Gestiones literarias y estéticas de excedentes / desechos / restos

This project is funded by the Leading House for the Latin American Region, in collaboration with University of Geneva, University of Bern, Universidad de Buenos Aires, and Universidad de Río Negro.

The aim of this project is to investigate literary and esthetic practices in Latin America that resignify remainders, waste, and surplus in general. Our working hypothesis is that these related categories express as much imaginary as material conditions of existence and circulation of objects, bodies and values, and that the analysis of their esthetic and literary construction and articulation can throw light on the dynamics that render them

problematic. Our research will focus, on the one hand, on how literary and esthetic practices identify articulations of the register of excess, and on the other, on how they themselves reproduce –and eventually also transform– the logic and mechanisms that generate and sustain it. The focus on Latin American works partakes of efforts to explore the contribution of perspectives from the “Global South” to the understanding of planetary problems, in this case, the global issue of surplus, waste and garbage management. In order to identify these contributions, however, we will keep in mind the European literary and artistic traditions with which they interact. This research will contribute to ongoing work on the symbolic and semantic operationsinvolved in the articulation of this “family” of concepts. It will attempt to clarify the characterizations of the imaginary mechanisms at work in the production of surplus, and in its management, be it of quantities of residual bodies and matters or of information. In the long run, it hopes to provide working terms and notions for exchanges between the humanities and social and environmental sciences on these urgent issues.