a cartography of the south’s great spaces
The fragmentation brought about by globalization allows us to revisit a specific dimension of historical space, the material world upon which modern civilization rests. This dimension is found in great spaces: for us, the primary model of a great space is the river basin, which we have been investigating since the creation of m7red. Great spaces are the point of convergence between geobiological systems and human history: they encompass a broad geographical timescale, a civilizational structural timescale, and the timescale of political history. A “great complex space” is, methodologically, a scale that allows us to frame local realities (cities, regions, zones) on the one hand, and to concretely articulate global relationships that do not conform to a given unit on the other. For example, how a great basin is an agro-industrial funnel extending from south to south or from south to north.
This project operates, on the one hand, by mapping great spaces and, on the other, by traversing them and making direct contact with them and their actors. The project originated in urban and rural fieldwork around the Matanza-Riachuelo basin (2008-2015) and acquired its current dimension in 2022 with our trip to the Volta River basin in Ghana, Africa. It was in that region and continent that we became aware of the dimensions and complexity of these vast spaces, their structures and potential, and especially their global relationships.
In the case of the Volta, we were able to understand how the region accumulates fragments of modernization stemming from its independence process, and how this process is articulated and connected with the Pan-African project on a continental scale.
In 2023, we traveled to begin the first mapping of the Río de la Plata basin, based on the hypothesis of the interrelation between a present-day energy and food production system and a historical cycle of diverse globalizations that are beginning to create tension and shape the region.
This new “large-scale” methodology inaugurates a new stage in m7red’s work, in which our previous theories and methodologies can be tested on a larger scale, leading to changes that are not only quantitative but also qualitative.
amerindia
In general, we think of human space and its global aspect (the fact that human societies conceive of a representation of the planet as a whole that includes the fields of economics, politics, and technology) in light of universal categories inherited from the European Enlightenment. This global space that we take for granted is based on two contradictory movements: on the one hand, homogeneity: deism and its immanence, the technical identity of space, the unity of the anthropological matrix, the identity of differences, etc. On the other hand, the dichotomy of nature and culture, of the old and the new, of barbarism and civilization, all articulated temporally through a convergent direction and tendency. This teleology would lead us from these dichotomies to their resolution in the future, be it positive and futuristic or apocalyptic and millenarian. Ultimately, it leads to a metaphysical conception that aspires to be secular and objective: historical progress.
From where should we consider these problems that affect us daily? From here, from the energy sources that power the devices we’re using to write this right now, from the terrestrial sources where the food on our tables grows. For us, m7red, this place is South America, the great Río de la Plata Basin, Argentina, and ultimately Buenos Aires—the global world in which we’ve been operating as a team for a long time. This world will have to be redrawn in reverse, from our perspective toward others. Along this path, in the tapestry of stories, friendships, and clashes that form the operational basis of this project, we will find a particular and incomplete, yet more real, globality. An imprecise and precarious map, faithful to the moment of crisis and systemic inflection of modern global universality, which seems to be exhausting its energies.
But is it possible to conceive of another kind of universality? A kind of historical and concrete universality that appears as a political problem after the arrival of Spain and then Portugal in America, but above all from the establishment of the world’s navigability as a planet. The Enlightenment model of historical progress is, as Latour says, one of a continuous purification and differentiation of what are “things,” the objective, nature, and what is culture, the subjective.
This model conceives of the historical process as one in which the new replaces the old, since the new overcomes the contradictions and mixtures of the old. The new is emancipation and consciousness; the old is slavery and confusion. A different model, and one that can be considered an intimate characteristic not exclusively American is one where, not without contradictions and conflicts, there is no process of purification and overcoming, but rather of mixing and coexistence, a historical process where the global and universal imply not only homogenization, but also generation. Not only in a generative sense, but also in the sense of generational coexistence: the cultural homogeneity of the South American continent is a product of the conservation and simultaneous mixing of cultures and historical projects. The past and the future coexist, and this is perhaps a definition of mixing.
At the same time, this mixing is determined by and determines vast spaces in which ecosystemic generative engines play a fundamental role. The abundance of nature observed by the Spanish and European explorers is characteristic. These vast spaces, such as the great river basins, the great bioregions (the pampas, the wetlands, the Andes), and civilizational zones like those of the Inca Empire, are regions that function as ecosystemic engines. They are a succession of generations of regions and political and cultural units, each a specific mixing-relationship machine. These “spatial and generative pieces” in turn establish second-order mixing processes, compositions that intertwine and articulate, sometimes initiating major organic-cultural processes.
We call this new way of thinking about space, and the project that encapsulates both the research in this documentary and that of the Volta River Basin in Ghana, Amerindia. It initiates an exploration of the internal mixing and composition processes and those between these genetic-spatial pieces.
In the modern or Enlightenment global vision, the heterogeneity of geographical and cultural composition is accidental and transitory within a progressive line of human historical evolution. The geographical will tend to flatten through infrastructure and technology, while the cultural will tend toward a unification that is both economic (the project of globalization and neoliberalism) and axiological (human rights, planetary governance). The planetary totality can only be interpreted in light of the category of identity with itself.
Hypermodernity, this process of rise and beginning of fall of the technological and cultural globalization of late capitalism, inverts certain parameters of classical modernity due to exhaustion, but also to the logical consequences of its categories. Positive progress becomes negative, and utopia becomes dystopia, but always with a unified historical end, both spatially and temporally. The human becomes posthuman, and the ecological becomes climatic; the holistic aspect of human and non-human systems, and the analysis of constructive and destructive relationships within and between these systems, become a scheme of inter-system impacts that must be eliminated. What was a single anthropological matrix, expressed in natural rights and human rights at the legal level, becomes a grid of infinite differences among identity groups that converge in a progressive purification. Again, these inversions maintain a unique direction and temporal and spatial trends for all parties involved.
composition is the cybernetics of mixing
We begin with the need to draw a map that allows us to understand where we are. The old global map is weakening before our eyes: the realization of European Enlightenment projects that led to that blurred and omnipresent entity called “globalization” after the fall of the Soviet bloc seems to have reached a turning point or bifurcation. At best, we will arrive at a world divided into blocs, and at worst, we will be witnessing the convergence of multiple structural crises on the threshold of a major systemic crisis.
Where are we? The given, universal, and homogeneous modern space does not seem to explain either human socio-political asymmetries or the local causes of global ecosystemic effects. Nor does it explain the emergence of those places where intensities accumulate, deforming that space—accumulations of wealth or of conflict and violence. Science and technology, on the other hand, explain that the possibility of intervention or knowledge is equal for every portion of that space.
The most synchronous and ubiquitous global event of modern globalization, the pandemic and its quarantine, gave rise to a process of progressive fragmentation and conflict. The immanent spatial fabric is torn apart and history unravels: in the present that was intended to be singular for all, ancient and future strata emerge everywhere. The movements of people and things stop and restart, encounters become virtual, and there is no concrete space, but all energy becomes concrete and situated matter. Everything aspires to be virtual. Where are we, and from where?
Amerindia posits to go to and traverse places, to see and listen, to converse in order to create that map. South America is the site of the first modern globalization, since the New World gave rise to the nomos of the earth. The spherical earth as a political unit is a product of this invention and simultaneous discovery of the spherical planet.
This stage of our work involves an exploration of the vast South American spaces and understands these large, complex spaces as the place that allows for the convergence of temporal series of individual political actions, of historical structural series, and of long “geographical times” (thinking of Braudel’s three temporalities). These are the spaces that, through their inherited and produced characteristics, generate a tangle of culture and nature, and function as metabolic engines (ecoregions, geological and biological systems) that shape the culture and histories of human groups.
Large, complex spaces allow us to find measures and scales that are diluted in global modernity. They are the matrices upon which human and structural processes are generated, such as cities, rural regions, large infrastructures and networks, as well as specific constructions and political events tied to specific actors and dates. In this sense, they are lost from view and appear immanent, but at the same time, large spaces allow us to give a concrete scale, both spatially and temporally, to major global processes such as globalizations, industrial, cultural, and political revolutions, but also to ecosystemic processes. To give scale in the sense of establishing a point of reference.
The crisis of globalization raises the problem of universals: Do we live in the same space? Is nature something continuous and immanent? Are the modes of human action anthropological tendencies or situated facts? Is the universal reached through the establishment of relationships, or has it always been there? Do we all live in the same time, in the same temporal matrix?
We understand South America as a vast, complex space that, in turn, contains several other vast spaces. It possesses an ecosystemic power that the old European powers could only describe as “wild nature,” a non-human state so potent that it impeded human “civilization.” Since the Inca Empire, major political and technological organizations have been built upon these vast spaces and have embodied them in different ways.
But this spatial vastness has allowed for a kind of historical mixing of times, groups, and ways of life—a mixture that is, in some ways, homogeneous. The Inca Empire found its expression in the Andean corridor, and the ancient Amazonian civilization in the basin. The Spanish and Portuguese empires conquered these civilizations but adapted their spatial and, to some extent, organizational structures. The same would happen in modernity. A continuous process punctuated by clashes, violence, and leaps forward, but each new historical actor overlaps with those already existing in this process of simultaneous clash and mixing. The moments when this mixture transforms into a synergistic process are the great moments of cultural and political composition, where the mixture becomes information for itself. Composition is a cybernetics of mixture.
These three local dimensions (large space, mixture, and composition) will produce and be produced by, and will affect and be affected by, these spherical globalizations and their respective technological revolutions. Within this framework of local places and global relational processes, we believe we can draw a map, whose scale is determined by large spaces and whose generative center, or point of origin, is South America.