Shredding Acts | Jumble Poetry
In my doctoral work Politics of Matter, I examine the making and unmaking of utopian worlds through a composite field site spanning two contrasting yet interconnected landscapes in southern Spain: The industrialised agricultural coast of Almería and the rural mountains of the Alpujarra. Across these terrains, divergent political imaginaries coexist, collide and leave material traces that continue to shape the present. Drawing conceptual inspiration from Walter Benjamin's notion of constellations in The Arcades Project , the thesis rejects a singular narrative in favour of a multimodal assemblage of ethnographic fragments. I propose 'shredding acts' as a means of restaging their representation. The following are such examples: I look at the tangled mess and see the words ‘Rojos de mierda’ and ‘outer-space’ and I think of the words of an Air Force army commander in 2019, who suggested a retake of the 1936 coup, the pulling of seeds from the pulp of golden teeth. He...
