manifesto has

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been overlooked in scholarship (Sanfuentes 2018). Second, almost all discussion of the Open City has focused on how Amereida is in one way or another a transplantation of ideas from the European avant-gardes onto American soil. Recognizing these common interpretations, however, Amereida is also operating within a modern Latin American intellectual lineage devoted to the formation of an autonomous continental culture. Focusing on this lineage, this chapter outlines the genealogy of Amereida, concluding that the poem confronts the problem of defining an autonomous continental American identity by synthesizing two divergent strands of thought in the intellectual history of Latin America: first, Latin American culture must emerge directly from the land itself without looking to European precedents; second, Latin American culture must be renovated through a unique engagement with European cultural forms. This chapter traces the Latin American intellectual lineage in which Amereida is operating. Starting with the rise of modernismo, this chapter will note a conflict in this literary lineage between a celebration of a mestizo autonomy and a look to Europe for the renovation of Latin American literature.3 Beginning with the divergent forms of thought between José Martí and Rubén Darío in modernismo, this chapter then tracks how this conflict was reshaped during the years of the vanguards during the 1920s and 1930s. Following the vanguards, this conflict would shift as authors like Alejo Carpentier and Suzanne Césaire began to rethink its boundaries and limitations. By the time we arrive to Amereida, the conflict between mestizo autonomy and cosmopolitan renovation, while still forming identifiable positions, are being reframed and rethought. This chapter may therefore appear to dive into the treacherous field of Latin Americanism, with all of its attendant problems of essentialization, depoliticization, and over-simplification (de la Campa 1999). The goal of this chapter, however, is not to theorize such a broad Latin Americanism, but rather, very specifically, to trace the genealogy of Amereida’s Latin Americanism. It is the argument here that Amereida engages one of the significant “macronarratives” of the modern American continent: the transatlantic meeting between Europe, Abya Yala, and Africa.4 Whereas this macronarrative is often framed for the Indigenous communities of Abya Yala as “the moment of the Spanish invasion” and for Black communities as the African diaspora beginning with the Middle Passage, Amereida comes to terms with this macronarrative from the position of those inheriting a legacy of European settler colonialism (Walsh and Mignolo 2018: 107). In this way, Amereida embodies the idea of the “New World” as found in Djelal Kadir’s Questing Fictions:

Refashioning Latin Americanism 41

it is a dialectic of exchange between language and the New World reality which language seeks to contain; an antithetical confrontation between the inventive/invented sign and the irreducible Continent as recalcitrant signified—the first fashioning and imaging the latter, the latter skewing, deflecting, evading the former as a protean rebus for a poetic image. The incunabula, the textual fabric, becomes the everchanging record, landscape, terra incognita, spectral “presence” emanating from that contentious “gnostic space.” (1986: 32)

Kadir’s theory is marked by a Eurocentrism, recommending that America was an empty wilderness waiting passively to be discovered by Europeans. Amereida, on the contrary, recognizes their inescapable inheritance of a particular colonial realization of this macronarrative in the meeting between an errant language and “the New World reality which language seeks to contain.” In this way, Amereida diverges from Kadir’s Latin Americanism in two significant ways: 1.) In contrast to Kadir’s eco-vision, Amereida explicitly struggles with comprehending Indigenous socioecological systems and coming into noncolonial relation with Indigenous communities; and 2.) Amereida not only recognizes that European languages “seek to contain” New World reality, but it attempts to move beyond this colonial theory of language as the authoritative container of knowledge, embracing the errantry, to use Kadir’s language, of the questing word, with “errantry” understood in the double sense of that which makes an error and that which wanders and travels. The poetic word of Amereida attempts to comprehend the otherness of the New World by hearing it in its otherness while inheriting a language that can never comprehend its alterity.

Chronicling Errancy In the introduction I presented the interpretation that the Open City was potentially aligned with a conservative intellectual tradition of twentieth-century Chile through its appeal to the formation of an American cultural soul. Such a conclusion, however, fails to reflect on how the concept of a continental American culture was not the concern solely of modern conservatism in Chile, nor has Chilean conservative politics been recognized by residents as the intellectual source from which the Open City was drawing. Instead, Amereida directly quotes, though without any marking to distinguish the quoted text, colonial-era and nineteenth-century texts discussing the significance of

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the American continent and an American identity, thereby connecting this 1967 epic’s desire to form an American culture to centuries-old thought on the issue. Indeed, Amereida prefigures Kadir’s (1986: xxi) thesis that would come two decades later, “the errantry which resulted in the discovery of the New World has become internalized by that world’s imagination; that the first voyagers’ error which led to the necessity of inventing a reality for an unexpected world, the happenstance discovery, serves as precedent for the ever-errant inventiveness of Latin American fictions.” A European language and imaginary ill-fitted for the American continent coming into relation with that continent’s socioecological systems forms the foundation of Amereida’s Latin Americanism, a cultural foundation of errantry that the epic identifies in colonial-era chronicles. Amereida’s debt to colonial-era chronicles and their understanding of errantry has been largely undiscussed in scholarship since its publication. For instance, Amereida’s (1991a [1967]) claim that the American continent is an ignored unknown—“it is a grand sea / and hidden / because although it is seen / most of it is ignored” (28)—is a quote from Fernández de Oviedo’s 1535 text, The Natural History of the Indies (Oviedo 1959); and the need to accept the alterity of America’s “donation,” “terms,” and “borders”—something which Amereida claims Columbus failed to accomplish—is explained later in the poem through a direct quotation of Amerigo Vespucci’s writing put in free verse: and sailed so far through the torrid zone that we find ourselves being below the equinoctial line and having the one and the other pole finally of our horizon and we pass through six degrees and altogether lost the tramontane star that scarcely even the stars of ursa minor were showing themselves to us or to say it better

Refashioning Latin Americanism 43

the guardians that revolve around the firmament —and so desirous

to be the author that designates the star of the firmament of the other pole (32)

Amereida recognizes within its very pages that the question of how to create an American culture while indelibly based from within an errant cultural framework inherited from Europe has appeared since the colonial era. Indeed, the poem cites not only Amerigo Vespucci’s and Columbus’s letters and Oviedo’s chronicle but also the chronicles of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Amereida Group 1991a [1967]: 136–37, 140–41), Antonio Pigafetta (143–52), Francisco López de Gómara (135–36), and Bernal Díaz del Castillo (134–35, 138–39).5 To come to terms with a settler American identity, Amereida implies, one must come to terms with this colonial inheritance. Central to many of these chronicles is the struggle to come to terms with the new natural setting of the American continent using an errant language that was developed to describe different ecosystems. Antonello Gerbi (1985) has traced this naturalism in early chronicles and letters of the New World, demonstrating that many of these writers framed this natural setting in terms of same as/other than European natural formations.6 For instance, Gerbi (1985: 80) demonstrates how Martín Fernandez de Enciso’s Suma de Geograf ía (1948 [1519]), like Oviedo’s text, tends to describe the Indies in such a way that “the imperialistic aim gives way to an overwhelming interest in the lands and islands already occupied. The fauna, flora, and peoples of America represent . . . a familiar reality with its own intrinsic importance.” For Gerbi, Oviedo and Enciso are interested in uncovering the novel reality of the Indies in contrast with the distinct reality of European natures. Against this, Giovanni de Verrazzano would produce a “constant likening of American features to aspects of the Old World,” an act that was reinforced by “dol[ing] out generous quantities of names of European regions and localities to baptize islands, bays and rivers” (115). Columbus, Gerbi (18) concludes, oscillates between these two positions.

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Furthermore, Gerbi theorizes the political-cultural implications of these two distinct visions. On the one hand, Verrazzano and others’ Eurocentric equation of Old and New World natures—an equation that requires the “Old World” as stable referent, precluding the possibility of decentering the logics built around and within that European context—represents a coloniality, “it is not just a matter of the Old World casting itself upon the New: it is the home world taking peaceful possession of the overseas discoveries . . . Recognition is already an act of conquest and subjugation” (1985: 6–7). On the other hand, Gerbi argues, the move to note and take account of the difference between natures by those like Oviedo and Enciso opens up a noncolonial space of newness and alterity (7). Gerbi’s analysis illuminates a distinction between a colonial logic tied to the imperial State—the search for sameness between natures is dedicated to an attempt to expand the reach of the Spanish Empire—and the decolonial logic of what Paul Bové (1996: 385) calls a thinking of the interregnum, “that place and time when there is as yet no rule, when there are ordering forces but they have not yet summoned their institutional rule into full view,” or what Emma Pérez (1999: 6) calls the decolonial imaginary, “[the space] where differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated.” Gerbi’s analysis illuminates two distinct visions of New World natures in colonial-era chronicles: the colonial Statist attempt to institutionalize and manage the land in the name of empire versus the decolonial interregnum in which, thinking otherwise than the colonial State, the alterity of the terrain is approached in its otherness.7 As Gerbi’s analysis implies, the discussion of nature in early colonial-era chronicles was a discursive site of (de)colonial struggle, perceiving the New World as that which could be subjected to or that which exceeds the limits of European cultural frameworks.8 Regardless of the position that each text stakes out with respect to (de) colonial struggles through their discussions of the relationship between errant European epistemo-cultural frameworks and New World natures, it can be argued that these works were always already engaged in the construction of a colonial literary culture based on the generous use of references to an Old World cultural framework, a culture that served to justify a new State formation organized around “the monopolization of certain types of intellectual labor” by the colonial State (Beverley 1993: 57).9 The colonial function of this literary culture can be seen, for example, in chroniclers’ use of Greco-Roman epics and myths in order to frame their encounters and observations. As Gerbi notes, chroniclers often perceived the Indies and Indigenous communities as “a miraculous confirmation of the traditions and myths of the Greeks and Romans” (Gerbi 1985: 60); even when recognizing socioecological difference, the distinct social and ecological realities of the New World were erased insofar as

Refashioning Latin Americanism 45

they were incorporated into an overarching hegemonic cultural framework of Greek and Roman myth, a framework whose navigation and interpretation was subsequently monopolized by colonial “experts.”10 The hegemonic installation of this literary culture structured around references to Old World classics guaranteed epistemic monopolization in the hands of colonial officials; any critique of colonization from within this mode of literariness therefore still supported colonialism by reinforcing this epistemic hegemony and monopolization. That is, following Edward Said (1975: 15–16), European ethnocentrism in the colonial context is not merely a lack of concern for others’ experiences but is a hegemonic discourse that serves to “analyze, characterize, confine inferior nonEuropean cultures into a position of subordination,” a discourse that is then ruled by European functionaries. By framing its myth of the American continent as a reworking of the Aeneid, Amereida therefore places itself within the legacy of this colonial culture. Indeed, the Aeneid was especially ripe for such colonial citation by New World chroniclers, being used by a variety of authors for a diverse set of purposes: Oviedo and López de Gómara (1922 [1533]), who are both cited in Amereida, repeatedly use this epic as a framing device; Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga’s (1933 [1569, 1578, 1589]) epic poem telling of the conquest of Chile, La Araucana, uses the story of Dido in order to critique colonial thinking while recognizing his position within that imperialist landscape (Quint 1993: 181–84)11; and Enciso’s Suma de Geograf ía (1948 [1519]) compares the conquest of the Americas to the acts of Jason and Hercules, thereby justifying the conquest as part of a mythical political dynasty (Gerbi 1985: 79). In other words, regardless of whether the work was criticizing colonialism or recognizing socioecological difference, the very act of citing the Aeneid reinforces the power of what Ángel Rama (1984) has called the “lettered city” (ciudad letrada): the social body composed of those cultured in a vision of literature as a colonial institution, “one of the basic institutions of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas” that led to “the development of an autonomous creole and then ‘national’. . . culture” controlled by a colonial elite (Beverley 1993: 2). In this colonial literary economy of the lettered city the Aeneid has held a central place, being used as a framing device for Latin American authors from the start of the conquest through the twentieth century (Cussen 1992; 2018: 446, 452). In this way, Amereida’s acts of repeatedly citing colonial-era chronicles, of acknowledging colonial chronicles’ and letters’ use of previous European epics (for example, they cite Vespucci’s citation of Dante to explain the Southern Cross [34]), and (most significantly) of founding its vision of an American identity within a retelling of the Aeneid are functionally an admission of its position within the colonial lettered city.

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Does Amereida therefore inherently reinforce the coloniality of power? Reproducing the foundations of the colonial culture of the lettered city? What I want to offer in the rest of this chapter is that if the poetic in Latin America has often served as an ideological instrument of the colonial nation-state, there is another genealogy of Latin Americanism in which the poetic serves as a discursive space in which to hear those “ungovernable” (to be discussed further in the next section) communities, individuals, and socioecological landscapes, those who cannot be contained by the representational technologies of that colonial nation-state; if Spanish colonization resolved the problematic of an errant epistemo-cultural framework coming into contact with novel socioecological structures by hegemonically installing its framework over and against those structures, Amereida resolves this same problematic by trying to imagine nonhegemonic relation between its errant framework and this new socioecological context.12 When Amereida takes colonial-era chronicles and places them into free verse, for example, it forces the reader to acknowledge those moments from the invasion of Abya Yala that exceeded colonial modes of representation and State-making. If Indigenous texts “articulating their languages and politics,” in addition to those nonhuman natures that exceed the representational capacity of the cultural foundations of European colonization, are in this way those that “question the hegemonies of national literatures” (Walsh and Mignolo 2018: 38), then the Open City explores what happens when, positioned from within the lettered city, one hears and puts oneself into relation with those Indigenous voices and socioecological realities that question the basis of lettered-city literary endeavors. In this sense, the poetic in Latin America is no longer a colonial epistemo-cultural framework that holds hegemonic dominance, but rather it becomes an open discursive space in which relations between cultural, epistemic, and socioecological differences are negotiated, a nonhegemonic discursive space in which to hear the other. It is this genealogy of noncolonial poetics of errantry from within the lettered city that I wish to trace in this chapter.

Amereida and Its Modern Precedents Modernismo What is surprising in Amereida is the relative absence of modern citations given that, as we will see in this section, there is an already existing genealogy of modern Latin American poetics of errantry in which the 1967 epic is positioned. Euclides da Cunha, for instance, is the only

Refashioning Latin Americanism 47

writer from the twentieth century who is directly cited on more than one occasion (and then only Os Sertões, which he wrote in the nineteenth century). The nineteenth century seems to also receive short shrift, with figures from this century being limited to a list (158) and a long quote from an 1830 letter of Simon Bolívar (161–62). The citation of Bolívar is particularly notable given that, as we will see, it provides a bridge into the formation of what is often described as the first Latin American literary movement: modernismo. Amereida’s quotation of Bolívar focuses on politics, with one central claim being, “America is ungovernable for us” (161). As a consequence of this realization, Amereida claims, Bolívar became entranced, being entranced bolívar [sic] was encountered stunned and nude all that which has been installed here appeared groundless and artificial how then being entranced to learn to live with the monster? how to become intimate with its threat if this threat is that which touches us in part the most inalienable part of our heritage? (162)

Amereida argues that what they define as the Bolivarian task of imposing a governance structure onto the American continent fails to recognize that continent’s inherent qualities—“the monster” and “its threat,” likely referring to Bolívar’s late-in-life desire to reinforce inherited colonial power structures against the “threat” of “ungovernable” Indigenous peoples, with Bolívar eventually claiming, “all is lost for ever, because the Indians will always be Indians, the llaneros will always be llaneros, and the lawyers will always be intriguers” (Favre 1988: 14). Through its discussion of Bolívar and ungovernability, this 1967 epic proposes a radical critique: the logic of installing a Westphalian nation-state structure onto the American continent as a mode of organizing a living-in-common is always already colonial.13 Or, as Mignolo (2013: 61) argues, “while the form nation-state came into existence ‘naturally’ in the history of Europe, it was a forced imposition or a forced adaptation in the nonEuropean world.” Amereida’s discussion of politics functions to distance its Latin Americanist social vision from the European conception of the nation-state. This question of American governance would not disappear in Latin American thought after Bolívar. José Martí’s 1891 text, “Nuestra América,” is dedicated to just this question of governance in the New World. He claims, the able governor in America is not the one who knows how to govern the Germans or the French; he must know the elements that make up

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his own country, and how to bring them together, using methods and institutions originating within the country, to reach that desirable state where each man can attain self-realization and all may enjoy the abundance that Nature has bestowed in everyone in the nation to enrich their toil and defend with their lives . . . Good government is nothing more than the balance of the country’s natural elements. (Martí 2007: 224)

If Bolívar, as represented by the sections of his 1830 letters quoted in Amereida, deems America ungovernable, Martí claims that it is possible to erect governance structures on the American continent but that this task must be realized through an intimate relationship with the unique properties of that continent. Furthermore, Martí links his discussion of governance to the natural qualities of the American continent. Martí is making a double claim in this respect. First, that the “country’s natural elements” differentiate it from other countries. Second, that such distinctions among “natural elements” necessitate differing governance and cultural structures. As Susana Rotker notes, Martí wanted governance to be of “our time, in front of our Nature” (1992: 125). As such, Martí imagines a nature in a common postcolonial manner as providing a foundation for cultural self-definition “set apart from the imperium” of the European metropole (Buell 1995: 54). As John Beverley (2001: 49) has noted, this focus on the governability of the American continent speaks more broadly to “the incommensurability between . . . the ‘radical heterogeneity’ of subaltern social subjects and the ‘reason’ of the modern nation-state.” The idea of governability as expressed by Bolívar and Martí speaks to a broader issue examined more recently in subaltern studies: the Westphalian nation-state is often a colonial political formation, the expansion of which is correlated to attempts to erase non-European modes of living in common. As such, decolonial social structures must rethink how to form a life in common on the American continent otherwise than that of one organized around the nation-state. As Beverley argues, “If . . . the subaltern is to ‘become’ the state (to recall Gramsci’s formulation), it is not only the subaltern, but also the state—and along with it, the state ideological apparatuses, including the education system—that will have to undergo a transformation” (61). It will be the later claim of this book (see Chapters 3 and 4), that the Open City went a step further: the nation-state at its various scaled manifestations (local, regional, national) implies a coloniality of power, and therefore one decolonial option is to utopically construct a mode of living in common otherwise than that of the nation-state.14

Refashioning Latin Americanism 49

The absence of an explicit discussion of José Martí in Amereida is additionally surprising given the text’s attempt to develop a poetry proper to the American continent. Martí is famously one of the lead figures of the Latin American literary movement, modernismo, which has often been described as the first Latin American literary movement, rather than an imitation or transportation of a European style (Paz 1974: 127; Rama 1985: 10–11). Not only was Martí arguing for a form of governance that recognized the uniqueness of the American continent and its natural phenomena, in addition to its supposed “ungovernability” within the framework of the nation-state, but he was also a leading figure in the discovery of a particular poetic voice for this continent. Martí’s influence on modernismo, however, is only one half of the coin: the Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío, and his cosmopolitanism would prove to be the flip-side to Martí’s focus on the formation of a Latin Americanist identity based on an autonomous relationship with the natural properties of the American terrain. If Martí is often defined in terms of his Latin Americanist identitarian politics, Darío is often cited as the figure who engaged foreign European literary traditions.15 His work, Azul, for instance, receives its name from a citation of Victor Hugo, and he routinely references French and Greek works rather than Latin American poetry. Darío frequently represents the other side of modernismo, what Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot (1983) refers to as the Europeanization of Latin America and its poetry in the nineteenth century. This lack of concern for the American continent seems to be similarly reflected in the (not-so-)natural spaces often represented in Darío’s poetry: gardens. As appears in one of Darío’s descriptions of Valparaíso, Chile, “There was nearby a beautiful garden, with more pinks [rosas] than blues and more violets than pinks. A beautiful and small garden, with vases, but without statues, with a white pitta, but without pumps, close to a small house as if it were made for a sweet and happy tale” (1990: 58). Nature, in Darío’s representation, is cultivated and formed by the gardener, rather than being the basis of cultural self-definition. In other words, Darío’s vision of nature draws from culture rather than, as is the case with Martí, culture drawing from nature. It may therefore appear that Darío is merely reproducing European cultural norms on American soil or that he is calling for the colonial replacement of the ecosystems of the American continent with those from Europe. This latter process, as John Richards (2003: 346) shows, has been a common act of colonization in the American continent, “As the Indians rapidly died off, the Spanish immediately replaced their ecological system with one more to their own liking.” One cannot help but ask: Are Darío’s gardens merely an

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aestheticization of this ecological and genocidal violence? A reframing of colonization as the introduction of the “true” beauty of European nature? This equation of Darío with coloniality is to ignore his poetic method, which was concerned with renovating Latin American literature through an engagement with and transculturation of the culture and literary traditions of Europe. As he would describe the relationship of Azul, his groundbreaking 1888 book of poetry, to French poetry, “Upon penetrating certain secrets of harmony, of hue, of suggestion that are found in the French language, it was my thought to discover them in Spanish, or to apply them . . . Azul is a Parnassian book, and therefore French. In it appears for the first time in our language, the Parisian ‘story,’ the French way of using adjectives, the Gallic turn inserted into the Spanish paragraph” (Darío 2005: 483–85). In other words, as José Olivio Jiménez notes in his invocation of Darío’s own description of his relationship to French poetry, through “the secrets of harmony, of hue, of suggestion that are in the French language, [Darío’s literary activity was] the prime responsible party for the profound renovation in meter and language of Spanish-language poetry that was accomplished by modernismo” (2011: 168). Darío did not merely imitate or reproduce French influences, he used French poetry as a departure point for the renovation of the Spanish language in Latin America; Darío was attempting to create a dialogue between Old and New World, not replace the latter with the former. In this way, gardening in Azul can be seen as a conversation between errant ecological knowledges of Europe with the socioecological systems of Latin America. It would appear that we therefore have two distinct lineages of modernismo creating two distinct cultural self-definitions based on two distinct ideas of what defines nature on the American continent: that of Martí and that of Darío. Such a distinction, although popular in many interpretations of modernismo, is far from accurate. Martí, for instance, did not define America in terms of a purity from Europe, but rather in terms of its autonomous mestizo culture that integrated multiple cultural sources, including sources from the North Atlantic (Rotker 1992; Siskind 2014). Furthermore, as we have already noted, Darío’s engagement with European literature allowed him to produce a distinct Latin American poetry; engagement with his “foreign neighbors”—in quotes since his engagement with these poetic forms demonstrates precisely the inadequacy of the foreign/domestic binary—allowed Darío to produce a particular American literature. Both Martí and Darío, then, were pointing to a similar end: modernismo as a Latin American literary phenomenon that struggled with the relationship between an independent American culture, its external connections, and its inheritance of errant European cultural forms.

Refashioning Latin Americanism 51

Avant-Gardes in Latin America This conflict identified in the poetics of Martí and Darío between what can be categorized as two differing modes of poetic errantry would continue in the divisions that appeared in the literary and artistic avantgardes in Latin America. If the previous dichotomy in modernismo could be summarized as the conflict between Martí and Darío, the conflict found in the avant-gardes of Latin America could be summarized as that between a European-oriented avant-garde, represented by the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, and an avant-garde represented by the Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, developed through an engagement with the perceived mestizo character of Latin America.16 In this moment, the conflict between Martí’s lineage of a mestizo autonomy and Darío’s lineage of a localized cosmopolitan renovation comes into its own with the avant-gardes in Latin America. What is often considered the first avant-garde poem of Latin America was paradoxically published in 1918 in Madrid: Vicente Huidobro’s Ecuatorial (Hahn 1998). Huidobro’s poetics have traditionally been interpreted as a type of literary cubism highly influenced by European literary trends, even polemically being declared at moments to have been mere plagiarism of other European cubists (Bajarlía 1964). Even further, Huidobro explicitly declared his dissatisfaction for American poetry with two exceptions, Rubén Darío and Edgar Allen Poe (Huidobro 1975: 80–81). At a glance, Huidobro’s poetry is a consequence of an interaction with Europe and a disdain for his American home.17 In contrast to this traditional interpretation, however, many have recently argued that Huidobro’s work represents a transatlanticism, effectively staging a dialogue between European and Latin American poetic forms (Infante 2013). For instance, claims that Huidobro’s ideas of poetry as creation came from Reverdy or Apollinaire miss that one of Huidobro’s famous explanations of poetry, “the first condition of the poet is to create; the second, to create; and the third, to create” (1963: 673), comes directly from Darío, who, speaking about poetry in Prosas Profanas, says, “And the first law, creator: create” (1990: 12), and Huidobro explicitly cites the poetic ideas of an author from the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson, as a precursor to his poetics (Woods 2018b: 129). In this way, and similar to Darío, Huidobro’s focus on Europe was not an expatriation from the Latin American literary tradition but a renewal of this tradition through the artistic and literary innovations that were occurring in Europe in the early twentieth century. If Huidobro’s formation of a continental American culture through his transatlanticism continued the lineage of Darío, the poetry of Cesár

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Vallejo would in many ways continue the lineage of José Martí. Vallejo’s (1992 [1922]) Trilce has long been lauded as a renovation of the Spanish language and Latin American literature. As Antenor Orrego would claim in his 1957 celebration of Trilce, Free of the Incan hypogeum, of the Spanish colonial coffin, free of servile imitation of Europe! . . . Since then [the publication of Trilce] America began to have universal voice and could aspire to be incorporated into the ecumenical core of human culture with its own effigy . . . [César Vallejo] intends to create, nothing less, inside of the Spanish language and without foreign model, a new poetic language, a new rhetoric, a new literary technique. (quoted in Matos and Villanueva 1987: 8–9)

If Huidobro and Darío focused on renovating the Spanish language and Latin American culture through European literature, Vallejo was initially understood within the intellectual lineage of Martí: forming a Latin American culture based within the American continent itself yet recognizing its European (colonial) cultural inheritance. This early interpretation of Vallejo received a formal development in the writing of Vallejo’s colleague and writing correspondent, José Carlos Mariátegui, in his 7 Essays On the Interpretation of Peruvian Reality. Although the central purpose of Mariátegui’s essay on literature is specifically to discuss the formation of a national Peruvian literature and not a continental American literature (2007: 191), his concern is still on the formation of a culture independent from Europe. His foundational theoretical claim is similar to Martí’s: The thinness, the anemia, the flaccidity of our colonial and colonialist literature comes from its lack of roots. Life, as Wilson affirmed, comes from the earth. Art has, as of necessity, to be nourished by the sap of a tradition, of a history, of a people. And in Peru literature has not bloomed from a tradition, from a history, from an Indigenous people. It was born of an importation of Spanish literature; was nurtured later by the imitation of that same literature. (2007: 201)

For Mariátegui, Vallejo proves to be the first poet in the history of Peru to express the voice of its particular mestizo character, against the “imitation” of “imported Spanish literature.” Moreover, according to Mariátegui this dedication to the formation of a national literature is expanded to a continental scale in Vallejo’s poetry, “There is in Vallejo a genuine and essential Americanism; not a descriptive and localist Americanism”

Refashioning Latin Americanism 53

(2007: 260–61). Vallejo, according to many interpretations leading up to the publication of Amereida, was the first “proper” American poet. Just as was the case with Martí and Darío, this clean distinction between cosmopolitan Huidobro and Americanist Vallejo is not as neat as many present. Huidobro’s early poetry, especially that of Adán is very much focused on Chilean naturalism. For instance, Tomás Gabriel Chazal’s 1916 prologue to the first edition of Adán argues that Huidobro’s poetry is supported firmly by intimate contact with Chilean nature (11–12). It has even been claimed that this early poem provides the key to understanding Huidobro’s later avant-garde works (Wood 1977). On the other hand, Vallejo’s (1927: 201) own critique of the avant-garde in Latin America would seem to place him squarely on the American continent, “America borrows and adopts the European clothing of the socalled ‘new spirit’. . . Today, as before, the writers of America practice a borrowed literature, that turns out tragically bad. The aesthetic—if this grotesque, simian nightmare of the writers of America can be called an aesthetic—lacks, today perhaps more than ever, its own physiognomy.” If we look at his specific critique of French surrealism in his essay, Autopsy on Surrealism (Vallejo 1982), however, we find that he opposes this European artistic tradition with a different European tradition: Marxism.18 To say that Vallejo is a purely autochthonous and autonomous voice ignores this influence from across the Atlantic. Similar to the supposed conflict between Darío and Martí, Huidobro and Vallejo’s distinct poetic visions represent conflicting visions of how to understand Latin American errantry.

After the Avant-Garde Following Huidobro and Vallejo, the conflict over differing visions of the formation of an American literature and culture would continue to find new life in both new vanguard and post-vanguard positions leading up to the publication of Amereida in 1967. In 1943, for instance, Suzanne Césaire would publish, “Surrealism and Us,” claiming that surrealism was blossoming in the Americas and providing a conceptual foundation for anticolonial struggle: Millions of Black hands will hoist their terror across the furious skies of world war. Freed from a long benumbing slumber, the most disinherited of all peoples will rise up from plains of ashes. Our surrealism will supply this rising people with a punch from its very depths. Our surrealism will enable us to finally transcend the sordid

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antinomies of the present: whites/Blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilized/savages—at least rediscovering the magic power of the mahoulis, drawn directly from living sources. (Césaire 2000: 136)

At a glimpse, Césaire is treading the same ground as Darío and Huidobro by arguing for the renovation of anticolonial struggle through an engagement with French surrealism. Yet in contrast to Huidobro and Darío’s movement to French poetry to renovate Latin American verse, Césaire (2000: 134) argues that surrealism arrived in Martinique and “blossomed” there. In Césaire’s framework French poetry has become Americanized instead of Latin American poetry renovating itself by appealing to French language and literatures. Near the same time, Alejo Carpentier would move beyond avantgarde cultural formations and present a sustained Americanist critique of surrealism in his prologue to El reino de este mundo (1969 [1949]). Although this prologue has subsequently been described as a theoretical examination of the genre of magical realism, Carpentier’s prologue disproves this categorization: he is interested in marvelous reality, not magical realism.19 More precisely, he argues that the attempt by surrealists in Europe to produce a “marvelousness” in their works is only an artificial imitation of the lived reality of the marvelous as is found in the nature and on the soil of the Caribbean, But observe that when André Masson tried to draw the jungle of Martinique, with its incredible intertwining of plants and its obscene promiscuity of certain fruit, the marvelous truth of the matter devoured the painter, leaving him just short of impotent when faced with blank paper. It had to be an American painter—the Cuban, Wilfredo Lam— who taught us the magic of tropical vegetation, the unbridled creativity of our natural forms with all their metamorphoses and symbioses on monumental canvases in an expressive mode that is unique in contemporary art. (Carpentier 1995: 85)

If this seems to be limited to the Caribbean, Carpentier would later expand his analysis to the American continent I found the marvelous real at every turn. Furthermore, I thought, the presence and vitality of this marvelous real was not the unique privilege of Haiti but the heritage of all of America, where we have not yet begun to establish an inventory of our cosmogonies. The marvelous real is found at every stage in the lives of men who inscribed dates in the history of the continent and who left the names that we still

Refashioning Latin Americanism 55

carry: from those who searched for the fountain of eternal youth and the golden city of Manoa to certain early rebels or modern heroes of mythological fame from our wars of independence, such as Colonel Juana de Azurduy. (Carpentier 1995: 87)

The marvelous in American literature, according to Carpentier, is a consequence of the lived reality found on American soil and in the particular terrestrial characteristics of the American continent. Even further, Carpentier claims that this relationship with America is found in the cracks of chronicles’ representations of colonial-era quests to “marvelous” spaces like the Fountain of Youth and Manoa (a similar decolonial against-the-grain reading of chronicles that we find in Amereida). The final artistic proposal for a renewed Latin Americanism to be touched on in this period is that of Joaquín Torres-García. In his Universalismo constructivo, his theoretical work that follows his intellectual trajectory in Montevideo from 1934 through 1942, he argues for the foundation of an autochthonous American culture based on constructivism. Although Torres-García’s position would shift over these nine years, a consistent thread remained in his focus on the “structure” of a work of art—the internal organizing relationship of the elements of a work as constructed by the artist—and a rejection of works that imitated the external world; the work of art was to be a unified creation of ensembles of pictorial elements within an aesthetic order. In this way, a painting was to be based on a structure and geometry, in which each of its parts are related to a whole within an all-encompassing architecture. To arrive at this mode of structuring the canvas, Torres-García demands that the artist look within their own self, creating by giving form to the unknown part of one’s soul within the aesthetic order of the work of art (1984: 43). He is also insistent that this personal force of the soul must be given form through “constructive reason,” with the work of art representing the “co-penetration of these two living forces” (1984: 532). This focus on the force of the soul expressed through universal constructive reason allows Torres-García to argue simultaneously for the particularity of the school of constructivism he was erecting in Montevideo as well as the universality not only of constructivism but of all American art prior to the invasion of Columbus, considering his constructivism to be a continuation of the Indigenous Andean artistic tradition.20 Torres-García argues that while the principles that order the work of art come from the particular spiritual properties of the artist, they are expressed within the geometric laws of a universal Reason that structure any painting. In other words, to invoke one of Torres-García’s metaphors, the artist expresses their own particular position within a

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universal Reason just as each person expresses their individual voice linguistically through an alphabet (1984: 620). It is in this way that we arrive at Torres-García’s position in terms of Latin Americanism: the need for the School of the South, A great School of Art ought to arise here in our country [Uruguay]. I say this without any vacillation: here in our country . . . I have said School of the South; because in reality our north is the South. There should not be north, for us, but rather through opposition our South. For this we now put the map upside down, and then we have the right idea of our position, and not as the rest of the world wants it. (1984: 193)

In this way Torres-García departs from both Martí and Darío by locating the particularism of an American culture within a universal Reason, thereby arguing neither for mestizo autonomy nor for cosmopolitan renovation. His global constructivist mapping struggles with the relationship between the American continent and artistic voice, but this struggle is now ordered around the formation of an autonomous voice within a universal reason. Lastly, one must acknowledge the nonartistic historical work of Edmundo O’Gorman’s The Invention of America (1961), the book that is often cited both within and outside of the Open City as a central inspirational text for Amereida. O’Gorman’s central claim is that Columbus never discovered America since he went to his death bed believing he had landed on Asia. As O’Gorman argues, Columbus’s conviction relied on a priori assumptions: that the world was formed by three continents— Asia, Europe, and Africa—all connected by a single land mass, thereby legitimizing the belief in the expansion of humanity from the single ancestral source of Adam and Eve. To imagine America as a separate continent was therefore to invent, quite literally, a new world-system that disrupted the former worldview of Europe. For this reason it is Vespucci who, epistemologically speaking, discovers America through his assigning the term “New World” to the American continent. As O’Gorman (1961: 62) writes, “When Vespucci speaks of a world he refers to the old notion of ecumene, of a portion of the Earth fit for human habitation. If he licitly designates the recently explored countries as a new world, it is because he intends to announce the effective finding of one of these other ecumenes.” Discovery in O’Gorman’s sense is not defined by the encounter with an entity universally unknown, but more specifically the encounter with an entity outside of a particular epistemological and referential framework, thereby challenging its very foundations; discovery

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is always defined in relation to a specific epistemology. As such, Vespucci comes to be a culture hero for O’Gorman insofar as he accepts the radical alterity and shock of the American continent.21 O’Gorman’s thesis, as Enrique Dussel (1995) has since noted, is Eurocentric insofar as it bases its discussion of the European-American encounter around its significance for a European worldview. For O’Gorman, the significance of this encounter is that it interrupts European thinking. The scope of The Invention of America remains in this historical realm, outlining the process through which Columbus landing on America eventually led to the revelation of the newness and unknown of the American continent for European subjects. Nonetheless, one can also note an epistemological opposition between O’Gorman and TorresGarcía. Whereas for Torres-García, the unknown is within the individual based in a particular context that then streams out to form a new culture within the contours of a universal Reason, the unknown for O’Gorman is the American continent which shatters European modes of thinking and therefore demands a new epistemic framework. Although the significance of this mode of thinking about America goes unexamined in O’Gorman’s work, his thesis, which demands an interruption and destruction of European thought based on an encounter with the American continent—a decentering errantry at the center of O’Gorman’s Eurocentrism that goes unacknowledged in Dussel’s critique—will become the foundation of Amereida’s resolution to the problem of forming a noncolonial American culture that recognizes its colonial European inheritance.22

Coloniality, Settler Identity, and Amereida By the time Amereida is published, the mission of forming a continental American poetics of errantry had therefore become well-worn territory. The various figures discussed in this chapter from Darío to O’Gorman even had varying direct influence on the group responsible for Amereida: Godofredo Iommi was a student of Vicente Huidobro for a brief time; Claudio Girola interacted with the Art Concrete group in Buenos Aires (some of whose members had personally studied with Torres-García), and Torres-García’s inverted map of America is explicitly reproduced in the epic (though without acknowledging its author)23; while there is no definitive link between the group and José Martí, the only other instance I have discovered of Amereida’s esoteric phrase, “difficult trees” (4) is in Martí’s Nuestra América; and Edmundo O’Gorman’s work is repeatedly cited as an influence on Amereida. Despite these direct connections,

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what is more significant is the position of Amereida within this genealogy of Latin Americanist thinking. In other words, if one can trace an errant genealogy of Latin Americanist poetics since modernismo, one must now investigate how Amereida itself operates within this field. The opening section of Amereida places the epic directly within the lineage of José Martí. In Chapter 1, I quoted the passage from the opening section describing Columbus’s failure to arrive to America. In this passage, Amereida frames the American continent as the land that provides its donations, its terms, and its borders against the expectations and errant conceptual frameworks of European explorers; the epic explicitly distinguishes itself from the colonial task of “establish[ing] another alien world as the dominant order” (Byrd 2011: 64). Martí’s focus on a “country’s natural elements” that distinguish it from others is mirrored in Amereida’s particularism. Where Martí and Amereida differ, however, is in the latter’s claim that the destiny of the particularity of the American continent can only be revealed poetically. That is, while the epic locates itself directly within the logic of Martí—to govern well, one must “balance the country’s natural elements”—it has shifted focus from the governor setting the destiny of the American community to the poet, thereby distancing the poet from the State while celebrating the former.24 This opening section also distances Amereida from what may appear as the poem’s most obvious influence: Vicente Huidobro. Given both that Huidobro was the principal figure in Chilean avant-garde poetry and that Iommi personally knew Huidobro, it might lead one to immediately assume that the epic would develop a Huidobrian poetics. The distinction between Huidobro and Amereida can be seen in their respective visions of nature. Amereida is centrally concerned with the poetic illumination and revelation of the unique natural elements of South America. Throughout the epic appear various flora, fauna, and natural phenomena that are endemic to this continent as well as nature-words that are particular to the Spanish language: gannets (alcatraces, 59); médanos (usually translated as “sand-dune,” this particular type of smaller sand dune appears outside of Latin America but is a particular word to the Spanish language, 11); river-basins where multiple rivers meet (cuencas, 131, 133); maizales, yuca, batatas, ajues (162); and the New World dove (torcaza, 64). More precisely, as Sergio Elórtegui (see Chapter 6) pointed out to me in conversation, these words are adaptations of errant Spanish terms to a New World reality for which that language was unprepared. Huidobro, on the other hand, rejects nature as it appears, focusing instead on the creation of a new nature. As he puts it, “The poet creates outside of the world that exists that which ought to

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exist. I have a right to want to see a flower that walks or a flock of sheep crossing a rainbow” (Huidobro 1963: 654). This conflict between Huidobro’s creation of a new nature and Amereida’s revelation of the distinguishing features of the American continent’s natural elements separate the two frameworks. Against Huidobro, it seems that Amereida is more in line with the work of Alejo Carpentier, reflecting his idea that a particular literary and artistic mode of expression and form will emerge organically from terrestrial qualities of the American continent. Similar to Carpentier, Amereida contains a passage in which an unnamed first-person narrator encounters “the marvelous” at a South American circus where circus posters are painted with a background that “turn[s] so vertiginously” (105). This conceptual convergence with Carpentier is complicated, however, when Amereida claims that these circus-poster painters learned their craft by imitating European painters (104). Within this logic, European painters are not making a cheap knock-off of the American marvelous, as Carpentier claims, but rather the opposite. Amereida concludes, however, that within imitations, “is given an act that goes beyond imitation” (105). As such, it appears that Amereida is also operating within a logic similar to that of Rubén Darío: Latin American artistic and literary forms are renovated through an engagement with European artistic and literary techniques. Indeed, if the epic opens (3–21) by emphasizing the failure of colonial explorers to accept what the American continent offers, the section immediately following shifts course noting that they have inherited the boundary that “here europe gave us / the ancient robbery / . . . / the heritage gives course / transforms the water into river / released / to the adventure of the channel or disappearance / what do we inherit / dawned on this border?” (26–27) In other words, this 1967 epic claims that Martí’s Latin Americanism is naïve at best: a settler American culture can never blossom immediately from the “natural elements” of the continent since the conceptual tools used to produce that culture arrived via European colonialism. Amereida focuses on the dilemma of forming a Latin Americanism around the errantry of European cultural formations that come into contact with a “New World” and that need to be decolonially renegotiated; the hope for a totally autonomous cultural foundation is dispensed with outright. Amereida is therefore aligning itself both with the lineages of Darío and Martí. For instance, one section of the epic describes the inventory of everything brought on the voyage through America (51–61) and the revelatory experience of a trip through Europe (62–70). This “travel” section circles around the tension buried in this apparently contradictory alignment of different ways of resolving the errantry embedded in the

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epic’s Latin Americanist vision. If the section opens by listing the necessary items for a voyage through the American continent—thereby mirroring similar lists found in European epics25—it quickly changes course and discusses “a turnaround in hearing in Europe” (viraje de oír en Europa) where “life sprouted” (63). The poem does not stop there, claiming, how many french invocations but if we confine it to only its noise the language would be returned foreign what gratitude but a poem by french sounds in alliance with pure phonemes from here—bouglainval and cerqueux—would not be sufficient. (65)

While deemed insufficient in itself, the poem argues for the renovation of American poetry by pushing its phonemes through the sieve of the French language. Even a trip to France for artistic or literary growth has a long history in Chilean avant-gardes, with trips to Europe for art students becoming commonplace starting around 1912 (Lizama 2003: 15).26 If Amereida follows in the path of Martí, it simultaneously aligns itself with the lineage of Darío and the Francophilia of early twentieth-century Chilean avant-gardes. The question therefore becomes how Amereida reconciles these two apparently contradictory strands of theorizing Latin American errantry. This reconciliation, I argue, occurs via the poetic act of naming. A little more than halfway through the epic, Amereida calls for a specific theorization of language “fully enrolled in the environment of arriving a word that as a result could not appear as a remedy that arrives in order to cure a sickness already declared like a word-response” (126). To explain this theory of language, Amereida compares it to a paratrooper who, upon approaching the earth, has to take a position to receive it, so that it receives the paratrooper and does not break their body (126). In other words, language becomes that which accepts the arrival of the earth. That such a reception of the earth is necessary is heralded by the criticism of Columbian coloniality in the pages of Amereida: the naming of the land from preconceived notions is a geo-epistemic equivalent to colonial domination. This epic’s theory of naming effectively codes a critique of the invasion and genocide of and land theft from Indigenous communities and points towards a rethinking of Indigenous-settler relations outside of the contours of such coloniality. Immediately following this passage is then asked the following question, “but then / how are there names?” Such a question points to a potential limitation of the theory of language outlined only moments earlier: If one must wait for the arrival of the earth, then how can one create a word with which to name an object? How can one name an

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object that appears without such an act being “like a word-response”? Answering this question, Amereida directly quotes and comments on various colonial-era histories of the New World that regale the reader with stories of how various places on the American continent received their settler names. An example and description of this process is provided in the discussion of how the country of Peru came to receive its name in a quotation of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Commentaries: its own name

saying

berú

and added another

and said

pelú... the christians understood conforming to their desire imagining that the indian had understood and responded in turn as if he and they had spoken in spanish and from that time that was the year fifteen fifteen or sixteen they called that rich and great empire perú corrupting both names as the spaniards corrupt almost all vocables that they take from the language of the indians (137)

Mark Thurner (2009) has read this passage as it appears in Garcilaso’s text as a representation of the experience of the “founding abyss of colonial and postcolonial history” (62) that “disrupts the intelligibility of signs and opens a gaping, or in Badiou’s terms, nameless ‘ontological fissure’ or ‘destructure’ in the existing structure of experience and discourse” (47). Even further, he notes that this shift from “Beru” to “Peru” within Garcilaso’s hybrid commentary-historical discourse—Garcilaso de la Vega operates in a space between historical representation and com-

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mentary that shifts smoothly between the historical present (“saying beru”), the past tense (“Christians understood”), and the present tense (“as the Spaniards corrupt”)—marks the shift from an Incan ethnoterritorial identity to a Peruvian one marked by colonial domination (54– 56). Expanding Thurner’s analysis, it might be said that Garcilaso de la Vega prefigures a troubling mestizaje marked by: the fragmentary presence of Indigenous languages in Latin American cultural formations, the rem(a)inder of colonial domination, the abyss of the conquest, and the (false) presumption of the disappearance of “Original Peoples”— that is, Indigenous communities and persons are the “Original Peoples” of the American continent who no longer exist (Saldaña-Portillo 2001; Stephenson 2001). Through its use of historico-commentary discourse and of switching between tenses, the Peruvian identity outlined in Gracilaso de la Vega’s representation of the naming of Peru is one that acknowledges both its hybrid Peruvian identity and violent colonial past—the name of Peru contains an Indigenous word while testifying to the colonial position of settlers—while relegating Indigenous identity to history books. Amereida departs from this mode of identity formation by placing its own commentary on top of Garcilaso de la Vega’s, but nothing is corrupted if on the adventure a language announces that which one hears and another word is born. (137)

If one follows Margarita Zamora’s (2009) thesis that Garcilaso de la Vega’s tripartite use of epic, historical, and commentary discourse functions to distinguish between conquest and colonialism—celebrating the former through its epic rhetoric while critiquing the latter through its commentary on historical events—then it appears that Amereida through its own invocation of the epic voice not only maintains Garcilaso de la Vega’s troubling celebration of the conquest but also removes the anticolonial undercurrent of his work by claiming that “nothing is corrupted.” Yet one must note the careful use of the present tense in Amereida’s commentary on Garcilaso de la Vega’s commentary. This passage’s temporal flattening through the singular use of the simple present serves to lift the settler-Indigenous encounter out of the past and place it into the present. The narrative of conquest and colonization as singular events in the past that erased Indigenous identity and led to the construction of a new

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hybrid American identity is eschewed in favor of an identity formation in which colonial settler and colonized Indigenous identities are continuously reproduced in the present day, thereby making (de)coloniality an active and contemporary process and structure. As Arnold Hirsch once commented, “More than a simple legacy of the past, the contemporary [US] ghetto appeared a dynamic institution that was continually being renewed, reinforced, and reshaped” (1983: xii); Amereida argues that the same can be said today about the colonization of Indigenous communities in Abya Yala. Within Amereida, Latin American identity is forced not merely to acknowledge its abyssal colonial foundation that lies in the past, but to decolonially reconfigure itself in the present. For this reason, a refrain appears repeatedly through Amereida, “tomorrow we depart to roam across [recorrer] america”; the opportunity to engage in a decolonial encounter and quest of the American continent (i.e., to shift away from a colonial invasion and conquest) exists today. Even further, in this commentary the act of naming is redefined as a triple process: listening to the other, enunciating what one hears in an errant language, and self-critically reflecting on the equivocation of the slippage between the other’s language and one’s own errant language. Naming is no longer a process of representation, but rather it is a consequence of: 1.) the encounter of one representational framework with an other reality and representational framework, 2.) the attempt to hear the alterity of that other framework and reality, and 3.) the self-critical deand re-construction of one’s own representational framework in order to be able to hear that alterity—a de- and re-construction that is never complete. Naming thereby comes to be a poetic process of improvisation, or as it is put earlier in the poem, perhaps the work hic et nunc let us say improvised which means made right there and not without preparation nor preparative and with all the time that one wants can marry the earth with the name it is this local celebration poetry the poetic act. (78)

In an improvised poetic act one hears the earth and Indigenous representations of the earth and then, using one’s errant language, gives name to that place through the poetic revelation of its particular qualities. The answer to the question of “how are there names?” (126) in a theory of language “fully enrolled in the environment of arriving” is simple: the improvisatory poetic act. In Amereida, naming is the poetic act in the decolonial interregnum in which one hears the other. Within this theorization we can now understand Amereida’s embrace of the name, “America,” as the signifier that gives name to the interrup-

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tion of a European mode of logic by Abya Yala; the epic implies that the term, “America,” has significance only in reference to a European colonial heritage. The authors are therefore not arguing for the (colonial) replacement of the various Indigenous names for the continent such as Abya Yala (Muyolema 2001), but instead they struggle with their own particular and provincial problem of addressing their position as inheritors of settler colonial legacies. To this end the epic quotes Amerigo Vespucci’s desire to trace the firmament of South America that differs from that of the northern hemisphere: it is an affirmative presence—one can see and trace the Southern Cross in the heavens—while also being that which is marked by its newness to an errant settler culture and unthinkable outside of that culture—he understands this new celestial body by quoting a passage from Dante’s Divine Comedy. In Amereida, this affirmative presence is not merely the “natural” landscape of the American continent but is the socioecological systems of Indigenous communities. For instance, one explicit example that Amereida provides of “living and constructing” in the American continent is an Indigenous community’s urban and architectural forms enmeshed in a forest ecosystem (162). If European settlers frequently thought of Latin America as “an empty landscape, as if the indigenous inhabitants did not exist” (Franco 2002: 154), Amereida divests from this tradition. Although Amereida repeatedly claims that America is abyssal, apparently reproducing the ideology Jean Franco identifies, this abyss is never seen as a lack or deficiency but rather as that affirmative presence which unsettles settler epistemocultural foundations. It might therefore be perceived that through this reading of Amereida I am following a tendency to repackage settler colonialism as a “cultural encounter” or “dialogue,” instead of what it really was and is: a “genocidal policy” directed at Indigenous peoples (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014: 6). Yet my reading is arguing the opposite: the recognition that settler colonialism is not an irreparable event of the past but is a structure continually reproduced in the present and thereby demands active decoloniality. Even further, Amereida proposes that for those coming from a settler position one has no choice but to confront the inheritance of a colonial epistemology. As Gayatri Spivak argues, “our sense of critique is too thoroughly determined by Kant, Hegel, and Marx for us to be able to reject them as ‘motivated imperialists,’ although this is too often the vain gesture performed by critics of imperialism. A deconstructive politics of reading would acknowledge the determination as well as the imperialism and see if the magisterial texts can now be servants, as the new magisterium constructs itself in the name of the Other” (1999: 6–7). My reading of Amereida argues that the settler sense of an American iden-

Refashioning Latin Americanism 65

tity is too thoroughly determined by the claims of colonial chroniclers to be able to simply dismiss them, and we (those coming from a settler lettered-city positionality) must instead poetically open an interpretive space from within those texts in order to be able to forge social relations other than those of coloniality. This, then, lies at the core of Amereida’s citation of and commentary on colonial-era chronicles: to place them in the temporal present and call on a settler American audience to poetically deconstruct the epistemological frameworks that prevent a decolonial intercultural encounter.27 As Spivak has described this method of deconstruction, “The challenge of deconstruction is not to excuse, but to suspend accusation to examine with painstaking care if the protocols of the text contains a moment that can produce something that will generate a new and useful reading” (1999: 98). Amereida provocatively calls on us to apply a poetic deconstruction to the coloniality of the chronicles, to examine with painstaking care if the protocols of these texts contain decolonial moments. Amereida’s relationship with Indigeneity is therefore double-edged. First, the absolute otherness of Indigenous communities within the pages of the epic reflects the processes of Orientalism exposed by Edward Said’s foundational work on postcolonialism. For instance, what would Amereida make of those cultural forms that demonstrate “partial connections” between European settlers and Abya Yalan Indigenous communities rather than their absolute difference (de la Cadena 2015): La Malinche’s interculturality (Pérez 1999); Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s (2012) argument that Incan cities embodied an early modernity; the “hybrid cultures” of late twentieth-century Indigenous communities (García Canclini 1989); Evo Morales becoming the first Aymara president of the Bolivian State; El Alto’s cholo identity (the ethnocultural category used “to describe an Indian who has moved to the city and who is therefore somewhere between Indian and mestizo”) (Lazar 2008: 16); Zapatistas “claiming rights to [Mexican] citizenship as Indians” (Saldaña-Portillo 2001: 403); George Copway’s Indigenous cosmopolitanism and modernity (Lyons 2017); a contributor to The Last Days of Shishmaref announcing, “I am an Inupiaq, I am a full-blooded Eskimo, and I am also American” (Louter 2008); and so forth?28 Following Jodi Byrd (2011: 71), Amereida reproduces a colonial assumption of “an inherent stability in the ‘Indian’”; while the European settler is errant, the Indian tends to be fixed in place, becoming a foil against which to theorize an American identity.29 Nonetheless, Amereida does not reproduce the colonial tendency to refer to Indigenous communities as an undifferentiated other, given that the epic is highly aware of the distinctions between and within Indigenous communities in Abya Yala. What is explored in the 1967 epic

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is the struggle to place errant European frameworks into decolonial dialogue with these various distinct communities “with their own laws, customs, languages, and orderings of the world” (Byrd 2011: 64), an encounter with alterity that is decoupled from the expression of “dissimilarity” in terms of “lack or deficiency” that is found in many colonial texts (Zamora 1991: 132). This leads to the second edge: unlike Said’s critique of Orientalism, there is no attempt in Amereida to represent or speak for Indigenous communities. Indeed, this 1967 avant-garde epic is not devoted to an “Indigenism” (indigenismo), as Iommi would later state explicitly (1984 [1978]: 6), but is instead interested in decolonizing and unsettling settler positionality.30 If the poem argues for a mestizaje, as it seems to at certain points, it is not one of a mixture of Indigenous and settler elements into a new identity that eliminates those previous identities, but rather an American identity based on the destabilization and decolonization of settler positionality through hearing the other in the poetic decolonial interregnum.

Conclusion As this chapter has argued, Amereida can be viewed as part and parcel of a genealogy of Latin Americanist thinking on the possibility and coherence of a settler American cultural identity built around errantry. What is unique about Amereida is how it synthesizes these various strands of thought into a decolonial turn on the transatlantic encounter: transforming the colonial conquest into a decolonial quest. After critiquing the first colonialist invasion of the American continent, Amereida proposes an alternative encounter that rejects colonialist domination of the land and instead proposes a poetic illumination and acceptance of the American continent. What must now be noted of this argument is the problems of this particular vision of Latin Americanism as well as just how much I have left out in the genealogy. For instance, in addition to what has been discussed here there is a world of significant literary figures in this discussion that need to be addressed: Borges’s “The Argentinian Writer and Tradition,” José Lezama Lima’s (1993 [1957]) La expresión americana, Fernando Ortiz’s (1995 [1940]) theorization of transculturation in Cuban Counterpoint, and so on. The goal of this chapter has not been to respond to all of these connections, instead focusing on reorienting analyses of Amereida towards its status as a literary text as well as towards its engagement with ideas from and about Latin Americanism. One must further critically comment on two elements of this conclusion. First, Amereida’s imagining of an American identity as the conse-

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quence of the decolonial interruption of Eurocentric ways of thinking cannot make room for Afrolatinx Americans or Indigenous individuals who are within the lettered city. In this way, Dussel’s critique of O’Gorman’s Eurocentrism still does in some way hold for Amereida: if being American is tied to the irruption of the New World, then this irruption is only significant for those with a European settler heritage, thereby apparently disqualifying Afrolatinx and Indigenous peoples from an American identity. The question one must ask is: does Amereida attempt to define the American identity or an American identity? While I already discussed this problem of the relationship between Amereida’s conceptions of settler and Indigenous identity in this chapter, I would like to comment here that the relationship with Afrolatinx identity is a minor, though present, element of the epic. On the one hand, Afrolatinx ways of knowing seem to be, similar to that of Indigenous communities’ ways of knowing, a constitutive difference of Amereida’s Latin Americanism. For instance, in the epic’s citation of Os Sertões, European epistemologies are disrupted by the silence of a soon-to-be executed Afrolatinx revolutionary (159–60). Through this citation, Afrolatinx subjectivity appears to be that which cannot be expressed within, and which thereby disrupts, a dominating colonial epistemology.31 On the other hand, part of the epic’s formation of an American cultural identity includes an examination of the work of the Afrolatinx sculptor, Aleijadinho. In addition, Godofredo Iommi’s and Gerardo Mello Mourão’s (who aided in writing some parts of Amereida) early poetry was done as part of a group, Holy Brotherhood of the Orchid, in which Abdias do Nascimento, the Pan-African activist who founded Black Experimental Theater in Brazil, participated and during which had a revelation about the intersection of anti-Black racism and theatrical performance in Latin America. This relationship with Abdias do Nascimento, a key Brazilian anti-racist artist of the twentieth century, has been entirely overlooked in discussions of the Open City and the poetry of Godofredo Iommi. Nonetheless, although Amereida struggles with the conceptualization of an American identity split between its inheritance of colonial European cultural forms and its attempt to form a decolonial relationship with the American continent, the position of Afrolatinx subjectivity within this theorization is insecure: neither inside nor outside, neither a constitutive other nor part of the same. Although (at least some) writers of Amereida were highly aware of anti-Black racism in Latin America, the relationship between Blackness and Latin Americanism in Amereida is, at best, unresolved and, at worst, the foundation for renewed racial exclusion: as a non-Indigenous colonized subject position (an arrivant position to use Kamau Braithwaite’s terminology), Amereida makes no clear space within its framework for Blackness in

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Latin America or for Afrolatinx poetics and ways of knowing. Amereida seems to reproduce a vision of Afrolatinx individuals as “historical minorities whose presence is not contested but whose entire belonging to the nation remains ambiguous” (Mbembe 2017: 176). As such, it should be noted that Amereida fails to cite works published prior to Amerieda, such as Candelario Obeso’s Cantos populares de mi tierra (2010 [1877], Popular Cantos of My Land), which reflect on the relationship between Blackness and a Latin American identity. Second, the genealogy of this chapter has largely ignored the voices of women with the exception of Suzanne Cesáire in addition to contemporary theorists.32 This is intentional: I am presenting the genealogy of Amereida, not the diverse and fractured genealogy of the formation of an American identity starting in the sixteenth century and continuing to today. Going through Amereida, the reader will notice that while women’s names often appear in lists throughout the epic, only one woman receives sustained attention in the entirety of the epic—and then only appears to be gazed upon as a passive object by the male poet (82)—no woman ever speaks, and only one woman poet is ever cited (Juana Inés de la Cruz, although it should be noted that the English scholar of Iranian languages and Zoroastrianism, Mary Beauce, is also cited; 66–67). To state it most polemically: if the goal of Amereida is to find the poetic voice of the American continent, this voice is apparently masculine. The goal of this chapter has been to lay out the intellectual genealogy of Amereida. To examine the gaps and weaknesses of this genealogy is a necessary task, since, as Celia de Zapata was already arguing in 1975, the inclusion of women in the Latin American literary canon would demand a reconstitution of its literary genealogy, history, and identity. Even further, Margarita Zamora (1991) demonstrates how literature of the conquest such as Columbus’s letters required a “gender-specific” discursive construction of the otherness of the New World in which feminized “virgin” land was imagined as exploitable for the violent invading male conqueror, a gendered aspect of the quest/conquest dialectic that remains ignored in the 1967 epic.33 Indeed, Jean Franco’s (2002: 137) note that in novels from the Latin American boom, “the figure of woman invariably threatens the male subject’s integrity and hence the integrity of the alternative community,” seems to apply just as well to Amereida. As I will discuss more fully in Chapter 4, however, this does not necessarily transfer over to the Open City where women played and play a central role in its development and maintenance. To say that the Open City is a reflection of the masculinity of Amereida is therefore to leave unacknowledged the processes of the translation, interpretation, appropriation, employment, and deployment of this modern epic at the City.

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It will be the argument of this book that the poetic methodology opened in Amereida—the poetic as the discursive space of the interregnum in which to hear the other—provides the basis for forming a mode of living in common that includes those excluded within the pages of this epic. It is towards this figuration of “the poetic,” in contrast to the poem of Amereida, that the next chapter turns. Notes 1. A description of the somewhat chaotic planning process of this trip can be found in José Vial’s (1965) letter to Francisco Méndez. 2. All citations of Amereida in this chapter are from Amereida Group (1991a [1967]). I do not include the year in parenthetical citations for ease of reading. 3. Mariano Siskind (2014) outlines this conflict in terms of a particularist Latin American identitarian politics versus a cosmopolitan “desire for the world.” He notes that he is not the first to struggle with this problem in Latin America, with Ángel Rama’s (1982) theorization of transculturation being a significant milestone against which Siskind sets his ideas. A justification of terminology regarding mestizo is necessary. First, to use the word mestizo, as Mignolo (2000: 14–15) argues, is to invoke a problematic racial imagination in which an American culture is naturalized via miscegenation. It is for this reason that many have rethought the idea of mestizaje without such racial connotations (Mignolo 2000; Dussel 2000, 2002). Recognizing and agreeing with these critiques, the term “mestizo” is maintained due to its use by Martí as well as later by Mariátegui. I am following the intellectual genealogy of Amereida, and all of its problematic vocabulary, not the needed reformation of these ideas later in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 4. I would like to note the absence of any discussion of East Asian immigration in Amereida and in many decolonial theories of Latin America, which tend to focus on transatlantic dialogues. This is a massively underresearched element that requires further examination. 5. A full annotation of Amereida identifying these sources has been done by Valentina Pérez (2011). 6. For a more recent investigation into the matter see de Asúa and French (2005). 7. For more on this Statist relationship to nature see Scott (1999), Grove (1995), and Griffiths and Robin (1997). 8. This theoretical idea that discussions of nature are related to the conceptual formation of communalities is indebted to the work of Erik Swyngedouw (1999). 9. In this instance, culture is defined as “an environment, process, and hegemony in which individuals (in their private circumstances) and their works are embedded, as well as overseen at the top by a superstructure and at the base by a whole series of methodological attitudes” (Said 1983: 8), thereby

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

Politics of the Dunes

making culture “a system of exclusions legislated from above but enacted throughout its polity, by which such things as anarchy, disorder, irrationality, inferiority, bad taste, and immorality are identified, then deposited outside the culture and kept there by the power of the State and its institutions” (11). Of course Indigenous subjects were more than capable of navigating this cultural field as well, as Guaman Poma’s elegant use of European literary and artistic conventions makes clear (Adorno 2000). Yet as Rolena Adorno’s discussion of the reception of Guaman Poma’s text also demonstrates, even when Indigenous subjects expertly navigate and engage this culture, their works are dismissed as inferior. The right to navigate this hegemonic epistemo-cultural framework was monopolized by colonial functionaries. Many interpretations argue that Ercilla’s comparison between Indigenous communities and the heroes of the Aeneid functions to project “an image, a landscape, and even an Arcadia over the territory and its people” (Casals and Chiuminatto 2016: 194). The argument of this chapter, following Marisol de la Cadena’s (2015) phrasing, is that these comparisons to Europe do indeed contain these imperial functions, “but not only.” This thinking through of errantry in terms of relation is thanks to the discussion by Édouard Glissant (1997). This is a commentary on Westphalian, Eurocentric colonial nation-states. As Dunbar-Ortiz summarizes, “the Indigenous concept of nation and sovereignty is quite distinct from the Western model of the state as the final arbiter of decision making, based on police enforcement” (2014: 203). Beverley shies away from this position. More recently, for instance, he asks bluntly, “Does the critique of the state in subaltern studies and postmodernist social theory generally rule out in advance the possibility of occupying the transforming the state from subaltern-popular positions?” (2011: 123). His answer is explicitly no. The critique of the “anti-Americanism” of Darío has a long tradition dating back to José Rodó’s (1899) claims of “the entirely anti-American Poetry of Darío.” This choice of Huidobro and Vallejo, in addition to being the classic canonical division, is chosen for a specific purpose: it is likely a binary that was operational at the formation of the Open City (Sanfuentes 2018). For more about this relationship between Huidobro, coloniality, and cubism see Woods (2018b). This influence of Marxism within Latin America, in addition to other non-European contexts, still presents a theoretical problem (Fernández Retamar 1978: 40–41; Mignolo 2000: 62–63; Chakrabarty 2000a: 47–71). Siskind (2014) provides a thorough history of this genre and how Carpentier arrived to it through transatlantic conversations. For a summary of Carpentier’s Latin Americanism see de la Campa (1999). This position continues the troubling tradition of imagining an American culture based on the integration of cultural elements of ancestral “Original

Refashioning Latin Americanism 71

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

Peoples” and never their current social, cultural, artistic, and political activities (Saldaña-Portillo 2001). The distinction between Vespucci and Columbus, which plays a central role in O’Gorman and Amereida, “is a cliché of Americanist literature” (Gerbi 1985: 35). This analysis is also indebted to Mignolo (2005b: 2–10, 33), insofar as he demonstrates through a reading of O’Gorman how “‘Discovery’ is the dominant, imperial version of what happened . . . , while ‘invention’ opens the window of possibility for decolonizing knowledge.” For a full discussion of the link between Amereida and Torres-García, see Jolly (2007). For the influence of Art Concrete on members of the Open City see Crispiani (2010). The “governor” receives brief mention in Amereida (68). This figure, however, emerges after poetic revelation to “help the people.” Those at the Open City, particularly Professor Isabel Reyes Nettle, have noted in personal conversation such lists in Homeric epics. These lists do not stop there. For example, there is a long tradition of tree lists in epics that continue through James Joyce’s Ulysses (Sandquist 1996). Much has been made of Godofredo Iommi’s travel to France during the 1960s and earlier. What I am pointing to here is that this speaks not necessarily to a directly French character of his poetry, but rather to a particularly American relationship to France that has a long history within Latin American poetics. As an example, I am thinking here of the Maori poet, Robert Sullivan (2013: 66), and his deconstruction of representations of Maori canoes by settler ethnographer, Elsdon Best. To be fair to Amereida, they were not alone in maintaining this strict binary between the lettered city and Indigenous communities. For instance, the Indigenous Aymara decolonial intellectual, Fausto Reinaga, made the same claim in his 1970 manifesto, The Indian Revolution, with regards to a perceived diametrically oppositional relationship between “the Indian” and “the West.” Indeed, it was Orin Starn’s insight in “Missing the Revolution” (1991) that many intellectuals’ failure to foresee the Shining Path’s 1980 insurrection in Peru was a consequence of a generalized inability to perceive the fluid relations between the countryside and the city, between Indigenous and settler identities. Amereida’s manichean thinking was common during the period. There is one instant in Amereida where it appears that Americans are defined as “immigrants / children of immigrants / mestizos / or aborigines” (27). If throughout Amereida Indigenous peoples are defined as the other of European settlers, this one passage sits in contradiction to this. For a further discussion of Iommi’s exploration of what it means for nonIndigenous Americans to put themselves in relation to Indigenous literary forms, see “Nahuatl Ode of America” (as well as its introduction) and “America, My Americas” in America, Americas Mías by Godofredo Iommi (2018).

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31. Amereida is not alone in this regard. As Dirk Vanderbeke (2011) has argued, Herman Melville uses the silence of Black revolutionaries to signal a refusal to be spoken within a colonial language. Even further, it appears that Godofredo Iommi may have received this interpretation of da Cunha from Abdias do Nascimento or that this section was partially written by Mello Mourão (Larkin Nascimento 2014; Mello Mourão 1993). 32. I would like to note that Amereida is reproducing a persistent patriarchal literary vision within Latin Americanism (de Zapata 1975). For instance, Eduardo Mendieta’s “Re-Mapping Latin American Studies” (2005), Djelal Kadir’s Questing Fictions (1986), and Román de la Campa’s Latin Americanism (1999) are all almost exclusively male-centered. This is not an excuse but quite the opposite: a broad-based critique of discussions of Latin Americanism that fail to reflect on the gendered status of the field. 33. For more on this relationship, in addition to the coloniality of gender, see the work of Anne McClintock (1995) and María Lugones (2007, 2008, 2010).

[• Chapter 3 •]

The Eruption of the Political? Politics, the Political, Hospitality, and the Foundation of the Open City

One of the reasons behind this [Dubreuil’s] book is to help us understand what I am calling apolitics, this desire for an outside— liveable, intermittent—that neither condemns to indifference nor is doomed fatally to consolidate the empire. It is up to us to give voice to this search for a liveable life that no politics could claim to build without destroying it immediately, without dissolving it in the process of organising places and powers. —Laurent Dubreuil, The Refusal of Politics

L

aurent Dubreuil’s (2016) call for an apolitics in many ways underlies the thinking of this book. His thesis defines politics as the attempt to establish a collective order and thereby regulate the sociality of the collective. In this way, Dubreuil argues, politics is “bound within a collective postulation of a totalising organisation of life” (11) and authoritarianism is in fact “of the same essence as politics” (21). Dubreuil thereby categorically rejects the thesis that “everything is political” and that the movement towards a more desirable society must be accomplished through acting within the field of politics. Dubreuil’s book, however, is marked not only by his refusal of politics but by his refusal to provide any concrete example of apolitics. This is demonstrable, for example, in his rejection of architecture, “Quite often, regretfully, ordinary architecture has nothing of the secondary. It is the product of official terms and conditions, without thought, at times with cut corners and a ‘signature’” (62). He is effectively claiming that architecture functions to reinscribe politics, to re-establish and reproduce order itself by spatially binding together a totalizing organization of life. Following this framework, architectural spatialization cannot engage apolitics and the Open City is fundamentally misguided.

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Dubreuil can therefore be understood as a jumping off point for this chapter in which I argue that the Open City demonstrates a poetic mode of living in common otherwise than politics. The Open City is therefore between Dubreuil’s apolitics—it similarly rejects politics, the political, the demand for a total ordering of life—while also inserting the critique of coloniality into this discussion and trying to spatially activate a poetic mode of living in common otherwise than the colonial nation-state. Beginning with a theorization of politics, the political, and the social through an engagement with the thinking of Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, this chapter will then outline the single entrance into the field of the political by those who would eventually found the Open City through the university reform movement. Subsequently, I will outline how the Open City came to form a poetic urban body that operates otherwise than that of politics. This chapter therefore follows in the footsteps of Dubreuil—rejecting politics as the proper field for creating a livable life in common—but seeks to move beyond his refusal to theorize affirmative conceptions of a sociality otherwise than politics by conceptualizing the Open City’s vision of a poetic political nonpolitics.

Politics and the Political In Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (2007 [1932]) and in Chantal Mouffe’s recent more thorough theorizations (1993, 2005) via her readings of Schmitt’s work, one finds a distinction between the concepts of politics and the political. As Mouffe writes: More precisely this is how I distinguish between “the political” and “politics”: by “the political” I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by “politics” I mean the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political . . . [P]olitical questions are not mere technical issues to be solved by experts. Properly political questions always involve decisions which require us to make a choice between conflicting alternatives. (2005: 9–10)

In other words, as Mouffe explains elsewhere in On the Political (2005), whereas politics is the liberal practice of arriving to a consensus through free debate and compromise in a public forum, the political is a process of hegemonic institution in which an alternative vision of a life in common is installed within a given territory.1 In this way, Mouffe (2005: 25)

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returns to Schmitt’s idea that the political is based on a we/them distinction, in which politicization requires “the production of a conflictual representation of the world, with opposed camps with which people can identify.” As such, Mouffe is centrally concerned with the formation of collective identities around which a coherent politicized “we” can be formed, and which can fight for hegemonic dominance. Mouffe is also clear that the political is distinct from the social. She argues that whereas the political is linked to acts of hegemonic institution, “the social is the realm of sedimented practices, that is, practices that conceal the originary acts of their contingent political institution and which are taken for granted, as if they were self-grounded” (Mouffe 2005: 17). To summarize this politics/political/social triad as theorized by Mouffe: politics is the process whereby individuals come to the public forum to arrive at a group consensus through free dialogue—a process that, Mouffe demonstrates, ignores the significance of collective identities; the political is the process whereby a “we” fights for hegemonic institution and control within State apparatuses; and the social is the set of everyday practices that constitute and reproduce the collective identity of a “we.” As this politics/political/social triad demonstrates, and as critical readings of Mouffe have claimed, her definition requires political activity—of both politics and the political—to occur within or around State institutions (Laurie 2013: 77). Within this theorization, the voice of the political unifies a collective identity that subsequently coercively dictates the organization of human coexistence from within a State apparatus.2 Jacques Rancière (2010: 43) has argued that this emplacement of the political within the realm of the State is in fact the suppression of the political insofar as it forgets that “the social is by no means a particular sphere of existence but instead a disputed object of politics.” Rancière’s vision of political activity is located precisely in this space that Mouffe dismisses as “the social.” For instance, although he critiques liberal politics as the evasion of the political in a manner similar to Mouffe, he distances himself from Mouffe’s conceptualization of the political in terms of hegemonic institution through struggles for power within State institutions, “Politics, when identified with the exercise of power and the struggle for its possession, is dispensed with from the outset” (Rancière 2010: 27). Instead, Rancière imagines an alternative mode of politics organized around a struggle over what he calls “the distribution of the sensible,” What really deserves the name of politics is the cluster of perceptions and practices that shape this common world. Politics is first of all a way

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of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition [or distribution] of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. (2010: 152)

Politics, according to Rancière, is the process of dividing a social landscape into a series of identifiable and sensible parts that are then occupied by subjects who only become sensible within these individual partitions. In this way, politics is fundamentally concerned with this distribution of the sensible, with the process of determining who and where one can be seen and known. We can therefore speak of both an aesthetics of politics (the political construction of a “we” based on a shared sense perception and on the coherence of a social whole composed of an identifiable and sensible division of the social landscape) as well as a politics of aesthetics (works of art aid in creating and reproducing that distribution of the sensible in so far as they affect our shared sense perception). Rancière thereby distances himself from claims that the political is centrally located within the realm of the State. The theoretical consequence, as Rancière (2010: 152) continues, is that the politics of art has nothing to do with the politics of its artists and “does not deal with their personal commitment to the social and political issues and struggles of their times.” Instead, art does politics through its intervention in the distribution of the sensible. The politics of art (and literature, architecture, music, dance, etc.) is tied to its ability to reproduce, disrupt, reinforce, destabilize, and transform the distribution of the sensible, which produces groups tied to specific functions, places in which these functions are practiced, and modes of life in common that correspond to these functions and places (36). Whereas Rancière calls those artists and officials who reproduce, enforce, and reinforce a given distribution of the sensible the police, those who rupture this distribution of the sensible, in effect making sensible and visible those who are “without part” (36) within this distribution—that is, those who do not correspond to any of the functions and places made visible and known within a given hegemonic distribution of the sensible—are engaging in what Rancière calls politics. For Rancière (2010: 37), politics therefore consists in dissensus, in “in re-figuring space, that is in what is to be done, to be seen, and to be named in it.” Rancière (2010: 38) is also clear that this dissensual rupturing is not a counter-hegemonic activity but is instead “the demonstration of a gap in the sensible itself.” Rancière posits that the political is a demonstration from within a given distribution of the sensible that said distribution

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contains a void, a supplement that has no part within that distribution. This void, this gap within the distribution of the sensible is not a “we” or an alternative hegemonic force; instead it is that which, to borrow phrasing from Amereida, bursts in and, oblivious to hope, vexes all intents to produce a seamless distribution of the sensible. This dialectical struggle between the formation of consensus—the stable partitioning of the sensible into a set of accepted and identifiable subject positions, functions, and places—and dissensus—the interruption of that partitioning of the sensible by opening this void in which the part without part is made known and sensible—underlies Rancière’s envisioning of the relation between politics and aesthetics. Both Mouffe’s and Rancière’s positions, however, falter within (post) colonial contexts. Indeed, a brief survey of their bibliographies demonstrates that they are primarily, though not exclusively, concerned with politics and aesthetics as they appear on the European continent.3 On the one hand, Mouffe’s focus on the formation of a coherent collective identity ignores that such coherence is often a colonial categorization that is disturbed through liberatory processes of hybridization, translation, interculturality, and transculturation, what Rafael PérezTorres (1995) has termed a “resistant multiculturalism.” As Homi Bhabha (1994: 115) argues, hybridized postcolonial thought resists imperialist logics by disrupting the authoritative “discriminatory knowledges” of colonial power, which function through the formation of unitary and nondialogic discourses “unmarked by the trace of difference,” by engaging in “mimicry and hybridization of those discourses.” As a result, some (post)colonial resistance is often founded on first identifying how any we/them distinction is inherently colonial and subsequently complicating any such “discriminatory knowledge.” In the case of Amereida, for instance, Mouffe’s vision of a seamless “we” cannot account for an unstable collective Latin Americanist identity in which errant European cultural formations come into (de)colonial contact with Indigenous communities. Similarly, Rancière (2010: 53) perceives dissensus as that which comes from within a society and never that which arrives from outside. For this reason, Rancière (2004: 41) theorizes utopia not as an alterity or a declaration of autonomy, but rather as the reconfiguration of the sensible in a way that illuminates what is unseen within a community. While such internal heterogeneity is not disputed, this ignores that one of Europe’s most powerful events of dissensus in terms of the rupturing of a shared distribution of the sensible was, as Chapter 2 argued, the European encounter with (i.e., invasion of ) Abya Yala. Moreover, Rancière argues that the irruption of the “not sensible” within a given distribution of the

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sensible exists to disturb consensus. Rancièran politics is the dialectic between con- and dissensus; a politics founded on the gap of the sensible—that is, the maintenance of the rupturing of the distribution of the sensible, the politico-aesthetic moment in which it becomes possible to sense and know that which was previously unsensible and unknown—is impossible for Rancière. Such an open society—open in the sense that the community remains permanently open to hear the other by building itself upon the void of the process of partitioning the sensible that makes dissensus possible—cannot be imagined within Rancière’s dialectic of con/dissensus.4 As we will see, the Open City proposes organizing a society precisely on this opening, this gap of the sensible itself which they call “the poetic”: the Open City as a poetic political nonpolitics of the abyss in which one can hear the other. As such, one should expect that at the Open City the sensible is constantly in the (continuously unstable) process of being partitioned: there is no politics (a struggle for position within a given distribution of the sensible or within State apparatuses) nor is there the political (the act of dissensus or counter-hegemonic insurgency that ruptures that distribution) because the poetic space on which the Open City is founded is located on that opening dislocated from the stable distribution of the sensible in which the other—the part without part in a distribution of the sensible—can be heard. For Rancière, this idea of the poetic—that abyssal space in which it becomes possible to hear otherness—is that which leads to dissensus; for the Open City it is the basis of their life in common.

On University Politics Soon after the publication of Amereida in May 1967, those involved in both the production of the avant-garde epic and the School of Architecture at PUCV undertook their next project: university reform. Although the university reform movement would start at PUCV, it would not be limited to this school, with students and faculty from across the nation proposing a common goal: the democratization of higher education in Chile through installing co-governance structures based on the participation of students and faculty in the election of university authorities. The university reform movement first exploded at PUCV on 15 June 1967 when students occupied the School of Architecture and presented to the administration their demands of an open, co-governed, and autonomous university. The students were heavily supported by the faculty, with university reform at PUCV eventually becoming or-

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ganized by the faculty of the School of Architecture and the Institute of Social Sciences (Rosenblitt 2010). As many commentaries have since discussed, the university reform movement in Chile never reached such imaginative heights as it did, for instance, in France at the Sorbonne in May 1968 (Collier and Sater 2004: 322). Nonetheless, as a result of the involvement of the faculty of the School of Architecture in the university reform movement, it becomes in many ways a testament to the political thinking between 1967 and 1969 of the group that would come to found the Open City. In addition to these demands regarding the democratization of the university, the university reform movement at PUCV was marked by the same focus on a decolonial American culture as is found in Amereida. In the 15 June 1967 manifesto for university reform, the faculty and student activists wrote, “Latin American universities were not capable of clarifying and cementing their own foundations in order to really dislocate themselves from their internal colonial (dependent) character” (Buttazoni et al. 1970: section “Manifiesto el 15 de junio 1967”), and later, “our universities are fickle and beggarly in specie, money, methods, orientation, study and culture with that, institutions are impeded from accommodating that which is or could be our own reality as Americans  .  .  . we [therefore] refer to the free and disinterested contemplation of that which perhaps can constitute our proper reality” (Buttazoni et al. 1970: section “Manifiesto el 15 de junio 1967”). Reflecting on this movement in 1970, faculty at the School of Architecture were considering that even contemporary mathematical thought in Chile was marked by its Eurocentric origins, and they celebrated the inauguration of the International Astronomical Observatory in Tololo, Chile, since “until that moment the sky of the Hemisphere of the South, with respect to the Northern Hemisphere, is unknown” (Buttazoni et al. 1970: introduction section). The 1967 manifesto of the university reform movement would conclude with a strongly American undercurrent reminiscent of Alejo Carpentier, “We declare ourselves to the Administration of our House of Studies and we propose its restructuration, so that, for example, housing, society, history and urbanism in Latin America can be seen with our own eyes; the desert and the deserts like the jungles, the flora and fauna and the grand American rivers . . .” (Buttazoni et al. 1970: section “Manifiesto el 15 de junio 1967”). This foray into university reform testifies simultaneously to this group’s singular entrance into the political struggle for decolonization as well as the formation of what would often come to be referred to as their “nonpolitical” stance. On the one hand, this movement represents a compromise between various forces, including the School of Archi-

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tecture, many Catholic loyalists, the Institute of Social Sciences, and a gathering of both far-left activists and conservative voices like Góngora (UCV 1968). At the same time that the future founders of the Open City are engaging in political compromise, collective organizing, and direct action, however, they were also forming what would later come to be referred to as the basis of their “nonpolitical” position: the total and absolute rejection of the fight for coercive power. They argue explicitly in the June 1967 manifesto that the University is “principally and solely experts, professors, and students,” thereby distinguishing it from “politics, social value, the extension of culture, [and] the suffrage of imperative necessities” (Buttazoni et al. 1970: section “Manifiesto el 15 de junio 1967”). This movement therefore in many ways exemplifies Mouffe’s idea of the political: various disparate forces came together in 1967 to form a new collective identity around a Latin American university and then fought for the hegemonic institution of this collective identity within the material structures of their higher education system. It is in this way that those involved can legitimately deny that they are engaging in politics—they have rejected the liberal mode of politics based on consensus building within State apparatus and have instead built a viable, affirmative, and alternative choice for the organization of the university. At the core of university reform, however, lies an unstated contradiction. In that same 1967 manifesto, the group would define colonial Latin American politics in terms of a relationship to power, “Since Independence until today . . . , our America has been continually veiled by its own children, importing without cessation and changing in a fickle and continuous manner notions and ideologies put to service by those who aspired to power” (Buttazoni et al. 1970: section “Manifiesto el 15 de junio 1967”). The manifesto argues that the aspiration for coercive power within a nation-state, and the imposition of dictates from that position of coercive power, is a reproduction of colonial relations of domination.5 Yet the very actions of the university reform movement—a struggle for autonomy from the Chilean nation-state—betray the actuality of this claim. That is, the unacknowledged distinction inherent to this 1967 manifesto between decoloniality—epistemic reconstitution, realigning the relationship with the terrestrial qualities of the American continent, and decoupling from struggles for coercive power within nation-state apparatus—and decolonization—the political fight to uproot Eurocentric epistemologies through reforming the university, the elimination of exploitative relationships with the earth, and the winning of hegemonic dominance over the State—is fraught. Decoloniality seems impossible without decolonization, and yet the available political strategies of decolonization inherently negate the goals of their decoloniality.

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This contradiction will not be able to be resolved within the limits of university reform. By the end of the university reform movement, one can perceive a fundamental shift in perspective that would later form the foundation of the Open City. If university reform had been based on the desire to “change life” and “change the world” from within an institution of Chilean higher education, professors at the School of Architecture in the early 1970s would shift to arguing instead for a “change of life.” As members of the School of Architecture would argue in a presentation to the Academic Senate in 1972, “The true struggle for the proper awakening of America is not against anybody. One does not try to fabricate the counter-image of an enemy in order to remain fatally dependent on them; one tries to sprout one’s own life, with one’s own untold form” (Vial and Godoy 1972: 3). The result, for these architects, was to “throw oneself into a new life, with all the risk that is involved therein” (Vial and Godoy 1972: 3). This position signifies that the School of Architecture will not participate in political actions of resistance, of counter-hegemonic institution, or of disturbing the distribution of the sensible enforced by the State. Their praxis is an invitation to a poetic alternative, not political intervention.6 As the School of Architecture would summarize in a phrase that would later become a founding conceptual block of the Open City, “The new form of life sprouts from life, not based on a decree dictated by power” (Vial and Godoy 1972: 3).

Founding the Open City After the failure of university reform, those at the School of Architecture would design two large-scale projects—the Avenida del Mar in Viña del Mar (1969) and the Maritorias de los Archipiélagos de la Patagonia Occidental (1969–70).7 These designs and projects reworked many of the ideas already discussed and developed by the School: the discovery of the destiny of the land, the erection of urban artifacts that carry this destiny towards an architectural form, the focus on the American land, and so on. What is notable, however, is the activism with which the School of Architecture tried to institute the Avenida del Mar plan. María Berríos (2017: 18) has summarized how the faculty and students organized direct action, or, to use the words of the school itself, “combat in defense of the city,” in response to a project proposed in 1968 by the Ministry of Public Works of an elevated highway that would unify Valparaíso and Viña del Mar. The faculty and students designated this plan as “urbanicide,” organized demonstrations, and then composed and exhibited their own Avenida del Mar plan as a counter-project (Berríos 2017: 18).

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While the architectural ideas during this period do not represent a radical break in the thought of the School of Architecture, it does represent, once again, the political undercurrent to their thought and action at the end of the 1960s. More precisely, at this moment late in the 1960s the School of Architecture at the Catholic University of Valparaíso had rejected the possibility inherent in liberal politics of arriving at a consensus regarding the elevated highway via communicative deliberation within State institutions and instead was engaging in counter-hegemonic political activity by affirmatively proposing an alternative option for the thoroughfare that would connect Valparaíso and Viña del Mar: they were constructing an alternative collective identity, configuring a space proper for that identity, and presenting it to the public as an affirmative alternative. At the same time that the ideas of this group were being recycled in these architectural projects, the foundation was being laid for what would become their most well-known activity and one which would attempt to resolve this contradiction: the Open City. In a final bid for radical university reform, Godofredo Iommi presented a plan before the university senate at the beginning of 1969. As stated in the final (failed) vote that went before the university senate for this proposal, there were three goals of university reform: democratization, pluralism, and the unity of life, study, and work. Godofredo Iommi also proposed a set of axioms within this 1969 proposal: “The absence of privilege for any discipline. The absence of the accumulation of riches and goods. The rejection of the institutionalization of power as domination. The total and absolute rejection of aggressive violence; agreement on defensive violence. The grouping will have to constitute a physical place where the Unity of life, work and study, founded in liberty, is possible.” With this final phrase, we see the first textual mention of what would less than a year later become the Open City: a physical place to realize the political nonpolitics given voice in the university reform movement of late-1960s, formulated and synthesized in the mid-1960s in Amereida, and first created in the architectural thought of the School of Architecture of PUCV in the 1950s and early 1960s. Not only does this phrase identify what will eventually become the Open City, but the three elements found in this 1969 vote—democratization, pluralism, and the unity of life, study, and work—will later come to be part of the legal statutes of the Open City in its early formation. If the failed university senate vote of 1969 is the first instance in which what will become the Open City actually appears in a written document, the move to constitute a physical site for the unity of life, work, and study in fact began at the end of 1968. According to Ana Paz Yanes, the

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first full-time resident of the Open City with Boris Ivelic and their son, Iván, during most of 1968 Godofredo Iommi was living in France after opening a workshop in Paris. Disappointed with the schedule and pace of work, he returned to Chile at the end of 1968 and, alongside Alberto Cruz, restarted work at the bottega they had founded prior to Iommi’s departure, where a bottega is a type of a workshop of Renaissance Italy in which masters and students work side-by-side in order both to nurture educational advancement and to produce sellable goods. Furthermore, upon his return to Chile, Iommi announced that the students and faculty should found a city with which to realize the ideas in Amereida, a realization that had failed to take shape with university reform. After the failure of the university reform movement, and therefore of the possibility of founding a city through PUCV, Iommi, Cruz, and others decided to purchase property themselves in order to constitute this imagined place. After looking for terrain throughout 1969, they finally found two adjoining plots thirty kilometers north of Valparaíso in Ritoque. It has been said that the land they found was available and cheap due to agrarian reform under the Eduardo Frei presidency.8 A central objective of Frei’s presidency was to modernize rural Chile, where “the remnants of the hacienda system,” in which a select number of landowners controlled most of the land of the country, still held sway (Taylor 2006: 20). His agrarian reform law (Law 16.640) was put into effect in July 1967 and allowed the government to expropriate any farm of more than eighty “basic” hectares, with owners “being entitled to retain an eighty-hectare ‘reserve’” and monetary compensation from the government (Collier and Sater 2004: 314). These terrains would then be redistributed to the farmhands who previously worked the lands. Frei’s agrarian reform, later strengthened and heavily accelerated under the Allende presidency, was a transformation of the rural power structure of Chile: whereas in 1965 farms of eighty hectares or more covered 55 percent of Chile, by 1972 such farms “accounted for no more than 3 percent” (Collier and Sater 2004 339). This theory of the purchase of the Open City is unlikely, however, since the terrain on which the Open City is located would probably not have been expropriated since its land, covered by sand and unstable soil, is not particularly fertile therefore setting its plot outside the definition of a “basic” hectare. Nonetheless, fear of expropriation may have played a part in the previous owners’ decision to sell as during this era stories abound of farmers who “refused to plant, sold off machinery, slaughtered their livestock, or (illegally) sent their animals across the mountains to Argentina” in order to avoid a feared expropriation (Collier and Sater 2004: 340). An alternative version of the purchase of the Open City plot has been told by Boris Ivelic, who was personally involved in the purchase. Ac-

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cording to Ivelic, after deciding to find a site for the creation of an open city, the group identified two possibilities: one closer to the town of Reñaca (just to the north of Viña del Mar) and a second one in Ritoque. With these two possibilities, Iommi provocatively asked the group, “Do we want to live in a condo complex or found a city?,” implying that the Reñaca site would not allow for the full realization of their poetic and urbanist ideas. Subsequently, the group agreed to the Ritoque option. The Open City group was therefore not sought out by the terrain’s owners in the midst of the agrarian reform. Rather, the group that would eventually found the Open City was wandering through the region, stumbled upon a grove of pine trees in what is now referred to as the “upper” part of the Open City, and, upon seeing the view of the sea and the terrains from this location, decided to found their city upon this site. After this foundational event, the group sought out the two owners of the adjoining plots that formed this terrain, made an offer to purchase them, and bought the land. Within this version, agrarian reform played little to no part in the purchase of the lands of the Open City. To purchase this property and to pay for subsequent construction activity at the Open City, the bottega that faculty and students had formed in 1968 became an independent and productive workshop to raise funds.9 While formed by faculty and students of the School of Architecture, the work of this bottega was institutionally distinct from the School itself and would become the means with which to fund activity at the Open City. Accepting external contracts for design work, the faculty and students of the School of Architecture thereby raised the money necessary for their independent work at the Open City. The designs and contracts of this bottega included design work for the chocolate and candy company, Hucke, as well as for the early version of the Copper Corporation of Chile, CODELCO. Works at the Open City would initially be funded by this bottega.10 Although the process to buy the land therefore began at the end of 1969, the soon-to-be Open City group needed a legal body with which to purchase it. As such, they formed the legal entity of the Amereida Cooperative, whose statutes were passed in March 1970—although the official formation of the Cooperative occurred on 28 January 1970, a date remembered by Yanes and Ivelic as it was also the date of the birth of their son—and which was a legal body capable of purchasing real estate. With the land then fully purchased in 1970, the Open City would receive its official poetic foundation in January 1971, as represented in the text “Opening of the Terrains.”11 The exact date of the foundation of the Open City is therefore impossible to set, with reasonable arguments claiming that the date should be placed anywhere between November

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1968 and January 1971. With the foundation of the Open City, a new set of questions emerges: How did the ideas of Amereida translate to this new context? How would the question of a decolonial encounter with the American continent come to be embodied in the construction of an urban space?

Open City Urbanism and Poetry During spring 1970 (September–November) a series of seminars on urbanism were held at the PUCV School of Architecture, notes on which were collectively written and subsequently organized by Miguel Eyquem. These seminar notes provide insight into the discussions occurring between the founders of the Open City at the time of its foundation. Substantively, these seminars are centrally concerned with the interrelationship between poetry and architecture. As the seminar notes claim, “Poetry discovers a ground, a place; architecture receives the revelation of this ground and constructs. The poet advances with the word to the moment that it lives, the architect establishes this word with a form. In this way, poetry reveals the destiny, the architect is occupied by the destiny illuminated by poetry and gives this destiny an ‘architectonic attraction’” (Amereida Cooperative 1970b: 1). A linear relationship is thereby established between poetry and architecture, “‘poetry’ (or ‘the poetic’) and architecture are related directly, and this is in two consecutive steps: step 1, revelation of reality by poetry; step 2, formation of the space proper to this reality by architecture” (Amereida Cooperative 1970b: 1). As such, this seminar claims that “architecture is not born by its own force; it is not born and engendered alone. It has a cogeneration. Decisive and capital situation for architecture: this generating of the form with words” (Amereida Collective 1970b: 3). While this would seemingly place architecture in a second-class position to poetry, the seminar arrives at a different conclusion, “The architect that undertakes daily architectural construction sees in poetry neither a cause nor an effect nor a convenience, but rather they see a gift. For the architect poetry is a gift” (Amereida Collective 1970b: 3). The basic thought of the Open City group at this time surrounds this relationship between poetry and architecture wherein the former provides the foundational grounding for the latter. If the central concern of this seminar is the relationship between poetry and architecture, one can also perceive a secondary concern regarding the relationship between urbanism and the earth. According to the conclusion of the seminar, the first role of poetry is to “revea[l], unvei[l]

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destiny, where the multiple of human existence is found” (Amereida Cooperative 1970b: 5). If this speaks to the fluid openness towards a multiplicitous alterity that cannot be contained in a singular and stable categorization, the second function of poetry is to “name the ground thereby making it a place” (Amereida Cooperative 1970b: 8). The role of poetry in this second role is explicitly the transformation of the earth, of a territorial location into a place. Synthesizing these two functions, the overarching function of poetry is, through naming, to gather “the multiple of human existence” into a common space on the earth; public, common space is to be organized around the multiplicity of humans, natural phenomena, and their relations, rather than organized around a stable collective identity or univocal distribution of the sensible. In this way, the idea of revealing the multiplicity of a place links architecture to the environment through the mediating force of poetry. This poetic foundation therefore disrupts traditional scientific epistemologies and theories of knowledge tied to the division between fact and value (Latour 2004 [1999]). If the poetic requires a constant openness to a multiplicitous otherness and therefore a constant disrupting of epistemic foundations, then the scientific dedication to the foreclosed production of knowledge would seemingly not function within this framework since any “fact” is unstable, constantly awaiting its disruption by the appearance of a new destiny revealed poetically. Indeed, a central aspect of these seminars is a theorization of just such an epistemic reconstitution built around the openness of the poetic, with the goal of poetic revelation being, “To get closer not to a knowledge, but rather to a comprehension of the ground” (Amereida Cooperative 1970b: 13). In other words, the role of calculation and technical know-how is no longer to dominate or master the landscape through knowledge, but rather to comprehend the terrain in such a manner that its destiny is poetically revealed. This seminar on urbanism is thereby proposing an epistemological challenge for architects: the replacement of the scientific domination of the land through knowledge with the poetic opening of the terrain through comprehension. What is being proposed in these seminars is the realization of a theory of habitation based on the revelation of the multiplicitous destiny of the American continent in two ways: 1.) The errant poetic revelation of the destiny of the American continent is now placed in the heart of urbanism and architecture. This centrality of the word is by no means new to the context of Latin American urbanism. For instance, Ángel Rama’s La Ciudad Letrada (1984) argues that the Latin American city is ordered based on the written word with, most famously, the Spanish 1573 Law of the Indies coercively determining the urban form of Latin

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American colonial cities.12 What the Open City proposes, however, is the shifting of the foundational word of the city from the realm of the coercive power of the political sovereign to the revelatory power of the poetic. As Alberto Cruz would later describe this shift, “The first Spaniards in America acted in the name of the word of the King. Now, with us, the word acts again, but it is in the name of the poetic word” (Cruz and Barla 2008: 52). 2.) These seminars introduce the hypothesis that architectural practice is intimately related to such poetic revelation.13 To understand the material consequences of this theorization of the relationship between poetry and urbanism as found in these 1970 seminars, one can look at a central practice of the Open City, the phalène—a collective, oral, and improvised poetic act wherein the particular characteristics of a place are revealed and subsequently given form through architecture.14 In the phaléne the participant experiences a change of life, in which they poetically encounter the destiny of a place that will subsequently guide their mode of inhabiting that terrain.15 In the specific context of the Open City, the foundational phalènes that uncovered its destiny are one of the few significant events in the City’s history that have been transcribed into a representational written narrative, with a 1971 essay, “Opening of the Terrains” (“Apertura de los Terrenos”), recounting the various poetic acts through which the Open City was founded. The text therefore operates on one level as a summary of the foundation of the City: the initial gatherings in November 1968 where founding the Open City was first discussed, the first poetic acts in March 1969 that would lead to the Open City, and finally the “opening” of the terrains at the beginning of 1971 through a series of phalènes. Furthermore, this text reveals how the noncolonial environmental vision of Amereida would be materialized in a new urban form in Ritoque. More precisely, the goal of this text is to uncover the “change in the conception of the axes—a shift [mudanza] of orientation” which would induce “a change of the mode of living, of treating the earth, the sea, the sky” (Iommi 1971a); the phalènes represented in this text lay the groundwork for the noncolonial relationship with the terrestrial qualities of the American continent that lie at the heart of the initial foundation of the Open City. “Opening of the Terrains” examines how the founding poetic acts of the Open City were concerned with a noncolonial encounter with a dune landscape. While the Open City is a large plot some of which, located on top of hills in the “upper” section, is a meadow landscape, the majority of the Open City is characterized by various types of sand dunes. The poetic foundation of the Open City, as represented in “Opening of the Terrains,” struggles with the definition of the destiny of the protean material that forms this landscape, “Sand is not of the water and

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is not water, but neither is it of the earth or is earth. Nor is it that which one must transform into another thing, whether it be land or water. Simply, the sand appeared as sands. Sands with their own reality, perhaps, unexplored until then” (Iommi 1971a). Subsequently, the sands of the dunes, constantly shifting, moving, appearing, and disappearing, are comprehended within “Opening of the Terrains” in terms of an “incessant returning to not knowing” (Iommi 1971a). More fully, the encounter with the terrestrial quality of the sands would lead to an epistemic reconstitution built around comprehension rather than knowledge in order to free the group from viewing the territory in terms of conquest and domination, As such, the sands are shown to us as the incessant returning to not knowing, which is not ignorance with respect to wisdom. Instead of the stability of some acquired knowing [saber], this mere trance of disappearance speaks to us of a continuous returning to not knowing, that precludes being settled [excluye radicarse] in an acquired knowledge [conocimiento] with respect to that which is still to be known [está por saberse] and, in consequence, is also not a knowledge [conocimiento] to be conquered [conquistarse]. (Iommi 1971a)

In this passage, “Opening of the Terrains” explicitly connects knowledgebased epistemology with conquest and distances itself with such an imperial way of knowing. In contrast, the incessant “returning to not knowing” of the encounter with the sands provides another epistemology built around errant, non-dominating comprehension. In Rancièran and Mouffean terms, the poetic relationship with the dunes is therefore located precisely in the liminal space between conand dissensus: a solidified, identifiable consensus is never formed since the sands, always appearing and disappearing, never allow the observer to settle into a defined partitioning of the sensible since such a partitioning must always be responding to the new appearances and disappearances of the dunes. In other words, the “dissensus,” if one can call it that, of “incessantly returning to not knowing” in order to sense the new appearances of the sands—a comprehension, rather than knowledge, of the dunes that can respond to the sands’ dynamic position between solidity/fluidity—is the new “consensus” (with con/dissensus put in quotes since this text’s poetic relationship with the dunes challenges this very distinction). In “Opening of the Terrains,” there is no distribution of the sensible in which objects located within a given partition can be known and sensed, but rather a poetic opening that allows for a fluid and unstable comprehension of the dunes. As the text argues, “From this

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poetic act they, the sands, appear as themselves [comparecen propias]. They are not firm, they are at the mercy of the wind, they are not earth, they are not sea and therefore they are never a beach” (Iommi 1971a). This comprehension-based epistemology is explicitly noncolonial, attempting to extend the epistemic revelations of its comprehension of the sands across the American continent. As the text continues, “the Open City does not see space as a landscape, but rather as the manifestation of its liberty, that is, of the ‘without option.’ ‘Without option’ is the Pacific and the Interior Sea or the continentality of America, revealed by the orientation of its own ‘north’” (Iommi 1971a). This “without option” of the relationship with the landscape of the American continent would lead to the dramatic epistemic reconstitution embedded in this text, shifting the way one understands the terrain from scientific laws to poetic warnings, And this meaning [sentido] does not come to us by virtue of formulated laws in the manner as is habitually formulated which we understand by the idea of “law,” but rather that we act according to warnings [advertencias] . . . The profound difference between warning [advertencia] and “laws” is shown to us . . . via the reorientation of America suspended in its own and proper North. (Iommi 1971a)

The Open City is therefore not a social landscape without power— power is here understood as the revelatory irruption of the warnings of the continent to which inhabitants must listen—but it is a landscape without coercive power—there are no dictates from within a colonial State that determine a fixed social ordering. This epistemic reconstitution then leads to a rethinking of urban inhabitation structured around a geographic reorientation according to the “continentality of America” and according to the continent’s own proper north. This is explicitly a departing and separating from the dictates of the global North in order to hear and recognize the destiny of the new continent according to its terms and subsequently to give urban form to this destiny in an open city (i.e., a city that is open to hearing the otherness of the continent). This urban form would be concretely examined later in the text through a total rejection of urban planning, It could be said that all planning, in general, deals with bringing together [conjugar] diverse factors in view of an equilibrium, for example, multiple processes. And it does this in view of a presumable [presumible] and more well-controlled efficacy. Hence, planning, according to its own proper interiority, is required to work . . . with laws.

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That is, with phenomena that under equal circumstances would be repeated with high probability . . . For this reason, warning [advertencia] is not properly a law in the habitual sense. Warning is poetic and as such is something that opens and does not close [por ello abriente y no cerrante]. (Iommi 1971a)

This justification of the rejection of planning contains a full summary of the noncolonial and environmentalist poetic political nonpolitics of the Open City. If it reproduces the critique of planning within liberal politics identified by Mouffe and Rancière, “Opening of the Terrains” departs from their vision of the political structured around the struggle between differing hegemonic plans, political structures, distributions of the sensible, etc. Instead, the Open City seeks to construct an urban form that is constantly open to the appearance of the other. In this sense, the Open City is radically apolitical: they reject all liberal State apparatuses that construct a stable planning process as well as all fixed distributions of the sensible, instead embracing the instability of the poetic revelation of otherness.

The Formless Formation of Poetic Hospitality The critic might argue that what is being proposed above is not a poetic political nonpolitics, but rather a depoliticization. By reframing university reform and the formation of the Open City as an errant social formation proper to the reality of the dunes, the question of the struggle over the structuration of these social formations is apparently elided. For instance, “Opening of the Terrains” at moments goes beyond a description of a noncolonial epistemic relationship with the earth and speculates on the proper social form for the terrains. Following the embrace of the reality of the dunes, rather than their domination or erasure, there is: a repetition of the rejection of aggressive violence found in the university reform movement—the rejection of violence towards the earth is translated into a rejection of aggressive social violence; the openness to hearing the alterity of the sands is reflected in the foundational act of creating an Agora, the public space where public meetings are held based on the constant returning to not knowing in order to be able to hear the other (i.e., other inhabitants present at the agora); and, as we have already seen, the poetic revelation of the dunes leads to the rejection of planning (Iommi 1971a). It appears that the founders of the Open City erected a rather rigid social order that could not subsequently be

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questioned since it was framed as a direct consequence of what emerges “naturally” out of the dunes. The formal statutes and bylaws of the Open City apparently point to such a conservative stance. At a first glance, the official statutes for the Amereida Cooperative (1970a) from March 1970 would seem to shy away from “hearing the other.” Although Title 1, Article 2 of these statutes is an aspirational claim—“The Cooperative will have as its objective: The organization of a solidarity community of life and work founded on the intrinsic equality of intellectual and manual activity; the absence of luxury; pluralism in social conception; rejection of power as domination of some with respect to others; hospitality; rejection of aggressive violence; study, creation, and peace”—this document is rather unnotable (except for the disappearance of the support for defensive violence that appeared in Iommi’s 1969 presentation before the academic senate). In fact, this Article 2 simply repeats conclusions that were settled long before the foundation of the Open City and most of the rest of the document is concerned with basic legal matters of property and ownership. Even the act of forming a cooperative, an apparently radical political position attempting to evenly distribute ownership among all cooperative members, at this time in Chilean history was rather banal: by 1973, one in five Chileans was associated with a cooperative (CEPAL 1985: vii). As María Berríos summarizes, the purpose of the Cooperative “was to deliver economic sustainability to the Open City through the realization of professional work done collectively” (2017: 21). Where this document is notable, however, is in its conservative vision of gender. It states, “All persons that are at least 18 years of age and are accepted by the Administration Council will be able to be partners of the cooperative. Barring extraordinary circumstance, married women can also be partners” (Amereida Cooperative 1970b: 4). Women, it seems, were only to be heard if they could speak alongside a man (as we will see in Chapter 4, this was not the case in practice).16 In contrast to this legal document, the internal documents of the Open City at this time discussing its operations demonstrate a different orientation. As might be expected for a group that organizes their life in common around the poetic rather than politics or the political, their initial social structuration was paradoxical, a lawful lawlessness whose common mode of being was poetic hospitality. In a 1971 text, Iommi represents the Open City as an urban space composed exclusively of guests, “Guest of an-other, just as you are to others. The accommodation [cabida] or properly together [junto], that is not simply ‘close’ [cerca]” (Iommi 1971a: 10). The radical political shift of this statement should

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not be underestimated: Iommi envisions an urbanism beyond the logic of citizen/foreigner, sovereign/subject, same/other and a political theory of rights in order to create a common space in which all are understood to be guests. In other words, if the citizen is the subject proper to politics, then the guest is the subject proper to the poetic opening that lies at the foundation of the Open City—the subject that both is given space by and gives space to all other guests so that each guest can be heard; a city of guests is a hospitable urban space built on the abyss of the poetic. Indeed, Iommi would take this position so far as to imply that there are no “laws” at the Open City but only “modes” of living-in-common (convivir) and that there is no “government” other than the “odd order that cares for the opening [abertura]”—the poetic opening in which guests can be heard by other guests in their own language (Iommi 1971a: 9). If the Open City has been criticized as being uninterested in issues of political structuration (Jocelyn-Holt 2012: 25)—e.g., “rights, guarantees for citizens, and political compromise”—then this is why: they are operating in a poetic space that organizes a mode of living in common (convivir) otherwise than that of the coercive power of the nation-state. Rather than organizing themselves around the rights, guarantees, struggles for power, and political compromises of a nation-state, the Open City’s foundation on the poetic voice allows for the formless formation of a living-in-common built around hospitality. Indeed, the Open City has been described as “nothing other than the City of the Act, of the Act of Hospitality” (Covarrubias 1990). Reflecting Jaime Reyes Gil’s (2010) later more extensive study, Iommi would define poetic hospitality at the City’s foundation as the capacity to hear the other. Even more radically, he would spatialize this hospitality in that same 1971 text: “No one can be substituted for another. And the measure, that allows each one to be as they are, of respect for the other, it is worth saying, the relation, is manifested in the distance that each one . . . grants the other. This is hospitality” (Iommi 1971a: 8). Hospitality as the spatialization of the poetic is defined as the active granting of space to and for other guests—a living-in-common that is always in the process of being established or formed but which never arrives to a firm establishment or formation. This text continues, employing hospitality in order to imagine and construct a completely deprivileged social space, “To not have privileges, then, signifies hospitality. That is, to open time and space, where we can distinguish ourselves, the ones from the others. Like the stars, all of them, can be seen each one in its own and unsubstitutable splendor, during the common night” (Iommi 1971c: 9). If hospitality is initially defined in narrow terms of relations with another, the radical consequences of this concept are laid bare here: hospitality as the total

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destruction of privilege. For Iommi at this moment, the Open City as an urbanism of poetic hospitality creates a common space for alterity in which all are understood to be guests in that space, constantly granting and surrendering space for and to others so that they can exist in their unsubstitutable splendor. The theorization of the urbanism of the Open City at this moment of its foundation presents a flexible and fluid regionalization and urbanism of hospitality that requires a constant maintenance of a poetic opening in order to hear other guests and subsequently grant space to and for these guests—their land uses, urban forms, architectural traditions, etc. The material consequences of this theorization of hospitality at the foundation of the Open City are radical: children are granted the right to participate in decision-making processes since there are no privileged ages (Iommi 1971b: 6; 1971c: 12); since everyone is a “guest,” there is no private property, no one is an “owner” of anything, and there are no houses that belong to or are owned by a family or person—instead there are hospederías (boarding-houses) that guests care for (Iommi 1971c: 11); to reinforce the absence of private property and the significance of being a guest, all residents were expected to change hospedería every six months (a suggestion which failed to last long at the Open City due to logistical issues); in short, “in the Open City the private economy disappears, since private life disappears . . . [instead, there is] public life and intimate life” (Iommi 1971c: 10). Through his theorization, Iommi constructs a new urban lexicon: hospitality, hospedería, the distinction between public and intimate life, residents as guests, and so on. Iommi’s theorization of poetic hospitality therefore erects a utopian conceptualization of urban life that no longer operates within the traditional contours of urbanism, politics, or the political. In this way, his poetic theorization of unconditional hospitality produces a possible pluriversal cultural foundation: to be hospitable is to hear the other, is to give space to a multiplicity of possible land uses, of relationships with a terrain’s ecosystems, and of worked landscapes. I would like to conclude here by briefly returning to a phrase by Iommi cited above, “Guest of an-other, just as you are to others. The accommodation [cabida] or properly together [junto], that is not simply ‘close’ [cerca]” (Iommi 1971c: 10). If I have been arguing that the idea of hospitality is an outgrowth from ideas found in Amereida, this phrasing recommends a subtle departure from this foundational poem. As a corollary to my challenging of the cultural politics of gender in the 1967 epic, one might claim that Amereida is a construct of the poetic gaze and never of the reflection on the experience of being gazed upon; the poet observes but is not observed. In Spivak’s (1999) language, Amereida is

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concerned with Europe and its others but never Europe as other. Yet in this passage from 1971, Iommi reverses this centered subjectivity of the observer by reflecting on his status as being a guest of an-other. If his urbanist vision of being a “guest” functionally rethinks a settler colonial urbanism—forfeiting colonial claims to ownership of stolen land—it is also a radical reconfiguration and decentering of identity around the interaction between self-identity and the identity assigned to the self by the other. In this instant, hospitality is not only “hearing the other,” it is a recognition that one is being heard as other by that other. By reframing himself as the “guest of an-other,” Iommi is radically decentering and unsettling his own identity, moving towards a new vision of subjectivity and agency. Identity shifts from being the bedrock against which to hear otherness to a process in which “the world no longer constitutes a threat in itself but appears instead as a vast reservoir of affinities” (Mbembe 2017: 94). Iommi’s apparent relinquishment of concrete discussions of cultural politics as found in Amereida effectively becomes a radical reconfiguration of the idea of the poetic towards a more decolonial manner of thinking. In this same document, Iommi would reflect on gender in a hospitable urban space, a reflection that shows both his difficulty in thinking through these problems as well as the rather radical position to which it at times led: Change of life, that is to say to be guest . . . Woman, who has children, tends to center everything around her house, which, under the empire of the attack and defense, may seem natural. What meaning can this “natural instinct” have in the space and time of the guest? In this cleared [despejado] field we will see again—incessantly—who knows what different forms which we will consider “natural” . . . Of course, I believe that it will have nothing to do with this sad joke of masculinizing feminism that is in vogue. (Iommi 1971c: 12–13)

Iommi’s vision of hospitality pushes him towards a total de-essentialization and denaturalization of femininity. The move to think of urbanism hospitably, and therefore through the construction of a novel public/ intimate distinction to think otherwise than the public/private distinction on which the “house” is founded, leads to a similar insistence that the gendered division of space, as well as the definition of femininity in terms of “motherhood,” must also be abandoned. Even further, pushed to its extreme—an extreme which, it must be maintained, Iommi never approaches—this would require a total abandonment of the gender binary in order to hospitably hear those who operate outside of that dichotomy.

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Yet the closing of this passage arrives to a conservative position reinforcing that binary by speaking of feminism as “masculinizing” women.17 The point here is not to simply note Iommi’s conservative and contradictory position—condemning feminism as “masculinization” only moments after he had critiqued the tendency to naturalize the category of women in certain positions and with specific gender expressions—but to note the absence of any problematization of masculinity, for the argument of masculinization functions only if “masculine” exists as a stable framework of reference. In this passage Iommi hints at denaturalizing femininity, but he never questions “natural” forms of masculinity. Here, again, I would like to reemphasize the following: when following the Open City one can distinguish between their poetic methodology and the products of that methodology (the poems, the architectural works, the sculpture, the manifestos, and so on). Even in his conservative reproduction of the stability and centrality of masculinity, Iommi demonstrates an avenue for thinking gender otherwise in terms of poetic hospitality.

Conclusion Amereida had been given a new life in the late 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. While this avant-garde epic was in many ways the culmination of a lineage of modern Latin American thought, in 1967 many of those involved with the creation of this poem sought to use it as the basis for creating a properly American university and, when this failed, as the basis for inhabiting the American continent in a new urban space. What should be noted is that the troubling content of Amereida—its insecurity about hybridized Indigenous identities, about Black subjectivity and its relationship to Latin Americanism, and so on—has been exchanged for the more abstract methods of poetic revelation and hospitably hearing the other. Within this process of abstraction, the conception of otherness becomes more dynamic: the other becomes the locus of intersecting and fluid identity formations thereby allowing for the possibility of hearing hybridized subject positions in contrast to Amereida. The absence of what might be termed “political commentary” at the foundation of the Open City speaks to a more nuanced understanding of alterity. Despite this abstraction, however, the founding documents of the Open City also outline a new concrete vocabulary with which to imagine noncolonial urban life from the position of European settlers: making political decisions through the poetic opening of the Agora rather than communicative deliberation in parliament or the State; residents viewed as guests in the terrains rather than settled owners of houses or citizens

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of a nation-state; comprehending the terrestrial qualities of a place by listening to the warnings (advertencias) from the land rather than defining its natural laws; comprehending a place through the errantry of the phalène rather than knowing a site through scientific assessment; inhabiting the terrain rather than owning a plot; caring for a hospedería rather than investing in a house; organizing social relations around hospitality rather than a hierarchized division of resources; demanding a change of life (cambiar de vida) rather than changing the world or changing life; constructing a social division of space around public/intimate space rather than public/private space. In short, if one conception of a political living-in-common imagines a representative parliament through which laws, based on knowledge acquired through environmental assessments and social surveys, manage an urban space in which home-owners operate within a political economy of a hierarchized distribution of resources, then the poetic living-in-common of the Open City imagines an Agora through which poetic acts open a common, hospitable space based on the comprehension of the terrain through phalènes and in which guests care for hospederías. The consequence of this renovation of Amereida would be the formation of a unique thought that can be understood as a poetic political nonpolitics. On the one hand, the insistence not only in Amereida but in university reform and the Open City that one had to be open to the other requires a relinquishing of one’s own drives and missions in order to not interrupt the other. As a result, a fight for coercive power—especially a fight for coercive power within a State that has colonized the systems, lands, and people with whom they were interacting—is distinct from this desire to allow for the sprouting of a life proper to the reality in which one lives. In this way, the Open City is decoupled from politics and the political. On the other hand, this political nonpolitics is characterized by radical democratization, the abolition of private property, a particular form of place-based environmentalism, and a vision of social change based within the imminency of life itself. It is in this sense that in “Opening of the Terrains” Godofredo Iommi distinguishes between la política—politics and the political as understood by Chantal Mouffe— and lo político—the process of conceiving a living-in-common (convivir). If the Open City rejects politics—the fight for seats within State systems of coercive power—and the political—the fight for hegemonic institution by a collective social body—it does not reject the process of structuring a life in common (what I term a political nonpolitics and what Iommi calls lo político). In other words, the Open City was following much of the “hippie” spirit of the 1960s (a reference that I have informally heard used by many to describe the early years of the Open City)

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to form a communal mode of life outside of the colonial nation-state, a mode of action that Vine Deloria Jr. (1988: 229–34) was identifying in the 1960s as a potential decolonial path for those coming from a settlercolonial position. I would like to emphasize in this conclusion the utopian element of this foundation. After theorizing a radical new vision of Latin Americanism and hospitality, the Open City realized these ideas in an urban space in Ritoque. Furthermore, looking outside of the Open City, this speaks to a broader point: to realize a hospitable society would require a massive redistribution of land and wealth including land reparations for Indigenous communities (“granting space to and for the other”), a reordering of power structures (“a poetic social structure built around the Agora”), and the abolition of private property. Even further, this framework responds to Eve Tuck’s (2009) demand that we craft responses to occupation, genocide, and colonization around a desire-based framework rather a damage-based one. This conclusion is never made (or even approached for that matter) by the Open City—it is an extrapolation of their thinking—but one which should be noted. Quite simply, a hospitable life in common cannot exist within liberal politics and requires a radical reordering of land distribution and power structures around decolonial modes of interaction.18

Notes 1. I have also mentioned two other popular theorists of this idea: Slavoj Zizek (see for instance his book, The Ticklish Subject) and Erik Swyngedouw. For Swyngedouw, however, the distinction is not between political/politics but between what he calls politics/post-politics. Also important to this debate, but undiscussed here, are Ernesto Laclau and Alain Badiou. 2. This thinking of the relationship between the State, politics, power, and coercion is indebted to Pierre Clastres (1989). 3. One of Mouffe’s famous collaborators is the Argentinian philosopher, Ernesto Laclau, who does reflect on the question of hybridity (Laclau 1996). The focus here is on Mouffe’s later solitary work on the idea of the political. 4. It should come as no surprise that recent readings of Indigenous politics and architecture as a dissensual Third Space (Bruyneel 2007; Kryder-Reid 2016) and interculturality (Rivera Cusicanqui 2016) remain undiscussed by Rancière and Mouffe. 5. This argument is made in an analytic way more recently in Walsh and Mignolo (2018: 237–39). 6. The School of Architecture is prefiguring Walsh and Mignolo’s (2018: 224) more recent argument regarding decoloniality as an option and not an imperative.

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7. These plans are available in Buttazoni et al. (1970). 8. León (2016 [2012]: 86) writes that they took “advantage of recent land reforms” in order to purchase the terrains and cites Alfieri (2000: 14). Alfieri again repeats this claim in a more recent article (Alfieri 2016: 107). 9. For a brief description of the bottega see Iommi (1971b). 10. The bottega closed at some point during the dictatorship in the 1970s. Since then, most works are financed through personal funds of residents. 11. I have been told in conversation that this date, 1971, is wrong: Alberto Cruz erroneously wrote “1971” on the document and this date was subsequently reproduced, but the actual date of this poetic foundation was January 1970. I have been unable to confirm this. 12. This observed relationship between Rama and the Open City is entirely thanks to Mihalache (2010). It also is important to mention Setha M. Low’s problematization of this argument in On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (2000). As she shows, the Latin American plaza is not simply a space that was written: it is a site of contention between the written word applied to space by a ruling power and the everyday practices of the subaltern. 13. Martin Heidegger is a common reference for those at the Open City. His claim that “Poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building” (2013: 213) is very similar to claims of this group. For more on the relationship between Heidegger and the Open City see Woods (2019). 14. Godofredo Iommi developed the idea of the phalène during his stay in France during the early 1960s. To say that the phalène is therefore a “European” or “French” poetic practice is to ignore, as I argued in Chapter 2, how this poetic practice was translated in the context of the Open City and the American continent. Even further, Mario Ferrero (2016: 23–30) describes what might be retroactively described as a “poetic act” led by Vicente Huidobro in the 1940s in which Iommi participated. 15. For a description of a phalène, see Godoy Arcaya (2001: 404). 16. I have alternatively heard that this refers to the possibility of two members of one household—i.e., a heterosexual coupling—having the opportunity to become part of the cooperative, and that the capacity for unmarried women to join was never questioned. Yet this does not solve the basic issue: why is it then assumed as default that the husband would be the member and not the wife? 17. It should be noted that there is a history of feminist discourse in Chile using this same argument (Franceschet 2005). 18. This claim has already been made, though in a more critical manner, by Derrida (2000).

[• Chapter 4 •]

Thinking Otherwise Keeping the Open City Open in the Dictatorship

The Chilean coup on 11 September 1973 represented a collapse of

what had often been perceived as Latin America’s most stable democracy (Collier and Sater 2004: 359). During the dictatorship, the particular iteration of poetic political nonpolitics of the early years of the Open City would be eclipsed, at least superficially, by a more professionalized and technically oriented language. Indeed, looking at Amereida II (1991b [1986]), published in the midst of the dictatorship as the follow-up to Amereida, one immediately notes a clearer, more technically crafted language: the collective author leaves footnotes, punctuation helps guide the reader, and the final section even gives a clear narrative describing the 1965 voyage from the south of Chile to Bolivia. Although it would appear that the Open City therefore depoliticized its activity—understood in the sense of foreclosing the distribution of the sensible—during the dictatorship, a closer inspection of the group’s activity reveals that the dictatorship era became the period in which the Open City was the most concerned with the politics of the Chilean State. This was and remains possibly the only period in which texts of the Open City would explicitly discuss their relationship with the national State, even if this focus was to emphasize a refusal of politics. Starting with an overview of the cultural political context of the dictatorship period and its significance for the activity at the Open City, this chapter will then discuss the literary and artistic works during this period of what has been termed the “new scene”—works that, despite their political undercurrent, never explicitly engage with the policies and activities of the Pinochet regime. This political nonpolitics, I argue, reflects the work by the Open City’s Isabel Margarita Reyes, whose work examining the technical aspects of including environmental concerns

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in architectural design functionally serves to emphasize the multiplicity of a space and of natural phenomena. Furthermore, the Open City’s reorganization of urban space and architectural production around the distinction between public and intimate space, in contrast to Pinochet’s reinforcement and policing of a public/private division, served to provide a thinking otherwise of urbanism and architecture in the midst of the dictatorship. Lastly, this chapter concludes with a reading of Amereida II, the major poetic work emerging from the Open City during this period, and how its apparently apolitical poetry in fact contains a robust critique of the Pinochet regime. In sum, the Open City during the dictatorship continued to be dedicated to organizing a poetic life in common otherwise than that of the Chilean State.

On the Dictatorship On 11 September 1973 the Chilean socialist experiment headed by the Salvador Allende presidency came to a bloody end when a military coup took control of the government. In the wake of the coup, a set of repressive laws were put in place by the new dictator of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet, including but not limited to: public gatherings of more than four people had to have explicit government permission, political parties were either outlawed or suspended, a curfew was put in place, leftwing newspapers “vanished,” and generals or admirals were assigned to leadership posts in nearly all national institutions (Cardone 2013: 138– 39; Collier and Sater 2004: 359–61). Before the close of 1973, Pinochet formed the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (Directorate of National Intelligence) or DINA—a secret police under direct control of Pinochet that would become internationally known for its human rights abuses. Repression in the dictatorship would be strongest during the first years after the coup. Across the country, detention and torture camps were erected, with one located in Ritoque between the years of 1974–75 only a few kilometers away from the newly founded Open City. Torture and political imprisonment would peak in the immediate wake of the coup. As identified by the National Commission on Torture and Political Imprisonment, cases of torture between 11 September 1973 and 31 December of 1973 account for 67.4 percent of all cases (18,364 cases) and cases of political detention account for 68.7 percent of the total (22,824 cases). In the wake of the coup, there was a massive wave of brutal political repression. According to the Pinochet regime’s 1974 Declaration of Principles, the main targets of their repression were Marxists. Seeing the intro-

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duction of Marxist politics as a weakening of the Chilean State and nation, the military junta promised to eradicate “international Marxism.” Functionally, this signified the banning of Marxist parties as well as the torture and detention of those suspected of engaging in Marxist political activity. The expanse of this repression represented a paranoia, with stories of book burnings that included medical manuals and books on “Cubism” (thinking that it was about the Cuban Revolution) (Donoso Fritz 2013: 115). This potentially put the Open City in a rather vulnerable position for two reasons. First, as has been already noted, there was a possible perceived alignment of Amereida’s ideas with Marxism. Furthermore, despite the explicit disconnect with Marxist political principles, the foundational bylaws of the Open City and the Cooperative could easily be interpreted as testifying to a leftist political orientation. Second, Iommi and Claudio Girola had in their youth been members of the Communist Political Party in Argentina. Although this did not necessarily equate with immediate repression—Mario Góngora was also a former member of the Communist Party and was supported by the dictatorship—it may have placed both the Open City and the School of Architecture in vulnerable positions.1 On the ground level, there was also a notable shift at the Open City. First, work was extensively slowed down in the years immediately after the coup. Indeed, given the restrictions on public gatherings and the nighttime curfew—working at the Open City was limited for those who needed to make the long return to Viña del Mar or Valparaíso before nightfall—it made construction and activity at the Open City difficult at best. A brief glimpse at the publication and construction activity during this time testifies to this fact: only six constructions were conducted at the Open City between 1973–76 (the water tower, the cemetery, a sculptural work connected to the cemetery, and three hospederías— two of which were started prior to the coup) and Iommi (1976) only published two short works during this time (La semejanza más sorda and El Paraíso). The PUCV School of Architecture itself only published three documents between 1973 and 1980 (by contrast, in the 1980s they published nine documents).2 This is unsurprising given that during the dictatorship a series of “police and informant networks” subjected the university classroom to intense surveillance, limiting educational content (Taylor 2006: 89). As political repression spread across the nation, the Pinochet dictatorship started to institute the neoliberalization of Chile. Although much has recently been made of the “Chicago Boys,” a group of influential economists from the University of Chile who, through an international agreement with the University of Chicago, studied the economic

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principles of Milton Friedman and his acolytes, the military junta “had no economic program that guided their decisions” prior to and in the wake of the coup and were in fact motivated by nationalist politics that often “favored a Statist vision” that would have continued the developmentalist planning model (Bernedo 2013: 59–60). Although the Chicago Boys would win a few early victories, it was not until after he was convinced by Friedman himself at an economics conference in Chile in April 1975 that Pinochet would decide to fully implement the Chicago Boys’ neoliberal plans.3 The effect was immediate: “public spending was reduced by more than a quarter”; money supply was reduced; “more than four hundred State-owned, State-controlled, or ‘intervened’ companies” were privatized; foreign direct investment was encouraged; and agrarian reform was halted, in addition to other policies. The effects were just as profound: unemployment rose “to nearly 20 percent” and “real wages plummet[ed] to three-fifths of their 1970 level,” but inflation—a major issue of the Allende regime—was rapidly reined in (Collier and Sater 2004: 366–69). That this was a “shock” to the national culture of Chile is demonstrated by the State in 1974 having to produce a television program, “Las cartas sobre la mesa,” in order to teach the public how to operate under “the new economic logic that was being installed in the country” (Klein 2007; Bernedo 2013: 64). Associated with neoliberalization was the depoliticization of Chile. If under Allende and Frei, social movements had petitioned for recognition under the welfare state, Pinochet’s dictatorship removed all such activity; the State would now be run in technocratic fashion without influence from social movements, bodies, and actors. As Marcus Taylor (2006: 86) summarizes, “an overriding aim was to negate the historically developed forms of class struggle that characterised the previous 50 years and led to the sustained expansion of state welfare institutions. No longer would social services be conditioned on the mobilisation and articulation of various collective social subjects [like unions] that levied demands on the central state apparatus.” In this way, depoliticization represents not a destruction of or delinking from the State and politics so much as the reconstitution of coercive power as the exercise of “responding to economic ‘facts’ ” (Taylor 2006: 43). As Sergio de Castro, one of the authors of Chile’s new neoliberal economic plan, said looking back at the months before the coup, “We began to analyze and the first thing that we debated was that all political influence ought to stay outside, since we did not know what type of government was going to come” (quoted in Bernedo 2013: 62). Within this framework economic proposals were to be technical responses to the facts of the economy, and all political interventions in the economy that had become commonplace

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since the 1930s were to be removed. As Pinochet would describe his socalled nonpolitical stance in a series of interviews in 1989 published as Ergo Sum Pinochet, “I saw my political acting as an act of service in order to help my country. You have known that we the military intervened in Chile because the vast majority of the country was requesting it and because they did not want to become a province of Russia” (Correa and Subercaseaux 1989: 58–59). A strict division of politics and the foreclosed technical operation of the country was a foundational part of the neoliberalization of Chile. The effects of neoliberalization and depoliticization were not limited to the macroeconomy and national culture. The Chilean university system experienced a profound transformation during this time as well. While the major reform of the University did not occur until the imposition of a new Constitution in 1980 and the Consejo de Rectores de Universidades Chilenas (Council of University Rectors [CRUCH]) circulating the Nueva legislación universitaria chilena (New Chilean University Legislation) in 1981, there was a general trend during the dictatorship to transform the University into an “innovative corporation” that was “agile, practical, competitive,” and focused on teaching “know-how” (Esquivel Larrondo 2007: 55). Higher education in effect became a commodity to be bought on the marketplace (Austin 1997). Although the most obvious effect of this legislation has been the proliferation of private universities across the country, it also had an effect on curriculum, with higher education beginning to emphasize the development of natural science and IT (Information Technology) programs “to the detriment of the humanities” (Esquivel Larrondo 2007: 55). Already in 1981 Góngora was noting this transformation of the Chilean higher education, lamenting the shift towards scientific professions rather than the humanities (1981: 134). With the lightening of repression in 1978 and with the move towards a “protected” democracy, to quote the Pinochet regime’s Orwellian phrasing, room started to appear for greater cultural experimentation. Although this shift should not be exaggerated—torture, disappearances, and political detention, peaking in the first months after the coup, would continue throughout the dictatorship—the possibility of artistic expression after the so-called cultural blackout became a much greater possibility.4 Faced with the new cultural, political, and economic landscape of the Pinochet dictatorship, new questions now had to be confronted by writers, artists, architects, professors, and others in Chile. How would the new role of the State affect their thinking and practice? How would they engage this transformation of the Chilean political economy and Chilean culture?

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Authoritarian Urbanism and the Otherwise Although discussions of the cultural stance of the dictatorship have often focused on its prohibitions and censorship policies, the regime also developed an affirmative cultural position, enforcing a “homogenizing, monoglossic, prescriptive, and abstract rhetoric . . . that sought not to replace public discourse with an imposed silence but to simulate it with relentless drone” (Pratt 1996: 153–54). In the field of architecture and urbanism, this “relentless drone” was realized, for instance, with “Operation Cleanup” (Operación Limpieza), through which the military regime eliminated cultural statements of the Allende era by “disinfecting” cities of left-wing political expression (Hernán Errázuriz 2009: 137–40). As an article from the newspaper, El Mercurio, described this process in 1973, “The authorities of the Government have announced their decision to carry out a program of restoring the image of cleanliness and order that the capital of the Republic previously had” (quoted in Hernán Errázuriz 2009: 140). That such cleanliness produced a monolithic, dominating drone within the city is evidenced in the fate of “a series of murals realized in the Mapocho River in 1972 that covered some 200 meters with a narrative of the ‘history of the Workers Movement and of the Communist Party . . . ’ [and which] was covered with grey paint a little after the military coup of 1973” (Hernán Errázuriz 2009: 141). This maintenance and policing of a univocal urbanism—a foreclosed urban distribution of the sensible—was made law in Santiago on 9 June 1975 by Mayor María Eugenia Oyarzún, who established that each year between 10 July and 10 September the exterior of all buildings should be cleaned and repainted, with “the use of the color black and other violent tones on the façades prohibited in order to not perturb the harmony of the whole” (quoted in Hernán Errázuriz 2009: 142). The dictatorship sought to impose onto the urban structure a singular harmony that eliminated disruptions of the distribution of the sensible. In this strict sense it was an authoritarian urbanism.5 The existence of literature directly engaging the authoritarian politics of the dictatorship has been widely noted (León 2016 [2012]; Cardone 2013). What should also be recognized, however, is that many of the political works that were celebrated outside of Chile were largely ignored within the nation. For instance, Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, the 1991 post-dictatorship play depicting the enduring trauma of a woman subjected to torture during the dictatorship and which received international recognition and praise, received little attention in Chile. One explanation outside of Chile has been, “probably because it cut a little too close to the bone” (Collier and Sater 2004: 403). Others like

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Nelly Richard arrived to an altogether different conclusion: “The work of Dorfman speaks of memory through a representational mechanism that other Chilean artistic practices had already deconstructed critically, and this critical experience of a greater complexity of significant operations makes one consider, in the case of Dorfman’s work, requirements of reading that Death and a Maiden does not satisfy and in front of which Dorfman’s work appears as rather naive” (Richard 1994: 119). The “other Chilean artistic practices” that Richard was discussing are from the experimental literature of what has been termed the “new scene” or the “advanced scene.” Through analyses of the work of Diamela Eltit, Enrique Lihn, Raúl Zurita, Eugenio Dittborn, Roser Bru, and others, a group of Chilean intellectuals started describing the work of this “new scene” as “unassimilable by the ‘official’ cultural system” of the dictatorship (Richard 1987, 1994: 16; Valdés 1996; Brito 1990). According to Richard and others, the new representational mechanisms of the “new scene” erected a means of dissenting without directly engaging Chilean politics. In Rancièran language, these authors were seeking new ways of intervening in and disrupting the authoritarian and univocal distribution of the sensible rather than being exclusively concerned with the policies of the State. The foreclosed univocalization of the urban by the Pinochet regime is recognized within “new scene” literature. Diamela Eltit’s Lumpérica (1983), for instance, describes the “epic struggle to find or achieve a convergence of selfhood, agency, language, and meaning” by a woman named “L. Iluminada” (“The illuminated [feminine] one”) who overstays curfew in a public plaza while dancing, spasming, and performing beneath the light of a flashing neon sign, “a potent image for the authoritarian state [in which] light/power emanate[s] from an unseen source” (Pratt 1996: 160). This struggle for winning a particular selfhood within the public plaza becomes necessary because the monotonous droning of the light, “el luminoso” (“the [masculine] luminosity”), bathes the plaza in a univocal hue, erasing multiplicity, specificity, and difference, But the luminosity [el luminoso] does not stop. It continues transmitting its own names until the plaza is nothing more than her [L. Iluminada] and the pale ones that with a fixed gaze are recognized in the flashing light. They are waiting their turn, so that the luminosity [el luminoso] confirms their existence, that is, names them otherwise. . . Incubated again, technology gives them life. (Eltit 1983: 16–17)

If, following Rancière, politics is the process of determining who can be seen and where by enforcing a particular partitioning of the sensible,

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then the authoritarian light of “el luminoso” determines a singular and univocal sensibility in which all are seen under the same medium of illumination (Pratt 1996: 160–61). Even further, Francine Masiello (2001) has argued how this work opens up an urban multiplicity within the plaza illuminated under the monolithic drone of the authoritarian neon sign. In the second chapter of Lumpérica, Eltit transcribes an interrogation in which the interrogator begins by asking, “What is the utility of the public plaza?” (Eltit 1983: 37) As Masiello argues through a reading of this passage, under the light of the neon sign the public plaza is “[c]leared of its original function as a site of festivity” and comes to be “at the mercy of an apparatus of representation” (2001: 68). Yet, Masiello continues, if the neon sign represents the authoritarian attempt to remove the possibility of dissensus and multiplicity by imposing a singular luminosity onto the public square, the social meaning that L. Iluminada gains “by force of this electric sign” posits a multiplicitous excess to this authoritarian logic, for within this luminosity “she exists as a fragmented image, not as a self-constituted whole” (Masiello 2001: 67). If this light exists, like “Operation Cleanup,” to bathe the urban plaza in a singular shade that enforces a monotone onto the whole in which each subject position is foreclosed and unified, then the fragmentation of L. Iluminada’s subjectivity represents the maintenance and fostering of multiplicity within the city—a dissensus in the authoritarian distribution of the sensible. I have focused on Lumpérica in order to argue that during the dictatorship it is, to use Jean Franco’s phrasing (2002: 180), “[o]ut of the now anachronistic gestures of avant-garde revolt” that a “refractory aesthetic” emerged as a mode of dissensus. If these theorizations of the “new scene” thereby reveal a consciousness of a Rancièran political undercurrent of experimental literature decoupled from State politics, they also often fail to examine how these same literary modes of dissensus may have embraced some cultural transformations created under Pinochet. Indeed, the postmodern poetics of the new scene (Richard 1994) were part of a global reconfiguration of cultural production that reflected the dissolution of the Fordist economy and the reconstruction of a decentralized, “flexible” economy (Harvey 1990). The shift from a modernist centralized system producing a new and powerful work of art—e.g., Vicente Huidobro as a creative poet-god creating a new being—to the postmodern focus on the flows and surfaces of a fragmented and multiplicitous subject was part and parcel of a transformation of a capitalist economy towards neoliberalization. That is, the subversion of a “unified” subject and of “totalization” by an alternative social arrangement based on multiplicity and fragmentation is, as Fredric Jameson (1991: 333) suggests,

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“a systematic repudiation of notions and ideals of praxis as such, or of the collective project.” A close homology can be constructed between the emergence of the new scene’s celebration of fragmentation and the demobilization of collective social subjects in neoliberalizing Chile. Norbert Lechner already hinted towards this critique in 1987, noting that the Chilean situation was marked not only by an authoritarianism but also by its growing involvement in a globalizing economic system. Recognizing this distinction, he questioned whether the new scene’s nurturing of the fragmentation of subjectivity was in fact an ideological contribution to “the loss of collective referents” under neoliberalization (1987: 28). Nelly Richard (1994: 96) also recognized this critique, noting that the new scene threatened to fracture and dislocate “public and common space” and “common sense” through its glorification of the cultural value of the multiplication of the products of the neoliberal market. Following Lechner’s and Jameson’s critiques, it therefore becomes central to ask: how can one construct a multiplicitous collective subjectivity— that is, move away from the fracturing of “common sense” embedded in new scene aesthetics—from within the context of neoliberalization? In many ways, this was not the significance or purpose of Lumpérica. Diamela Eltit’s amplification of the “insubordination of signs” (Richard 1994) under el luminoso was an act of Rancièran politics: it was an intervention in the urban space of the public square in order to register a dissensus in the official distribution of the sensible. The formation of a new collective subjectivity, however, requires not a dissensus but rather a “re-existence,” a thinking otherwise that affirmatively poses an alternative mode of living in common based on multiplicity (Walsh and Mignolo 2018; Albán Achinte 2008). Here, I want to turn to the text Arena de la construcción, de la luz y el sonido, en la obra de arquitectura (Sand of construction, of light and sound, in the architectural work) by Isabel Margarita Reyes. It will be the argument here that Reyes’s discussion of architectural production that takes light into account seeks to deconstruct the univocal authority of a singular unified beam of light, but that, unlike Eltit, she both is uninterested in any sort of political intervention and posits an architectural thinking otherwise than the urban vision of the dictatorship. Reyes continues the poetic political nonpolitics of the Open City and thereby functionally posits a multiplicitous alternative to authoritarian urbanism and to the Rancièran politics of the new scene. Written between 1978 and 1983, Arena was produced by Reyes when she began teaching as part of the faculty of the School of Architecture and Design.6 Reyes might therefore be said to be part of an operationally termed “second generation” of the Open City—those who were pres-

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ent for the founding but were students at the School of Architecture or recent graduates in the late 1960s and early 70s, only coming into leadership positions during the 1970s and 80s. (“Generation” used with the understanding that in a strict sense it is inappropriate to speak of “generations” at the Open City given that the group is pushing towards a new collective subjectivity in which such hierarchized divisions of age no longer operate.) This speaks to a significant and often overlooked characteristic of the Open City, namely, that it is a social body made up of multiple members coming from different contexts with distinct intellectual, architectural, and artistic positions. Asked as a new professor at the School of Architecture to teach her students about the role of light, sand, and sound in architecture and construction, Reyes researched various technical manuals (especially the REEF manuals in French) and reconstructed their contents into a single text.7 Reflections on her first years of teaching this material are then included as parts two and three of the textbook. Reyes’s Arena (1983) is therefore focused on an apparently limited technical matter: the relationship between architecture and the physical properties of light, sand, and sound. Part one of the text focuses on the poetic qualities of sand and its relationship to architecture. In this section, one finds repeated the general discussions found in Amereida and the founding of the Open City regarding the relationship between the American continent, poetry, and architecture: These six reflections . . . address or try to confront architectural activity and, in that, to confront the construction in, with, and through poetry. And especially that of Amereida. It opens the continent which we inhabit and manifests itself to us. Through this, we encounter ourselves in it and, at the same time, before it. . . Through this, all effort tends towards the possibility of the construction of an illumination whose luminosity, in which we remain immersed, is presented to us as present. (43)

Reappearing in this text are the same concerns that appear in Amereida and that form the intellectual foundation of the early years of the Open City (the formation of a mode of inhabiting that is proper to the terrestrial materiality of the continent and the exploration of the relationship between poetry and architecture). This textbook continues the work of Amereida and the foundational tenets of the Open City by seeking a mode of teaching architecture in a way that poetically takes into account light, sand, and sound. In contrast with this first poetic section, parts two and three of Reyes’s work are characterized more by the measurements, calculations, and

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technical aspects of construction than by the relationship of architecture, poetry, and the American continent. For example, her drawings often focus on mathematical formulas and graphs more than poetry (Reyes 1983: 51). As such, a critic might object that this text reflects the technification of the university that one would expect within the broader transformations of Chilean higher education under Pinochet. Furthermore, this work seems to lack a substantial discussion of many of the thematic contents of Amereida such as a continental-scale consideration of inhabiting America and the relationship between modern European cultural formations and Indigenous communities.8 This is most evident in Reyes’s discussion of the construction of a light box. In the text, she devotes an extended passage to the design of a cube in which to observe the luminosity of incoming sunlight. Through this focus, there appears to be a distinct shift from a consideration of how to inhabit the American continent to a focus on highly localized architectural production. Although this is not alien to the thought of the Valparaíso School—Alberto Cruz’s 1954 text on the construction of the Chapel at Los Pajaritos, for example, addresses the same issue of the light box with a similarly locally circumscribed focus—this small spatial scale should be noted.9 In Arena there seems to even be a basic shift in the relationship with the environment. If nature in Amereida and “Opening of the Terrains” was revealed or illuminated, in Reyes’s text it is now constructed, “The conception of an architectonic work appears in a directed space. And, therefore, an architect does not think in a field of autonomous or neutral simultaneities like technique. And that because architecture is capable of seeing how it is inhabited, for example, in light and technology, how light is constructed” (15). The implicit argument of these critical comments—the architectural ideas of the Open City in the late 1970s and 1980s participated in the cultural logic of the dictatorship—misunderstands the relationship with nature nurtured in Arena. Reyes’s construction of the light box is fundamentally interested in revealing the multiplicity of a beam of light. As we see in her handwritten diagrams, she theorizes light as constructed insofar as its multiplicity must be revealed through construction. Construction and revelation exist in a dialectic, not in separated and opposing fields. For instance, Reyes is interested in the juxtaposition of various luminosities and the construction of a cube whose interior “reflects light in open concave angles and [whose] translucent papers leave light diffuse in the corners of the cube” (71). In other words, “The purpose is to make equal the luminosities of different colors by means of colored light. ‘A’ light corresponds to a range of lights. The constructive purpose is to obtain a light that is comparable (matrix, model) and measurable (verifiable)” (64). Reyes’s focus on construction functions to illuminate the

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multiplicity of the (only apparently) monolithic luminosity of the sun. To construct light, in other words, is to strengthen the weakened margins of a beam of light and to subvert the authority of the light’s singular appearance. Construction is the designed deconstruction of univocality that leads to the revelation of multiplicity. Although these ideas had already been present at the Open City prior to Reyes’s discussion—for instance, the 1970 seminars on urbanism also defined calculation in terms of its ability to open up multiplicity—this relationship with calculation is given a renovated signification in this 1983 text. More precisely, this focus on the construction of architectural space that illuminates the multiplicitous margins of a singular luminosity can be functionally contrasted with the urban activity of the Pinochet regime which, as I argued earlier, constructed a univocal urban space and enforced a foreclosed understanding of natural phenomena through the reformation of higher education around hard sciences and technical know-how. In other words, Reyes’s text offers an architectural thinking otherwise than the dictatorship’s interventions in the urban sphere and the university which sought univocality. If, following Laurent Dubreuil as quoted in the previous chapter, authoritarianism is of the same essence of politics insofar as both are “bound within a collective postulation of a totalising organisation of life” and poetry seeks an alternative space for a non-totalizing life in common, then Reyes’s architectural theory founded on the poetic revelation of the multiplicity of light exists in a space distinct from politics, authoritarian or otherwise. For this reason, as Massimo Alfieri (2016: 107) argues, it should be unsurprising that the Open City was not “prevented from continuing with its activities . . . [but was] treated rather dismissively and dubbed ‘los locos de Valparaíso’ (the madmen of Valparaíso).” Their architectural thinking otherwise was both uninterested in a direct confrontation with authoritarian urbanism in the field of politics and was incomprehensible from within that urban imaginary. This distinction between an architectural thinking otherwise (Reyes) and a critical intervention in the official urbanist practices of the period (Eltit) helps counter what might be a critique of the textbook: it maintains a distance in regards to questions of social structuration. This “lack” of a discussion of social concerns can be seen in Reyes’s appeal to the question of ethics. As she writes, “One must trace, then, this road to the constructive word and circulate it. This represents assuming an ethical posture. Of the ethical-poetic. That which makes comprehensible that the relation between the art of constructing man’s [sic] dwelling and science and the technical is also inside of an ethical magnitude. Said magnitude upon being poetic, in this way, is public. Since poetry, due to its own na-

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ture, is public” (Reyes 1983: 13). Reyes’s introduction of ethics represents a novel departure within the thought of the School of Architecture and the Open City, being the only text I have read in which this concept is explicitly discussed. In this way, however, it may appear to the critic that the text is marked by various lacks: a lack of a discussion of the relationship with the other in terms of their identity within a colonial matrix of power as appeared in Amereida; a lack of a discussion of a collective American identity in favor of individual and decontextualized ethics; a lack of an investigation of a noncolonial mode of inhabiting the continent. All of the social concerns found in Amereida and in documents from the late 1960s, the critic might object, have now been neutralized by reconfiguring the Open City’s poetic political nonpolitics in terms of a language of ethics. Yet as is emphasized throughout this book, descriptions of a lack often speak to an inability to perceive an alternative presence. And in fact, this critical interpretation ignores the specific function that ethics serve in Reyes’s text. The natural-ethical-public triad of this passage forms an interwoven triangle. Beginning with the claim that the relationship between science, the technical, and “man’s” dwelling is of an ethical magnitude, Reyes shifts to exploring the public nature of poetry, reproducing the Open City’s appeal to the poetic as the foundation for its urban social body. This passage thereby forms a dialectic between the sphere of the public and the ethical sphere of the individual, a relationship mediated by poetry. What appears in Reyes’s text is not the elimination of the City’s poetic political nonpolitics, indeed she still insists on the poetic and public foundation of architecture, but rather the conceptual exploration of hospitality at the level of the individual. On the other end of this triangle, the relationship between the social (public space and individual ethics) and nonhuman nature (light, sand, and sound) is mediated through construction (in the case of the public) and its associated field of calculation (in the case of individual ethics) which opens up nonhuman nature’s multiplicity. In sum, the question of the ethical can be understood as the conceptual coalescence resulting from the human inhabitant’s synthesis of their dialectical relationships with both nature (mediated through calculation) and the social space of the public (mediated through poetry). For Reyes, ethics is not a departure from the poetic political nonpolitics of the Open City, but its reconception at the level of the individual inhabitant. Within the broader cultural space of Chile during this period, Arena maintains a particular place. In addition to deconstructing the singularity of the beam of light and subverting the authority of its univocality (a thinking architecture otherwise than an authoritarian logic), the text’s appeal to ethics places it in an ambiguous relationship with the process

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of neoliberalization and its subversion of the organization of a collective public. If Reyes, like the “new scene,” seems to have embraced the individualized and neoliberal logic of ethics, she insists that this ethical magnitude is always poetic and, “in this way, is public.” Reyes’s text undoubtedly has a more limited spatial focus than many of the texts from the late 1960s and early 1970s—moving away from a conceptualization of the terrains as a whole as appears in “Opening of the Terrains,” much less a continental-scale inverted map of America as appears in Amereida—but “upon being poetic” this limited sphere of the human inhabitant and their architectural space is always conceived as part of a broader public realm. The focus on ethics is not a reflection of the fracturing of the public under neoliberalization, but rather an examination of the building blocks that form the public at the Open City. One element of this interpretation needs to be explicitly addressed. Namely, placing Reyes’s text in conversation with the urban practices of the dictatorship is not meant to imply that she was responding to the political climate of Chile during this period. Reyes, as an up-andcoming architect and professor engaging with the intellectual atmosphere at the School of Architecture, was in the process of forming her own autonomous position from within the thinking of the School. Did I not argue, for instance, that her text in many ways reflects the thinking of the School of Architecture from before the 1960s? Is her lightbox not an insightful development of Alberto Cruz’s design for a chapel at Los Pajaritos? More abstractly, the Open City and the School of Architecture were and are social bodies formed by multiple interacting people with multiple positions that cannot be reduced to a singular set of dogmatic beliefs. As an intellectual dynamically engaging the poetic and architectural thought of her institutional home, critics must therefore resist the temptation to reduce Reyes from a theoretical agent participating in a newly forming intellectual tradition to a passive expression of the broader Chilean social landscape. Although it has been the argument of this section that her work functionally can be read within the sociopolitical landscape of Chile by thinking an architectural practice and pedagogy otherwise than that pursued by the dictatorship, one must be careful not to construct an overdeterminative interpretive framework. The argument of this section is therefore specific: although a reading can note partial connections between Reyes’s text, the poetic methodology of the Open City, and the broader historical context of Chile, it does not signify that Reyes’s text is determined by that context nor does it mean that the dictatorship definitively transformed the Open City. In other words, what I offer here is one possible reading of Reyes’s text among many, it is not to claim that the historical period defined her work.

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Beyond Public/Private Everyday life in Chile during the dictatorship was policed by the Pinochet regime through a strict division of space between public and private spheres with women defined as “corresponding” to the latter (Pratt 1996: 151). The Chilean State prior to the coup had made advances towards gender equality as understood within Western liberal politics: by the 1950s “unmarried women over the age of twenty-one” were made “fully responsible” and autonomous before the law; the first publication ran by and for women, La Mujer, appeared in 1887; professional education had been made available to women starting in 1877, with “a female presence” in the university and professional world becoming notable by the 1930s and 1940s; under González Videla’s presidency women were appointed as a cabinet minister and as foreign ambassadors; and women gained the right to vote in 1949 (Collier and Sater 2004: 287; Ramírez Errázuriz and Ulloa Inostroza 2019). The dictatorship would depart from this trajectory of women entering the public sphere, arguing that it is in the family that women realize their mission and thereby become, in the words of the 1974 Declaration of Principles, “the spiritual rock of the Fatherland.” Even when Pinochet himself would apparently depart from this, saying “in my family I am not authoritarian” and that he wants an “intellectual” wife, he framed women’s access to education in terms of their ability to be more “interesting” for the husband, “I like women like my wife and very feminine. Intellectual? Of course! A woman with whom one cannot converse is of no interest to me” (Correa and Subercaseaux 1989: 33). For Pinochet, the purpose of women’s education is exclusively to “better” a private sphere neatly divorced from the public sphere. Pinochet effectively sought to define women’s desires, assigning to their actions a specific, singular, and limited “meaning and even an epistemology” (Pratt 1996: 152). As María Valenzuela (1993: 309–11) summarizes, the cultural politics of the military regime was based on a rigid conception of women’s social roles, assigning them the duty of “assuring the ideological continuity of the regime” through “educating children for the Fatherland” from within the private sphere. Responses in Chile both immediately preceding and in the wake of the coup to the policing of the public/private division of space was of course by no means univocal. For instance, in 1972 a group of women organized the “March of the Empty Saucepans,” a public demonstration by Chilean women against the Allende administration that subsequently aided in its destabilization. As Camilo Trumper (2016: 43) argues, this protest was framed in terms of a response to a state of emergency that had disrupted these women’s desired division between public and private space, “a

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dire political and economic situation had forced women from the safety of the home and into contested public spaces.” The functional value of this, as Trumper continues, was a reinforcement of the public/private division of space insofar as the march required that binary in order to legitimize the narrative of “forcing women from the safety of the home and into contested public spaces.” This embrace of the clean distinction between (masculine) public space and (feminine) private space, (male) politics and (female) domesticity, which only breaks down under a state of emergency, can be contrasted with the work of the arpilleristas (those who make arpilleras) during the dictatorship. Starting in 1974, women who had relatives (spouses, children, siblings, parents, etc.) who had been disappeared or detained began forming workshops to make arpilleras, “wall hangings made of scraps of cloth that narrate the story of life under Pinochet through the fabric itself ” (Agosín 1996: 2). As Marjorie Agosín summarizes, The arpilleristas organized themselves, first as mothers and wives of the disappeared, and then as political citizens. They still did not belong to political parties; many of them functioned within a confined domestic world which meant that their everyday existence revolved around home, school, and church . . . The arpilleristas were united in an alliance of sisterhood that tried to negate masculine authoritarian power, oppression, and exploitation. (1996: 10)

In many instances, this work led to a broader process of politicization leading to actions such as hunger strikes, street demonstrations, and women chaining themselves to the gates of Parliament (Sastre Díaz 2011). In other instances, however, such a process of politicization is not so clear. The testimony of Anita Rojas is telling in this regard. After emphasizing her own politicization through the arpillerista workshops, she concludes her testimony with the following, “The association has become my family. We have an office and going there is like going to my own house” (Agosín 1996: 122). Rojas’s testimony is operating in a space between public and private, in a space where going to an office is “like going to my own house,” where a “political” association “has become my family,” where hunger strikes occur “to obtain a response about our family members.” In this instance, the arpillera workshop was not characterized solely by the entrance of women into the public sphere (though it was at times that as well), but was the deconstruction of the public/ private binary itself. This deconstruction of the public/private division of space formed a central theoretical investigative question of the Chilean sociologist,

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Julieta Kirkwood, during the 1980s. Under Kirkwood’s theorization, a response to Pinochet’s patriarchal authoritarianism, rather than attempting to seize power within the State, was to transform everyday life in Chile. Indeed, she explicitly rejects “the possibility of realizing small adjustments of schedules and of roles to the already-existing order, since this would be nothing more than the insertion into a world already defined by masculinity,” instead framing her politics as the following: “to rethink the organization of the everyday life of women and men; it is to question, to negate . . . the affirmation of the vital necessity of the existence of two experiential areas, the public (political) and private (domestic), that stereotypically sacralizes exclusive and rigid spheres of action for men and women” (Kirkwood 1986: 181). Against aspirations for power within the State, Kirkwood’s political intervention demanded a reorganization of the division of public and private. What the arpilleristas’ praxis and Kirkwood’s theorization point towards is a demand to reconfigure everyday life of men and women outside of the public/ private division of space. The Open City is at a glance divorced from these practices and theorizations: Kirkwood seeks to “change the world” through interventions in the Chilean social landscape, and the a-lettered cultural production of the arpilleristas is far from the lettered practices found in the Open City. What I want to argue here, however, is that the Open City’s eschewing of the public/private division of space in favor of the public/intimate division of space functionally posed a mode of living otherwise than the gendered division of space policed by Pinochet, regardless of the initial intention behind the formation of this public/intimate distinction. In this sense, the Open City, as should be expected, never engaged the cultural politics of the public/private division of space (i.e., they were never political agents, in contrast to Kirkwood and the arpilleristas), but they did activate a mode of living otherwise than the patriarchal authoritarianism of the military regime. The construction of the Hospedería de la Entrada (Entrance Boarding House) by Boris Ivelic, Ana Paz Yanes, and the rest of the Open City is exemplary in this regard. Yanes had been part of the Open City from its initiation. In her fifth year at the School of Architecture, she was invited to participate in the bottega of Iommi and Cruz in late 1968. During this time and through 1969, Ivelic and Yanes also helped locate a site for the Open City and were subsequently participants in its foundation in 1970 and 1971 (see Chapter 3). After helping build the “igloo”—the first building of the Open City, the igloo was initially a common space for work, meetings, and collective meals—they and others would travel to and from the Open City nearly every night to work on construction.

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Immediately after building the igloo, people would then rotate shifts staying overnight in the building, with at least two persons always being on site twenty-four hours per day in order to watch over the terrain. In 1972 Yanes, Ivelic, and their two-year-old son at the time (Iván, who still lives at the Open City and whose work will be discussed in Chapter 6) moved into the igloo. They were the first permanent residents of the Open City.10 In 1980, Ivelic and Yanes proposed the erection of a hospedería in which they could live. Their proposal was presented in an Agora, the Open City agreed through poetic consensus to the proposal, the hospedería was founded through a poetic act, and the family began to build later that year. The structure was built at the entrance to the Open City at the crossroads where guests departed to other places, thereby leading to its name: Hospedería de la Entrada (Entrance Boarding House). The interior space was raised on pillars and underneath the built structure initial plans contained a public, outdoor cinema.11 In other words, the idea that the Hospedería de la Entrada would be a “private house” was discarded immediately: decisions were made collectively in an Agora (even if starting from an individual proposal), the family would not own the building (that is, they would not be able to personally sell it or leave it to be inherited), and the hospedería was planned to host public events. The idea that this was a private household in which domestic duties would be separated from public life was abolished in the very process of construction: it was a collective project of the Open City that would be a site of multiple, interrelated uses in which the distinction between public and private was deconstructed and replaced by the distinction between public and intimate. In other words, the Open City’s praxis proposes that a division of space otherwise than public/private not only requires a total reconfiguration of urbanist and architectural practices and foundations, but alternative understandings of collective, familial, and individual subjectivity as well. The process of constructing the hospedería would further emphasize the multiplicity of the site. Ivelic went to the northern-most part of the Open City where a grove of pines is located in order to chop down trees as material to raise the hospedería on wood pilotis. Furthermore, by raising the hospedería on pillars, not only was room made for the public cinema, but sand and wind would now be able to pass unimpeded by the architectonic structure; a place-based relationship with the terrestrial quality of the entrance lay at the foundational design of the Hospedería de la Entrada. Next, to prepare the wood for construction Ivelic approached the nearby oil refinery in Concón which had access to the large tube necessary to create the machine to impregnate wood. The re-

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finery agreed to lend said tube to the Open City; Ivelic then built the wood impregnator himself, and the family began personally impregnating the wood for construction. In short, construction was illuminating the multiplicity of the place: the transitoriness of the wind and sand and their movement through the space, the multiple functions of public and intimate life, the arrival of guests to the Open City, and so on. Technology was not being used to dominate the entrance, but rather to reveal its underlying multiplicity. This story of the Hospedería de la Entrada may seem rather unremarkable to an outside (uncharitable) critic: it was, they might claim, simply a family starting a home and raising their children, in many ways fitting in with the dictatorship’s desire to strengthen traditional family units and the private sphere. More broadly, the Open City during this period was characterized largely, though not exclusively, by the construction of single-family housing (hospederías). Would this not represent, the critic might continue, an affront to the work of Kirkwood and the arpilleristas? At best an evasion of the period’s cultural politics in favor of the depoliticized comforts of the home? To narratively juxtapose this activity next to Julieta Kirkwood and the arpilleristas, this critique runs, seems at best to be a non sequitur and at worst a gross misunderstanding of all three (Open City, Kirkwood, and the arpilleristas). What I would like to point to, however, is a functional theoretical relationship between them all: their rethinking of “the organization of the everyday life of women and men” outside the public/private binary that was a constitutive system of conceptual differences and of collective subjectivity for the Pinochet regime. In the particular case of the Open City, their collective construction of an urban structure organized around a public/ intimate division of space speaks to their constructing a poetic mode of living in common otherwise than Pinochet’s patriarchal authoritarianism structured around a public/private division. Whereas Kirkwood and the arpilleristas were politicized agents directly engaging the Chilean State in order to depose those who policed the public/private division of space, the Open City was collectively (i.e., as a polis as a whole) activating an alternative urban structure outside that division. Returning to Rancière, the personal commitments of residents of the Open City to the political struggles of the time (i.e., whether they supported the “March of the Empty Saucepans,” Kirkwood, or the arpilleristas) are inconsequential. What is significant is that they had functionally constructed a mode of living in common that no longer operated according to the public/private binary.12 It may therefore be said that this deconstruction of the public/private division is a reformulation of the idea of hospitality visited in Chapter 3.

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Is not their idea of hospitality—a granting of space to each guest and to be the guest of the other—precisely an expression of this division between public and intimate spaces? I would like to conclude this section with an excerpt from a recent (unpublished) piece by Miguel Eyquem (2017) about the formation of the Valparaíso School starting in the 1940s in Santiago. In the document, he reveals the following: the idea of hospitality as practiced at the Open City came from Ximena Amunátegui (whose husband was Godofredo Iommi). Underlying the foundation of the Open City (in addition to Alberto Cruz’s design of the Chapel of Los Pajaritos—identified in the passage by the discussion of the “white table” and the “faces of the cube”—and his courses on plasticity) is the practice of hospitality by Amunátegui: For us who were unmarried, Ximena was fundamental. In this way she was a fundamental founding member. Godo’s [Iommi’s] house was the home of Godo and Ximena . . . Here is born the “white table” [from Cruz’s design of the Chapel at Los Pajaritos] . . . The white table hosted all. Idea of Alberto. It let one write, draw . . . afterwards it was transformed into a symbol: Hospitality. (Eyquem 2017)

It might be claimed that Amunátegui’s only apparently “domestic” and “private” practices constitute the foundation of the “public” urbanism of the Open City. One cannot help but pose a question that no longer has an answer: who should be cited as the representative agent of the notion of hospitality, Amunátegui, who revolutionized its practice, or Iommi and Cruz, the scribes who, following Amunátegui, theorized this notion? In this passage, the distinctions between public/private and urban/ domestic, in addition to the liberal conception of agency and subjectivity, are not totally dispensed with—the maintenance of a public/intimate distinction in addition to the use of individual names and of the idea of a stable collectivity testify to this—but they are reworked so radically that they no longer hold the same signification.13

On Amereida II and towards a Critique of Pinochet In each of the above examples, the thinking otherwise than the authoritarian State never explicitly mentions the political landscape of Chile. The Open City would, however, come to name the broader social context in their major poetic work produced during the dictatorship: Amereida II (1991b [1986]). This follow-up to Amereida is partially composed of fragments written between 1965 and 1967 not included in the original

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epic poem. For instance, the last third of the text is a reproduction of the journal (bitácora) from the 1965 journey that was kept by travelers. After collecting these fragments, in addition to writing new material, they were reformatted, re-edited, and then organized into a literary work. In this sense, Amereida II appears to be completely unconcerned with the historical and political moment in which it was created, at best a nostalgic turn to the past in an attempt to keep alive the hopes and dreams of that former era and at worst a form of escapism in which the authors ignored the horrors of the reality in which they were living.14 On closer examination, however, Amereida II proves to be the poem most engaged with Chilean politics in the entire history of the Open City, though always through displacement, metaphor, and metonymy. In Amereida II, the embrace of a multiplicity and pluralism that operates beneath and subverts the domination of a monolithic and single-minded technological logic functions as a criticism of the dictatorship and a proposal for an alternative, poetic mode of living in common. A central “antagonist” of Amereida II is Chile’s state-owned oil corporation, ENAP, Empresa Nacional de Petróleo (National Petroleum Enterprise). This focus is by no means hidden in the poem, with ENAP appearing in the very first phrase of the work, “And then the barge crossed us / with trucks from E.N.A.P.” (3).15 Within Amereida II, the reference to ENAP functionally provides a bridge between the pre-coup and post-coup Chilean social landscapes. In 1945, CORFO (Corporación de Fomento), the Chilean government office formed in 1939 that was in charge of fostering Chile’s energy sources and promoting national industrialization, discovered oil reserves in the extreme south of Chile. ENAP was then formed by the State “to coordinate the development of the oil industry.” Later in the 1950s, they would build a refinery at Concón—the refinery that Boris Ivelic approached for his wood impregnator and that still stands today about five kilometers from the Open City, a constant reminder of the presence of the State even within the terrains of the dunes of Ritoque. By the 1960s, ENAP’s oil production fulfilled around “three-quarters of the country’s petroleum” needs and became a central export of the nation. During the dictatorship’s massive waves of neoliberalization, ENAP would remain one of the few large corporations still nationalized (the copper corporation, CODELCO, being another). If in 1965 ENAP had been one of many nationalized industries, by 1986 it was a rarity—one of the few examples of massive State-directed industrialization in the midst of a sea of privatization under a neoliberal authoritarian government (Collier and Sater 2004: 269–70, 371–72). ENAP and the oil industry receive heavy criticism in Amereida II, the central strand of which is an examination of how it destroys multi-

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plicity. The poem initially discusses oil in terms of such multiplicity, “in maternal rocks / plants / algae / millions of schools of fish / petroleum / of mestizo origin / animal / vegetable” (24). In this 1986 epic, oil is explicitly a mestizo material that mixes a variety of materials together. To define this material, Amereida II implies, is a quixotic mission, since its multiplicity resists such a singularized categorization. In contrast to this multiplicity, however, Amereida II notes that the focus of the oil industry is to erect “a system of direction and control” with which to “recover crude oil” and “separate [oil] from the gas,” that is, to remove all multiplicity from the petroleum so that it can be used for the single use of fuel (27). This critique, of course, is by no means new for those involved with the Open City, given that we have already seen in Chapter 3 that many at the City had already theorized that the singularized definition of natural phenomena through scientific logic is intimately related to coloniality. Although the theoretical foundation of this claim found in Amereida II is therefore consistent with the already emergent thought of the Open City, its ecocritical focus on the oil industry is novel. This critique of the techno-scientific reduction of multiplicity of which the oil industry was guilty would not be limited exclusively to this ecocritical lens. For Amereida II then expands its critique of this industry to the ENAP encampments that were erected to house workers, Never will an encampment be able to be a city. Because an encampment by definition encloses a single “business” guided by a single intention. Implies being taken entirely from outside and planted here or there where the business might want. It is the work. The univocal . . . It is the directed “economy,” not free competition. It is the common risk, not the individual . . . For this reason an encampment will never be able to be a city. Proper to a city is multiplicity, the ordinary with the extraordinary, possibility, instability, business and leisure. (33–34)

In this moment, Amereida II again visits familiar territory: whereas city space is marked by multiplicity, by the encounter with the other, and by the appearance of alterity, the space of the ENAP encampment is characterized by its reduction of that multiplicity to a univocality. If ENAP and the oil industry impose a univocality and singularity, Amereida II implies that what is proper to the city (via its discussion of oil in its pre-refined state) as well as the earth is their multiplicity that can only be poetically revealed, never scientifically determined. This passage also testifies, however, to an economic alignment with “free competition” rather than the “directed ‘economy.’” Following Jean Franco (2002), this association of poetry, liberation, and the free mar-

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ket was nothing new to Latin American poetics. Franco (2002: 52–56) demonstrates through a reading of Octavio Paz’s work, for instance, how Paz’s celebration of freedom and his criticism of the State—both the welfare State as well as a bureaucratic Stalinism—quickly devolved into a libertarianism, ignoring the emerging neoliberal State that would come to dominate the social landscape of Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. Franco’s summary of Paz rings similar to the poetry of the Open City when she notes that Paz’s focus on “celebration,” hospitality, and the poetic posits an alternative way to construct a life in common. Franco’s citation of Paz’s (1991) Children of the Mire appears as if it could have been written on the dunes of Ritoque, “the time has come to build an Ethics and a Politics upon the Poetics of the now. Politics ceases to be a construction of the future; its mission is to make the present habitable” (quoted in Franco 2002: 52). Moreover, Franco’s critique of Paz seems to translate perfectly to the embrace of free competition that appears in Amereida II: although [Paz] criticized the bureaucracies of Eastern Europe and the welfare states, including that of Mexico, he overlooked the fact that a new kind of state—the neoliberal state—was coming into existence. This is the “democratic” state that sustains the illusion that the free market is the agent of regulation and change and that the apparatuses of the state are there simply to negotiate between citizens when, in effect, the cards are stacked against the poorer classes. (2002: 54)

As Franco argues, there is a tendency within some Latin American appeals to the poetic as a non–State-based mode of organizing a life in common to perceive “free competition” as a further means of separating from the politics of the State. These appeals, however, do not perceive how the State starting in the 1970s was the driving force behind the furthering of “free competition” through neoliberalization. Nonetheless, to stop at this oversight is to ignore the second element of Franco’s summary of Paz’s political position: a serious and engaged resistance to authoritarian States. If Paz celebrated the free market as a form of democracy, this was in part due to his equivocation in forming a (false) binary between the nondemocratic State and the democratic free market; the celebration of the latter is therefore just as much a metaphor for antiauthoritarianism as it is a celebration of the actualities of neoliberalism. This same resistance to the encroachment of a repressive State into the affairs of the poetic would be reflected in the broader role of the State in Amereida II. More polemically, to identify the embrace of “free competition” with an embrace of the Pinochet regime—rather than

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an embrace of a poetic tendency in Latin America to associate libertarianism with poetic liberation—is to ignore that in this 1986 epic, it is precisely the State’s drive to authoritatively impose a single, monolithic, and univocal order that prevents the poetic revelation of the multiplicity proper to the American land. Amereida II may miss that “free competition” by the 1980s was a key element of the Chilean State, but that does not mean that they embraced the politics of Pinochet. Indeed, a substantial critique of the Chilean State during the 1980s appears in Amereida II through two different routes. First, as was already mentioned, ENAP was one of the few state-owned corporations in Chile in 1986. In other words, at the moment Amereida II is published, ENAP is an example of the directed economy in action. By specifically identifying one of the few State-owned companies still in existence during the dictatorship, the critique of the directed economy becomes a critique not only of the tradition of pre-coup State-driven developmentalism, but of the Pinochet regime itself. Amereida II’s discussion of ENAP thereby takes on a new significance in this light: the process of refining oil, through which the multiplicity of the American land is transformed into a single purpose (fossil fuel), reflects the imposition of a univocal, authoritarian logic on the American terrain. Even further and more provocatively, the urban form of the ENAP “encampments” critiqued in Amereida II bear a striking resemblance to the image of the city idealized in the mission of “Operation Cleanup”—embedded in this 1986 epic is a critique of the authoritarian urban planning vision of the Pinochet dictatorship. Amereida II’s displaced critique of the State through its critique of ENAP demonstrates its continued rejection of the logic of the Pinochet regime. Second, within the pages of the journal section of Amereida II there is a discussion of a military-based government that manages its jurisdiction in a nondemocratic fashion. In this section, which is a reproduction of a travel diary of the initial 1965 Amereida voyage, the group of this voyage was prevented from reaching their final destination in Bolivia, “Santa Cruz de la Sierra . . . which we proclaim as the poetic capital of America” (198), by a military captain who, as the narrator claims, “fulfilled the function of Mayor of Villa Montes,” the city where their voyage was abruptly stopped (199). To rephrase: the Amereida group, poetically revealing the destiny of America by traveling to the poetic capital of the continent, was stopped from accomplishing their mission by a repressive military regime. Just as is the case with its discussion of ENAP, Amereida II in this moment criticizes an authoritarian, military government by displacing this criticism outside of the Pinochet dictatorship: first onto the oil corporation controlled by the Chilean State and later

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onto a Bolivian military government. Amereida II discusses Chilean cultural politics by displacing its direct critique onto metonyms (ENAP) of and metaphors (a Bolivian military government) for the Pinochet dictatorship. Following a broader tendency of Latin American poetics of the time, in Amereida II “political positions are coded as cultural values” (Franco 2002: 105). What should always be remembered, and is repeatedly emphasized throughout this book, is that Amereida II argues that the poetic and the political are two separate realms.16 According to at least to Iommi’s logic, Amereida II is not a political work, but critiques the effect that the State has on limiting the revelatory power of the poetic voice. What this signifies, however, is that he is interested in imagining a poetic mode of living in common otherwise than that organized by a nation-state. One could easily claim that this poetic living in common is political insofar as it takes an interest in conceiving of a structuration of social life and any such interest constitutes a political position. In other words, it seems that the Open City demands a reconfiguration of the concept of “politics,” not a distinction between politics and the poetic. Nonetheless, I choose to respect the division formed by the Open City between politics and the poetic. Rather than implying that they didn’t understand what they were doing, I choose to hear their own systems of differences and attempt to understand their mode of poetically living in common.

Conclusion During the dictatorship, the Open City would come into their own, participating in and contributing to the tradition of antimaterialist avantgarde movements in Latin America that imagined their alternative communities (e.g., Ernesto Cardenal’s community of Solentiname) as “the pure antithesis to the miseries of the real nation, to market-driven capitalism and bureaucratic communism alike” (Franco 2002: 3). They thereby pursued a poetic revolution that functioned outside the logic of the State; to understand the Open City in terms of its “political position” is to be operating according to a vocabulary and epistemo-cultural framework alien to the group. And yet, the Open City at the same time demonstrates a robust resistance to the authoritarian cultural logic of the Chilean dictatorship. In contrast to many left-wing insistences that the State is the privileged site of political action, the Open City demonstrates an alternative form of utopianism via its poetic political nonpolitics: a poetic environmental urbanism focusing on materializing an urban space organized around the multiplicity of the terrestrial quali-

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ties of the American continent that translates into the social embrace of pluralism. That all of these ideas have their roots in activity at the Open City prior to the coup also testifies to another conclusion: although the Pinochet dictatorship had an effect on the cultural landscape of Chile, it was not what might be termed a watershed moment. This is not to deny the effects and trauma of the dictatorship—the history of torture, repression, and killing during this era should never be minimized or dismissed—but that the means with which many addressed this dictatorship in many ways were formed prior to the coup. During the dictatorship, the discourse of the Open City changed. Open discussions of the abolition of private property and the deprivileging of social space in published texts did not continue in the new political context. Nonetheless, the principles of these foundational years were maintained throughout the dictatorship. Furthermore, the activity at the Open City during the dictatorship era exposes a little discussed feature of the group that is rarely if ever discussed in scholarship: the group was composed of multiple people situated in multiple subject positions that had distinct, though related, theorizations of the activity of the Open City. In short, understandings of the Open City must move beyond the tendency to read Godofredo Iommi and Alberto Cruz as the “official” representatives of the group—a highly troubling tendency in scholarship that largely denies agency to the women, children, students, and other faculty members who have lived in, developed, and transformed the Open City themselves. More provocatively, scholarship must move beyond the desire to represent the Open City within a totalizing narrative or image (consequently, I wish to heavily insist again that the Politics of the Dunes is a reading, not a representation, of the Open City). Do Open City texts not insist on multiplicity and on the inadequacy of colonial categorizations and representations to contain the other? Shouldn’t scholarly discourse reflect on the intellectual and theoretical consequences of this position? It may be noted, for instance, that I have left undiscussed what might be considered the “significant” and “representative” texts of this era (all written at least partially by Iommi): “Hay que ser absolutamente moderno” (first composed as a lecture in 1979) and the rest of the Four Workshops of America in 1979 (Cuatro talleres de América en 1979, published in 1982 with Cruz, Girola, and Mendez), “El pacífico es un mar erótico” (first written in 1978 and later published in 1984), and “De la utopía al espejismo” (1983). The discussion in “Hay que ser absolutamente moderno” (quoted and briefly discussed in Chapter 1) of the need to conduct poetic work under fascism—Iommi speaks specifically of the continued

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work of poets and philosophers in Nazi Germany—would seem to lend itself more clearly to my analysis of the relationship between the Open City and the politics of authoritarianism. All of these texts reflect Iommi’s attitude as found in (and as cited and translated by Ana-María León, to be discussed in the next chapter) Hoy me voy a ocupar de mi cólera, “we [the school’s founders] disengaged ourselves, radically, from everything that could be called action . . . no type of action, categorically, none: it doesn’t mean anything. This is a hard, strong division, dangerous for the individual life of the self. Innocuous, for the political life, without any political transcendence, but, yes, hard, for the individual life of each person . . . And we don’t intend to change the world” (Iommi 1983a; translation in León 2016: 90). The goal of this chapter in this regard has been triple: 1.) To return to the major poetic work of this period, Amereida II, which has received scant attention in discussions of the relationship between the Open City and the Chilean dictatorship. 2.) To contextualize claims of apoliticism within the broader activity of the Open City. This chapter has argued that the Open City effectively and functionally constructed a poetic mode of living in common otherwise than authoritarianism. 3.) To demonstrate the pluralism of the Open City. Although Iommi and Cruz were the leading figures, within actual operations there were a variety of different voices participating in the formation of a life in common at the Open City. The Open City should be viewed as a collective project and not the realization of the vision of a few leaders. Notes 1. Alejandro Crispiani (2010) has convincingly argued that the Marxist politics of Iommi disappeared after his engagement with Concrete Art. Nonetheless, Rafael Luis Gumucio Rivas (2017) has recently noted, though without any other support, that during the Allende years Iommi is quoted as saying, “the bourgeois is always the other.” While this is not a Marxist position, it may have placed Iommi in a vulnerable position after the coup. 2. These dates are taken from Pérez de Arce, Pérez Oyarzún, and Rispa (2003). It should be noted that some of the dates that they provide might be incorrect. For instance, I have been told that the Hospedería de los Diseños was not built until the 1980s, despite their dating its construction in 1977. 3. Collier and Sater provide an overview to this process (2004: 364–65), but Verónica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate (2003) provides a more in-depth look at this “coup after the coup.” 4. This phrase was invented by a Pinochet functionary in 1977 (“Apagón intelectual,” La Tercera de la Hora, 19 February 1977, 3). For a full discussion of this phenomenon in which cultural production in Chile rapidly declined after the coup see Donoso Fritz (2013).

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5. These comments are heavily indebted to the work of Luis Hernán Errázuriz (2006, 2009; Hernán Errázuriz and Leiva Quijada 2012), who has explored the aesthetic vision of the military regime. 6. Reyes does not currently and never has lived at the Open City but has been involved with the space as a member of the Amereida Cooperative since its very beginning. For instance, the first water towers of the Open City were initially designed by Reyes. If the original statutes of the Amereida Cooperative say that only married women can join, Reyes demonstrates that this was not the case in practice. 7. The entirety of Reyes’s research is available in multiple binders in the José Vial historical archives at the School of Architecture and Design of PUCV. 8. In her 2018 lectures (“Taller de Amereida”) in the America Workshop, however, Reyes had a distinctly continental-scale focus. In discussing Arena it should be remembered that she was tasked with teaching a specific course on a specific theme. 9. Mary Ann Steane (2011) has provided a more thorough review of such localized foci on light by the Valparaíso School. 10. Yanes insisted that work at the Open City was a collective effort and it would be inappropriate to emphasize the work of any individual. She objected to an early draft of this section, for instance, because according to her it mistakenly portrayed her as an individual heroine and therefore undermined the collective nature of work at the Open City; the work of the Open City is a collective and never an individual project. I highlight her name in this paragraph for two logistical reasons. First, this narrative was a consequence of a formal interview with her specifically. She is named in order to reflect proper citation. Second, I am trying to make a specific intervention in the academic world (i.e., make an argument that, strictly speaking, has nothing to do with the Open City). Despite being almost completely ignored in scholarship, women have always been living at the Open City as well as actively participating in the structuration of a poetic life in common within its boundaries. Indeed, at any given point in time nearly 50 percent or more of the people living at the Open City are women who are active agents in its formation. In other words, the Open City is a collective project and not the personal project of Iommi and Cruz. In third-party scholarship, the women of the Open City often go unnamed and unrecognized, a common tendency within political, urbanist, and architectural research to ignore the work of women (Corcoran-Nantes 1990; Franceschet 2005). 11. This planned cinema was never completed. Although the patio on which the cinema was to be erected was constructed, the cinema never took shape. 12. Insofar as the Open City rejected direct action, Kirkwood and the arpilleristas could not be more different than the Open City. 13. One should also not minimize the implication in this fragment that it is Iommi’s house. Though I am reading this passage to pull out the constitutive addition Amunátegui makes to the Open City, there is still nonetheless a

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tension that I have noted at various moments in this book between a radical reorganization of gender relations—e.g., the denaturalization of gender and the deconstruction of the public/private division of space—and a conservative understanding of gender—e.g., describing feminism as the “masculinization” of women and only engaging one women poet in Amereida—that some, but by no means all, with connections to the Open City display(ed). 14. Again, it should be noted that this was written by a collective author not all of whom were in Chile. That said, the guiding force of the work was situated from within the particular context of the dictatorship. The transnational character of this work is outside the scope of this study. 15. All references to Amereida II come from Amereida Group (1991b [1986]), which was initially published in 1986. 16. This is also the conclusion of León (2016 [2012]), to be discussed in the next chapter.

[• Chapter 5 •]

On Subaltern Historiography Thinking the Open City Historically

The historiography of the Open City is rather short. Through the

1970s and 1980s, the City would receive little scholarly attention (especially outside Chile), with important exceptions in the work of Enrique Brown (1984, 1985); Humberto Eliash and Manuel Moreno (1985, 1989); and a few others. It is not until the 1990s that the Open City comes to be the object of an extended international critical gaze from scholars. At the same time, the Open City entered what might be its most productive period to date outside of the founding years, with numerous buildings being erected during the 1990s and early 2000s. The image of the Open City that would emerge in this critical discourse was one of a group of formalist architects that largely ignored the atrocities of the dictatorship and disengaged from the political renovations of the Allende regime. In many cases this narrative of political evasion was manifested through the absence of any discussion of the political history of Chile (PendletonJullian 1996; Pérez de Arce, Pérez Oyarzún, and Rispa 2003; Steane 2011), and in other cases the lack of the Open City’s focus on politics became a direct site for criticism (León 2016 [2012]; Trumper 2016). One cannot help but ask: How did a group that abolished private property and was explicitly devoted to democratization and pluralism gain this reputation? How did a group whose foundational poem was explicitly concerned with questions of “underdevelopment,” the ungovernability of the American continent, and a critique of the logic of the “discovery” of America receive this image? This chapter traces the process through which the poetic political nonpolitics of the Open City came to be interpreted as an evasion of politics in general. This history of the histories of the Open City follows a four-part process, after exploring the theory of subaltern historiogra-

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phy. First, the embedding of the poetic political nonpolitics in “technical” and “professionalized” language that started in the 1980s and which continued through the 1990s resulted in the Open City maintaining an ambiguous position in relation to the neoliberalization and globalization of the Chilean social landscape; through their architectural activity in the 1990s, the Open City came to appear as an aesthetically-driven group of architects unconcerned with the political and politics, rather than a group that delinked their poetic mode of living in common from the State. Second, early histories of the group would struggle with recognizing this careful balance between the poetic foundation of the Open City and their relationship with the globalizing architectural world. Third, the second historiographical period starting in the early 2000s departed from this orientation: the Open City would now be interpreted as an expression of an architectural school of thought. Fourth, following this second wave of historical analysis, by the 2010s the Open City came to be subject to a series of criticisms claiming that they had engaged a type of escapism in the face of the atrocities of the Pinochet dictatorship. It may therefore appear that I am making a simple claim of the “misrepresentation” of the Open City or more polemically, following Lisa McKenzie’s (2015) theorization of the term, of a “symbolic violence” waged upon the Open City. Yet one always must caution against such authoritative claims to “misrepresentation,” for, following Gayatri Spivak, “No possible reading is a mis-reading. The spirit of refutation and defetishization is a homo-erotic adventure that simply gives the game to the best arguer, the best manipulator of power” (1999: 97–98). Following the Open City’s own activities, one can propose an alternative historiographical theorization: each of these histories opens a new distribution of the sensible with which to hear the Open City. As such, readings of the group should not be seen as foreclosed understandings or representations of the space and the activity therein, but rather should be embraced—even if they may appear to be misrepresentations—as openings to hear the other in a new way. It will be the theoretical claim of this chapter that in this way the Open City presents new openings for understanding the relationship between subaltern historiography (especially subaltern architectural historiography) and elite subjectivities and collectives.

On Subaltern Historiography and the Lettered Researcher The history of subaltern studies is well-known: with “subalternity” initially theorized by Antonio Gramsci (1992) in “Notes on Italian History,” the term would take on new weight with the formation of the South

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Asian Subaltern Studies Group in the late 1970s and the creation in 1982 of the series, Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. One of the central dedications of this group and series was to re-examine the writing of modern Indian history through a revisionist analysis of colonial-era peasant uprisings. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000b: 17) would summarize subaltern historiography’s foundational critique of traditional elite histories, the latter’s representations of subaltern uprisings often signified these events as “pre-political,” with both elite Indian and foreign historians dismissing such revolts as lacking in “specific political content.” Subaltern historiography, in other words, demonstrated how Eurocentric and elite Indigenous histories were attempting to legitimize hegemonic projects of monopolizing political power by defining subaltern agents as pre-political actors that needed the aid of enlightened interveners to arrive to a full political consciousness. Against this vision of history, Ranajit Guha, who would prove to be among others a central contributor of this new intellectual field, noted that elite historical writing fails to acknowledge “the contribution made by the people on their own, that is, independently of the elite” (1988a: 39), and proposed a new mode of history writing that could take into account the perspective of subaltern agency. Subaltern studies therefore had an early relationship with Marxist historiography, which had for a long time attempted to tell histories from the perspective of the proletariat. Yet as Chakrabarty (2000b: 20) continues, this Marxist mode of telling history ignores that although the “domination and subordination of the subaltern by the elite was . . . an everyday feature of Indian capitalism,” this was “a capitalism of the colonial type.” Marxist histories, with their limited focus on the proletariat, would thus often miss this central element of the coloniality of historical knowledge, to use a phrase that proves precise if anachronistic given that it was not developed until Aníbal Quijano’s work in the 1990s. As Chakrabarty would elaborate in Provincializing Europe, this proved to be a difficult task for the historian of (post)colonial regions. If Europe had constructed historical temporality as a means of justifying colonization—colonized subjects were always in a “pre-political” state and therefore required the intervention of European agents (bourgeois, imperialist, Marxist, or otherwise) in order to accelerate historical processes and bring them to political enlightenment—then how could one tell a history that was not inherently colonial? The consequences of such a rethinking of historiography would later have its effects in Latin America and in Latin American studies with the formation of the Latin American Subaltern Studies group in the early 1990s as well as the publication of the collection, Postcolonial Debates: An Introduction to Sub-

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altern Studies (Debates postcoloniales: Una introducción a los estudios de la subalternidad, 1997), edited by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Rossana Barragán.1 Although the history of the study of subalternity in Latin America should not be understood as the transplantation of the ideas of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, they shared a common goal of rethinking history based on a recognition of subaltern subjects as active and theoretical historical agents (Guha 2001; Mignolo 2001). This discussion of subalternity would be refined in Gayatri Spivak’s now classic 1988 essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” which was then reproduced and reworked in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). One central element of Spivak’s analysis is the insistence that a resident of the so-called “Third World” is not inherently subaltern. For instance, in her analysis of the suicide of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri—who, unable to carry out a political assassination to which she had been tasked by a nationalist Indian movement, decided to kill herself but waited until the onset of menstruation in order to avoid her suicide being diagnosed as “the outcome of illegitimate passion” (307)—Spivak initially claimed provocatively that “the subaltern cannot speak,” since, despite Bhubaneswari’s careful staging, her suicide had been misinterpreted by both male participants in the Independence movement as well as elite Indian women. Spivak’s conclusion is double. First, as she would state in her analysis, “Bhubaneswari Bhaduri was not a ‘true’ subaltern. She was a woman of the middle class, with access, however clandestine, to the bourgeois movement for Independence” (308). Spivak is effectively pointing towards what Guha refers to as an ambiguity of subaltern subjectivity: certain subjects in (post)colonial contexts that are ranked among the subaltern can under certain circumstances act for the “elite.” Subalternity is defined not as a positivist essence that is the collective property of an identifiable oppressed group, but rather is an “identity-in-differential” dependent on the shifting sociality of the processes through which the categories of “elite” and “subaltern” are structured (271). This leads to Spivak’s second conclusion: the subaltern is being muted by the representational and epistemological frameworks with which elitist historians approach subalternity. In other words, Spivak argues against elites identifying with the subaltern in a “well-meaning gesture of solidarity,” instead calling on them to focus attention on what histories “cannot say” due to the overdeterminative epistemological and representational frameworks with which they approach subalternity (Rendell 2005: 51– 52). In short, elite ways of knowing history are constructed in such a way that they foreclose the possibility of hearing the other in their otherness, always insisting on understanding them “correctly” from within a “superior” epistemological framework.

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Spivak demonstrates this general thesis—the representational and epistemic framework with which we attempt to understand history precludes the possibility of hearing the other—through an analysis of the tendency in Western thought to conflate re-presentation (darstellen), the practice of describing the historical conditions of existence that separate a subaltern community’s mode of life, and representation (vertreten), the practice of forming an identity of subalterns’ interests that can then find the bearer of its voice within the State and political economy (1999: 257–60). This conflation, Spivak argues, is functionally an essentialism that reinforces a centered Western subjectivity and mode of politics; these elite re-presentations are an epistemic violence that insist on reframing subaltern individuals as centered subjects that can be represented in Western liberal State apparatuses and political economy, regardless of whether those individuals have alternative visions of agency (representation, vertreten) and alternative ways of knowing themselves (re-presentation, darstellen). For Spivak, there is a tendency for Western historical re-presentation to be dependent on the assumption of a centered representative voice that can be re-presented and represented. In Sylvia Wynter’s (2003: 260) phrasing, there is an “ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.” Other modes of human agency that are not dependent on such an ethnoclass conception of the human are therefore silenced within that ethnoclass’s historical re-presentations, leading to Spivak’s conclusion that the subaltern cannot speak. The question Spivak’s analysis begs is: How does one recognize one’s position within a dominant (silencing) epistemic and representational framework while at the same time attempting to open that framework up in order to hear the other in their otherness? What does an elite epistemic reconstitution in order to hear the subaltern look like? As has been argued throughout this book, this is precisely the question approached by the Open City, which has created a space of marginality to rethink colonial language, history, and re-presentation, and subsequently to deliberate how this leads to a poetic mode of living in common with new modes of historical agency other than what has appeared in politics heretofore. I argued in Chapter 3, for instance, that Iommi’s theorization of a hospitable city of guests requires the decentering and unsettling of Eurocentric subjectivity. Even further, the Open City was founded on a recognition that they had to accomplish this and arrive to a new historical American consciousness while inheriting and being situated within dominant Eurocentric language and history. It is notable, for instance, that Amereida’s historical sources are often the more rac-

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ist and xenophobic examples of colonial chronicles, with Oviedo—who Tzvetan Todorov (1984: 151) describes as “a rich source of xenophobic and racist judgments; according to him, the Indians are not reduced [to] the level of horse or ass (or even just below it), but somewhere among construction materials, wood, stone, or metal, in any case on the side of inanimate objects”—receiving ample space within the pages of Amereida and those figures who are often perceived as anticolonialists, like Bartholomé de las Casas, receiving none.2 This 1967 epic confronts the struggle of constructing a decolonial American consciousness for those coming from the elite lettered tradition: How does one, given their inheritance of such a racist and xenophobic historical memory, come to a decolonial historical knowledge of America? How does one dispense with the colonial logic of the lettered city formed by the conquistadors and the chroniclers—the Eurocentric insistence that one ethnoclass mode of re-presenting individuals as attaining representative subjectivity or not is superior to all other modes of knowing and historical representation—without denying one’s formation within that city? How do I hear the other when my way of hearing and knowing is designed to deny that they can speak? In Spivak’s (1999: 268) language, how does one confront that one’s sources for the “entry into the civilization of the Other” are structured around denying that other a voice? Marisol de la Cadena (2015) in many ways provides such a historiographical method by moving towards a historical space to hear the other while recognizing one’s inheritance of coloniality. De la Cadena’s work details the history, everyday practices, ways of thinking, and political struggles of Nazario Turpo and his father, Mariano Turpo, two monolingual Quechua-speaking Indigenous men living in the Ausangate valley in southern Peru. As she insists, the book was a consequence not of knowing or representing the life, practices, and Indigenous ways of thinking of the Turpo family, but rather of translating them into Western anthropological discourse while deconstructing the hegemony in which the “modern” lettered discourse of the Western anthropologist is hierarchized as superior to and more enlightened than the “premodern,” a-lettered world of Nazario and Mariano. This does not mean, however, that these worlds (lettered versus a-lettered) were decoupled, instead being understood as “partially connected,” “both distinct and present in one another” (62). De la Cadena highlights, for instance, that “Indigenous politicians and intellectuals now peopled” the contemporary lettered city and held posts in government positions. Yet she also insists that the lettered city “continued to be the hegemonic translator of other partially connected worlds” (62). The goal of her work, then, is to tell the

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history of the Turpo family from her ambiguous position as a Western anthropologist who had inherited the colonial language of the lettered city. Her model for this mode of intercultural discourse comes directly from Nazario Turpo. According to de la Cadena, he would repeatedly return to his desire for equal pedagogical exchange, becoming comfortable learning from de la Cadena the proper way to travel on airplanes, check into chain hotels, use the subway, and operate golf carts—an experience equal to, he would explain, her asking him (seemingly obvious) questions about operating in and navigating his Peruvian town (xvii). This interculturality of Nazario Turpo is evident, for instance, in an anecdote told by de la Cadena, Nazario [Turpo] was aware (indeed!) that depending on the circumstances, many knowledges, things, and practices were more effective than what he knew and did. Once I asked him why he was not able to cure José Hernán, his grandson, who was suffering from stomachaches. He looked at me, and with a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me smile said, Because up here I do not have antibiotics . . . But learning, in this case about antibiotics, did not replace Nazario’s healing practices; rather, it extended his knowledge: knowing about antibiotics meant to know more, not to know better. (xxii)

Nazario’s model of knowing more rather than knowing better would serve as a key instrument for de la Cadena’s methodology. She is just as insistent, however, that those operating with “Western” and “modern” knowledge—in quotes since Nazario’s very use of the tools of so-called Western and modern knowledge like antibiotics disproves the supposed purity of such categories—refuse to accept the ways of knowing of those like Nazario, insisting on the hegemonic translation of all “other” knowledges into “superior modern” modes of thought. One further anecdote particularly appropriate to the discussion of climate change and decoloniality is necessary here. De la Cadena relates a story of Nazario Turpo giving a presentation in Quechua to the World Bank in order to request funding to build irrigation canals in his village due to increasing water shortages, The water was drying out, he explained, “due to the increasing amount of airplanes that fly over Ausangate, making him mad and turning him black.” I do not know who told him what, but later at the hotel he explained to me: Now I know that these people call this that the earth is heating up; that is how I will explain it to them next time . . . In the

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end, I was sure that Nazario’s will to understand “global warming” was far more capacious than that of the World Bank officials, who could not even begin to fathom taking Ausangate’s rage seriously. Nazario certainly outdid them in complexity; he had the ability to visit many worlds, and through them offer him as well. (xxii–xxiii)

While Nazario moves towards the discourse of “global warming” in order to make himself heard within the language of the World Bank, the World Bank is inflexible, refusing to move towards the language of Nazario. This openness to knowing more rather than knowing better, that is, rather than hegemonically insisting on the “superiority” of a particular epistemology, lies at the core of Nazario’s intercultural dialogues. The absence of such openness within the modern discourse of the World Bank, however, precludes the possibility of their learning more from Nazario about the localized effects of global warming in the Ausangate valley. Citing the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004), Marisol de la Cadena is speaking towards reconstructing the relationship between elite researchers and subaltern individuals around equivocation rather than error. Viveiros de Castro is interested in the translation of “Amerindian” worlds into Western anthropological discourse in a way that absorbs “the radical originality of the contribution of the [American] continent’s [Indigenous] peoples” and thereby “configures the people as theoretical agent rather than as passive ‘subject’” (2004: 3–4). The difficulty, as he notes, is that modern Western anthropological discourse is rooted in a “multiculturalist and uninaturalist ontology”—one natural world with multiple cultural perceptions of that world—whereas “the anthropological image conveyed by Amerindian cosmopraxis” is “unicultural and multinatural”—every being (human and nonhuman) has the same generic soul, but each soul views a distinct natural world from their respective bodies (Viveiros de Castro 2004: 3). To explain the latter Indigenous epistemology, he points to an “Amerindian” myth, the original Shokleng, after sculpting the future jaguars and tapirs in araucaria wood, gave these animals their characteristic pelts by covering them with the diacritical marks pertaining to the clanic-ceremonial groups: spots for the jaguar, stripes for the tapir. In other words, it is social organization that was “out there,” and the jaguars and tapirs that were created or performed by it . . . For the Shokleng, in fact, culture is the given and nature is the constructed. (13)

In this example, there is one cultural soul that then structures nature in multiple ways thus leading to multiple natures. The difficulty of trans-

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lating from one world to another (e.g., from Western anthropological discourse to “Amerindian” cosmopraxis) is not a problem of finding equivalent terms in each world, but of translating between differing systems of relations, as well as the differing conceptions of agency and representation, that underpin and structure those worlds. The result, for Viveiros de Castro, is equivocations—the problem of miscommunication as it “unfolds in the interval between different language games”— rather than errors—the problem of miscommunication within a single language game (Viveiros de Castro 2004: 11). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Marisol de la Cadena subsequently call on us to embrace intercultural equivocation rather than colonially dismiss other cultural forms as performing errors. Here we move to a theoretical conclusion linked to the broader problematic of subaltern studies: history deals with errors whereas historiography deals with equivocations. In other words, a history operates within a given system of relations and analyzes an event, period, trajectory, person, institution, and so on within that structure. As such, one can identify errors according to the rules of that structure. (For example, to say, “The United States was founded in 1100,” is an error since it does not follow the structuring rules of Western chronology.) Historiography operates in the dialogical and translational space between systems of relations. The task of the historiographer is therefore double: to embrace what each system of relations opens up in the analysis of a historical subject—that is, identifying what we can learn more from a given historical account—while also analyzing how the foreclosure of that system of relations precludes the ability to hear the other of that system—that is, identifying how each system of relations insists on its own particular manner of learning better. In Spivak’s language we need a nonforeclosed mode of historiography in which historical representation tied to a specific way of knowing the world opens up to hear other worlds operating according to distinct ontologies (differing modes of agency and being) and epistemologies (differing ways of knowing). The Open City, therefore, provides a space in which to practice such historiographical analysis. As Iommi (2001: 390) himself would write, “Many are the ways of reading, and all are legitimate . . . Sometimes, not often, reading touches us, awakens us, warns us, or summons us. The manner in which it happens does not matter if reading is transformed into a touch, a call. It could be said then that reading befalls us like an experience . . . In the same manner that a wound alerts and reveals the body, this experience opens us, prompts questions and suggests answers simultaneously.” It is the call of this chapter to expand this vision of literary reading to historiography.

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The Open City in the Post-Dictatorship Period As part of Augusto Pinochet’s 1980 Constitution, it was required that a referendum of his regime be held every eight years. Thus, “in February– March 1987 new electoral registers were opened and non-Marxist political parties were allowed” to form and encourage voter turnout. The Concertación or “Concert of Parties for No” (Concertación de Partidos por el No), a combination of “more than fifteen political parties and movements,” proved to be the most functional organized effort to guarantee a “no” vote against Pinochet, and on 5 October 1988 the “no” vote won the day. Following the presidential and congressional elections held a year later in December 1989, Pinochet would finally leave office. In this year between the referendum and the elections, a series of changes were introduced in Chilean governance as a consequence of dialogues between Pinochet’s regime and opposition parties and movements (Collier and Sater 2004: 378–81). Despite these changes, postdictatorship Chile was arguably more notably marked by the continuation of dictatorship-era policies. For instance, the Concertación, who would win the 1989 elections, continued the neoliberalization of Chile started by Pinochet leading to an economic boom between 1990 and 1997 as well as massive inequality in terms of who received the benefits of this boom: in 1994 of the 480,000 companies in Chile less than two percent (7,300 companies) “accounted for 76 percent of all sales in Chile” (Taylor 2006: 127). Even claims that poverty levels dramatically dropped during the 1990s fail to note that this poverty reduction was a “success” only in comparison with the massive impoverishment of the country during “social restructuring” between 1975–85, given that poverty levels in 2000 were approximately the same as in 1970 (Taylor 2006: 138–39). In contrast with Pinochet, however, the Concertación government relied on a liberal State rather than authoritarian repression in order to legitimize its position. As Marcus Taylor (2006: 127) summarizes, “By . . . ensuring that all actors subscribe to the established ‘rules of the game,’ the Concertación has carefully maintained a particular balance of class power that was enshrined in the restructuring undertaken by the Pinochet regime.” More broadly, post-dictatorship Chile was participating in the growing tendency towards globalization. With the progression of neoliberalization, Chilean urban space began to increasingly imitate North American business districts through: the formation of high-rise central business districts, the transference of commercial activities from street markets to shopping malls, the rebranding of modernization as “Americanization,” and the development of close ties with foreign corporations (Tomic, Trumper, and Dattwyler 2005). This shift from modernization to

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globalization was evident in the renewed focus on consumption rather than production, on cyberspace rather than place-based relationships, and on the need to reorient identity around such new international relations (Rabasa 2001; Moreiras 2001; Masiello 2018). This shift is evident, for instance, in Alberto Fuguet’s McOndo, which contrasts his experience of the Latin American social landscape (which he calls “McOndo”) with that of the magical realism of the 1960s and 70s (embodied in the fictional setting of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de Soledad, “Macondo”), “Our McOndo is as Latin American and magical (exotic) as the real Macondo . . . Our country McOndo is larger, overpopulated, and full of pollution, with expressways, metro, cable TV, and slums. In McOndo there are MacDonald’s, Mac computers, and condominiums . . . five star hotels built with laundered money and giant malls” (Fuguet and Gómez 1996: 15). A problem therefore emerges regarding the formation of a unique Latin American cultural identity within this landscape of apparently homogenized global cultural consumption. This is one of the foci of Alberto Moreiras’s The Exhaustion of Difference (2001), which questions the response by Latin Americanist thinking to the new globalized context. One exemplary element that Moreiras analyzes is the academic shift in focus from literary studies to cultural studies. For Moreiras, literature and literary studies during the Cold War “had a key function as preservers of the unified space of the nation,” but with the decline of the significance of the nation with globalization, “literary studies have lost their hegemonic function for the ideological production of social value” (12), leading to the rise of cultural studies in its place.3 It would appear that the Open City with its foundation on the poetic word was an anachronism dedicated to a literary form that no longer had a function within the social landscape of Latin America; the nation-based literary form of the poetic had been replaced in the globalized context with the amorphous form of the cultural.4 As Moreiras also notes through a reading of Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins (1996), however, this neat narrative ignores that “cultural studies” is not so much a dispensation with the literary so much as its reconstruction into what can be termed the neoliterary, “it replicates the literary argument, while recognizing that literature can no longer work” (Moreiras 2001: 88). In short, the lettered city does not disappear, it is renegotiated. Yet in this way, Moreiras argues, literary studies takes on “a subaltern function” (12). The goal of this new subaltern literarity, Moreiras continues, is to be “an antirepresentational, anticonceptual apparatus whose main function would be that of arresting the tendential progress of epistemic representation towards total articula-

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tion” (33). This new Latin Americanism would not seek to represent or define “Latin America” or a coherent Latin American identity, but would instead seek to prevent the formation of any overarching and foreclosed identity. As he puts it, “What is at stake in alterity is certainly not alterity itself, but precisely this uncertain possibility of communication whereby the other can break through preconstituted representation and assert something like a new word” (133). It has been the consistent argument of this book that the Open City is founded on just such a Latin Americanism, one that is errant, opposed to the “total articulation” of foreclosed representation, and which opens up a space in which the other can “assert something like a new word.” The vision of the poetic at the Open City therefore takes on an apparently ambiguous position in the globalizing environment of the 1990s and 2000s: still dedicated to the poetic, and thereby to a literariness supposedly anachronistic in the age of globalization, this literariness would also prove to be a potentially radical force for Latin Americanism in this era. In many ways, the Open City thrived in this globalizing post-dictatorship context. In the two years immediately after the election of the Concertación government three large projects were completed at the Open City: two workshops—Taller de los Prototipos (Prototypes’ Workshop), Taller de Obra (Project Workshop)—and an exhibition space for the 40th anniversary exposition of the PUCV School of Architecture—Casa de los Nombres (House of Names). A central task of this book has been tracking the continuity in and periodization of the history of the Open City. In some ways one can outline the periodization of the Open City based on what types of structures are being erected at any given point in time: university reform was centered around the alteration of the urban space of Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, the foundational years of the Open City were marked by the construction of multiple public places (Agoras, the igloo before becoming a residential space, the Sala de Música [Music Hall] that would act as a meeting space and communal dining hall, etc.), the dictatorship years were largely focused on the erection of single-family housing (hospederías), and the years immediately after the dictatorship were largely concerned with the erection of buildings for the production and exhibition of architectural and artistic works (the workshops and Casa de los Nombres) with the exception of the Hospedería del Errante. Even in the 1990s, however, there was a continued focus on a placebased relationship with the terrain. For instance, a massive construction built into the dune landscape, Casa de los Nombres allowed the sands to travel over its roof as they were blown about by the powerful winds arriving from the sea. Although this construction proved unsustainable

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and had to be deconstructed in the new millennium, an intimate relationship with the sands and dunes that was present at the founding of the Open City as described in “The Opening of the Terrains” was reproduced in this exhibition hall. Furthermore, the design of the workshops, especially that of the Prototypes’ Workshop, embraced the drive to poetically reveal the multiplicity underlying the terrestrial quality of place. The building itself is located at the entrance of the Open City, its rear pointing to the crossroads of the lower half of the City but hidden from view since the edifice is half-buried. All one sees from the crossroads to the rear of the building is the inclined roof rising from the earth, an extension of the ground’s trajectory into the horizon. From the entrance to the Open City, one arrives to the rear door of the Workshop by following a declining path carved out of the earth. If one continues along this path, one can also walk to the Workshop’s front entrance, which points towards a courtyard shared by all three workshops of the Open City (the third workshop, Taller del Escultor [Sculptor’s Workshop], was erected in 1998). Facing the Prototypes’ Workshop from the courtyard, a wall of paned glass faces the guest, allowing a premature view of the work taking place inside. Paned glass walls then continue on each side of the Workshop, allowing light both to pour in during the day and to shine out with artificial light during the night. The (impure) southwest orientation of the front wall allows for greater natural light to enter into the Workshop while the semi-buried back forces one to examine the relationship between this construction and the earth. The workshop effectively constructs a place in the earth for light to enter. Strictly speaking, the three workshops were constructed for the purpose of fulfilling functional needs of those who desired a workshop space at the Open City. Nonetheless, these buildings, in addition to the Project Workshop built in the early 1990s, hosted an additional function: they (at least at moments) would be the site at which students from the university who came to the Open City for class could work. In this way, the workshops came to be an embodiment of the unification of life, study, and work that lay at the foundation of the Open City. Here at the Workshop complex organized around a common courtyard, the resident of the Open City can do their own work immediately next to where they reside in addition to learning from and teaching others. For instance, one or two teaching assistants (profesores ayudantes) of the PUCV School of Architecture often reside in the Hospedería Rosa de los Vientos. For these profesores ayudantes, the workshops are a classroom for their students who come to the Open City as part of their study, a place to do their own work, and a part of their living environment.

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Despite this culmination of the unification of life, study, and work, the construction of the workshops is a double-edged sword. If on the one hand they embody the early poetic political nonpolitics of the Open City’s structuration of everyday life, they also potentially speak to an engagement with the continued professionalization of the university experienced in the post-dictatorship era. Just as the workshops can be viewed as the embodiment of the unification of life, study, and work, they can also be perceived as the creation of an external-campus atmosphere for EAD (PUCV School of Architecture and Design). If the façade of the Prototypes’ Workshop, which faces an interior courtyard of common workshops, can be seen as the manifestation of the Open City’s environmental urbanism through which is constructed a particular relationship with light and the earth, it can just as easily be seen as the creation of a world of work cut off from the surrounding everyday life of the Open City. In this sense, the work of students at the Open City could be framed as testimony of the following: the Open City becomes a laboratory for architectural experimentation, the work of which occurs in the workshops located at the entrance and separated from the rest of the space. Even further, the 1990s works of the Open City often give the appearance of participation in a globalized and neoliberal political economy marked by the emergence of a homogenizing postmodern aesthetics. The Hospedería del Errante, constructed in the 1990s and designed principally by Manuel Casanueva (although, as I note in Chapter 4, one should always remember that the Open City is a collective effort and the assignation of authorship to any individual is largely to miss the City’s renegotiation of individual and collective subjectivity) with money from a State-funded grant, is an expression of this ambiguity. The structural definition of this work is defined by the separation of a flowing concrete façade from a vaulted interior. The glass and concrete exoskeleton, curving and jutting with the winds of the meadow of the upper part of the Open City, is separated both physically and aesthetically from the interior, seemingly appealing to a postmodern architectural aesthetic in which depth is replaced by interacting surfaces, an aesthetic that reflects the new financialized globalized economy and the “Americanized” architecture of post-dictatorship Chile (Jameson 1991; Tomic, Trumper, and Dattwyler 2005). As Rem Koolhaas (1994: 100) would describe this postmodern turn in Delirious New York, modern construction techniques allow for an architectural “lobotomy” in which the expression of the “containing envelope” of a building is decoupled from the activities it conceals in its interior. This separation of interior and exterior, whereby

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the exterior no longer has to make “certain revelations about the interior that the interior corroborates” (Koolhaas 1994: 100), is apparently reproduced in the Hospedería del Errante’s lobotomy of the flowing surface from its vaulted interior space. One cannot help but ask if this work is a reflection of the neoliberalization of Chile that embraced globalization and its postmodern urban and architectural forms. This interpretation of the Hospedería del Errante in particular and the Open City in general as participating in a globalized cultural field of postmodern architecture—that is, the Hospedería as one more expression of a postmodern critical regionalism—is to ignore the actual process of creation. The surface of glass and concrete was designed by Casanueva in order to respond to the particular characteristics of the wind at that site. If there is a disjunction between the depth of the interior and the surface of the façade, Casanueva effectively places depth within surface itself, reconfiguring the Open City’s relationship with the terrain by poetically revealing the multiple specificities of the wind at the site from within a postmodern aesthetics. If superficially the Hospedería del Errante is an expression of a globalizing postmodernism, functionally it continues to express the founding ideas of the Open City structured around the poetic revelation of the terrain. To repeat the conclusion of this section: the Open City maintained an ambiguous relationship with the growing globalization and neoliberalization of the Chilean social landscape. As we will see, this ambiguity, an ambiguity that has existed since Amereida’s attempt to create an “American” poetry while recognizing its inescapable connection to European cultural forms, is often elided in the historiography of the Open City.

Historiography and the Open City The Irruption of History Perhaps one more example of its (ambiguous) entrance into (neoliberal) globalized culture, in the post-dictatorship era the Open City was subjected to a level of international critical scrutiny previously unforeseen. Magazine articles and a few scholarly discussions about the Open City had appeared prior to the 1990s, but it is only since the publication of Ann Pendleton-Jullian’s The Road That Is Not a Road (1996) that the Open City has been the object of sustained global critique. PendletonJullian’s work has been and continues to be a touchstone text for anyone trying to learn more about the Open City. It is easy to understand why given that Pendleton-Jullian’s work eloquently and succinctly summa-

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rizes the terms, activities, and main European influences on the Open City: travesía, poetic act, hospedería, French surrealism, Le Corbusier, etc. Her work acts as a theoretical description of the Open City, treating it as an urban structure and urbanist and architectural collective organized around a set of foundational ideas and traditions. PendletonJullian’s work defining the terms and ideas of the Open City is so successful and rigorous that some from the Open City even informally recommend this study as the best representation of their project. For anyone looking to understand the conceptual basis of the Open City, The Road That Is Not a Road is arguably still the foundational study. Nonetheless, in the triad of life, study, and work, the first element is largely missing from Pendleton-Jullian’s discussion. While she emphasizes the radical nature of the work and study present at the Open City, the absence of any discussion of the everyday life of its residents in The Road That Is Not a Road seems to imply that this is insignificant. This problem is embodied in her argument that “the work of the Open City results in objects that demonstrate a way of doing” (1996: 11–13). On the one hand, this phrase summarily dismisses any manner of describing the architecture of the Open City as a “style” or “school”; it is not a model that can be reproduced but is rather a “way of doing” architecture. On the other hand, this categorization seems to ignore that the work of the Open City results in objects that not only demonstrate a way of doing, but a way of living in common. It might be said that The Road That Is Not a Road discusses the Open City as if no one lives there, forgetting that for many the Open City is their home. The presence of children at the Open City, for instance, is ignored despite Iommi’s claim at the moment of foundation that there are no privileged ages within the City. In a 2018 book release event for part of Manuel Sanfuentes’s edited collection of Godofredo Iommi’s writing, one young child drew a welcome poster for all arriving guests. The poster read, “Welcome to the Music Hall to see the books of Godo,” and contained hospitable images of drinks and food. Why, I ask, should this contribution be deemed any less an expression of the Open City than the poetry of Iommi or the Hospedería del Errante? In short, Pendleton-Jullian’s book analyzes how the Open City rethinks architecture and urbanism (and is therefore an indispensable analysis of the space) but often misses how it rethinks structuring everyday life. This is understandable given one element of the broader research context within which Pendleton-Jullian was writing and to which she was tacitly responding: the dissemination and popularization of postmodern and post-functionalist thinking during the 1990s; it is not that the life of the Open City is dismissed, but rather it is simply not within the scope of her analysis. Most notably, one common thread running

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throughout The Road That Is Not a Road focuses on the anti-planning element of the City by discussing: the poetic and nonfunctionalist appropriation of Le Corbusier by the architects, the significance of surrealism in the formation of the urban space, and the use of “artisanal” techniques for building. In these instances, Pendleton-Jullian seems to be partly responding to concerns in the United States where participatory planning, post-functionalism, and the anti-technification of design had been gaining ground since the 1970s. Indeed, her invocation of the idea of ad-hocism explicitly calls to mind Charles Jencks’s famous 1972 work.5 In this way, the Open City resolved many of the problems of US urbanism and was a perfect case study: they sought a nontechnical mode of urbanism founded on the poetic word, they rejected strict functionalism, and they successfully détourned surrealism and Le Corbusier for more poetic purposes. Pendleton-Jullian is partially coming to the Open City with a postmodern representational framework as developed in the North Atlantic. Pendleton-Jullian’s particular reading of the Open City’s anti- or nonfunctionalism illuminates two enduring insights regarding the overarching work of the Open City. First, her research orientation drives her to the following question, “one has to wonder what it is that makes the Open City of Amereida a city. Is it a city?” (1996: 113) Indeed, with relatively little autonomous infrastructure outside of water provision and sewage—there is no health care, no stores, electricity arrives from sources exterior to the Open City, there is no food production, etc. (although they did at one point in the 1970s autonomously produce brick on site, and Boris Ivelic did create a wood impregnator and a road in order to transport and prepare lumber he chopped down himself )—one cannot avoid the question that Pendleton-Jullian raises as to whether the site is actually a laboratory of urbanism rather than an urban space itself (113). By separating itself from functionalism, her analysis implies, one must question whether the Open City is a functional urban space. This vision leads Pendleton-Jullian to a rather decolonial vision of urbanism, though she at no time engages this theoretical tradition, Implicit in the question [whether the Open City is a city or a laboratory] is a rejection of city as the spatial manifestation of an imposed order and efficiency and, as a corollary, a rejection of plan making as the expediter of this imposed order that fixes and closes the possibility of city because it does not provide space for those intangible things of human-urban correspondence . . . Destiny is not something to be imposed upon the city but allowed to unfold through time and space. (1996: 117)

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Second, this perspective allows Pendleton-Jullian both to compare and distinguish the Open City from the architectural activity of Arcosanti and the Ulm School. In all three instances, she points to their focus on an environmentalism undergirding their architectural practice as well as the collectivist spirit guiding all of the groups. Yet in contrast to Ulm and Arcosanti, she argues, the Open City rejects the supremacy of scientific and top-down modernist epistemologies (21). By implicitly putting the Open City in contact with US postmodern architectural criticism, Pendleton-Jullian reveals new elements of the City’s activity, analytical revelations that have partly inspired Politics of the Dunes. The issue, however, is that in this reading of the Open City’s nonfunctionalism (and this is an element of the book and should not be understood as being its definitive element), Pendleton-Jullian confuses as universal her particular set of theoretical premises based in a North Atlantic vision of (post)modernity, urbanism, and architecture. This is especially notable in Pendleton-Jullian’s struggle to comprehend modernity and modern architecture in Latin America. At moments, she describes modernity and Latin America as opposites, “What is more significant is that the work of the institute redirects the question of ‘modern’ man and his relationship to historical and cultural sites specifically onto Latin American man and his relationship to his historical and cultural sites” (48–49). Here, “Latin American man” and “modern man” form an exclusionary binary. This allows her to argue that the Open City, removed from the modernist tradition of Europe, can discover a new humanist vein within modern poetry, thus allowing her a way out of the top-down modernist planning of the North Atlantic under attack during the 1990s while simultaneously saving the modern tradition. Instead, she describes the work at the Open City as “artisanal” (3). Given that many of the buildings at the Open City are constructed with concrete and glass (typical “modern” materials), that Open City members (Jolly, Eyquem, and Jolly 2011) have recently published on innovative techniques of flexible concrete molding (though, granted, after Pendleton-Jullian’s book was published), and that heavy machinery is frequently used in construction processes, it is unclear to what she is referring. Functionally, she recreates the modern/nonmodern binary that underlies the colonial distinction between global North/South, never seeing the Open City as active and equal participants in a planetary modernity (StanfordFriedman 2015). Even more troubling, in her discussion of the relationship between Indigenous theory and the Open City (1996: 167–75), she treats the diverse landscape of Indigenous communities in the Americas as a monolithic group that is opposed to all modern ways of thinking, thereby ignoring the highly modern and differing social forms that have been

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and still are present in Indigenous communities and nations (DunbarOrtiz 2014; Rivera Cusicanqui 2012). Indeed, Pendleton-Jullian does not site a single source (much less an Indigenous intellectual) when summarizing Indigenous theoretical traditions. By focusing on an only apparently abstracted urbanist language that is in fact an expression of a particular provincial thought of the North Atlantic, Pendleton-Jullian makes a series of equivocations. More precisely, she misses the difficult question of cultural translation between the North Atlantic urbanist and architectural landscape of the 1990s and the Chilean landscape from the 1960s to the 1990s. She uses a Eurocentric vision of modernity—one in which Latin American settlers are always not-yet-fully-modern and Indigenous communities are univocally and unequivocally “primitive,” a word which she at one point uses to describe Indigenous peoples (169)—to understand the Open City, re-presenting them using this postmodern North Atlantic representative framework, even if the City is often pushing towards new conceptualizations of representation and re-presentation. The point is not that her work is fundamentally a postmodernist understanding of urbanism, but rather that it assumes the discourse of modernity and the problematization of that modernity within a North Atlantic discourse during the 1990s (a problematization that still nonetheless reinforced “the modern/colonial hierarchies in a postmodern register” [Castro-Gómez 2007]). These specificities do not discount Pendleton-Jullian’s analysis—in fact, this section is largely a celebration of her work and I insist that it is still the foundational secondary text for anyone seeking to learn more about the group—but do call on the reader to note the limitations, foreclosures, and equivocations implied in a closed North Atlantic discourse of urbanism, architecture, and (post)modernity when approaching the Open City.

From Urbanism to Architecture If the 1990s represented a struggle between the institutionalization of the Open City into a site of architectural experimentation versus the furthering of its radical poetic unification of life, study, and work through a novel environmental urbanism, by the early 2000s this struggle, at least for those outside of the Open City, would apparently be won by the former. In 2003 Rodrigo Pérez de Arce and Fernando Pérez Oyarzún published The Valparaíso School: Open City Group (Pérez de Arce, Pérez Oyarzún, and Rispa 2003), a re-presentation and chronology of the individual architectural works of the “Valparaíso Group” or “Valparaíso School,” the name used to identify the architectural collective formed by the members of the PUCV School of Architecture and Design in

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addition to the group of poets, philosophers, and painters intimately involved with Amereida and the Open City. The book locates itself in the field of formal architectural analysis and architectural history, the benefits of which are evident insofar as they can clearly demonstrate the transnational influences of Le Corbusier, CIAM, the generación del 50 (the 50s generation) in Chile, and others (in contrast to PendletonJullian’s North-Atlantic–centric vision). As such, they can claim that one will find in the works of the Valparaíso School a formal language of modernism composed of “diagonals, sloping planes, acute and obtuse angles, apparent examples of destructuring which can immediately be associated with the shapes and forms of deconstructivism” (Pérez de Arce, Pérez Oyarzún, and Rispa 2003: 7). Through Pérez de Arce and Pérez Oyarzún’s insightful analysis, the formal architectural language underlying the Open City is demystified. Moreover, this formal analysis allows Pérez de Arce and Pérez Oyarzún to outline the architectural form that expresses the Open City’s nondominant relationship with the earth. According to the authors, the Open City simultaneously recognizes the connection to and rejects the resort-town model of the relationship to the sea: [The Open City] façades do not provide evidence of any attempt at that visual dominance of the sea which is a normal characteristic of spa towns; quite the opposite. In fact, its windows, generally sealed, are blocked by walls which obstruct the view of the horizon. Strongly imbued with an extraordinary spirit, the Open City favours the more subtle effects of the sea: breeze, sounds, temperature, humidity . . . (Pérez de Arce, Pérez Oyarzún, and Rispa 2003: 58–59)

Pérez de Arce and Pérez Oyarzún never approach the theoretical tradition of decoloniality, but this analysis approximates a description of a decolonial relationship with the earth insofar as the colonial relationship with the earth in terms of exploitation and mastery is exchanged for the poetic revelation and comprehension of the terrains. Nonetheless, within this theoretical framework the Open City is understood as a collection of structures that operate within the contours of an architectural school of thought; the authors’ re-presentational framework requires the formulation of a centered representative collective subject (i.e., an architectural school) to speak within the interpretive framework of architectural history and formal analysis. As Pérez de Arce and Pérez Oyarzún summarize the Open City, “From 1970 onwards the research and design activity, and a large proportion of the energy of the group [the Valparaíso School], began to be focused on what

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became known as the Open City” (Pérez de Arce, Pérez Oyarzún, and Rispa 2003: 9). The Valparaíso School is subsequently summarized in terms of the continuity of its architectural work, “The permanence and continuity of the Valparaiso School over a period spanning more than fifty years makes it, on that basis alone, rather exceptional in the architectural production of the world, and one of the most important cultural phenomena in the recent history of Latin America, transcending what might have been an atypical academic experience” (9). This conclusion is represented in Pérez de Arce and Pérez Oyarzún’s basic narrative: the body of the book is a description and chronology of various architectural works produced by Valparaíso School, of which the buildings at the Open City are some. As they say in their description of the Open City, “It is without doubt at the Open City where, by circumventing the framework of action of normal professional practice, the architects of Valparaiso have literally constructed a way of ‘doing’ architecture in experimental conditions” (56). Acknowledging the life of the Open City and the resistance against professionalization, Pérez de Arce and Pérez Oyarzún re-present the Open City as a representative expression of an experimental architecture produced by a centered collective subject (i.e., a school of architectural thought and praxis). What is lost in this analysis—imperceptible in the re-presentational distribution of sensible that they draw with their examination of architectural and urban form—is the relationship between the architectural works of the Open City and the group’s attempt to construct a poetic mode of living in common, an equivocation demonstrated in the analysis of the post-dictatorship architectural works. In the seven-sentence analysis of the Designers’ Workshop, in addition to photos and captions, Pérez de Arce and Pérez Oyarzún discuss how the building was constructed (sentences 1–2), describe the exterior and interior (sentences 3–5), place the workshop within the context of the workshop courtyard (sentence 6), and conclude with a discussion of the sculptural work on top of the roof (no longer there today) (sentence 7) (114). The description of Casa de los Nombres is fuller, providing a more thorough description of the poetic act and collective work process through which the building was constructed (80–81). There is even a description of how the work is presented as a continuation of the sand dunes (81). Yet the additional questions of the significance of poetic revelation of the earth, the unification of life, study, and work, and the role of these buildings in the social structure of the Open City remain undiscussed. If Pendleton-Jullian’s work walks the tightrope between discussing the radical restructuring of life present at the Open City and a formal analysis of its architecture and architectural practices, Pérez de Arce and Pérez

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Oyarzún’s work falls squarely in the latter. Who is living at the Open City and how their everyday life forms the City is never mentioned, and the function of poetry in relation to architecture is never analyzed in full. Instead, it appears that the Open City is a site of architectural formalism devoid of such social concerns. With Pérez de Arce and Pérez Oyarzún’s book, the Open City is reframed as a representative expression of an architectural school of thought using the re-presentational tools of architectural formal analysis and architectural history. It is therefore an invaluable work insofar as it presents a thorough description and chronology of the group’s architectural work and demystifies the formal language of their design, but the attempt to rethink how to poetically live in common cannot be seen within this specific theoretical and historical approach.

From Architecture to Politics Since the 1990s, the interpretation of Pérez de Arce and Pérez Oyarzún has largely held sway within scholarly discussions about the Open City. For example, in a 2017 monograph on Alberto Cruz’s work, the justification of the term, “the Valparaíso School,” only appears in a footnote (Berríos 2017: 14–15 ff.14). In this context, Ana María León’s article (2016 [2012]) is of particular note. Although León concludes with a critique of the Open City—the Open City refused to engage the political landscape of Chile during the dictatorship despite the erection of a concentration camp only miles from their site—her focus on the politics of architecture also illuminates many elements of the Open City that have been overlooked by scholars. Through a comparative analysis of the architectural and poetic works of the Open City and the theatrical works of prisoners at the Ritoque concentration camp during the dictatorship, León makes a provocative argument, I compare the school’s [the Open City’s] pedagogical methods and the [concentration camp] prisoners’ performances, describing their origins in French Surrealist theater and Brazilian Marxist pedagogy. In the camp, these influences were mobilized with specific political intent, but in the school, which expressly detached itself from politics, similar activities had much different motivations. I argue that the school’s detachment implied a removal, a voluntary imprisonment, which should be understood in the context of the political turmoil of 1970s Chile. (81)

León’s critique of the “voluntary imprisonment” of the Open City is powerful, arguing that this group, for whom “the only avenue of action

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existed outside the larger political context” (98), was “suspended in utopian isolation” (96) leading to its appearance as “introspective and solitary” (91). Although she concludes her article critically, León’s political perspective also opens and celebrates certain “political” elements of the Open City previously unforeseen, arguing that their poetic and architectural practices “create a certain freedom, a space to act” (98) in addition to linking them conceptually to other utopian architectural communities “such as Utopie in France, and Arcosanti, Drop City, and Ant Farm in the United States” (96–97). León’s article is groundbreaking, becoming the first attempt to address the intricate relationship between poetics, architecture, and politics at the Open City and in so doing illuminating previously undiscussed elements of the group.6 At this juncture, however, I raise a serious hesitation regarding León’s article: Despite some version of the term “politics” or “political” appearing more than forty times in the article, León never defines this notion. For instance, she concludes that “the Open City’s poetic acts encouraged participation but sidestepped its political meaning” (95), but it is unclear what a “political meaning” signifies. Here, it may help to look at the other “space of exception in Ritoque” that does contain “political content”: the theatrical works at the concentration camp which stand “as a foil to the Open City’s architectural performances” (81). This distinction between the Open City and the concentration camp mirrors much of the thought of León’s article which functions through a series of binaries: the concentration camp’s theatrical works versus the Open City; social commitment versus escapism (88); liberation versus freedom (96); critical versus a-critical consciousness (94). In each of these binaries, León champions the pole that contains “political content” (81) and critiques the pole “detached from politics” (81). In the case of the concentration camp, she discusses the prisoners’ critical re-presentation of their interactions with the guards through the construction of a fictional “town of Ritoque.” Does political content therefore refer to the re-presentation of agents of and interactions with the State, its representatives, and its activities? Is the absence of political content a lack of affirmatively representing Pinochet, torture, DINA, police, and all of the other repressive measures, agents, and acts of the dictatorship? One further clue appears through León’s brief discussion of Foucault wherein she distinguishes practices of freedom based on “an exercise of the self on the self ” versus practices of liberation that focus on “the rule of law and techniques of government,” claiming that Foucault identified the latter as “illusory liberation” (96). Yet León does not mention how later in the same interview that she cites in her article, Foucault insists that “games of power” are established through “technologies of govern-

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ment”; the “practices of the self and freedom” are not an individualistic separation from technologies of government but a protest against, dispensation of, and delinking from “abusive techniques of government” (Foucault 1997: 299). The distinction between “an exercise of the self ” and “liberation from external power” that León identifies in Foucault’s writing is precisely the binary that he deconstructs. More precisely, Foucault claims that “power permeates all social interaction” and is not found uniquely in the State and in class struggle (Cook 2015: 183). In this way, Foucault is able to reveal how power appears in apparently “nonpolitical” fields outside of the State, Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix . . . One must suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole. (1984: 94)

For Foucault, it is not a question of “external forms of discipline” and “internal repression” but of how power permeates the entirety of a social body, and how a total rethinking of social relations is therefore necessary to counteract power. For instance, he celebrates how the “gay movement” highlighted “that with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation” (Foucault 1997: 165), thereby presenting “political innovation, political creation, and political experimentation outside the great political parties, and outside the normal or ordinary program” (172). As Foucault himself might say, he is not against the practice of liberation as defined by León, but more precisely says that the “practice of liberation is not in itself sufficient” (282). The point then is not that León misreads Foucault, but rather that the interpretive political framework with which she approaches Foucault and the Open City overdetermines her re-presentation of their theoretical activity. For Foucault, politics is that which concerns power relations that permeate every social relation. The Open City, on the other hand, seeks a (poetic) foundation for a living in common outside of coercive and colonial power. Whereas Foucault expands the concept of politics to include apparently “nonpolitical” phenomenon, the Open City accepts the distinction between a politics limited to the institutional space of the State and the nonpolitical space of poetry. Nonetheless, both perceive that non-State spaces provide opportunities for organizing new, more

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desirable modes of living in common. León, similar to the Open City, seems to locate politics in an identifiable social body or institutional space. Yet against the Open City (and Foucault), she seems to identify the space of the State (and its various embodiments like the concentration camp of Ritoque) as the proper site in which to engage social concerns. Within her framework, those non–State-based practices identified by Foucault and practiced by the Open City therefore cannot be understood as acts of agents working towards structuring a more desirable life in common. Indeed, it is unclear, for instance, what she would make of Iommi’s distinction between politics (la política) and the political (or what I term political nonpolitics, lo político).7 And here appears my central contention with her article: it implies that the limited political space of the State is the only proper space for social intervention and dismisses the Open City’s attempt to think otherwise and delink from this site of coercive and colonial power. In short, she repeats that essentialism identified by Spivak to assume a singular and superior mode of representation (vertreten), requiring other modes of agency to either be translated into that mode (i.e., demonstrate their political content) or to remain unheard as existing in a “voluntary imprisonment.”8

Towards Self-Reflection Here, I wish to briefly reflect on my own methods. With an academic formation in postcolonialism, decoloniality, Marxism, and subaltern studies I arrived to writing this chapter with certain historical, intellectual, architectural, and literary markers already in mind: the publication of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in 1987; Aníbal Quijano’s distinction between coloniality and colonization in the 1990s; the passing of NAFTA in 1994; the Zapatista uprisings in the 1990s; the antiprivatization insurrections in Bolivia in October 2003; the election of Evo Morales in 2005; and so on. Despite the lamentations of the disappearance of a coherent Latin Americanism in the rise of globalization, it appeared that a new Latin Americanism was being formed. I could not help myself from asking: Where were many of these markers in the Open City during this time? Why did the post-Cuban Revolution context seem to play such a functionally important role in the writing of Amereida and the foundation of the Open City, whereas these new developments appeared to be insignificant to their activity? The absence of a discussion of the Zapatistas seemed to be especially notable. Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s (2001) discussion of the Zapatistas’ relationship with the “Indianist movement” and mestizaje is particularly compelling insofar as it demands us to rethink the idea of “America”

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within a globalizing context that takes into account contemporary Indigenous communalities. Would this not be of particular concern for those at the Open City? A new American identity emerging in Latin America that was formed through the encounter between a non“Indianist” but largely Indigenous movement and the encroachment of a coercive State? Yet even more clear evidence of this potential connection is the Zapatista model of social organization: “mandar obedeciendo” (rule obeying). Does this not speak, I asked myself, directly to the idea of the hospitable Agora? This silence in regards to the Zapatistas led to my next curiosities: If comparisons are routinely (and justifiably) made between the Open City and Arcosanti, Archizoom, the Bauhaus, etc., why are the various utopian projects of Latin America never mentioned? Where is the comparison to Canudos, especially given that the War of Canudos is explicitly mentioned in Amereida? What about the claims during the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua that, “The triumph of the revolution is the triumph of poetry”? And more appropriate for the moment of the Open City, where is any comparison with Ernesto Cardenal’s poetic community in Solentiname that sought a “revolución desprovista de venganza” (“revolution without vengeance”)?9 Solentiname’s nurturing of a relationship between poetry, Catholicism, and a utopian community seemed a perfect comparison to the Open City, so why was there no dialogue? It may be speculated that there is an absence of relation due to these communities’ and movements’ decision to take up arms. Yet didn’t Iommi in 1969 declare his support for defensive violence? And wouldn’t the Zapatistas’ taking of arms be such an example of defensive violence, an attempt to defend their territory in order to constitute a society organized around mandar obedeciendo? Without access to capital like the Open City had and has, is not such a defensive violence the necessary instrument to maintain their territory?10 When thinking through these questions, I consistently return to two related positions. First, at the end of “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” Ranajit Guha (1988b: 84) writes, “Blinded by the glare of a perfect and immaculate consciousness as the historian sees nothing, for instance, but solidarity in rebel behaviour and fails to notice its Other, namely, betrayal.” Although the Open City is by no means a “rebel” community, Guha’s invocation of betrayal raises questions about the lack of solidarity with other Latin American utopian communities by the Open City in the 1980s and 1990s. Might this silence be such a betrayal? But second, the Open City has never made an attempt to form bonds of solidarity with social movements of the twentieth or twenty-first century. Even further, it can easily be seen that my analysis can quickly devolve into an overdetermination of the Open City according to the methods of subaltern and

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postcolonial studies. In short, if I worry about the question of betrayal, it is more likely that the methods of postcolonial and subaltern studies produce their own equivocations when addressing the Open City. This supposed “lack” of solidarity or a “lack” of political content is not a lack but quite the opposite: it is testimony that there is an affirmative presence of something that requires me to rework categorical frameworks, to be hospitable to their words, and to rethink my own methodology.

Conclusion In the wake of the dictatorship, the Open City became the object of international critical attention. Since the fall of Pinochet, numerous books, scholarly articles, and magazine entries have discussed the activity of the group. Each of these studies, this chapter has argued, opened up a new way of viewing the Open City (Pendleton-Jullian: the urbanist language, conceptual tools, and practical consequences of the City; Pérez de Arce and Pérez Oyarzún: the formal architectural language of the group; León: the political consequences of their social and poetic imaginary), but in addition overlooked much of their underlying poetic political nonpolitics. More precisely, using Rancièran language, the distributions of the sensible with which they approached the Open City allowed them to open certain unique elements of the City’s practices and intellectual labor, but precluded them from seeing others. Even my analysis, it was argued, has struggled with this question of equivocation: the insights of decoloniality and subaltern studies do not translate smoothly and threaten to interpretively overdetermine the life of the Open City. In this way, each of these modes of analysis is legitimate, as they allow us to perceive something new about the Open City, but limited as each mode’s given historical approach circumscribes what can be seen within that analysis. Each analysis opens up and closes off the Open City in a distinct way. If we are to follow the mode of learning of Nazario Turpo and Marisol de la Cadena, we must refuse to hierarchize these varying historiographical openings and let each analysis teach us more about the Open City rather than allowing one “superior” analysis to teach us better. If this chapter therefore critiques scholarship that fails to address inter-historical dialogue and argues for a historiography built around managing equivocations, I would like to conclude with another element: the possibility of the productive equivocation. The recent participation of the Open City in documenta 14 is exemplary in this regard. Occurring

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every five years in Kassel, Germany since its first appearance in 1955, documenta has become one of the most significant contemporary art exhibitions in the world. The Open City was invited to participate in the 14th iteration of documenta in 2017 and submitted a pavilion, the Pavilion of Hospitality, which was located in Karlsaue Park and became a site for lectures, musical performances, and eventually the play of children. The submission embodied the two sides of the Open City’s artistic activity. On the one hand, the Pavilion of Hospitality embodied the aesthetic for which the Open City has come to be known. On the other hand, the use of the Pavilion also speaks to a further significance: an alternative mode of relating work and life. Instead of being a work to be viewed, discussed, and critiqued, the Pavilion was experienced through its use; the Open City’s work spoke to a way of living rather than a way of viewing. Niklas Maak’s (2017) review of the Pavilion of Hospitality at documenta 14 demonstrates this possibility of perceiving the Open City’s way of living through their individual works. After giving a brief history of the Open City and a description of their work at documenta, he argues, The art is not limited here to the production of symbols, but rather creates spaces in which one can pass entire days, an ideal world . . . , in which the relationship of work and life, study and free time is organized differently than in all other cities and places that we know. Is the “return to the land” always a depressive or escapist retreat from urban civilization, or can a counter-model be developed “from the land,” which then radiates to the cities? That is one of the questions that the Open City poses. (Maak 2017)

Maak grasps from the work presented at documenta 14 that the Open City is not concerned with the production of art objects but with the social organization of an alternative mode of relating work, life, and study. It may also appear, however, that Maak’s reference to a “return to the land,” with its particular environmental politics in the North Atlantic, is one more equivocation, one more misunderstanding in translation. I would like to remind the reader that this phrase, “return to the land” (“Gang aufs Land”), is also the title of a Friedrich Hölderlin poem, the very poem that was read at the poetic foundation of the Open City in 1971. This equivocation is in fact a return to the City’s foundational poetic act, an errant translation in which the foundational phàlene of the Open City returns through the opening of the journey to Kassel, Germany.

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Notes 1. For a full history of this group see Rodríguez (2001). 2. Sahagun is mentioned by Iommi in “Nahuatl Ode of America” (Iommi 2018: 122). This is not to excuse the coloniality and racism of these figures either. For such a critique of the racism of de las Casas, for instance, see Wynter (2003) and Tinker (1993). 3. Since the publication of The Exhaustion of Difference and the heyday of studies of the effect of globalization, others have demonstrated how even in a supposedly “globalized” setting the idea of the nation still plays a significant role (Bracke 2018; Jones 2016; Nixon 2011). 4. This general sense is demonstrated through the titles of books like Jean Franco’s The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City (2002) and the introductory discussion to the volume Latin American Literature and Mass Media, edited by Debra Castillo and Edmundo Paz-Soldán (2001), “Beyond the Lettered City.” 5. Given that the rise of postmodern architecture occurred in the 1970s with, for example, Robert Venuti, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Peter Eisenman’s “Post-Functionalism” (1998 [1976]) and Charles Jencks’s The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), it may appear that this claim is a bit anachronistic since The Road That Is Not a Road is published in 1996. One must also remember, however, that this postmodern focus continued through the 1990s with, for instance, Edward Soja publishing Postmodern Geographies in 1989 and Thirdspace in 1996. 6. That said, Iommi’s poetry has been critiqued within Chile as decontextualized, as too “abstract,” and as an evasion of politics since the 1960s (Ibáñez Langlois 1969). 7. To aid the reader, one can distinguish between politics, the political, Rancièran politics, and lo político (as defined by Iommi) which I have consistently referred to as political nonpolitics throughout this book. 8. To move from the elite world of the Open City to subalternity, what would León make of women’s formation of novel identities as rural wage workers during the dictatorship that “challenged past notions of why men rightly exercised authority over women” (Tinsman 2000: 166)? Would this new identity formation of rural working-class women, which lacks political content in the strict sense, be considered a “voluntary imprisonment”? As Spivak defines the subaltern, “Please remember I am not talking about resistance groups, but people who accept wretchedness as normality. That’s the subaltern; those are the folks with whom I worked” (2012: 280). The subaltern— defined by Spivak as specifically the poor, Indigenous, rural woman of the so-called “Third World”—is the person whose position in a global colonial matrix of power does not permit “any recognizable basis of action” (i.e., any “political content”) (Spivak 2012: 431). To charge León with championing a rigid political framework that can only imagine masculinist political formations that engage the State would be in extremely bad faith, and I have

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no desire to do so. The point is that one can embrace the openings of her article and then expand her notions of politics in order to constructively rupture the foreclosure of her framework. Indeed, the reader should take pause before her repetition of the notion that a practice “lacks political content,” a notion that has been heavily and justifiably critiqued by subaltern historians. 9. This comparison is particularly important in light of León’s article. Solentiname started with a preference for “revolution using non-violent means . . . But afterwards we came to realize that in present-day Nicaragua nonviolent struggle is impracticable” (Cardenal 1979: 11). The end for Solentiname, at least partly as a result of this, was brutal repression leading to death and exile for its members (Cardenal 1979). 10. This support of defensive violence by Iommi would disappear as quickly as it appeared in 1969. I have never seen such a defense or support of defensive violence in subsequent articles and documents written by him. It is therefore a curious statement that remains imprecise given that no rigorous definition is provided in the document and that it never appears again.

[• Chapter 6 •]

Towards a Decolonial Environmentalism The Limits and Openings of the Open City’s Environmental Urbanisms

The early 2000s were met at the Open City with the unfortunate

events of the deaths of Alberto Cruz in 2013 and Godofredo Iommi in 2001. Today, for the first time in the history of the Open City, residents are arriving to the site without ever having personally known these two founders. Even further, the Open City in the postmillenial landscape was far from the rhetoric of the years of the 1960s. This is not to say that the themes of this previous epoch—the poetic vision of the group, the search for an American identity, the relationship between poetry and architecture, the significance of hospitality, epistemic reconstitution, and so on—were not still significant; but rather, to give just one example, that the push to form a new mathematical science no longer marked by Eurocentric origins was no longer part of the drive of the group as it had been for others in the late 1960s. In many ways this should be expected since by the 2000s the Open City had been active for four decades and the group was embedded in a new social, cultural, political, and economic context distinct from that of the 1960s. Indeed, as I will argue in this chapter, the Open City did not simply reproduce the ideas founded in the 1960s but dynamically utilized those early methods in order to confront their new local and global context: the human-induced transformation of the local natural landscape of Ritoque as well as of the global earth system. In short, the poetic mode of living in common at the Open City would now at least be responding in part to the Anthropocene, not to the post-Cuban Revolution landscape of the 1960s.1

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As we will see below, heavy industries in the area near the Open City have dramatically transformed local marine and terrestrial ecosystems leading to dramatic environmental degradation. This alteration and degradation of the terrain is not limited to the Open City, with the broader national ecosystems of Chile now suffering similar fates. Many at the Open City over the past decade have responded to these transformations, thinking about what a poetic political nonpolitics would constitute in such an Anthropocenic context. More precisely, the Open City provides a means of thinking a noncolonial architectural response to the Anthropocene through its heightened awareness of hearing the other. If a central element of many decolonial responses to the anthropization of the earth has been deconstructing the relationship between elites and those subaltern communities that disproportionately suffer the environmental consequences of humans’ transformations of the earth—i.e., neither speaking for those communities nor ignoring what occurs within their boundaries, but reimagining dominant epistemologies in order to take into account these subaltern experiences and ways of knowing—the Open City provides one urbanist option in response to this decolonial demand. The reader should also note a careful bibliographic element of this chapter: Alberto Cruz and Godofredo Iommi are never cited. Although this is not to deny the continuing heavy influence of these two figures on the Open City (nearly every member of the Open City discussed in this chapter at one point studied with both and all make recurring references to Amereida), I want this chapter to emphasize that the life of the Open City is not determined by the intellectual activity of these two figures. As such, this chapter focuses on the work of nine current (as of 2020) members of the Amereida Cultural Corporation and/or residents at the Open City (Victoria Jolly, Sebastián de Larraechea, Javier Correa, Manuel Sanfuentes, David Luza, Juan Carlos Jeldes, Sergio Elórtegui, Iván Ivelic, and Claudia Porzilo).2

On the Coloniality of the Anthropocene In 1991 the chief economist of the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, either penned or signed a memo encouraging toxic waste dumping in “LDCs” (Least Developed Countries). The most contentious and often most frequently quoted section of this memo reads, “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that . . . I’ve always thought that

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under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City” (quoted in Nixon 2011: 1). The Summers memo effectively speaks to the interrelationship between environmental harm and subalternity, with subaltern subjects—never allowed to speak within Summers’s proposal—being expected to silently and disproportionately bear the brunt of the harms of the anthropization of the earth. As Rob Nixon (2011: 19) summarizes, this land policy and regionalization of the Anthropocene, that now ubiquitous term referring to the geological age in which human activity is the dominant influence on the environment, is one in which there is displacement without moving, “[a displacement] that, instead of referring solely to the movement of people from their places of belonging, refers rather to the loss of the land and resources beneath them, a loss that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable.” To describe this process, Nixon coined the concept of slow violence. If violence is usually perceived as “immediate in time, explosive and spectacular,” there is another form of “slow” environmental violence, as exemplified in the Summers memo, “that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (Nixon 2011: 2). Nixon’s work is dedicated to uncovering how subaltern subjects have resisted such environmental violence by forming their own environmentalisms.3 Nixon’s vision can therefore be described as an expansion of the idea of environmentalism beyond wilderness preservation and its attendant processes of imagining and creating landscapes purified of human activity. This vision of a non-preservationist environmentalism has recently been reflected by other environmentalist thinkers such as Ashley Dawson (2017), Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright (2018), Mimi Sheller (2018a, 2018b, 2019), and Ben A. Minteer and Stephen J. Pyne (2015), who have come to the conclusion that environmental preservation is no longer possible: the environment has been transformed by human activity to such an irreversible extent that attempts to resist the anthropization of natural spaces are in vain. Furthermore, whereas human activity previously resulted in circumscribed and limited sacrifice zones like the Wigan Alps (Hoskins 1955: 171–72), today we see daily proof of planetary-scale environmental transformations: melting Antarctic ice due to global warming releasing DDT initially trapped during the 1970s; 50–80 percent of e-waste from the USA being exported across the globe; cases of Down Syndrome increasing in West Berlin following the Chernobyl Disaster in Ukraine; and the now infamous creation of a Pacific Ocean “garbage patch” (Geisz et al. 2008; Basel Action Network 2002;

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Sperling, Neitzel, and Scherb 2012; Lebreton et al. 2018). In short, it appears that the position of Hobbs et al. (2006) has become true, though their focus is on the particular effect of invasive species rather than the anthropization of the earth in general: This may seem to some to be a defeatist approach which recognizes that some ecosystems are more or less transformed irreversibly and that invasive species are likely to persist in some cases. For instance, one reviewer [of the draft of Hobbs et al. (2006)] commented that the examples [analyzed in the article] are ecological disasters, where biodiversity has been decimated and ecosystem functions are in tatters, and that “it is hard to make lemonade out of these lemons.” Our point is, however, that we are heading towards a situation where there are more lemons than lemonade, and we need to recognize this and determine what to do with the lemons. (5)

For many, the days of mitigation are over, today all we can do is adapt. This human-induced transformation of the earth will have a dramatic effect on urbanism in the upcoming years. For instance, Ashley Dawson (2017) has recently argued that mitigating sea-level rise from global warming by reducing our carbon footprint is now a quixotic quest. Today, we have no other choice than to adapt by completely reconfiguring urban regionalizations via retreating from cities located on the current coastline, given that “more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the sea; by 2025, it is estimated that this figure will reach 75 percent” (Dawson 2017: 5). Looking at coastal Florida in the United States, Dawson’s proposed response is stark, “A transition is inevitable. Like all coastal cities, Miami will have to engage in some strategic and, ultimately, wholesale retreat” (Dawson 2017: 30). Such evacuation planning for “the good of humanity” should strike worry into the reader, given the long history of forced displacements of marginalized and colonized communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dawson’s proposals for retreat, however, are starkly contrasted with such top-down modes of displacement, instead seeking grassroots modes of organizing. He highlights specific examples to demonstrate the possibilities for such noncoercive forms of retreat: the Oakwood Beach Buyout Committee on Staten Island that sought funding from the US government’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program in order to organize a “community-led . . . subsidized retreat” (Dawson 2017: 183); the architectural visions of retreat by Kate Orff, Anuradha Mathur, Dilip da Cunha, and Kazi Ashraf; the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Native Ameri-

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cans who “won a grant of $52 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s National Disaster Resilience Competition to relocate their community to a safe spot further inland”; and many others. In effect, Dawson is examining the urbanism of what Mimi Sheller calls mobility justice, “the politics of unequal capabilities for movement, as well as on unequal rights to stay or to dwell in a place,” which she has deployed in her own environmental-justice focused response to climate change (Sheller 2018a: 26). Both Dawson and Sheller are therefore calling for a more fluid and equitable politics of movement and urban dwelling in response to global climate change. As Mann and Wainwright (2018) have discussed, this adaptation to a dramatically changing earth also requires a rethinking of the idea of politics. According to their argument, the previous political visions of nation-state–guided environmental preservation have past. Today we need to think about a politics that addresses the inevitable planetary-scale transformation of the earth by human activity. Mann and Wainwright offer four potential political formations that will define the future of environmentalism: 1.) Climate Leviathan: the conservative “saving” of capitalism by erecting a Green New Deal or a Green Keynesianism, a fundamentally contradictory position, they argue, insofar as it expects a State led by elites (e.g., the lettered city) to regulate and manage a market economy driven by those same elites, thereby effectively excluding the participation of those subaltern subjects who are, by Gramsci’s definition, subjected to the State and never subjects of the State.4 2.) Climate Behemoth: The reactionary populism of climate denial organized around a Schmittian politics of the formation of a “proudly unreasonable minority,” such as Donald Trump and Theresa May, “agitated by the ill-gotten riches of a handful” (Mann and Wainwright 2018: “Climate Leviathan,” Section V, paragraph 2). 3.) Climate Mao: an anti-capitalist variety of territorial sovereignty that “expresses the necessity of a just terror in the interests of the future of the collective, which is to say that it represents the necessity of a planetary sovereign but wields this power against capital” (Mann and Wainwright 2018: “Climate Leviathan,” Section IV, paragraph 1). 4.) Climate X: The formation of a world that “is no longer organized by capitalist value, and in which sovereignty has become so deformed that the political can no longer be defined by the nation-state’s sovereign exception” (Mann and Wainwright 2018: “Climate X,” Section I, paragraph 2). The result is “a world of many worlds”—Mann and Wainwright explicitly cite the Zapatista slogan—that works towards equality, inclusion, and dignity. Climate X therefore rejects “the assertion that ‘planetary’ concerns must dominate those of the many communities and peoples who inhabit the

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planet” (Mann and Wainwright 2018: “Climate X,” Section V, paragraph 10). In the end they conclude that Climate X “is in our view ethically and politically superior, but Mao is more likely to enter the scene from stage left” (Mann and Wainwright 2018: “Climate Leviathan,” Section II, paragraph 5). Following this diagnosis, a central element of Mann and Wainwright’s work is to imagine a Climate X mode of living in common outside capitalism and the State. In this sense, their vision of Climate X and its explicit connection to a Zapatista “world of many worlds” reflects the vision being explored so far in his book: a decentralized mode of living in common that thinks sociality otherwise than in terms of the nation-state and capitalist political economy. Even further, and based on a reading of “Blockadia” as outlined in Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything that concludes with a celebration of First Nations’ environmentalist organizing in Abya Yala, Climate X makes room for an environmentalist politics founded on decolonial collective organizing and knowledges. Putting Mann and Wainwright into conversation with Coulthard (2014) and Escobar (2018), Climate X would functionally signify the self-determination and autonomy of Indigenous and other communalities. What goes unstated in Mann and Wainwright’s theorization is the need to decolonize Anthropocenic knowledge production. As Indigenous scholars have noted, the discourse of the Anthropocene is dominated by the “white intellectual space” of the North Atlantic academy, ignoring, for instance, Indigenous epistemologies and territorial knowledges (Todd 2015: 246–47). Although this is apparently disproven by major academic, political, and scientific institutions recently including Indigenous voices within their walls, articles, and reports, it has been observed that Indigenous knowledges are included only if they meet the epistemological standards of modern scientific assessment (Agrawal 2002: 290; 2009). For instance, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports—the supposed benchmark in scientific assessments of climate change—privilege positivist science, marginalize other ways of knowing, and claim that climate change has “undermined or made irrelevant” Indigenous knowledges (Ford et al. 2016: 2, 5). Within this mode of coloniality tied to political ecology, colonial perspectives of Indigenous knowledges often oscillate between 1.) a fetishization of Indigenous peoples as “expert and harmonious stewards of nature” (Smith 2018: 2–3), and 2.) a dismissal of Indigenous communities as “in urgent need of state guidance” to improve their understanding of the “ecological function” of their territories (Murray Li 2000: 127, 141). In this way, then, Indigenous peoples claiming their knowledges in the era of climate change continues to function “as an intellectual and political exercise

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to subvert and resist colonial hegemonic ideologies and Eurocentric discourses masquerading in the (Western) academy as universal knowledge” (Dei 2011: 22) We have returned, then, to the problem of the relationship between elite and subaltern knowledge production in which the epistemic frameworks of elite scientists preclude the possibility of hearing other knowledges.5 Recent artistic, literary, and cinematic expressions of Indigenous Futurism—a decentralized artistic movement by Indigenous artists that reflects on “already-existing relationships to time, technology, and worlds” and often crosses over with Indigenous Science Fiction (Cornum n.d., 2015; Dillon 2012)—have staged this dismissal of Indigenous ways of knowing. The short film, The 6th World (Becker 2012), for instance, displays the reticence of a fictional scientific spaceship team in the future to use Navajo strands of corn for the colonization of Mars, favoring their own genetically modified crops. After the genetically modified corn fails, the Navajo spaceship captain, Tazbah Redhouse, insists on using the Navajo strand, which thrives in the new landscape. In this vision, Navajo knowledge is neither equivalent to modern science nor some mystical way of knowing: it is an epistemology with a long genealogy that is partially connected to Western scientific ways of knowing. These Indigenous Futurist fictions point to a larger issue within knowledge production: the inability of modern Western scientists to distinguish between equivocation—a disjunction arising from inter-epistemic dialogue—and error, a mistake made from within an epistemology. Will Smith (2018) and Peter Rudiak-Gould (2014), for instance, have addressed what appear to modern Western scientists and theorists to be false understandings of climate change in Indigenous Pacific Island communities. Rudiak-Gould (2014: 366) notes that despite the average Marshall Islander having “a carbon footprint less than one-tenth that of the average American, and the nation as a whole [contributing] just 0.0003 percent of the world’s carbon emissions in 2008,” thereby making them “as close as can be to pure ‘victims’ of climate change,” these Marshall Islanders nonetheless partially blame themselves for global warming, against the “enlightened” perspectives of Western scientists and political theorists who imply that the Indigenous Islanders have no agency in the advancement of climate change (especially Western Marxists, see for example Malm 2015). What Smith and Rudiak-Gould argue is that Marshall Islanders “misunderstandings” of political ecology in fact “often frame a more pointed and active critique of state involvement” (Smith 2018: 13) that speaks to a heightened awareness of the intimate relationship between climate change, coloniality, and the nation-state. Failing to address the inter-epistemic dialogue between modern sci-

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entific epistemology and the Indigenous Pacific Islanders’ own epistemological engagement with climate disruption from a (post)colonial positionality, modern Western scientists and theorists can confuse this epistemological equivocation for an error in knowledge. To move to the different context of the Alaskan Arctic, Victoria Hermann (2015: 396– 99) demonstrates how Indigenous communities displace colonial narratives of environmental vulnerability (“wherein developed nations can impose misguided solutions onto helpless, powerless, weak, and backward ‘vulnerable Arctic communities’”) with narratives synthesizing international human rights law and Indigenous epistemologies, effectively offering other dynamic ways of knowing climate change. The problem is therefore: how does one generate a nonhierarchical discursive space which struggles with the intercultural dialogue formed between differing ways of knowing the environment, a space that would require the capacity to carefully distinguish between errors and equivocations?6 The Open City’s epistemic reconstitution in many ways becomes an example of such an interculturality. The Open City speaks not to the attempt to appropriate Indigenous epistemologies, but to poetically open a discursive space within settler epistemologies in order to hear these knowledge claims. The Open City’s poetic methodology points not towards the inclusion of Indigenous voices as “proto-scientific” or as attaining factuality under certain circumstances, but towards decentering and deconstructing modern epistemologies in order to hear other ways of knowing. As Mann and Wainwright (2018: “Climate X,” Section II, paragraph 5) argue, however, this option, as manifested in the political theory of Climate X, is limited due to its scalability. The utopian gesture towards the elimination of political sovereignty inherent to Climate X (e.g., the Open City’s poetic mode of living in common) is countered by the apparent need for such a sovereignty within “any climate justice movement that could possibly be effective or radical . . . From this vantage, X is too democratic, too antisovereign.” Looking at the Open City, the limitations are clear: they have no infrastructure (outside of sanitation and providing their own water from local wells), productive industries, access to primary resources, and so forth. This is in stark contrast, for instance, to the Jujuy, Argentina social movement of Túpac Amaru, “led by a formidable Kolla Indian woman called Milagro Sala, [it] has been building entire communities for the poor” (McGuirk 2014: 21), communities that include operational hospitals, factories, and community centers. In other words, in a limitation already pointed out by Derrida’s (2000) analysis of hospitality, the Open City’s poetic political nonpolitics of hospitality is paradoxically dependent on the State for the integrity of its territorial formation (e.g., it is

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protected by private property laws even if within its boundaries there is no private property). Even epistemologically, this small scale leads to certain limitations. For example, in contrast to Nazario Turpo and the Indigenous Pacific Island communities analyzed by Smith (2018), there is no engagement with the planetary spatiality of climate change at the Open City. Their focus on local territoriality as seen in “Opening of the Terrains” and Arena limits the possibility of placing their activity into conversation with planetary-scale transformations. Nonetheless, it should also be mentioned that this is primarily a problem for parties outside of the Open City when examining how the work at the Open City can aid in broader discussions of the planetary-scale transformation of the earth. The implicit question of this chapter—How can the thinking of the Open City aid in the decolonial reconstitution of elite responses to the human-induced transformation of the planet?—is one that is functionally valid for the critic and theorist, but inconsequential to the actual praxis and theorizations within the Open City. Recognizing this limitation, the work at the Open City can present us with current prospects for decolonial epistemic reconfigurations in the era of the anthropization of the earth. Founded on the poetic space of the decolonial interregnum, part of the postmillenial work occurring within the Open City is examining how that poetic foundation relates to current human-induced transformations of the earth. The argument of this chapter is that a harmony currently exists within the Open City regarding members’ relationship to local manifestations of the Anthropocene. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno theorized harmony dialectically as a concept that requires dissonance as its constitutive element, a theorization radically different than the authoritarian harmony proposed under the Pinochet regime (see Chapter 4): Without the memento of contradiction and nonidentity, harmony would be aesthetically irrelevant, just as . . . identity can only be conceived as identity with what is non-identical. The more deeply artworks immerse themselves in the idea of harmony, of the appearing essence, the less they can be satisfied with that idea . . . Dissonance is the truth about harmony. (2013: 151)

Adorno begins by defining harmony as the consequence of organizing dissonances around an essential core, thereby dissolving that dissonance within an overarching harmonious form. He then dialectically turns this definition on its head, however, by noting that such a harmonious dissolution requires dissonances that can be dissolved. In the words of the Open City, harmony is that hospitable sonorous space that makes room

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for the dissonant other. What one discovers at the Open City is not a singular position in regards to the transformation of the environment, but a harmonization of various positions.

Slow Violence and the Open City On 27 October 2018, I walked to the Sala de Música (music room) to attend a concert being organized at the Open City. In addition to musical works by Remmy Canedo, Andrés González, Nikola Lutz, and Ana María Rodríguez, the concert included a multimedia performance of video, music, and painting by three members of the Open City—Javier Correa, Sebastián de Larraechea, and Victoria Jolly—in collaboration with an international performing ensemble.7 The performance was highly engaged with the particular space of the Sala de Música. As Mary Ann Steane (2011: 105) describes the interior, “The Music Room of the Open City is a square single-story room of lightweight timber construction . . . Lit by a narrow glazed courtyard at its centre and striated shafts of sunlight at its corners, the room reduces and transforms the strength and brightness of the Pacific light into a warmer more restrained cadence.” At the performance, attendees lined the perimeter of the room with the large ensemble gathered around the center courtyard while de Larraechea conducted from a corner. Circling the courtyard, Jolly had laid black sheets of paper on the floor on which she painted while standing using a brush with an extended handle. At the same time, a video projected against the courtyard’s windows. In addition to this complex multimedia work, Jolly eventually walked through the space and began to read poetry that had been printed out on paper and attached to various structural beams. With the music still continuing, Jolly then exited the space, climbed a ladder onto the roof, and dropped a fine white powder through the roof ’s opening into the courtyard. The powder then slowly gathered on the black sheets of paper laid on the floor on which Jolly had painted. It was, for me, a shocking and provocative poetic act, awakening the brutal reality of the slow violence occurring in the region. In the United States while closing out my relationship with my previous academic institution, those at the Open City informed me of the news on the day it happened, 21 August 2018: a “toxic cloud” had drifted south from the Quintero/Puchuncaví region located a few miles to the north of the Open City (if scholarship often places the Open City in conversation with its southern neighbors of Viña del Mar and Valparaíso, this northern neighbor is almost always forgotten). The cloud officially intoxicated 301 people of Quintero (Guajardo M. and Chavarri M. 2018),

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though the Open Town Hall of Quintero-Puchuncaví (Cabildo Abierto Quintero-Puchuncaví 2018) posted the much higher number of 1,759 persons, of whom 1,113 (62 percent) were minors. The use of the passive voice here is intentional: still today it is unclear who is the party responsible for the cloud, though it is assumed that it came from the Ventanas Industrial Park located just to the north of Quintero. This cloud reached the Open City as well, leaving a fine white powder across the terrain, a toxic waste residue that Jolly’s performance of dusting powder into the Sala de Música jolted into my consciousness. Intentional or otherwise, the performance at the Open City had forced me to place that site into connection with the landscape of Quintero/Puchuncaví. This event was nothing new for those in the region. A similar toxic cloud in 2011 sickened 33 children and 9 adults, and a report that year showed high levels of toxic elements in the area’s schools (Carmona Lopez 2011). Although we have already seen in Chapter 4 how the ENAP refinery in Concón played a role in the Open City’s imaginary, this was not the only environmental exploiter in the region. In 1961 as part of national economic development, the Chilean government pushed for the founding of the Ventanas Industrial Park—“14 industries operating on the coast, including copper smelters, cement plants, dry bulk ports, copper concentrators and four thermoelectric plants fueled by coal and petroleum coke (a cheap but highly carcinogenic residue derived from cracking processes)” (Balcazar 2016)—leading to a massive degradation of what was once a land rich in biodiversity previously giving life to native flora as well as agricultural production: acid rain caused by “emissions from power plants” between 1964 to 2007 led to a 99 percent reduction of land area that produced “cereals and tubers” as well as a massive increase in public health hazards (Balcazar 2016; Valenzuela Pérez 2016; Sirvent Araya 2011). In addition, if this industrial development was supposed to bring work and higher incomes to local communities, the result was the opposite: the Quintero/Puchuncaví area today is one of the poorest in the region (Guajardo M. and Chavarri M. 2018). If this extended process reflects Nixon’s idea of slow violence, the 2011 and 2018 “toxic clouds,” in addition to two oil spills connected to ENAP in September 2014 and August 2015, were specific explosive events that testify to the degradation of the landscape. As Balcazar (2016) summarizes, since 1964 “Ventanas Bay was transformed from a summer tourist destination into a reservoir of chemical waste.” In a summarizing phrase, Quintero and Puchuncaví have, since at least 1993 when they were identified as a “zone saturated by contamination,” come to be perceived by many as a sacrifice zone (CVN 2014; Diario UChile 2017; Villalobos Díaz 2018a, 2018b).8

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This narrative, however, threatens to be transformed into one more example of “damage-centered research” that is intent on portraying subaltern territories “as defeated and broken” (Tuck 2009: 412). Responding to this demand to recenter our conception of the anthropization of the earth away from such a damage-centered paradigm while still maintaining an environmental justice foundation dedicated to a decolonial feminism (she is looking specifically at Indigenous responses to environmental violence in Canada), Michelle Murphy has coined the term “alterlife,” referring to life already altered, which is also life open to alteration. It indexes collectivities of life recomposed by the molecular productions of capitalism in our own pasts and the pasts of our ancestors, as well as into the future. It is a figure of life entangled within community, ecological, colonial, racial, gendered, military, and infrastructural histories that have profoundly shaped the susceptibilities and potentials of future life. Alterlife is a figuration of chemical exposures that attempts to be as much about figuring life and responsibilities beyond the individualized body as it is about acknowledging extensive chemical relations. (Murphy 2017: 497)

In this way, she theorizes a “decolonial feminist sense of enmeshed land and body [that affirms] more consensual ways of being together within these extensive, noninnocent chemical entanglements” (Murphy 2017: 497). In contrast to the colonial logic of the term “Anthropocene,” alterlife is a highly flexible notion that is dependent on local conditions, modes of collective organizing, and place-based relationships with the land. Moving from the Anthropocene to alterlife allows us to conceive both resistance to environmental harms resulting from terrestrial anthropization as well as affirmative adaptations to the alteration of socioecological systems. When we look at the response in Quintero, what we see is precisely such an alterlife. Organizations like the S24 fishing union and “Let’s Save Quintero” (Salvemos Quintero) have emerged as not merely acts of resistance to preserve a vernacular landscape tied to a territorial identity, but as a mode of collective organizing for building a life in common that responds to the entwinement of land, bodies, and chemical exposures.9 Responses by residents of Quintero have not been explicitly within the sphere of public demonstrations and appeals to the government, with the organization, Salvemos Quintero, for instance, organizing a community mural painting day in September 2018. The mural gives expression to the vernacular socioecological identity of the region—an image of a

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fish in the hands of a fisherman hanging over a fishing boat, rolling hills playing home to birds juxtaposed next to beaches populated with singlefamily housing—in addition to the new reality in the sacrifice zone of chemical waste—a painting of a young woman wearing a gas mask. There is also an explicitly political undercurrent to the work, with one section containing a pig in a top hat stuffing money into the mouth of a bureaucrat while overlooking an industrial landscape spewing smog into the air. The mural, in other words, expresses a complex collective identity formed through the dialectical struggle between an affirmative, vernacular, place-based environmental identity and the erasure of that identity through the creation of a sacrifice zone. We have apparently returned, in other words, to Ana María León’s (2016 [2012]) critique of the Open City’s evasion of discussions of politics insofar as it appears that today the experimental architecture and poetics of the Open City seem to stand in stark contrast with the slow violence occurring in Quintero/Puchuncaví. Demian Schopf ’s work, in which he juxtaposes “shantytown” and waste landscapes next to “sumptuous” and highly ornate Bolivian carnival suits, may appear to take a brutally honest form at the Open City: the highly cultured landscape of avant-garde architecture in the City located immediately next to the toxification of Quintero/Puchuncaví (Andaur 2012; Massielo 2018).10 Yet attending the performance at the Open City in October 2018, I had the impression of another relationship, one that refused to appropriate the voices and actions of organizers of Quintero, but one that also recognized the socioecological reality of the presence and effect of industrial waste in the terrains. In other words, I had the impression that the poetic revelation of the terrain at the Open City would now have to occur under the shadow of toxic clouds and acid rain. If painterly traces were to be left on paper in the Music Hall, they were traces that would also have to respond to the dust left by toxic waste residue. Sitting in the Music Hall that October night, I felt that the Open City’s practice of hospitality now had its own poetic alterlife.

On Silence Currently, the School of Architecture officially hosts three poets—Jaime Reyes Gil, Carlos Covarrubias, and Manuel Florencio Sanfuentes Vio— all of whom currently live at the Open City. I would like to focus here on Sanfuentes’s recent work, “Tender Deceit” (“Tierno Dolo”) in the collection Trebolar (2013). In the introduction to the collection, Sanfuentes revisits the well-known theorization of modernist abstraction,

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The efforts have been enormous in the de-liberation of the object from its representative and ideological servility, and in the isolation of the function that has to . . . ; all this in order to make appear that which happens, Courbet’s “place of the encounter,” from which arises the hope of a here. Abstraction, in all of its epochs and variants, has played in this a double role; on the one hand, it lays clear the dysfunction of art, and on the other hand it opens the encounter between memory and material, clearing the way for a representative multiplicity that grates against the limit of its own performativity. (2013a: 8)

Although Sanfuentes in this passage rehearses the modernist critique of representative art, he favors the movement away from representation not for the already discussed reasons of the historical avant-gardes— e.g., to form a new constructivist School of the South (Chapter 2) or to creatively distantiate oneself from nature (Chapter 1)—but rather to make space for the encounter with what he calls “representative multiplicity.” If the role of representative art and literature, Sanfuentes argues, has been to foreclose the categorization of an object, abstraction gives space to new relationships built around de-liberation: the observation of an object so that its multiplicity, previously restrained under a regime of de-notation, is liberated in an encounter in the present. Abstract deliberation becomes the means of breaking apart the foreclosed representation of an object. His poetic work, “Tierno Dolo” (Sanfuentes 2013b), is marked by an acute focus on that which exceeds foreclosed denotation. Throughout the poem, Sanfuentes (2013b) appeals to various vague imprecisions—“the heart of whatever” (60), a “gesture” (63), “the unapparent” (66), “the possibilities of the name” (74), “paraphrasing” (74), “distracting the purpose” (78), “a mute letter” (83), “imperfect reason” (83), “the ignored determinants” (84), “infinite perhaps” (90), “language deprived of the hero’s name” (91), “letters in vain” (94)—effectively challenging the epistemic act of carefully representing a pre-given circumscribed entity by appealing to moments that interrupt and exceed denotation: distraction, deprivation, invisibility, “whatever,” a gesture, “perhaps,” possibility, and so forth. This epistemo-representational challenge is similarly matched in the design of the poem: black splotches erupt from the bottom of the page often obscuring the lettering of the text, forcing the reader to interpolate the covered letters. The signifiers in these instances are not erased but rather stripped of definitive clarity, forcing the reader to recognize their own inculpatory involvement in inscribing meaning onto the poem. This dialectic between definition (“representative servility”) and definitional excess (“representative multiplicity”) is demonstrated in the

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closing words of the work, “New silence of the sky, company of memory, a place without name where to love always, again, etc.” (95) In this section, Sanfuentes attempts to temporally clarify the “place without a name” in terms of its longevity (“always”) and frequency (“again”), but then notes through the use of “etc.” that this clarification via denotation is always already marked by a definitional excess. This imprecision of “Tender Deceit” speaks precisely to its constitutive dialectic between denotation and de-liberation. Whereas deliberation delinks an entity from its “representative and ideological servility” in order to make room for the encounter, denotation is the act of naming a “representative multiplicity” in order to make it sensible. And yet that very act of denotation subsequently recoagulates into a “representative servility” that needs to be re-de-liberated. Although we have apparently returned to the con/ dissensus Rancièran dialectic, Sanfuentes’s closing use of “etc.” resolves this unending process of oscillation. If I have repeatedly argued that at the Open City the poetic is the space in which to hear the other, then the “etc.” of “Tender Deceit” signals that which exceeds denotation but can be encountered in a poetic space. The concluding “etc.” of “Tender Deceit” is not imprecision, but rather the admission that the definitive precision of univocal representative denotation is always already that which excludes the other and forecloses the encounter, and which therefore needs to be poetically opened in order to encounter a “representative multiplicity.” Even more broadly, Sanfuentes conceives the excess of representative knowledge as silence. Throughout “Tender Deceit” is the recurring figure of that which does not speak but at the same time is not meaningless. Silence is not a lack or deficiency of meaning, but rather a meaning that exceeds a representational framework and is therefore experienced as silence. As Isabel Margarita Reyes (1983: 60) puts it, “Here, silence is the not recognizable. Each place has its own silence.” It is in this sense, for instance, that Sanfuentes writes, “Blank, the pron . . . u . . . sows alone, lies down, th . . . si . . . nc . . . barks at me” (2013: 72). The ellipses in this quote serve to highlight the black splotches that rise up in order to cover parts of the words “pronoun,” “the,” and “silence.” Not only is silence that which is an indecipherable speech act—silence in this passage specifically barks, referring to a speech act that does not impart meaning—but the black splotches of the design of the poem require the reader to acknowledge that which obscures signification by preventing unimpeded access to the signifier. This clouding of meaning is then overcome by the reader imparting signification onto that which the splotches obscure. The aural and visual silences of the passage therefore do not lack significance, but rather alert the reader both to that which exceeds their representational framework (they cannot understand the splotches and

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barking silence as signifying elements) and to their culpability in the process of reconfiguring that excess as mere noise interrupting definitional clarity. In other words, the framing of silence in “Tender Deceit” forces the reader to de-liberate the text rather than consume its de-notations. I want to argue here that this shift towards de-liberation through the appeal to silence harbors a decolonial potential. To demonstrate, let us turn to one moment where Sanfuentes addresses a specific representational and ontological framework, “The far limit, the meticulous consecutive note divided the affectations [afectos] that permitted us to capsize [zozobrar] one another; Argentinian, white . . . a tenacity that ruins the attempts [tentativas]” (2013: 65). For Sanfuentes, the formation of meticulous representative denotations such as the racial and national categories constitutive of the colonial matrix of power (“Argentinian” and “white”) preclude encounters that “permit us to capsize one another.” Sanfuentes pushes towards an opening of those categories in order to liberate the affective encounter with the other: a movement from discrete ontological entities (“Argentinian,” “white”) to fluid epistemic relations (“affectations that permit us to capsize one another”). As Mignolo and Walsh argue, this shift is central to decoloniality, “everything goes back to knowledge, for it is through knowledge that the domains [of the colonial matrix of power] are instituted as worlds (ontologies) while the enunciation institutes itself as the renderings (description, explanation, representation, interpretation) of existing worlds and by so doing hides the fact that the worlds that the enunciation renders are not representations of existing worlds but instituted in and by the ‘doing’ of the enunciation” (Walsh and Mignolo 2018: 150). For Walsh and Mignolo, this coloniality of representation subservient to ontology (that is, to assumed preexisting entities that can be categorically de-notated) becomes decolonial when we embrace the de-ontologizing activity of affectively relating to others and disrupt the process through which an authorized and hegemonic (colonial) institution of a world reconfigures itself as the rendering of an already existing world. Through this capsizing of colonial ontology through fluid epistemic relationality, one liberates knowledge by “understanding and affirming subjectivities that have been devalued” under coloniality (Walsh and Mignolo 2018: 146). Sanfuentes’s fragment identifies how categories of nation and race function precisely under such a colonial epistemology linked to ontological denotation and seeks a mode of decolonial subjectivity organized around an affective relationality through which our understandings of the self are “capsized.” The function of a silence that barks and of black splotches that obscure the meaning of a given sign is to poetically open colonial epistemic and representational frameworks in order to hear and encounter the other.

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This critique of representation and celebration of the deliberation of excessive silence also effectively appears in recent architectural work by David Luza (a resident of the Open City at the Hospedería del Colgante) and Juan Carlos Jeldes (professor at EAD and a member of the Amereida Cultural Corporation).11 In the last decade, Luza and Jeldes participated in the renovation of the now abandoned saltpeter works and corresponding urban form of Santiago Humberstone and Santa Laura (SH-SL) in northern Chile. Their architectural intervention was intended to aid in the transformation of the site into a museum following UNESCO’s 2005 declaration that the space was a world heritage site because of three criteria: 1.) the saltpeter industry became an intercultural site of scientific exchange between South America and Europe (a generous way of describing a semi-colonialism that heavily favored Europe’s position in this intercultural relationship) 2.) “The saltpeter mines and their associated company towns developed into an extensive and very distinct urban community with its own language, organisation, customs, and creative expressions,” and 3.) the works represent the now no longer operational saltpeter industry of northern Chile, the largest site of saltpeter mining in the world (UNESCO 2005: 142). Jeldes and Luza participated in the conception and reorganization of the site into a museum in order to protect this legacy. Today, SH-SL is functionless. In 1913 the invention of the Haber process, which synthetically forms ammonia, made the Chilean saltpeter industry unnecessary. Former mining sites in northern Chile subsequently became ghost towns, silent reminders of an extractive industry and the massive transformation of the global landscape through both the local exploitation of the earth and the creation of fertilizers shipped across the planet (Mutic 2012). SH-SL became a testament to the long-term entanglement of Chile in global processes of capitalist political economy transforming the earth. In other words, we have returned to Murphy’s concept of alterlife and the planetary-scale entwinement of bodies, worked landscapes, and chemical relations. Yet Murphy’s conceptualization is largely (though not exclusively) spatial in its focus, noting the complications of who and what belongs where, what is inside versus outside, and how to map the increasingly complex bodily interrelations of a changing earth. SH-SL begs another question: what happens when we focus on an alterlife’s intertemporal relations, those persistent environmental transformations whose original context no longer exists? For instance, what of the cumulative effects of spaceindustry related environmental contamination in Kazakhstan that are the legacies of the Soviet period but still affect populous cities today like Zhezhazgan and Karaganda (Kopack 2019)? The temporality of alterlife

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thereby returns us to the questions of subaltern history, its relationship to environmental change, and the limitations of the framework of the Anthropocene. More precisely, the Anthropocene tells stories about the transformation of the earth, but within this narrative, as I have argued elsewhere (Woods 2018a), such altered landscapes are apparently built and maintained by no one: they merely are. The concept of the Anthropocene makes visible human-induced transformations of the earth as well as those transformations’ effect on us in the present, but it leaves out those bodies entwined and exploited in the processes that created those transformations. In other words, those exploited bodies enmeshed in the altered earth exceed the representational capacity of the category of the Anthropocene and are rendered silent. Indeed, has the concept of the Anthropocene and its corollary focus on “the human” not been repeatedly critiqued by Marxists who note the differentiated positions in and inequitably distributed effects of the transformation of the earth?12 If silence can be imagined as representational excess, then one silence of the Anthropocene is the exploited human bodies that are entwined in the alteration of the earth. For the architectural redesign of SH-SL, the question therefore becomes: How do we make audible the silenced bodily entwinements of the subaltern history of environmental change? How do we make the working classes of the now abandoned saltpeter works speak to us in the present? Architectural intervention in worked landscapes can play a significant role in structuring this subaltern silence in the history of environmental transformations. The High Line in New York City, for instance, has been celebrated for taking twenty-three blocks of abandoned elevated railway and transforming this landscape of decay, collapse, and environmental degradation into a popular public park (Fehrenbacher 2014). In so doing, however, the design erases any reference to the industrial and labor history of its site (Patrick 2014). That this erasure of its subaltern past (and present, given that it is “the most highly staffed park per acre in NYC”) has had a significant effect on the urbanism surrounding the High Line is testified to the now well-known gentrification of the area that targets “poor, queer and racially marked persons as raucous, criminal and antisocial” (Patrick 2014: 927; Cataldi et al. 2012: 371). The High Line redesign integrates the postindustrial landscape of the (formerly) abandoned railway into the urban fabric of NYC, effectively adapting architecture to the new demands of the Anthropocene, but it does so by actively silencing its subaltern history (Woods 2018b). This silencing of the subaltern might be contrasted with Rem Koolhaas’s design of the Ruhr Museum, a former factory transformed into a public space

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that gives voice to the industrial history and memory of the area. In Koolhaas’s design, the visitor is in many ways put in the shoes of former workers with the escalator design of the museum matching “the flow of the original factory production” and “all the machinery remain[ing] in its original condition, in order to raise awareness of industrial culture” (Portillo 2015). Koolhaas responds to the silence of an industrial past by artificially transporting visitors into that past context thus allowing it to speak. This design, however, requires framing the factory as disconnected from the urban context of the contemporary visitor, who needs to be transplanted to the experience of the former worker in order to empathetically share their experience. This design effectively conjures a circumscribed experience of a former “industrial culture” and places the visitor within that experience. As such, one does not encounter the former life of the factory and its connection to our current alterlife but encounters only Koolhaas’s conception of that past life. Functionally, the subaltern past is still silenced. In contrast, Luza and Jeldes are concerned with making the silence of the industrial past of SH-SL speak as silence. That is, they are concerned with the question of “how silence is inhabited and what are the signals that ought to be given for a significant tour, but at the same time are silent” (2016: 3). This silence, they make clear, is the silence of “the most intimate dimensions of the everyday life” at the site, “putting an emphasis on childhood and the histories told by parents and grandparents who ‘at one time’ inhabited the encampment” (2). While they personally heard these stories from informal guides on their own tours (2), they emphasize that such intimate testimony would not be heard by tourists who would walk the grounds alone, traversing the space of silence that these memories inhabit but which cannot be heard. Their solution, similar to Sanfuentes, is to create a place in which visitors can deliberate the excessive silence of this past. For this reason they created various shaded sites (sombras) for rest that allow visitors to deliberate the worked landscape, “respecting the silence of the desert” (5). In addition, Jeldes and Luza reconfigure the space in such a way that visitors traverse (recorrer) its grounds through a hands-on walking tour, an element which they insist creates an experience “beyond the singular experience of gazing which is proper to the spectator.” (4). This self-guided walking tour is designed in such a way that it grants “a condition of free circulation through streets and passageways . . . [making it] evident to the visitor that they are participating, mediated through their own will, in an experience that permits them to be inside of a valuable site” (3). Against Koolhaas, the design does not force a singular foreclosed experience of the site. Moreover, there is no attempt to recreate the experience of past workers on

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these tours, since their proposed design, “resignified those social, historical, and aesthetic values of the saltpeter offices of SH-SL, through [mediante] a way of conceiving the new objects so that they might express belonging without falling into false historicism [falsos históricos] and in that way rescue [rescatar] the syntax of the formal language of the site” (5). As with Sanfuentes, representation is eschewed in favor of an abstract formalism (“the syntax of the formal language of the site”) that allows for deliberation. This abstract deliberation constructs a space for an encounter with the silence of the place, that meaning that exceeds the representational frameworks with which the site is approached by visitors. Luza and Jeldes make no attempt to place the visitor in the shoes of the former worker or to make claims of the disappearance of that past, but rather force the visitor to confront the silence of the bodies entwined in the saltpeter industry that bark along the tour. As they explicitly write, they place “the old [antiguo] . . . in relation with that which currently exists” (5). The silence of the architectural past of SH-SL—those forms that exceed the visitor’s ways of knowing an urban space—are juxtaposed next to and disrupt contemporary urban meanings. This deliberation of a disturbing silence is by no means new. Raymond Williams (1973: 126), for instance, argues that a “disturbing meditation” on nature that leads to a disruption of the conventional order in fact emerged with Romantic poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. He cites Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” to demonstrate this new problematization “of identity, of perception and of nature itself ” (Williams 1973: 126): “Tis calm indeed! So calm, that it disturbs / and vexes meditation with its strange / and extreme silentness” (Coleridge 2002: 168). Is this idea of nature as disrupting one’s identity not precisely the relationship with the silence of SH-SL outlined in Jeldes and Luza’s project and in Sanfuentes’s poetry? The focusing on the calmness that disturbs, that vexes meditation with its excessive silence? Williams further argues that this Romantic gesture represents a shift from poetic representations emerging from agricultural working-class transformations of nature to the championing of “the lonely creative imagination” (1973: 132). This latter act of deliberating nature, Williams argues, is part and parcel of a bourgeois sensibility, “the wild regions of mountain and forest were for the most part objects of conspicuous aesthetic consumption” that were made possible “from the profits of an improving agriculture and from trade” (1973: 128).13 It might critically be argued that Luza and Jeldes reproduce this bourgeois “structure of feeling”: the lone creative genius or tourist, definitively separated from the actualities of mining from a safe distance under the shaded sites designed by Jeldes and Luza, consumes an aesthetic image, “the syntax of the formal language of the site,” an act

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of consumption made possible by the profits obtained from that industry. It might be critiqued that deliberation, whether on a walking tour or from the shaded sites, is an inherently bourgeois relation. With Luza and Jeldes’s work, however, the disturbing presence is not a “wilderness”—that is, an image of nature purified of working classes— but precisely the transformation of the earth by the “silent” (or, more precisely, silenced) working classes: At these saltpeter sites [salitreras] it is possible to appreciate the traces left about the desert by excavations and infillings [rellenos] that permitted the construction of thoroughfares and the filling of mining pans [bateas] or the gravel mounds [tortas de ripio], today lookouts [miradores], that through the action of the wind have been founding and constructing a new desert landscape. For this case, the palimpsest of the saltpeter sites would be the environment [entorno] itself, more than the encampments, since they are these traces, excavations, and promontories that today permit the realization of new interpretations of the place. (2016: 6)

The design is founded on the presence of an intertemporal working-class alterlife and forcing the tourist to deliberate their experienced silence of this desert landscape significantly transformed by those workers who they cannot hear.14 Luza and Jeldes’s position is in this way still maintaining what Williams identifies as a bourgeois structure of feeling organized around travel and distantiation, for at no point does their design bring the visitors into community with those workers who left the traces in the desert or those communities today who maintain a collective memory of that worked landscape. Yet their work functionally disrupts the tourist way of thinking in order to force de-liberation of those epistemic frameworks that actively silence the subaltern history of the landscape, therefore taking great care not to appropriate the experiences, collective memories, and epistemologies of the working classes of the Chilean desert. Accepting the inheritance of this bourgeois structure of feeling, Jeldes and Luza effectively disrupt it through their architectural interventions. This de-liberative vision today can be functionally seen as an attempt at decolonial dialogue between the lettered city and subaltern worked landscapes from the position of the lettered city. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanquí rephrases Spivak’s question, “Can the subaltern speak?”: In a country [Bolivia] of colonial deafness, perhaps it would be worth it to invert the question. Can the dominant elites hear what the subaltern

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says when they speak? Perhaps here resides the reason for the symbolic fight, and for violence itself as a language. So, the war for space, the war for food, the war for gas and for coca have adopted at times this language, more for the violence of the repressive gesture than for a rejection out of principle of dialogic spaces of politics. (2010: 67–68)

Rivera’s phrasing here emphasizes the environmental aspects of Indigenous organizing in Bolivia through her invocation of the 2003 Bolivian gas conflict and the continuous struggles over coca cultivation by Indigenous farmers. Rivera also demonstrates how this landscape is colonial insofar as it is founded on a foreign social body determining land use policy without consideration for the self-determination of Indigenous communities. Yet she also emphasizes that the question is not merely whether dominant elites are listening or subaltern subjects are speaking, but rather whether those elites when listening can hear what the subaltern says. In the words of this section, the question is: how can one deconstruct dominant epistemic and representational frameworks so that the voice of the subaltern becomes part of a representative multiplicity rather than an excessive silence? The work of Sanfuentes, Luza, and Jeldes testifies to the continuing need for the epistemic deconstruction of dominant discourses in order to be able to hear the subaltern. They are by no means in the same positionality as Rivera even under the greatest straining of the idea of subalternity and they make no attempt to speak for the subaltern, but their work functionally approaches the same question.

Poetic Ecology? In 2013, Sergio Elórtegui moved to the Open City to reside in the Cubícula Locanda (The Inn Cubicle). A biologist by training, Elórtegui was the first ever natural scientist to move to the Open City. His assessment of the environmental health and integrity of the site was troubling. At a glance, the landscape of the Open City appears to be a thriving ecosystem. The lifeless sand dunes are matched only by the verdure that surrounds them in addition to various wildlife that coexist alongside human residents and their architectural works: foxes, jackrabbits, and dozens of bird species in addition to the domesticated horses, cats, and dogs that often roam the grounds. Over the past forty years, however, biodiversity at the Open City has slowly been declining: large flocks of the Franklin’s gull no longer stop at the Open City’s wetlands as part of their transcontinental migration pattern as they previously

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did; the ensis macha—a type of mollusk that once covered the floors of local shores—is now almost completely absent due to heavy pollution from Concón and Quintero industries and overfishing; and an invasive species of lupine (Lupinus arboreus) has started taking over the dunes, slowly starting to change the sandy landscape into a biologically homogeneous grove. Although the first two examples may be said to be caused by broader forces than just those at the Open City—the residents were not the ones overfishing or consuming macha—the City does hold some responsibility (though, I will argue, not culpability) for the final transformation of the landscape. As Elórtegui explained in personal conversation, in the 1990s the Open City planted a grove of non-native eucalyptus trees in order to block wind and make a section of the lower half of the City more habitable. Indeed, almost three decades later this grove has made living in the “Cells” as well as the Hospedería del Colgante possible; the wind had previously made the site where these hospederías are situated inhospitable. As the eucalyptus grew, however, this drastically transformed the dune landscape in two ways. First, the decrease of wind prevented the regeneration of the dunes celebrated in “The Opening of the Terrains,” thereby allowing plants to take root rather than being washed away by the shifting sands. The constant moving, appearing, and disappearing of the sands that lay at the foundation of “Opening of the Terrains” was losing its material referent. Second, the presence of the eucalyptus trees increased the moisture of the air immediately in their wake, thereby making the site even friendlier to new plants such as the invasive lupine. Nonetheless, the consequences of planting the eucalyptus were completely unknown by the Open City when they planted the grove; the ecological consequences were a result of a lack of knowledge, not antipathy towards the landscape. This narrative is therefore one that has become intimately familiar to ecologists and environmentally conscious architects: human activity has transformed the landscape in such a way that it has decreased biodiversity. The point is not to condemn the activity of the Open City—Elórtegui himself is a member—but to affirmatively emphasize a new opening into the relationship with the land. Elórtegui’s own writing on ecology emphasizes this potential relationship between his mode of ecological exploration and the Open City. In 2009, he co-wrote with Patricio Novoa Quezada a short book, Orquídeas de la Regíon de Valparaíso (Orchids of the Valparaíso Region), addressing the fact that, “The situation of the orchids of the Valparaíso Region is extremely worrying” (29). Even more worrying is the particularity of these orchids, given that “66 percent of the orchid species that grow in Chile are endemic, which makes it ur-

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gent that we define the state of conservation of our orchids” (27). Elórtegui and Novoa Quezada then identify the leading threat to this delicate plant: habitat loss and alteration through deforestation at the hands of agricultural activity and rapid urbanization due to projects tied to “tourism, summer houses, new roads, and gas pipelines” (28–29). These authors are therefore reproducing one of the central theses of ecology today: habitat destruction at the hands of expanding urbanization is one of the greatest global threats to biodiversity, defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) as “the variability among living organisms from all sources, including terrestrial, marine, and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part” (Elórtegui and Novoa Quezada 2009: 28; Wilcove et al. 1998: 614; MA 2005: 1). This ecological vision celebrating biodiversity and critiquing biotic homogenization in many ways reflects ideas found at the Open City. For instance, Elórtegui’s criticism of the modern designs of roads and gas extraction, which, according to Elórtegui, dialogue neither with the local ecosystems nor with the Indigenous populations who have inhabited those spaces, mirrors the Open City’s own criticisms of this mode of urban expansion: the theorizations that roads colonially “flatten” the earth’s terrain rather than engaging its multiplicity (Amereida) and that the representation of oil as fossil fuel is an epistemic reduction of multiplicity (Amereida II). As was shown in Chapter 4, central to the Open City’s critiques of this mode of univocal urbanization is how they transform places of multiplicity into single-use sites. In other words, the Open City’s focus on multiplicity, as well as its critique of the particular mode of urbanization that homogenizes that multiplicity, can easily be translated into Elórtegui’s language of conserving biodiversity and critiquing biotic homogenization. Even Elórtegui’s criticism of tourist-based architecture and urbanism is reflected in the Open City’s architectural practices. As Pérez de Arce and Pérez Oyarzún (Pérez de Arce, Pérez Oyarzún, and Rispa 2003: 58–59) have noted in their analysis of the works of the Valparaíso School (see Chapter 5), the architecture of the Open City drastically differentiates it from the architecture of the summer vacation home. Elórtegui’s criticism of a particular mode of urbanizing Chile reflects the Open City’s critique of a homogenizing mode of urbanization. The alternative that Elórtegui offers to the homogenization of the landscape also harmonizes with the thinking of the Open City. In his co-authored discussion of the orchids of the Valparaíso region, Elórtegui celebrates the unknown of the orchid. As he writes, “people deny the existence of Chilean orchids: only two or three orchids have a common name. From the scientific point of view, orchids are the last studied species of the flora of Chile” (Elórtegui Francioli and Novoa Quezada 2009:

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14). Even within scientific study, as Elórtegui explains, there is a long history of the difficulty of quantifying the number and types of orchids in Chile, with the specifics of this flower remaining largely in a fog. The situation does not change when one looks at individual orchids. For instance, a mystery surrounds the case of the Codonorchis lessonii, whose origin in Chile “is a great unknown, since there is no explanation with which to understand its presence in Chile, considering its closeness to the orchid family whose species prefer to grow in Africa and in the Old World. From the phylogenetic point of view, Codonorchis lessonii is not related with any orchid specie that inhabits Chile” (Elórtegui Francioli and Novoa Quezada 2009: 18). Here, Elórtegui mirrors the foundational logic of the Open City: the American continent is a great and unknown interior sea, and we have to deconstruct our representational and epistemological frameworks in order to hear this other. Although the subsequent mission to specifically poetically reveal this unknown continent is absent in his work, with Elórtegui choosing to engage a scientific mode of ecological understanding instead, points of harmonizing contact emerge between his ecological vision and the environmental urbanism of the Open City around the concept of the unknown. Just like Sanfuentes, Luza, and Jeldes, it might be claimed that Elórtegui is arguing for the rereading of silence in order to emphasize that the inability to garner meaning from the silence of the landscape is not equivalent to the absence of meaning; one has to rework one’s epistemological and representative frameworks in order to transform that silence into a signifying message.15 In contrast to these three, however, Elórtegui is demanding a new opening: one in which it becomes possible to hear the nonhuman other. Although this book has repeatedly emphasized how members of the Open City functionally heard nonhuman others (e.g., the sand in “Opening of the Terrains” and light in Arena), Elórtegui’s work provides an ecopoetic opening. Indeed, glancing at previous projects at the Open City an ecological consciousness is not necessarily in conflict with their environmental urbanism and architecture. The Vestal del Jardín, constructed in the mid-1990s by Iván Ivelic and Claudia Porzilo alongside the Open City, is an example of not only an environmental awareness within the Open City, but an example of placing this environmental awareness at the forefront. The Vestal is built at the top of a ravine (quebrada), which at the time of construction in the mid-1990s was a steep and quickly eroding cliff. A conscious decision was made during the foundational poetic act to locate the Vestal only meters from this cliff, forcing Porzilo and Ivelic—who would subsequently care for this architectural work—to immediately take action to manage this site to prevent the building from falling into the ravine.

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To protect the Vestal, a series of soft solutions working with the terrain were realized: infilling the precipice with local soil so that there was a soft decline into the ravine rather than a cliff ; installing a series of small, semicircular ditches in the area uphill from the ravine to divert water; setting up a plumbing system that sent water down into the ravine via a series of switchbacks, thereby preventing erosion due to water coming from the residents living in the Vestal; and planting various flora in the now soft decline to hold the soil firm. In other words, hard engineering was rejected outright and environmental management of the site subsequently became a practice of gardening. The cultivation of the site was therefore not strictly a removal of human activity—Ivelic, Porzilo, and others at the Open City dramatically transformed the prior properties of the place—yet was highly aware of its terrestrial qualities. Avoiding the colonial imposition of a landscape or built form onto the site, the Vestal del Jardín listens to the warnings of the site. The arrival of such an ecology would even appear to be a realization of the old dreams of university reform. According to the 1967 University Reform Manifesto, “it is evident that poetic and scientific-technological knowledge carries with it a European foundation that tends towards its own interior light and has been generalized throughout today’s world, since, for example, the contemporary mathematics and, with it, the dominant scientific thinking that reigns in Asia, in America, in Africa, in Australia do not fundamentally differ from that which lives in its place of origin: Europe.” If the university reform movement and subsequently the Open City thereby called for an epistemology specific to the conditions of the American continent, then it would appear that an ecopoetic comprehension of the terrains specific to the Open City might be said to be a realization of the dreams of 1967. If the Open City, as I have repeatedly emphasized, runs contrary to a scientific epistemology based on natural law and a foreclosed mode of representation, it does not run contrary to a poetic ecology based on listening to the warnings of the territory. As Isabel Margarita Reyes and the 1970 Seminar on Urbanism had already noted in the 1970s and 80s: the technologies of science can function poetically to open up the multiplicity of the earth.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the response by some people living at the Open City to the new context of the anthropization of the earth, demonstrating how their responses harmonize through their distinct approaches. The purpose has therefore not been to argue for a singu-

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lar, cohesive response by a unified collective, but to emphasize, as has always been part of the history of the group, how their architectural, poetic, and now ecological projects are founded in the attempt to hear the other. Central to this idea has been a continued rejection of any attempt to speak for or identify with the other, instead seeking to hospitably give space to each and every other. This is notable, for instance, in Luza and Jeldes’s renovation of SH-SL and their making audible the silence of the worked landscape. Through this hospitality, these members of the Open City thereby demonstrate an option for an alterlife environmental urbanism and architecture. In addition, this chapter has been dedicated to demonstrating a heightened awareness to the local realities of Ritoque, especially the transformation of the landscape due to human activity. The Open City represents a dynamic and flexible mode of poetic architecture and urbanism that is particularly well-positioned to respond to the needs of our current environmental epoch. The reader may be disappointed that this chapter offers no overarching theory of how the Open City relates to the Anthropocene on a planetary scale. The reason for this is simple: the City has not yet formulated such an overarching response to the Anthropocene. In other words, a contemporary document that might present a generalized attempt to hear the anthropized terrain of the planet or of the Open City (as “The Opening of the Terrains,” for instance, heard the dunes in the 1960s) simply does not exist. Indeed, as I noted in Chapter 4, such largescale visions have functionally disappeared since the coup, with many of the members of the Open City now interested in smaller-scale interventions. Although discussions about creating a nature sanctuary within the Open City have occurred over the past few years, as of yet there has been no conclusion to these talks. Instead, what we have is what I have presented in this chapter: a harmony between discrete and individual responses to the anthropization of the terrain by guests of the Open City. Notes 1. This is not to make a claim that this is the only or even the central concern of the Open City. As has been a constant refrain of this book: the Open City is marked by an internal diversity that one should not try to reduce to single issues. For instance, Óscar Andrade Castro and Jaime Reyes Gil (2016) recently argued that the poetic acts which organize life, work, and study form the central structural core of the Open City. 2. I must apologize for not including in this chapter the work of Jorge Ferrada, the current resident in the Hospedería del Errante. His absence is by no means a commentary on his work. Furthermore, it should be mentioned that this list does not include people who previously lived at the Open City,

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

such as Michèle Wilkomirsky, or who are part of the Amereida Cultural Corporation but do not live at the Open City, such as Andrés Garcés. Nixon, of course, is building off the work of others like Ramachandra Guha (1999), Joan Martinez Alier (2003), and Kiran Asher (2009). One can look, for instance, at the Indigenous Environmental Network’s (2019: 1) sympathetic critique of Congresswoman Alexandria OcasioCortez’s Green New Deal Plan, which both celebrates Ocasio-Cortez’s initiative and worries that it “will leave incentives by industries and governments to continue causing harm to Indigenous communities.” I must note here Agrawal’s (1995, 2009) powerful argument that distinguishing Indigenous knowledges reproduces colonial categorizations and is theoretically untenable. As Murray Li (2000: 121) summarizes, “Everyone has practical, usually tacit knowledge of their social and physical environment,” thereby making “the distinctive feature of ‘indigenous environmental knowledge’ . . . not its content but rather its location in particular agendas.” This theorization, however, fails to confront differing ways and methods of knowing. That is, even if two individuals or communities were placed within the same location, they may come to differing knowledges based on the differing epistemological methods with which they process and approach that location. Epistemology, knowledge, and positionality within the colonial matrix of power are in a mutually constitutive relationship. For an example of such decolonial dialogue outside of the Open City, see the documentary, Qapirangaiuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change by Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro, produced in the Inuktitut language with translations into English and French appearing in subtitles. I focus on the visual performative aspect of this performance for a simple disciplinary reason: I lack the methodological tools necessary to analyze music and cinema. Much of this analysis is thanks to the doctoral thesis of Leonardo F. Valenzuela Pérez (2016) and the documentary, Aquí se respira lucha (Here we breathe the struggle, 2018), which investigate the history, life, and reality of the “sacrifice zone of Quintero Bay.” The Facebook page of “Salvemos Quintero” is an invaluable resource for those interested in reading deeper into the organization of resistance in Quintero/Puchuncaví during 2018–19. During this time, the Facebook page was a constant stream of articles and reports giving updates, information, and responses to the situation. Just as in the case of the dictatorship, it should be repeated here that such a clean division of violence to the immediate north of and peace within the Open City is far from the case. Toxification resulting from the Ventanas industrial park reaches the Open City as well. It should be stated that, as far as I am aware, Sanfuentes, Luza, and Jeldes were not in conversation during their respective projects. I am writing of a functional conceptual convergence, not a direct relationship. For examples of this Marxist critique, see Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016), Malm (2015), Hornborg and Malm (2014), and Moore (2015).

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13. In Abya Yala, this has a further colonial element: to create a such a wilderness space required the forced displacement of Indigenous communities; American Romanticism’s disturbing perception of nature was an aesthetic of colonialism (Cronon 1995; Dunbar-Ortiz 2014). 14. I am referring here specifically to tourist visitors. The saltpeter mines still play a fundamental role in collective memories in northern Chile, collective memories explicitly addressed by Jeldes and Luza (Calderón Gajardo 2010, 2014). 15. For a theoretical discussion of this idea exploring how modern Western epistemology actively silences nonhuman animals and environments by “theoretically and practically domesticating” them as “that which and those who cannot come to ‘rational discourse,’” see Eric Nelson (2011: 105).

[• Conclusion •]

Socialities, New Openings, and the Lingering Question of Capital

The central argument of this book has been that the Open City rep-

resents an option for environmental urbanism and architecture through its structuration of a poetic mode of living in common (convivir) otherwise than the demands of the colonial nation-state. Central to this social structuration is a poetic hospitality in which room is constantly being granted to and for the other so that each can be heard in their “unsubstitutable splendor.” On this unstable, shifting, and dynamic abyss, the Open City dedicates itself to the confrontation with heterogeneity and alterity on which the social structuration of the group is founded. This mode of living in common (convivir) is therefore against liberal consensus-building in which multiple factors are brought together in search of an equilibrium—since this equilibrium fails to actually confront the problem of alterity, heterogeneity, and otherness (as Mouffe and Rancière have shown in addition to the Open City)—as well as more conflictual processes of hegemonic institution or dissensus—which fail to provide a de-hierarchized mode of structuring a social landscape around the recognition of alterity. It is towards this de-hierarchized confrontation with otherness that the social structuration of the Open City strives, seeing the field of the poetic as one possible foundation for such a mode of living in common otherwise than that of coloniality. In other words, the Open City, beyond its architectural activity, moves towards an alternative sociality. Michel Maffesoli’s work in The Time of the Tribes (1996) is of particular help in understanding this mode of sociality otherwise than politics. As Maffesoli (1996: 90) argues, the Mafia might be considered a metaphor of sociality “in that it emphasized the protective mechanism with respect to the outside world (that is, in relation to the overarching forms of power), as well as pointed out the secrecy it engenders is a way of confirming the group.” Secrecy, Maffesoli contin-

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ues, becomes one possible way of understanding many social landscapes. The consequence, he concludes, is a mode of resistance that is generally separated from politics, “This autonomy, as opposed to the logic of politics, is neither ‘pro’ nor ‘con’; it is intentionally situated on the sidelines. This is expressed by a distaste for confrontation, by a saturation of activity, by a distancing from militancy” (1996: 92). The reader may glean from this passage my hesitance in engaging in a full reading of Maffesoli’s work—his focus on the “social glue” that is central to the formation of affinitive “tribes” is precisely not the mode of living in common that I argue is present at the Open City. Nonetheless, Maffesoli’s work demonstrates something significant: a focus on sociality can function as a means of organizing a thinking otherwise than the nation-state. As examples, Maffesoli discusses: how Zen thought and mystic Taoism “are regularly resurgent and always in opposition to the instituted forms of the ideology and official policy of the Chinese state” (58–59); how organizations in Berlin founded on nonheteronormative sexuality produced both a “federative and equalizing” effect in their sociality (92–93); and how feminist and ecological movements focus on liberation rather than partisan intervention (92). The Open City is not unique in its political nonpolitics. This overarching argument of the poetic political nonpolitics of the Open City, which they initially expressed in the particular context of Chile in the 1960s and have subsequently developed, has two corollary consequences related to coloniality and urban environmentalism. First, this poetic political nonpolitics functionally provides a decolonial option for modern architecture in Latin America. Throughout their existence, the Open City has theorized a close link between coloniality, coercion, and the Eurocentric nation-state, seeing the social dynamics of the nationstate as an extension of colonial domination. Against this extension of colonial State-making, the Open City sought to activate a noncolonial urban mode of living in common. As a consequence, there is an implied distinction in the work of the Open City between decolonization—the struggle to replace or depose colonial apparatuses and processes—and decoloniality—the affirmative actualization of an autonomous, noncolonial epistemology and social structuration. Those who would go on to found the Open City came to the conclusion during the 1960s that political struggles within the nation-state to move beyond colonial structurations of a life in common were still founded on the same process of dictating through coercive power how to order the social landscape. Second, the architectural, poetic, and urbanist work of the Open City reveals a close relationship between the coloniality of power and environmental exploitation. Their insistence on an epistemic reconstitution built around comprehension rather than knowledge, the rejection of oil

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extraction as an authoritarian and colonial process, the illumination of the multiplicity of a ray of light, and the response to current anthropized landscapes demonstrate the need both to decolonize environmentalism and that decoloniality demands a reconsideration of modern Western relationships with the earth. This epistemic reconstitution demands that we reconsider decoloniality through the lens of environmentalism and environmentalism through the lens of decoloniality.

Where’s Capitalism? It may be argued that one limitation of this study is its weak theorization of capitalism and capitalism’s relationship with the Open City. While this was briefly addressed in Chapter 3—the Open City’s insistence on the abolition of private property—and Chapter 4—the embrace of “free competition” against the directed economy—the Open City’s relationship with capital requires further examination beyond this current work. As this strange combination demonstrates—a rejection of private property and an ambiguous embrace of market-based competition—the economic vision of the Open City requires a dedicated investigation that cannot be approached within the specific scope of Politics of the Dunes. This is especially significant today in the wake of the 2019 “social explosion” in Chile that has categorically condemned neoliberal economic inequality. Indeed, the Chilean government’s and elite media analysts’ response to the social explosion exemplify how those coming from the Chilean lettered city refuse to hear others. For instance, the Chilean journalist, Polo Ramírez, announced on live television, “We knew that there was inequality, but not that it bothered them so much”(“Sabíamos que había desigualdad, pero no que les molestaba tanto”) (El Desconcierto 2019), and the Chilean television personality, Don Francisco, stated bluntly, “I realized that there was much frustration, but I didn’t know that there was such anger and that there is an important human group that has to be heard” (“me di cuenta de que había mucha frustración, pero no sabía que había tanta rabia y que hay un grupo humano importante que tiene que ser escuchado”) (El Dínamo 2019). Made explicit in elite Chilean responses to the social explosion was the absence of the relationship nurtured at the Open City between a positionality in the lettered city and the deconstruction of that lettered city through an open relationship with others (as well as the repositioning of the lettered city as other). In this way, the Open City potentially has much to add to current discussions of the social explosion.

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Nonetheless, this does illuminate what I consider the major limitation of this book: I have left unmentioned up until now the workers employed by the Open City, by members of the Open City, and/or by the PUCV School of Architecture and Design. The labor of Jorge Álvarez, Canepa Fuenzaleda, Olivia Calderón, and many others significantly contributes to the life of the Open City. Twenty-first–century revisitations of Italian Autonomism and its insistence that we (architectural historians and critics, literary scholars, etc.) reconsider the relationship between construction and architecture, challenging this division of manual and intellectual labor, is particularly significant in this regard (Aureli 2008). Indeed, Libero Andreotti’s insistence that we move from “the autonomy of architecture” to “the architecture of autonomy” is particularly notable in the case of the Open City which operates in a space between these two fields—neither the “re-politicization of architecture” demanded by Andreotti (2016: 5) nor the problematic “utopian tradition” (that is, the “autonomy of architecture”) justifiably critiqued by Manfredo Tafuri (a critique that looms large over the Open City, as is demonstrated in León’s citation of Tafuri’s critique of utopianism in her article). As this book has focused on what the Open City can tell us about the relationship between architecture, urbanism, poetry, coloniality, and environmentalism, I want to conclude with one final hospitable opening: What happens when we hear labor at the Open City?

Top: Igloo and construction at the Open City, 1973. Courtesy of José Vial Archivo Histórico, negative number T pro 73 – proyecto título R. Varela Ciudad Abierta – 019. Bottom: Igloo in 1982. Courtesy of José Vial Archivo Histórico, negative number CAV alm 82 – almuerzo construcción xenotafio Sra. Molina – 003.

Left: Vestal del Jardín under construction, 1997. Courtesy of José Vial Archivo Histórico, negative number CAO jar 97 – Vestal del Jardín, 1997–99 – 25. Right: Vestal del Jardín, 2003. Courtesy of José Vial Archivo Histórico, negative number CAO jar 03 – 019 – Vestal del Jardín.

Top: Hospedería de la Entrada, 2002. Courtesy of José Vial Archivo Histórico, negative number CAO ent 02 – Hospedería de la Entrada – 004. Bottom: Sala de Música interior, 1982. Courtesy of José Vial Archivo Histórico, negative number CAO mus 82 – sala de Música – 01.

Top and bottom: Hospedería del Errante, 2002. Courtesy of José Vial Archivo Histórico, negative numbers CAO err 02 – 011; CAO err 02 – 033.

First Session, SouthWest: 1/a) Deflector surface: The lowest layer of air (a) strikes against the ramp and rises and forms the layer’s limit. The intermediate level of air (b) rises along the surface. The highest level of air (c) is deflected and produces an eddy on the roof. South-West: 1/b) Duct: The lower and inferior levels of airflow are introduced in the openings of the duct, being expelled at a high velocity and with ascending direction, forming a “Crest” that results from the wake effect and the Venturi effect.

West: 2/b) Effect minimized by placing a small deflecting surface at the base of the larger surface.

South-West: 1/b) “Crest,” wake effect designed to move upwards, product of the form of the duct. South-West: 1/a) The deflector surface produces an ascending movement of the wind that ends with turbulence on the roof.

South-West: 1/c) The upper layer is deflected, surrounding the “Crest” and creating a turbulence on the roof. Eddy zone. South-West: 2/c) Duct: The aerodynamic effects produced by the duct are similar to the previous session, through which it can be concluded that the duct does not influence in any way the structure of the roof nor the corner under study.

Left and right: Designs for the Hospedería del Errante demonstrating Manuel Cassanueva’s concern for the wind. Courtesy of José Vial Archivo Histórico, negative numbers Esquemas vientos 001; Esquemas vientos 002; Esquemas vientos 003.

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Index Achupallas Project, 14 Adams, William, 29 Ad-hocism, 144 Adorno, Theodor, 166 Aeneid, 6, 15, 45 Afrolatinidad, 66–68 Agora, 5, 95, 116, 139, 153 Agosín, Marjorie, 114 Agrarian reform, 83–84 Aleijadinho, 67 Alfieri, Massimo, 110 Allende, Salvador, 19, 83, 113, 128 Alterlife, 169–70, 175–76, 178, 184 Amereida, 15, 19–21, 23–4, 39–69, 95, 96, 108, 109, 110, 112, 118, 152, 153, 181 and Afrolatinidad, 66–68 and Europe, 59–60 and feminism, 68–69 and Indigeneity, 64–65 and the invention of America, 20 and Latin Americanism, 57–60, 66 and literary studies, 39–40 and marxism, 19–21, 100–101 and naming, 60–64 Travesía of, 14–5, 39 Amereida II, 99–100, 118–124, 125, 181 Amereida Cooperative, 7, 84, 91 Amunátegui, Ximena, 118 Andreotti, Libero, 190 Ant Farm, 150 Anthropocene, 158–184 and architecture, 175–76 coloniality of, 163–65, 169 politics of, 162–63, 165 urbanism in, 161–62 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 3, 152 Apolitics, 73–74 Archizoom, 153

Arcosanti, 145, 150, 153 Arpilleristas, 114–15, 117 Ant Farm, 150 Authoritarian urbanism, 104–112, 120 Avant-gardes, 51–53, 55 Avenida del Mar plan, 81 Baeza, Arturo, 14 Balcazar, Sebastián, 168 Barragán, Rossana, 130–31 Barthes, Roland, 6 Bauhaus, 153 Beauce, Mary, 68 Bellalta, Jaime, 14 Benn, Gottfried, 16, 24 Berríos, María, 81, 91 Beverley, John, 48 Bhabha, Homi, 77 Biodiversity, 180–82 Bolívar, Simón, 47–48 Borges, Jorge Luis, 66 Bottega, 83, 84, 115 Boulting, Jonathan, 15 Bové, Paul, 44 Brathwaite, Kamau, 67 Brecht, Bertolt, 5 Breton, André, 5, 16 Brown, Enrique, 128 Bru, Roser, 105 Büchner, Georg, 2 Buell, Lawrence, 26 Byrd, Jodi, 65 Canudos, 153 Capitalism, 189–90 Cardenal, Ernesto, 153 Carpentier, Alejo, 40, 54–55, 59 Casa de los Nombres, 139–40, 148

224 Index Casanueva, Manuel, 141–42 Césaire, Suzanne, 40, 53–54, 68 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 130 Chazal, Tomás Gabriel, 53 Chicago Boys, 101–102 Chilean university system, 103, 109, 110 Chronicles, 41–46, 55, 64–65 and the Aeneid, 45 CIAM, 147 Coloniality, 28–29, 62–65, 77, 89–90, 187–89 and history, 130–36 and literature, 44–46 Columbus, Christopher, 20, 42–43, 56–57, 58, 60 Concertación, 137, 139 Conquest, 62–63 Constructivism, 55–56 Copway, George, 65 Correa, Javier, 159, 167–70 Coulthard, Glen Sean, 163 Coup, 99–100 Covarrubias, Carlos, 170 Critical regionalism, 27–33 and coloniality, 29–31 Cruz, Alberto, 13–14, 15, 18, 39, 83, 87, 109, 112, 118, 124–25, 149, 158, 159 Cruz, Fabio, 14, 15, 39 Cubícula Locanda, 179 Cultural studies, 138–39

Depoliticization, 4, 102 Derrida, Jacques, 165 Developmentalism, 17–19, 119, 122 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 43 Dittborn, Eugenio, 22, 105 do Nascimento, Abdias, 67 Documenta, 154–55 Dorfman, Ariel, 104–5 Drop City, 150 Dubreuil, Laurent, 4, 73–74, 110 Dunes, 87–90, 108, 116–17, 139–40, 179–80, 182, 184 Dussel, Enrique, 1, 57, 67

da Cunha, Euclides, 47–48 Darío, Ruben, 40, 49–50, 51, 54, 57, 58, 59–60 Azul, 49, 50 Dawson, Ashley, 160, 161–62 de Castro, Sergio, 102 de Ercilla y Zúñiga, Alonso, 45 de la Cadena, Marisol, 133–36, 154 de la Cruz, Juana, 68 de Larraechea, Sebastián, 159, 167–70 de las Casas, Bartholomé, 133 de Verrazzano, Giovanni, 43–44 de Zapata, Celia, 68 Decoloniality, 3–4, 152 Deguy, Michel, 15 Deloria Jr., Vine, 97

Fanon, Frantz, 3 Fédier, Francois, 15 Fernandez de Enciso, Marín, 43–44, 45 Foucault, Michel, 150–52 Frampton, Kenneth, 27–33 Franco, Jean, 64, 68, 106, 120–22 Frei, Eduardo, 18–19, 83 Friedman, Milton, 101–102 Fuguet, Alberto, 138

Ecocriticism, 26, 120, 182–83 Ecology, 26–27, 28 and coloniality, 28–9, 31–32, 85–86, 147 and the “New World,” 43–44 and the Open City, 180–83 politics of, 26–27 Eliash, Humberto, 128 Elórtegui, Sergio, 58, 159, 179–83 Eltit, Diamela, 105–107, 110 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 51 ENAP (Empresa Nacional de Petróleo [National Petroleum Enterprise]), 119–20, 122–23 Escobar, Arturo, 24, 163 Eyquem, Miguel, 14, 85, 118

Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, 43, 61–62 Gardens, 49–50, 182–83 Gerbi, Antonello, 43–45 Girola, Claudio, 15, 39, 57, 101 Glissant, Édouard, 3 Globalization, 137–38, 141–42

Index 225 Góngora, Mario, 18–19, 101 González, Jorge, 13 Gopal, Priyamvada, 3 Governability, 46–48 Gramsci, Antonio, 129 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 3 Guha, Ranajit, 3, 130, 153–54 Gutiérrez Girardot, Rafael, 49 Heidegger, Martin, 17 Herrmann, Victoria, 165 High Line, 175 Hirsch, Arnold, 63 Historiography, 128–55 and coloniality, 1–2 Hobbs, Richard J., 161 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 24, 155 Holy Brotherhood of the Orchid, 67 Hospedería (concept of ), 93, 96, 139 Hospedería del Colgante, 180 Hospedería del Errante, 139, 141–42 Hospedería de la Entrada, 10, 13, 115–18 Hospedería Rosa de los Vientos, 11, 12, 141, 180 Hospitality, 1, 5–6, 91–97, 111, 118, 132, 170, 184, 187 Hugo, Victor, 40 Huidobro, Vicente, 25–26, 51–53, 54, 57, 58–59, 106 Hybridization, 77 Igloo, 115–16 Indigenous Futurism, 164 Iommi, Godofredo, 5, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 24, 39, 57, 58, 66, 67, 82–83, 84, 91–95, 96–97, 101, 118, 123, 124–25, 132–33, 136, 152, 158, 159 “Hay que ser absolutamente moderno,” 16, 17, 24 Italian Autonomism, 190 Ivelic, Boris, 83–84, 115–17 Ivelic, Iván, 144, 159, 182–83 Jameson, Frederic, 106–7 Jeldes, Juan Carlos, 159, 174–79, 182, 184 Jencks, Charles, 144 Jocelyn-Holt, Alfredo, 16–17

Jolly, Victoria, 159, 167–70 Kadir, Djelal, 40–42 Kandinsky, Wassily, 24 Kirkwood, Julieta, 114–15, 117 Klein, Naomi, 163 Koolhaas, Rem, 141–42, 175–76 The Last Days of Shishmaref, 65 Latin Americanism, 40–42, 55–56, 59, 138–39, 152 Latour, Bruno, 1, 26–27 Latronico, Vicenzo, 21 Le Corbusier, 24–25, 143–44, 147 Le Guin, Ursula K., 6 Leatherbarrow, David, 32–33 Lechner, Norbert, 107 León, Ana María, 16, 125, 149–52, 154, 170 Lettered city, 45–46, 86–87 Lezama Lima, José, 66 Lihn, Enrique, 105 López de Gómara, Francisco, 43, 45 Lovelock, James, 27 Luza, David, 159, 174–79, 182, 184 Maak, Niklas, 154–55 Maffesoli, Michel, 187–88 Malevich, Kazimir, 25 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 24 Mann, Geoff, 160, 162–64 “March of the Empty Saucepans,” 113, 117 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 52–53 Maritorias de los Archipiélagos de la Patagonia Occidental, 81 Martí, José, 40, 47–49, 50, 51, 52, 57–58, 59–60 Marxism, 100–101, 130, 152 Masiello, Francine, 106 McHarg, Ian, 26, 27 McKenzie, Lisa, 129 Mello Mourão, Gerardo, 67 Memmi, Albert, 3 Méndez, Francisco, 14 Mestizaje, 40, 50, 62, 66, 119–20, 152 Mignolo, Walter, 1, 3–4, 22, 29, 47, 173 Minteer, Ben, 160

226 Index Modernism, 24–33, 143–47 and environmentalism, 24–33 Modernismo, 40, 46–51 Modernity, 24, 26, 28 and coloniality, 28–9, 30–32, 146 Mondrian, Piet, 25 Morales, Evo, 65, 152 Moreiras, Alberto, 138–39 Moreno, Manuel, 128 Mouffe, Chantal, 74–76, 77, 88, 187 Mulligan, Martin, 29 Murphy, Michelle, 169–70, 175 Nation-state, 46 and coloniality, 46–48 Neoliberalism, 101–103, 106, 107, 111–112, 119, 120–22, 137–42 “New Scene,” 99–100, 105, 106, 112 Nixon, Rob, 160, 168 Novoa Quezada, Patricio, 180 Obeso, Candelario, 68 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 39, 56–57 Olivio Jiménez, José, 50 Open City and authoritarianism, 13, 16–7, 23–4 and coup, 16, 99, 101 and the critique of private property, 13, 93, 96 and decolonization, 97 and feminism, 91 founding, 15, 81–85, 87–95, 152, 155 historiography of, 13–4, 15–6, 128–155 politics of, 81, 90–95, 96 “Opening of the Terrains,” 87–91, 96, 112, 166, 180, 182, 184 “Operation Cleanup,” 104, 106 Orrego, Antenor, 52 Ortiz, Fernando, 66 de Oviedo, Fernández, 42, 43–44, 45 Oyarzún, María Eugenia, 104 Pavilion of Hospitality, 154–55 Paz, Octavio, 120–22 Pendleton-Jullian, Ann, 16, 142–46, 147, 148, 154 Pérez, Emma, 44

Pérez de Arce, Rodrigo, 146–49, 154, 181 Pérez Oyarzún, Fernando, 146–49, 154, 181 Pérez Román, Jorge, 15 Pérez Torres, Rafael, 77 Phalène, 87, 96, 155 Pigafetta, Antonio, 43 Pinchart, Maria Pilar, 21 Pinochet, Augusto, 16, 100–102, 109, 110, 112, 121–22, 124, 137, 149–50, 154 aesthetics of, 104, 106 and feminism, 113–15 and neoliberalization, 100–3 The poetic, 1, 5–6, 46, 68–69, 78, 187 and coloniality, 1, 46 and ecology, 180–81 and politics, 4–5 The political, 4, 74–75, 149–52 Political nonpolitics, 4, 22–24, 110–11, 123–25, 128–29, 154, 159, 187–89 Politics, 4, 74–78, 149–52 and aesthetics, 4–5, 75–77 Politics of architecture, 73–74, 149–52, 190 Porzilo, Claudia, 159, 182–83 Postmodernism, 106, 141–42, 143–46 Public space, 106, 111–12, 113–118 Pyne, Stephen, 160 Quijano, Aníbal, 1, 28–29, 130, 152 Quintero, 167–70 Rabasa, José, 4 Rama, Ángel, 45 Rancière, Jacques, 74, 75–78, 88, 105–6, 107, 117, 187 Reading, Bill, 138 Reinaga, Fausto, 3 Representation, 1–2, 63–64 Reyes, Isabel Margarita, 15, 32, 99–100, 107–112, 166, 172, 183 Reyes Gil, Jaime, 92, 170 Richard, Nelly, 22, 104–5, 107 Richards, John, 49 Ricoeur, Paul, 30 Rimbaud, Arthur, 5, 24 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 1, 3, 65, 130–31, 178–79 Rojas, Anita, 114

Index 227 Rotker, Susana, 48 Rudiak-Gould, Peter, 164–65 Ruhr Museum, 175–76 Sacrifice zone, 168–70 Said, Edward, 45, 65 Sahagun, Bernardino, 133 Sala de Música, 139 Saldaña-Portillo, Josefina, 152 Salvemos Quintero, 169–70 Sandoval, Chela, 6 Sanfuentes, Manuel, 159, 170–73, 176, 179, 182 Santiago Humberstone and Santa Laura saltpeter works, 174–79 Schmitt, Carl, 74–75 Schopf, Demian, 170 Schuster, Joshua, 3 Sheller, Mimi, 160, 162 Silence, 172–73, 176–79, 182, 184 Simons, Edison, 15 Siskind, Mariano, 21 Slow Violence, 160, 168, 170 Smith, Will, 164–65, 166 The social, 75, 187–88 Social explosion, 190 Solentiname, 153 Spivak, Gayatri, 2, 3, 4, 64–65, 131–33, 136, 152, 178–9 St. Francis of Assisi, 11–12, 13 Steane, Mary Ann, 167 Stein, Gertrude, 3 Subaltern studies, 2–3, 129–33, 152–54, 178–79 and Anthropocene, 174–76 and environmentalism, 160 Summers, Lawrence, 159–60 Surrealism, 5, 24, 53–54, 143 Swyngedouw, Erik, 23 Tafuri, Manfredo, 190 Taller de Diseño, 139–40, 148 Taller de Prototipos, 139–40, 141

Taylor, Marcus, 102, 137 Thurner, Mark, 61–62 Todorov, Tzvetan, 133 Torres-García, Joaquín, 39, 55–56, 57 Transculturation, 50 Tronquoy, Henry, 15 Trumper, Camilo, 114 Tuck, Eve, 3, 97 Túpac Amaru Movement, 165 Turpo, Mariano, 133 Turpo, Nazario, 133–35, 154, 166 Tzara, Tristan, 25 Ulm School, 145 University reform, 78–82, 139, 183 and decoloniality, 79–80 politics of, 79–81 Urbanism seminar, 85–86, 110, 183 Utopie, 150 Valenzuela, María, 113 Vallejo, César, 51–53 Valparaíso School, 13–4, 109, 146–49 and politics, 81–82 history of, 13–4 Vergil, 6 Vespucci, Amerigo, 42–3, 45, 56 Vestal del Jardín, 182–83 Vial, José, 14 Vitale, Luis, 18 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 135–36 Wainwright, Joel, 160, 162–64 Walsh, Catherine, 1, 3–4, 22, 29, 173 Williams, Raymond, 177–78 Wynter, Sylvia, 132 Yanes, Ana Paz, 83, 115–17 Zamora, Margarita, 62, 68 Zapatismo, 65, 152–53, 162–63 Zizek, Slavoj, 23 Zurita, Raúl, 22