Abstract

CALOMARDE, Nancy. Looking at the City from the Sewer: (Post)Urban Fictions. Recial [online]. 2023, vol.14, n.23, pp.205-209.  Epub June 30, 2023. ISSN 2718-658X.  http://dx.doi.org/10.53971/2718.658x.v14.n23.41703.

The article intends to investigate the (post) urban representations of Havana from the productions of two cuban artists: a sample of the visual artist Carlos Garaicoa, Epifanías urbanas (2017) and the story collection En la Habana no son tan elegantes (2012) by writer Jorge Angel Pérez. In both cases these heterogeneous narratives can be interpreted as forms of (post)urban dystopia, interconnected with recurring visual and literary images that depict of “after the after” (De la Campa, 2017, p. 33). These stories not only deconstruct the modulations of the myth of modernization in the Latin American city, but also move towards aesthetic-cosmological inflections that reinterpret and disrupt the dichotomous relationship between the creative subject and the urban landscape. My hypothesis is that these figurations of the city, viewed and imagined from the decentered place of the sewer, generate a centrifugal movement within the city's imaginary archive, transforming these representations into synecdoches of loss and disarray. As Havana, while remaining a city, has escaped from its foundational protocols, it has also distanced itself from the genealogy of the mythical Latin American cities like Macondo and Santa María. Thus, the oblique gaze of art, emerging from the sewer (both as a physical space and a metaphorical vantage point), gives rise to its opacity.

Keywords : (post)urban fictions; sewer; catastrophe; end.

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