Degrounding Latin America: Architecture, Violence, Community

Abstract

My dissertation proposes an interdisciplinary examination of the relationships between foundational violence and the built environment in Latin America. My research integrates art, architecture, urban studies, forensic studies, and philosophy to develop the notion of degrounding: a principle for better understanding the intimate correlation between ground (simultaneously: land, reason, and foundation), violence, and language. This notion transpires from the dissertation's four sections, each organized around a "foundational project," where the analogy between building an environment and building a community is at work. The first chapter examines the installation of a theological ground in Latin America through the institution and destruction of the Jesuit "reductions" in colonial Paraguay (1607-1767). I delve into the theological economy (Giorgio Agamben, Oreste Popescu, and San Javier), seeking connections to architecture and conversion violence. My analysis compares the Marxist formulation of primitive accumulation with the Schmittian understanding of appropriation to develop an economic reading of conversion as expropriation. The chapter's final section offers an aporetic, non-syncretic reading of the ruins of Paraquaria, informed by Jacques Derrida's work, Aporia. The second chapter examines Brasilia's construction and inauguration (1956-1961). An essential part of the visual/ rhetorical corpus I analyze in this chapter comes from the Arquivo NOVACAP, including the promotional video O'bandeirante (Jean Manson). The chapter proposes a new interpretation of Brasilia's foundational narrative by reassessing its relationship to the "candangos" (migrant workers) and the dessert ("sertão"). Central to the argument is my analysis of Niemeyer's Museo da Cidade, Derrida's notion of the supplement, and Didi-Huberman's "figurante," as is Martin Heidegger's exploration of angst and modernity. My third chapter continues examining the secular ground initiated with Brasilia in the context of the "long" Colombian Peace Process (2001-2018). The chapter considers a triple set of optics: the legal ground, in the Ley de Justicia y Paz; the forensic ground, in the catalog Rastros: desenterrando la verdad (Fiscalía de la Nación); and the grounds of signification, in Doris Salcedo's counter-monument, Fragmentos (2018). The last section of the chapter focuses on La escombrera (2001-2015), an urban mass grave in a rubble heap in Medellin, Colombia, as a site that subverts or "degrounds" these three grounds of sovereignty. Critical texts to the arguments developed in this chapter are Derrida's essay "Force of Law," Jean-Luc Nancy's chiasm: the truth of violence and the violence of truth (The Ground of the Image), and Gareth Williams's notion of decontainment. Finally, the conclusion considers the immense trenches of Michael Heizer's land art Double Negative as a site where an experience of groundlessness as freedom is possible.