Media, technology, and participation: life in its duration, toward a new evanescence?

Abstract

Narrated through images and languages that evoke ever more extreme and often arresting realisms, the capturing of poverty through greater authenticity and intimate access, while arousing empathy or seeking social justice, has reached a creative abundance aided by cultural coalitions and incessant technological advances in the production, access, and mobility of text, photography, video, and film. This article addresses the aesthetic and political economies informing street children self-representation in two more or less recent Latin American examples in film and photography, where stark marginalization and truculent realities constitute the daily landscape but also the object of exposure, namely the Mexican documentary Voces de la Guerrero (dir. Adrián Arce, Diego Rivera Khon, Antonio Ziriòn, and the colonia Guerrero gang, 2004) and the bi-nationally produced book/project Cicatrices en mi piel: los niños de la calle se fotografían a sí mismos (Scars on my Skin: Street Children Photograph Themselves, Hartwig Weber and Sierra Jaramillo, 2005). This trend can be considered, I suggest here, as a vivid manifestation of the commoditized cultural content Maurizio Lazzarato analyzed as immaterial labor but reflective, correspondingly, of a ‘precarization’ woven into global image and labor flows with a utopian, transformative imprint of ever more extreme realities of destitution. As testimonies of postindustrial urban displacement and cruelty, but also as reformative pedagogic missions, the examples I look at and interrogate in this article also resonate with other visual trends in that they are structured explicitly as collaborative endeavors between artists, ethnographers, sociologists or various other activists, and marginal subjects, with the express goal of the latter's self-representation and restoration. What distinguishes such collaborations is an overt drive toward auto-representation and an expressed hope that being in the image and in some control of its production will, through photographic dispersion, result in social renovation and/or empowerment.