YOUTH AND CINEMA AT THE END OF TIMES: EUROPE AND LATIN AMERICA. VIOLENCE, SUBJECTIVITY AND THE CRISIS OF UTOPIAN HORIZONS IN CONTEMPORARY AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCTION
The first decades of the twenty-first century have been marked by a growing perception of civilizational crisis, described by numerous contemporary thinkers—such as Franco Berardi, Mark Fisher, Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Byung-Chul Han—under the notion of the “end of times.” In this context, contemporary audiovisual production has become a privileged space for exploring the ways in which young people experience violence, uncertainty and the collapse of utopian horizons. This symposium proposes to comparatively analyze European and Latin American audiovisual productions made between 2000 and the present, attending to the narrative and aesthetic forms through which the transformations of contemporary youth subjectivity are represented. Special attention will be paid to phenomena such as political radicalization, affective fragility, digital hyperconnectivity, new configurations of violence, and strategies of survival and belonging in contexts of social breakdown. Within the European corpus, series and films such as Adolescence, Utøya: July 22 and Les Combattants allow us to examine different youth responses to contemporary collapse: from violent implosion bred in digital ecosystems marked by misogyny and resentment, to survivalist preparation in the face of a perceived imminent climatic and social catastrophe. These works show how the threat no longer comes solely from the classic social margins, but also from apparently integrated subjectivities whose drift reinforces a climate of opacity in which youth find themselves immersed. In Latin America, films such as La jaula de oro and Monos allow us to think through other configurations of the crisis: migrations marked by state, criminal and border violence; young people subjected to extreme conditions of precarity; fragile communities attempting to rebuild minimal forms of affection, organization and belonging amid institutional fragmentation and the loss of stable generational reference points; as well as processes in which the substitution of authority figures within the guerrilla chain of command transforms youthful impulses toward autonomy into the systematic reproduction of logics of domination within a dystopian universe with its own distinct features. The symposium seeks to bring together research from the sociology and anthropology of youth, film aesthetics, cultural studies, studies on violence and analyses of contemporary subjectivity. It will promote interdisciplinary approaches that allow for discussion of both the audiovisual representations of youth and the historical and political transformations that these images represent. It also aims to strengthen academic cooperation networks among researchers and institutions in Europe and Latin America interested in youth, audiovisual cultures and contemporary crises. Rather than understanding film and series as mere passive reflections of social reality, the symposium proposes to think of them as cultural devices that actively participate in the production, circulation and problematization of present-day imaginaries.
