To follow up a bit on Harmony's last post, we are not attempting to aestheticize, or to offer sober, moral correctives on discourses of global ghettos.
We are simply trying to articulate an ongoing series of questions: what do slums and favelas make and allow us to dream, and what are the relations of those dreams to collective and individual desire? What does the incredibly intense nature of hyperurban formations do to the production of peoples, both those that exist and those yet to come? How can we think slumjectivities in ways that are not entirely predicated on ideas about resistance and bare life? In a way that doesn't try to posit slums on some 'outside,' outside of capitalism or economy, but that traces all the microeconomies that rise, ivy-like, around the cracks.
What is the subjectivity not just of the people that inhabit slums, but of the slums themselves? How do they speak?
It appears possible to us that the ruinious and intricate materialities of slums resonate across time and memory with other sorts of ruins (and possibly that ruins are the slums of a future collapsed on the present), the ruins of social and political movements which populate the margins of history. We are constantly asking, what can be recovered? What possibilities and affinities are made available again?
We are asking: without succumbing to otherness, to slum chic, what kind of living archive of the possible are slums and favelas currently forming?
