Spectres of hierarchy in a Chilean domestic archive

Abstract

The work of Chilean documentary film-maker Ignacio Agüero demonstrates a constant preoccupation with the home and its environs. In his film El otro día (2012), his home is presented as the repository of personal memory and, more problematically, of national history. Agüero’s camera travels between domestic interior and urban exterior, attempting a reconstruction of community across the physical and social boundaries of Chile’s capital. This article contends that Agüero’s development of an analogy between the (middle-class) house and the film camera restricts that endeavour. Where much scholarship on domestic documentaries privileges notions of encounter and intersubjective exchange, this article engages with theorizations of the archive and ‘counter-archive’ to insist on the persistence of spectral images of hierarchy. These spectres mark the limitations of a project of memory undertaken through the logic of private property.