Waste and Cultural Critique: A Theoretical Map Inferred from Latin American Aesthetics

Abstract

The semantic field of waste and dirt is a resource for artistic practices that have contributed to regulate, to question, or to attack symbolic systems and social imaginaries in different historical-political contexts. Beginning with the cultural economy of modernity/coloniality and its asymmetrical logic of exclusion and discard, the essay investigates a series of rhetorical figurations and types of production of meaning that  have articulated the isotopy of dirt in the Latin American and Caribbean context. Thinking through the interaction and complicity between culture, art and garbage, and drawing upon a couple of brief readings, it proposes five paradigmatic aesthetic modalities that enable the tracing of a theoretical map of the aesthetic use of waste as imaginative basis for cultural critique.