Paper short abstract:

The cartonera publishing movement is reaffirming itself as a practice of resistance and permanence in these turbulent times. Transgressing the rules of capitalism and valuing collective production, the nuclei of cartoneros produce books as instruments of environmental and social regeneration.

Paper long abstract:

In 2003, Buenos Aires was still experiencing the side effects of the financial and social crisis that hit the country in 2001, leading to an explosion of the unemployment rate and social inequalities. Faced with this scenario of crisis, Eloisa Cartonera emerges as a result of occupations, demonstrations and protests, an editorial project that uses cardboard bought directly from waste picker cooperatives to make hand-painted book covers. Different people produce books from materials that would be discarded in the trash and that is integrated into the production cycle. Since then, the cartonero movement has developed rapidly across Latin America and the world and has become a symbol of resistance due to its original political and cultural characteristic. The cartonero universe brings together a multitude of participants, enabling the bond and the exchange of experiences that values the production and the affection generated in this process. It is an original way of publishing books as an instrument of resistance and subverting the devices of the publishing market. This work is aimed at presenting the collective Dulcinéia Catadora, a cartonera publisher created in 2007, in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, and at understanding this collective as a sympoietic practice that presents other ways of thinking and designing, by cultivating the response-ability , the ability to respond to contemporary social challenges, as well as the mechanisms it uses to break with the logic of neoliberal capitalist production.

Paper short abstract:

By looking at industrially produced objects, whose original functions were subverted in street protest, we aim to reflect on how the relationship with the everyday environment is transformed in the midst of a social crisis and how these reinterpretations may nest more profound changes.

Paper long abstract:

In October 2019, fueled by a collective discontent with the lifestyles and inequalities generated by the capitalist model, social protests took Chilean streets. People massively manifested demanding profound changes to the system. Known as the "Estallido social" (Social Explosion), the demonstrations paralysed an important part of the country and managed, after a few weeks of revolt, to initiate a process that will end up with a new Constitution.

These events triggered a process in which the country was re-imagined, subjectivities were re-written and also objects and the environment were heavily transformed. This study places its focus on a set of industrially produced objects, whose original functions were subverted in the streets to enable new uses and meanings. Kitchen items such as pots and ladles were used to make noise; road signs and pieces of urban furniture were re-located to block the streets; and gas cylinders were re-shaped to protect against police forces. While specialized literature generally seeks to recognize the new social forms and models that emerge from the crisis, this article aims to reflect on the ways in which the relationship with the everyday environment is transformed in the midst of a social crisis and how operations of resignification and reinterpretation may be also necessary to nest more profound changes. As such, this study seeks to characterize these operations of mutation, and from there to move towards elucidate the practical and symbolic repercussions that this new material reality has had on the social body and daily life.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the alternative social and material infrastructures Polaroid users built in order to secure the continuation of their practice. It explores the residual and tinkering practices and the sharing of skills and knowledge practitioners deploy in order to challenge obsolescence.

Paper long abstract:

As new and innovative media technologies continue to be produced at an unprecedented pace, previous ones that are considered to be less technologically ‘advanced’ end up in landfills. Regardless of the nature of the innovation, there seems to be a prevalent assumption that ‘the new’ always implies a ‘betterment’, and that this is the pathway towards progress. In the last couple of decades, it has become evident that obsolescence produced by the arrival of the new is more concerned with economic return than with actual innovation. Processes of planned obsolescence have evidenced that the life expectancy of technologies is not dependent on the material capacities of said technology but on futurological tropes in which technology appears to be an end in itself. These perspectives, however, have proven to be highly problematic. In a world in which waste play such a fundamental role, understanding the ideological conception of the ‘obsolete’ along with people’s expectations towards technologies becomes of extreme urgency. My paper looks at Polaroid technology and how since the demise of the Corporation Polaroid has continued to be practised albeit the markets’ decision to discontinue. By offering an ethnographic account on the residual and tinkering practices Polaroid users carry out in order to secure its continuation, and bringing attention to the affective relationship users’ establish with the practice, my paper argues that processes of obsolescence can be contested by the emergence of alternative material and social infrastructures that challenge the notion of linear technological progress.