Aesthetic and Design of Latin American Technology

Yovanna Pineda, University of Central Florida, "Caudillo Techno-Aesthetics"
Moderator: Mikael Wolfe, Stanford University
Abstract: Caudillo Techno-Aesthetics

In this chapter, I examine the language and aesthetics that liberal elites used to promote their vision of the countryside as a space to advance science and technology before 1880.  They perceived an empty space requiring the use of science and technology to develop the land for the convenience of human settlers. The goal was to convert this space to productive land was for the international exchange of commodities.

Drawing on archival materials, fieldwork, literature, traveler accounts, lore, and material culture, the elite developed a secular discourse of science and technology to be embedded in culture as common sense.  As prolific writers, thinkers, and administrators of the nineteenth century, Eduardo Olivera, Domingo Sarmiento, Estanislao Zeballos, and many others invented the language that would become the foundation for Argentina’s imagined destiny or future (el porvenir) as a civilized, modern nation. Their books were translated in different languages and widely read during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their narrativity represented the logic of the period. These writers, along with others, created an identity for future generations to emulate, accept, or contest—and continue to reproduce or build upon. 

Update: Owed to Hurricane Nicole arriving to central Florida on 11/10, Yovanna's talk will be rescheduled to December 8 and will present together with Diana Montaño. 

• Presenter: Yovanna Pineda, University of Central Florida, "The Techno-aesthetics of rural men, farm machine repair, and climate in modern Argentina"
• Discussant & Moderator: Diana J. Montano
• Summary:  Rural men constructed different masculinities according to available physical, ecological, and social resources in the Argentine pampas region. During the twentieth century, the pampas was fertile land for crop farming, but was also prone to drought, excessive rains, and locust invasions. Different types of rural crises threatened men’s sense of masculinity as providers of the family farm, but it also offered opportunities to reshape and create new male identities. Farm communities developed an alternative narrative of rural spaces through the use, repair, and design of heavy farm machinery, in particular the combine harvester in the breadbasket region of Santa Fe province. Regardless of the task, men, engaged in manual labor on a farm or skilled in operating, designing or repairing machinery, were considered honorable men that could weather the adversities of the region’s challenging ecology. Drawing from archives, interviews, material culture, media studies, and ethnography, this proposed paper examines the intersection of ecology, repair, and masculine identity. The case study is from the communities in and near San Vicente, Santa Fe Province. It suggests that the town celebrated the harvester as a provider of family and became central to local male identity.
• Related topic of the paper - https://repair.uni.lu/blog/spaces-of-design-repair-in-twentieth-century-...

Thursday, 10/13/22, 1:00pm-2:30pm EDT 

• Presenter--Lucas Erichsen, Instituto Nacional da Mata Atlântica - Brasil. Places for a first and last look: slaughterhouses, aesthetics, and technology in 19th Brazil.

• Moderator: Yovanna Pineda 

Abstract: 
Eating animal meat is an act inseparable from human history, topologically dispersed, immersed in different historicity, and by a multitude of things: evolutionary, biological, gustatory, cultural, technological, aesthetic, economic, ecological, ethical, and perceptual elements. It was throughout the 19th century that public slaughterhouses emerged, places built by the State where killing animals for human consumption was regulated and conducted. Public slaughterhouses were also environments of constant interaction with the biophysical world and spaces constituted by the insertion and development of technologies, techniques, and gradual recognition of aesthetic elements that combined, aligned with the production and distribution of meat in Rio de Janeiro. 
My essay explores three public slaughterhouses in Rio de Janeiro between 1854 and 1882. It was during this period that Rio de Janeiro underwent intense transformations and where we can find three public slaughterhouses in operation. Analyzing this junction illuminates how the State, conceptions of modernity, technology, and aesthetics played a significant role in the history of one of the activities most rooted in Brazilian culture and still neglected in Brazilian historiography, in the history of technology and the history of Brazil."    
 

September 8, 2022 - First Round 

• Presenter: Daniel Rebouças, Federal University of Bahia, Electric paths: chapters on the representations and social revolts of the electric tram (Salvador, Bahia, Brazil; 1897-1930)
• Moderator: Yovanna Pineda

 
Daniel Rebouças, Federal University of Bahia
Short Bio: Daniel Rebouças is doctor of history at the Federal University of Bahia. He is a group member of "History of Humour in Brazil (1989-1930)/ University of São Paulo, Brazil" and authored The City of Bahia and the Electricity: A political, economic, human and cultural approach, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century (Salvador: Caramurê Publishing house, 2018).
Presentation title: Electric paths: chapters on the representations and social revolts of the electric tram (Salvador, Bahia, Brazil; 1897-1930)     
Abstract: This essay examines the social and political relations between part of the population of Salvador, capital of the State of Bahia, and one of the greatest electrical inventions of the late 19th century: the electric streetcar. From the immense initial expectations around the new means of transport, the article shows how this invention came to be seen – and represented – as a synonym of violence, social oppression and a symbol of the nationalist struggle, in the 1930s. For this, I will mainly use series of photographs deposited in the Siemens Museum Archive, in Berlin, in the Neoenergia Archive, an electric energy company in Bahia and in the Public Archive of the State of Bahia.
 
Documents are posted via our Google Drive. Please join the group to receive the link to the papers. If you have joined the group and still have not received the link, please email Yovanna Pineda at ypineda@ucf.edu to receive the link and/or paper. Thank you for your interest in our group! 
 

October 13, 2022

•  
• Presenter #1-Yohad Zacarias, University of Texas. Austin. The aesthetics of lighting and electrical substations and the unequal extension of technology in urban space. Santiago de Chile. 1900-1930.

• Presenter #2-Lucas Erichsen. Places for a first and last look: slaughterhouses, aesthetics, and technology in 19th Brazil

Leida Fernandez-Prieto, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales - Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, “Mute Witnesses:  Mapping the Meanings of the Images on the History of Cuban Agriculture”
 
 
To be rescheduled for Fall 2022. David Pretel (on parental leave, sp22), Pompeu Fabra University, “Green Gold Modernity: Machines, Peonage and Henequen in Yucatan’s Gilded Age”
 
 

#1-Lisa Munro, Independent Scholar. "Collecting Souvenirs Close to Home: The Politics of the Machine Production of Authentic Indigenous Aesthetics for Mass Consumption." She has published some of her work at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2021.1977677
#2-Peter Soland, Southeast Missouri State University, "Aerial Shots and Bomber Jackets: The Role of Aviation, Celebrity, and Cinema in Re-Imagining Latin America."

#1-Fabián Prieto-Nanez, Virginia Tech, “The Invastion of Satellite Antennas. Autoconstruction and the Routes of Popular Electronics in Latin America"
#2-Sonia Robles, University of Delaware, "Aural and material obstructions to technological development in Mexico"
 
 

#1-David Dalton, UNC Charlotte, “Eduardo Urzaiz's novel, Eugenia and the Interface of aesthetics and science in constructing eugenics in postrevolutionary Mexico”
 
#2-Lucas Izquierdo, Independent Scholar, “Analogue Technologies: the novel genre’s virtualization of Peru in Arguedas, Vargas Llosa & Roncagliolo”
 

Diana Montaño, Washington University in St. Louis, "Development is Modernity + Rural Electrification: The Aesthetic of Latin American Electricscapes"
 
Daniel Rebouças, Universidade Federal da Bahia Brasil, “Aesthetics of Electricity in Bahia”