Through an analysis of two post-crisis films (Estrellas, Federico León
and Marcos Martínez, 2007; El nexo, Sebastián Antico, 2005) shot in
the largest slum in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this essay sketches the
terms for conceptualizing a cultural dimension of the Global South
marked by the aesthetic reappropriation of poverty. Working against
what has been called Latin America’s persistent “melodrama of poverty,”
and avoiding the type of cinematic representation that depicts
the slum in terms of violence and uncertainty, the directors of these
films highlight the fact that the reappropriation of poverty is often at
the base of alternative forms of social and artistic agency. While the
ability to work under conditions of material lack has long been an
important dimension of Argentine artistic production, their films
flaunt deprivation in order to transform precarity into an ideological
and aesthetic weapon, re-staging social inequality in a spectacular
fashion and advancing inventive modes of action. In this way, they
argue that “making do” can also become the basis for an alternative
creative paradigm. In their exploration of this paradigm, which allows
slum inhabitants to build a house in two minutes and create a
spaceship out of junk, both films pose far-reaching questions: who
has a right to perform? What roles are available for the people of the
slum? And, what are the conditions for having artistic and social
agency in economically deprived areas?