Towards a cartography of deceleration: ghost stories?

Abstract

This article aims to think about what we call “devices of deceleration”, which is accomplished by means of an analysis of Marilia Garcia’s two poetry books Câmera Lenta (2017) and Parque das ruínas (2018), both published in Argentina in 2020, as well as an installation by Nuno Ramos, “El derecho a la pereza” (2016). All these site specific aesthetic experiences highlight the frustration in relation to industrial development projects in Latin American peripheral economies. They also evoke spectral entities (both from the past and from the future) of a society grounded on slavery and socio-environmental exploitation. In their slowness, Garcia and Ramos propose an overlapping of temporal layers from different centuries, which refer to a process of territorial occupation process that we also associate to the traumas arising in 2020’s everyday life. If, on the one hand, cessation of most of the economic and social activities has exposed us to a series of challenges and problems, on the other hand, we suggest that it is even more revealing to think about what has not stopped in this context. In fact, the quarantine has provoked a deepening of social inequalities and an opportunity for the rising of capitalism's extractive activities, ranging from land mining to data mining. It also enabled the acceleration of the project of extermination of indigenous people, the devastation and occupation of their land. Therefore, by means of an interdisciplinary method, we approach these works as interpellations to our present.