El Sur como espacio identitario en Torres García, Borges y Solanas
This study conceptualizes the symbolism of the South as an identity space built by a political ideology and a local aesthetics. The Uruguay artist Joaquín Torres García’s inverted maps (1936, 1943) are a political stand that asserts the enunciative power of Latin American artists who create independently of the European cultural centers. His theory of “Constructive Universalism" proposes a new art for Latin America, for the South, and originating in the South, by combining pre-Colombian artistic ethics and modernist abstraction. In the short story "The South" (1953) and the essay "The Argentine writer and the tradition" (1951), the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges redefines South American literature, marginalized and peripheral, as a literature that is entitled to all aspects of the Western culture. By doing so, he rejects a culture that would only be nationalist. We analyze Argentine filmmaker Fernando Solanas’ cinematic diptych, which includes the films South (1985) and Tangos, the Exile of Gardel (1988) in dialogue with the manifesto "Towards a Thrid Cinema" (1969), co-written with Octavio Getino. The South is seen as a space for the denunciation of the censorships imposed by the dictatorship and imperialism, but also as a space for the renovation of culture and identity. In the two movies, Solanas uses a regional cultural product, the tango, as tool of political denunciation. Throughout the study, we use Michel Foucault's notion of “heterotopia” and Walter Mignolo’s concept of the “moveable center” to explore South’s multiple meanings.
Tango Symbolism of the South Imperialism Neocolonialism Artistic ethics Argentine dictatorship Tango Pre-Colombian art Modern art Moveable center Heterotopia