Revisioning slums
If, for the better part of the 20th century, it was New York and its glistening imitations that symbolised the future, it is now the stacked-up, sprawling, impromptu city-countries of the third world. The idea of the total, centralised, maximally efficient city plan has long since lost its futuristic appeal: its confidence and ambition have turned to anxiety and besiegement, its homogenising obsession has constricted the horizons of spiritual possibility and induced counter-fantasies of insubordination, excess, and life-forms in chaotic variety. Such desires flee the West’s surveillance cameras and bureaucratised consumption to find in the Third World metropolis a scope, a speed, a more fecund ecology … [But] in the erotic delectation of these yawning life forms, which rise up with such titanic ambition, with such indifference to the history of western ethics and aesthetics, is the terror, the exhilaration, of a death wish. - Rana Dasgupta, The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
When I showed photographs of Rio’s favelas in class earlier this term, one of the things we talked about was the aesthetics of poverty. Surely the use of so many pretty colours indicates a certain amount of hope and joy, the students said. A sort of “scrapped-together beauty,” as Jeff Ferrell would have it, I said. But in the case of slums, isn’t that also part of what the privileged-but-sensitive foreigner needs and wants to see?
Instead, the photographs of Dionisio González can be seen to play with the notion that favelas are exotic. Subtopia’s Bryan Finoki writes that his photos “immediately question the viewer’s knowledge of what a ’slum’ actually looks like… [and] despite the way they may look to us, how is it that those from the outside want to view these images in some way, and digest them as accurate portraits of squatter settlements?”
Journalist Roberto Marinho suggests the photos are both “a way to recover the landscape … [and] a Utopian reconstruction of places that are impossible to save unless it’s done in the artistic terrain of dreams and wishes.” But Bryan claims that these images eloquently express the tensions between contemporary urban order and chaos, and challenge the viewer to imagine the broader implications of favela “development” or “re-housing” plans.
I wish I could share Bryan’s enthusiastic reading of them, but I’m having difficulty understanding what makes these photo-collages different from cinematic slumsploitation that “celebrates the slum as a dangerous but creative place where people improvise solutions.” Any thoughts?
- Anne
December 4th, 2007 at 5:29 am
Anne, I don’t know about the representation of favelas, but I think there are plenty of ways to engage ambivalently with the productive capacities of completely fucked up situations in ways that do not simply “aestheticise” them, at least not in terms of a predictable, objectifying closure. With a lot of my research on the documentation of war-zones by bloggers who live in them, I’m trying to engage with the slippery dystopian/utopian relay that can appear in the middle of trauma.
For example, a lot of the stuff I’ve found by Lebanese bloggers during the 2006 war is counterintuitively ambivalent, often challenging attempts at “proper” moral positioning (e.g. the easy cultivation of spectatorial disgust and outrage at a situation), and also defying the stereotype of being “stalwart, heroic survivors who just get on with it”. Instead, plenty of Lebanese blogging during the war performed a dangerous fascination with living amidst ruins and death. These dangerous liaisons shouldn’t be written off as mere post-traumatic “shock” (i.e. a lapse of one’s sensibilities), rather, they’re people’s engagement with the cultural-political fabric of their everyday lives. In Lebanon, dwellings are violently ripped apart by Israeli bombs, and people’s “private” belongings, life trappings and body-parts spill out into some kind of “public” amongst the ruins, and yet people still negotiate this most appallingly violent and oppressive “blurring” of public and private by folding it into the more generalised public/private negotiation that a lot of blogs perform as a matter of course in their daily practise. Of course, we shouldn’t smooth over the complexities that are dangerously leapt over by this observation, but I’d also like to suggest that this kind of leap — a dodgy “totalisation”, if you like — is precisely what these bloggers are performing. Elegiac/utopian totalisation “from below”, or a rogue version of the World Wide Web’s foundational archive fever, or will-to-map. Nothing is being offered as some kind of “solution” (”war zones are the future!” is hardly convincing, and that’s not the kind of utopianism I’m identifying here anyway), but there’s definitely a weird productivity going on.
Given the way blogs from Lebanon might be both problematically and productively situated in a global economy of representation, this “playing with violent publicity” obviously plays out in multivalent ways. Consider the crudest exmaple: the popularly circulated photos of Lebanese survivors cheerfully smoking the arghile amongst the ruins of their houses (or more famously, in swimsuits by the pool of a bombed hotel), usually annotated by Lebanese bloggers with wry captions like “Only in Lebanon!”. The everyday circulation of these images by Lebanese bloggers can generate a very different kind of affect — something that mixes mourning and defiant pleasure — from the way they might be used in an advertising campaign for a western newspaper. (This is a real example — the national daily newspaper here in Australia is using the image of the smoking swimsuit girl, where she definitely becomes a freaky instance of the anomalous and prodigal Orient.) And to a western, nominally progressive blog-readership that’s hungry for “authentic” news of suffering in the Middle East, another problematic relationship awaits…
So, I’m basically arguing for a sensitivity to vernacular *breadth* when approaching the ambivalent representation of spaces of trauma. There’s a *lot* that can be going on, and while I agree that the position of the reader should be thoroughly interrogated, I don’t think people’s attunement to ambivalence should be reduced to a case of privileged wish fulfilment. Otherwise we relegate people living in such fucked up spaces to playing “morally appropriate” roles of worthy, indignant and noble sufferers, incapable of productively synthesising alternative responses to their environments.
Sorry, thinking aloud.