THE COSMOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE AND ITS FORMS: NARRATIVES, ART AND POLITICAL ACTION IN LATIN AMERICA
What are the forms of the archive produced in Latin America when different dimensions of experience—such as memory, territory or bodies—become intertwined within a single web of meaning? Cosmographies respond to this question by attending to the way certain cultural practices represent, reorder and project the complexity of the lives, materialities and memories that configure a shared world.
As its name indicates, the cosmographic archive refers to the representation of the cosmos and, above all, to the mapping of its associations, damages, disputes and possibilities of re-existence arising from unequal and contingent assemblages. A relational and conflictive composition among ways of dwelling, remembering, resisting and imagining, sedimented by languages, narratives, aesthetics and posthuman and post-anthropocentric political practices oriented toward dismantling the structures of division that shape our horizons of meaning: human/non-human, reason/matter, bios/zoe, res cogitans/res extensa. Its latency can be traced in certain mythologies, with their ideas of heterogeneously generated, interdependent and cyclical cosmos; in organicist thought and its philosophies of unity, so dear to certain Andean imaginaries and to European Romanticism; in ecological thought and complexity theories, which have insisted on interdependence, nonlinearity and scale effects; and in certain ontological turns that shift our attention toward other bodies and materialities.
With this perspective in mind, we invite the presentation of analyses of literary, visual, audiovisual, performative, digital, community and political works that can be read as expressions of the cosmographic archive. We are especially interested in proposals that displace the privilege of the human as the axis of intelligibility to instead address interspecies bonds, wounded territories, ecologies in crisis, indigenous and Afro-descendant knowledges, feminist practices, community archives and political imagination, as well as the mediations, frictions, partial translations, dependencies and conveniences that articulate these fields.
