Paper short abstract:

This paper considers Scherson's engagement with urban spaces where the flows, movements and flexibilities of the city meet with friction and stasis. I use Foucault's notion of the heterotopia to explore these spaces as a critique of the neoliberal utopia of fluidity.

Paper long abstract:

Play (dir. Alicia Scherson, 2005), is often cited as a key work within the constellation of aesthetic and thematic concerns that have been discussed under the label of 'el novísimo cine chileno'. The film offers a distinctively colourful and ludic take on 21st century Santiago, a city that has been at the heart of a neoliberal test case over the past few decades.

On the surface, Scherson's Santiago is a space of transiency, movement and flexibility, crossed by flows of people, traffic, capital and information. It seems to be offering possibilities for exploration and encounter, casting the urban consumer in a landscape of choice and hinting at the possibility of playful reinvention.

However, this paper is concerned with what I refer to here as 'slow spaces' - spaces where flows encounter obstacles, where movement contends with friction and where choice runs up against limits. I argue that these spaces are where Scherson's urban imaginary is at its most critical; this is where the illusory nature of consumerist utopias becomes spatialised.

By placing these spaces in dialogue with notion of the heterotopia, I explore the construction of these 'slow spaces' in critical relation to the utopian promises of consumerism at work in the neoliberal city and the experience of these spaces as a disruption to the rhetoric of possibility