Aeropuerto: disenchantment, dialectical rescue

ABSTRACT

At the intersection of the critical and the creative, my contribution builds on my work in visual-ethnography. I have been recording video at the site of a ‘future’ international airport in rural Peru. I call the project Aeropuerto. Aeropuerto is a visual archive of objects and places in transition. It’s a collection of images about the arrival of an international airport and the economic development it promises – a seemingly linear process that is happening very fast in a Quechua community that, until recently, experienced time cyclically. Now, I engage with Aeropuerto to convolute images and theoretically informed ideas. For this exploration, I play with my visual ethnography as an expression of the dialectical image. I present how a ‘future’ airport is materialising in constructed environments, landscapes and other forms of cultural expression to question the linearity of the process of development and the losses and erasures it brings. I slow down the fast pace of linear temporality and challenge its rapidity with a ludic application of the ‘now time’, illustrating a visual story in which the world of things awaits the dialectical rescue we see with Benjamin’s theory of collection. This project is comprised of written and video components.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialectical rescue
• heteropolis
• Quechua
• alternate temporalities
• collection
• visual ethnography

Acknowledgements

While I am the sole author of this essay, I have been making this project in collaboration with Augusta Pumaccahua, Jacinto Singona, and their family, along with Marcos Lopez, Macarena Barrio and Manolo Aparicio, who are anthropologists from the Catholic University of Peru. Our collaborative work is reflected in my observations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tania Aparicio is from New York City and Lima, Peru. She received an MA in sociology from New School for Social Research, where she is completing her PhD under a Dean’s scholarship and dissertation fellowship. There, she is also part of the Janey Program for Latin-American Studies. She was awarded a 2018–2019 Fulbright-Garcia Robles Student Researcher in Mexico in affiliation with Cineteca Nacional and UAM-Iztapalapa. Her dissertation investigates the organisational strategies to curate and exhibit the moving image in emblematic film organisations in the Americas. Her case studies include Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City and the MoMA film department in New York City. In 2018, she started a new visual ethnography project on the transition to linguistic inclusivity in Peru nation-state’s bureaucracy, which currently only functions in Spanish, denying the speakers of the other 100+ official indigenous languages their constitutional right to be treated as equal citizens.