UN BUQUE FRIGORÍFICO LLENO DE PLÁTANOS

“Hoy me encuentro en la penumbra de mi cocina en la capital alemana, contemplando el plátano que me estoy comiendo. De golpe me doy cuenta que éste plátano que tengo entre manos es un clon idéntico al que me comí para merendar un día del verano de 1998, bajo el sol deslumbrante de una tarde cualquiera en Barcelona. Y es que, en realidad, este plátano es la copia genética de todos los que me he comido en mi vida”.

Así comienza “Un buque frigorífico de plátanos”, el artículo de Hannah O'Flynn en HAMBRE Magazine. Una reflexión sobre los sistemas de producción capitalistas alimentarios.

Leer aquí.

[Pronto se publicará la segunda parte de este artículo]

CHIMERAS OF INFINITE EXPANSION: THINKING CAPITAL ACCUMULATION WITH FRUIT CHAN'S DUMPLINGS

This thesis looks to enquire into the nature of capital accumulation so as to understand what has historically enabled sustained exponential capital accumulation to appear as possible, as its appearance as possible underlies the capitalist’s drive to accumulate capital. To do this, it will explore the different mechanisms used historically to ensure expanded capital accumulation: the colonial project of capitalism as a spatial “fix” to some of the inner contradictions of capital, and the development of uneven geographical development. The process of tracing the historical shifts of capitalism through which expanded capital accumulation has been pursued, has here been done in conjunction with an examination of film director Fruit Chan’s omnibus short film and subsequent feature film Dumplings. This is because of the film’s protagonist’s manic drive to expand herself in time, which throws her into a brutal carnage of exploitation and dispossession of other women in order to feed her chimeric desire of reproducing herself in time. The protagonist’s madness of infinite expansion is paralleled in this thesis with the capitalist drive to infinitely accumulate capital, so as to help in the understanding of its history.

In Search of the Miraculous: Bas Jan Ader on the absurd and the longing for transcendence

In Search of the Miraculous: Bas Jan Ader on the Absurd and the Longing for Trascendence is an investigation on the correlation of ideas between the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader’s works and the Algerian thinker and writer Albert Camus, who Ader was enormously influenced by. In particular, I have looked into the parallelisms between the artist’s artworks and one of the texts Camus is the most known for: The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus, 2013); which Bas Jan Ader was deeply interested in. In this dissertation I hope to enquire the depth of the influence of Camus’ ideas on the artist's investigations on the uncertainty of Calvinist salvation and to look at how Bas Jan Ader developed forward from Camus' ideas. I also hope to enquire to what extent Bas Jan Ader broke away from his thinking in his last work, In Search of the Miraculous (1975). This work, which, as with his other works, also takes the form of a test against such uncertainty, proclaims a search for the trascendental or miraculous, a form of leap of faith that contradicts and exits Camus' line of thinking with a gesture of hope. Very little has been written up to date about Bas Jan Ader, and even if his correlation with Albert Camus has been investigated superficially in pre-existing literature, the depth of his influence on his work has not been extensively scrutinized up to now. For the purpose of this investigation, I will analyze four of the most essential works of Bas Jan Ader: Nightfall (1971), Broken Fall (Organic) (1971), I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1971) and his last work, In Search of the Miraculous (1975).