Cajitas de cartón

The visual rhetoric of waste in the film conveys more than just a realistic depiction of the lamentable circumstances in which some immigrants live. An analysis of the metaphorical value of waste in the context of the immigration issues raised in the film reveals how some Spaniards, and even Spanish institutions themselves, perceive immigrants in the same light as they view actual waste. Moreover, the scenes involving waste dramatize how progressive attempts at integration into Spanish society result in increased rejection and alienation of the Other. Ultimately, the film critiques the way in which Spanish society has dealt (or better yet, not dealt) with the integration of immigrants and with different forms of discrimination, institutional or otherwise.

2020

The paper is an introduction to MA thesis, for art in public spheres. It is an interactive art project, long term one. The thesis is printed as Tarot cards (the writer version), and meant to be performed and translated into multidisciplinary mediums.

EGA Revista de Expresión Gráfica Arquitectónica, 2019

2012

The Cartomancy, 2020

To the first feminist friend I ever had-my beloved father. To Federica Martini, for being my role model, for always asking interesting questions and for the remarkable balance she strikes between passionate writing and discipline. To my dear sisters, Andrea and Caterina, for believing in me, as without both of them I would never have written this thesis. To David and Murat, for allowing me to share my world with them and for being my first interactive listeners.

VLC arquitectura. Research Journal

The architect Carlos de Miguel González was the author of the fishing village in Cartagena (Spain). The project promoted by the Instituto Social de la Marina in 1947 consisted of the construction of a housing complex and a Fisherman's House completed in 1955. The work was part of the Plan Nacional de Mejoramiento de la Vivienda en los Poblados de Pescadores which intended to address one of the main concerns of the Spanish state after the Civil War: the problem of poor housing. Thus, numerous actions were carried out along the entire Spanish coast, some published in Revista Nacional de Arquitectura. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to publicize the Cartagena project and the vicissitudes of its construction, as the built work is quite different from the original project. It also aims to highlight its most outstanding features through a comparative analysis with the other projects published in the journal and by studying possible links with the vernacular architecture...

2014

While critics of La casa de cartón have all considered Martín Adán’s only novel within the cosmopolitan vein of Spanish American vanguardismo, the present study questions this classification by showing how the narrative’s nameless protagonist distances himself from not only 19th century tropes and discourses that had characterized literary production, but also from those of his contemporaries. An exploration of Adán’s multiple parodies of literary production in Spanish America, as well as the alternative for collective cultural expression embodied in the trope of adolescence, points to the need to reconsider how we, as critics, approach and, ultimately, organize the canon.

The aim of this article is to offer a reading of the relationship between food and memory in Las Cartas Que No Llegaron, a novel by the Uruguayan writer Mauricio Rosencof. The article particularly highlights the importance of flavours and places of a culinary tradition in the process of reconstruction of a family’s identity and history. It also explores the relationship between the need of memories and the search for one’s childhood’s flavours within a Jewish family torn by persecutions and forced migrations, walking the difficult path of integration through hunger and poverty, and finally experiencing the years of Uruguayan dictatorship, with new separations, isolation and torture. This study especially analyses motifs such as the following: the symbolic value of some recurring meals; the kitchen as a favoured and metaphoric space where memories are recalled, and family bonds are strengthened; the act of cooking as maternal language and rituality; the clash between the re-surfacing of childhood’s flavours and hunger, grief and death in the death camp. Parallellisms between eating food and reading imaginary letters by far away relatives, between cooking and writing, are also pointed out. The essay opens with a cultural and anthropological overview of the migrations of the Jewish people towards Uruguay in the first decades of the 20th century; it subsequently analyzes the text through a methodological approach mainly – but not exclusively – based on symbolic and psychoanalytic criticism. An accurate reading of Las Cartas Que No Llegaron allows to understand how the process of reconstruction of one’s personal identity and family history is entwined with the subtle relationships between speech and nourishment, language and food, memory and culinary tradition.

2023

“Lolo” is one of the eight stories from the book Otosan (2015). Written by Peruvian journalist Luis Arriola Ayala, this book gives visibility to postcolonial, transnational migrant experiences. “Lolo” tells the story of an encounter between two undocumented workers, a young Peruvian and an old Filipino, in a garbage incineration plant in Tokyo. Despite the alienating situation and not being able to speak the same language, the two manage to find temporary companionship and ways to resist. This short story is based on the author’s personal experiences working in Japanese factories.

American Indian Art from the Thaw Collection , 2009

The notion that baskets can “speak,” eloquently expressed by Pomo writer Greg Sarris, is reflected in the central role they play as protagonists in indigenous stories from California and the Great Basin. In one Karuk account, a burden basket was transformed into a kind of “Noah’s ark,” carrying a man and his dog to safety as a great flood covered the earth. A Salish story tells of a basket containing the remains of a woman’s late husband, which gave her pleasure in bed and eventually impregnated her with twins. A Yokuts tale relates that Coyote, the incorrigible Trickster, poked his head through an old basket and mocked it as “good for nothing,” only to have it choke him to death! ...