In the Spotlight Cynthia Francica

What does the apocalypse and/or post-apocalypse mean for you?

Having grown up in Argentina, a country which has historically undergone a relentless succession of devastating political, economic and social crises, I have experienced first-hand what it means to mourn lost worlds, and to then have to start over and re-build yourself and your community from scratch over and over again. The felt, lived experience of worlds ending is an everyday struggle we learn to wade through. Paradoxically, that continuous state of (post)apocalyptic anxiety and grief can, as in the case of the 2001 crisis, open space for other forms of creative and social assemblages that offer alternatives to the dynamics of capitalism. In my research, which focuses on Southern Cone literature and visual arts, my goal is, precisely, to think through those notions and practices which, emerging from contexts of ongoing precarity and dispossession, become tools for survival, resilience, and community building. 

For a thorough study of the ways in which creativity blossomed in the art scene during and immediately after the 2001 crisis in Argentina, see Andrea Giunta, Poscrisis: Arte argentino después de 2001, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2009. 

What is your fellowship trying to achieve, which questions is it addressing, and with which methods?

Latin America, a region characterized both by the unrelenting expansion of extractivist economies which leave acute social and environmental damage behind and by alarming rates of violence against feminized and marginalized subjects, offers fertile ground to illuminate the ties between environmental injustice and the lives, and deaths, of gendered and otherwise marked bodies. In this context, I propose that attending to the (post)apocalyptic images and vocabularies that emerge from aesthetic practices becomes an important task. 

These imaginaries, I argue, re-invent the ways in which we conceive of gender, sexuality and embodiment and, more broadly, of our relation to the more than human. In my research, I chose to work with the category of the ‘more than human’ because, in contrast to the notion of the ‘nonhuman’ and its problematic association with categorical thinking and a binary worldview, the notion of the more than human involves, following Erin Manning, a relational ‘ecology of practices…  that emphasizes hyperrelationality and dynamic expression in a worlding that is co-constitutive’ (Always more than One. Individuation’s Dance, 2013).

An example of the situated (post)apocalyptic imaginaries I study is the decolonial feminist notion of “cuerpo-territorio” (body-territory), a practical idea conceived to resist extractivist territorial exploitation ().

For an initial approach to these topics, see Cynthia Francica, “Feminisms” in Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics, ed. by Jens Andermann, Gabriel Giorgi and Victoria Saramago (De Gruyter, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-010

For a general reflection on the connection between the notion of ‘cuerpo-territorio’ and feminist hemispheric solidarity, see Carol D’Arcangelis and Lorna Quiroga, “Cuerpo-Territorio: Towards Feminist Solidarity in the Americas,” Revista Eletronica de ANPHLAC 35 (2023): 155-6, .

How does the fellowship project build on or connect to your previous career or biography? 

My work has long focused on feminist and queer visual arts and literature, and on the dimensions of affect, embodiment and relationality. My previous project, from which the present one derives, centered on the figuration of female/feminized bodies in connection to the non-human in contemporary art and literature in Latin America. I was particularly interested in working through the ways in which affective configurations connected to abjection and mourning opened space for marginalized subjects to subversively expand, explore and even celebrate their stigmatized connection to the non-human. I argued that it is precisely due to such stigmatized animalization and/or reification that marginalized bodies offer insights into the affective and material relations of humans to the more than human.

My current project builds on that impulse to probe our embodied connection to others (both human and other beings), expanding my focus through approaching specific concepts and praxes that, often emerging within activist and communal movements, can potentially serve as tools to navigate our complex presents.

What do you hope to take with you from the project and its results?

My aim is to consolidate my project and move forward with my research and writing during my stay at CAPAS. Hopefully, my research will materialize in the form of a book manuscript in the near future. 

What are the aspects you are looking forward to with respect to input from other disciplines, other perspectives, and the exchange with the fellows and people at CAPAS?

The opportunity to come in contact with scholars who are thinking about the same or similar problems through diverse disciplinary and methodological lenses is priceless. As a result of the conversations that take place at CAPAS, each of our research projects will grow and develop, surely, in meaningful and unforeseen ways.  

To get some practical advice: What would be the three things you would definitely need in a post-apocalyptic world? 

From my perspective, we already live in a post-apocalyptic world in Latin America. In my experience, what we really need to wade through the end of worlds, more than a specific object, are other beings, both human and more than human. We depend on others, both on the basis of our material and physical needs, and of our affective life – we cannot survive, much less thrive, without others. To me, the most important thing we need to foster is the conscious awareness of the inevitability, the wonder, and the pain of our co-existence. There can be no (inhabitable, livable) future without cooperation.

What are some of your favourite pop culture references to the/an (post)apocalypse?

I definitely recommend the experience of reading The Falling Sky (2013), by Davi Kopenawa. This incredible book includes drawings, personal narratives and historical accounts, and dwells into the Yanomami peoples of the Brazilian Amazon, their shamanic philosophy, and their political struggle for recognition of native rights. 

 

Cynthia Francica is Associate Professor in the Literature Department at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago, Chile. Her main research fields are gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, affect studies, new materialisms, climate crisis and the post-human in contemporary literature and visual arts.