New Medi a, Cardboard, and Communi ty

i n Contemporary Buenos Ai res

Craig Epplin
University of Pennsylvania
a modication of the fabric of the sensible, a transformation of the visible given
Jacques Rancie`re, Art of the Possible (:o)
Cardboard is hardly a material we associate with new media or digital
technology in general. And yet in considering a series of recent editorial proj-
ects in several Latin American citieseditorial projects whose last name is
always Cartonera and whose dening attribute is a trash aesthetic of hand-
painted books made from recycled cardboardit seems difcult to avoid
confronting the present media ecology characterized by these technologies.
These editorials produce, on some level, a kind of new media, although
the mere novelty of their enterprise is only the most supercial of their afl-
iations with this concept. On the contrary, it seems clear to me that these
projects also enact a form of production that should be interrogated within
a discussion of the forms of sociality associated with new media and the
politico-economic landscape they inhabit and condition.
The principal project I have in mind was founded in :oo,, is based in
Buenos Aires, inhabits a modest space down the street from the soccer sta-
dium in La Boca, and bears the name Elo sa Cartonera. The project was
launched in post-:ooI
1
Buenos Aires and has recently opened a sister work-
I. The term post-:ooI is intended as a shorthand reference to the Argentine economic crisis
whose quick crescendo in December :ooI can be seen as the outcome of a long decline over
several decades. Luis Alberto Romero frames this decline within a narrative of decadence that, in
j,8, Hispanic Review (autumn :oo,)
Copyright :oo, University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
,8o i ui sv.xi c vvvi vw : autumn
shop in Sao Paulo, while also inspiring similar groups in Lima (Sarita Car-
tonera), La Paz (Yerba Mala Cartonera), Santiago (Animita Cartonera), and
Mexico City (Lupita Cartonera). The project has attracted increasing atten-
tion since its inception, as much from the world of the visual arts as within
the literary sphere proper, a trend visible in its participation in the exhibits
Civilizacio n y Barbarie [argentinos contempora neos] (:oo) and arteBA
(:oo), both in Buenos Aires, and Lo Material No Cuenta (:oooo,), in
Madrid. Perhaps as a consequence of this notoriety, the editorial recently
published, in conjunction with the Akademie Scholss Solitude, a text titled
No hay cuchillo sin rosas. Historia de una editorial latinoamericana y antolog a
de jovenes autores, which, as the title indicates, offers a retrospective glance at
the project. No hay cuchillo sin rosas, also the name of Elo sa Cartoneras
workshop, is a collaborative text whose introductory section both presents
the projects theoretical justication and describes its functioning in some
detail. Making the books, the text tells us, is simple: We buy cardboard
in the street. From it we cut out the books covers. We paint the title and the
authors name with tempera and stencils. Then we print, staple, and bind the
originals (,).
2
This activity is regarded as both an educational processwe
learn the different stages involved in making a book: graphic design, printing,
binding, cutting, and painting the covers. We also learn to do other tasks like
distribution, diffusion, and the sale of the books at fairs, poetry festivals, and
other places we are invited to attend (,)and an attempt at constructing
an alternative economic ethos through which we learn to work coopera-
tively and generate genuine work (). The theorization of the project is
more fully developed on Elo sa Cartoneras website, which describes the edi-
torial as an artistic, social, and community project that seeks to invent its
own aesthetic, regardless of the origins of each participant, attempting to
inspire a process of collective learning. It publishes unedited marginal and
avant-garde works from all over Latin America, pays ve times the market
price for the cardboard that it uses, and claims that the process of physical
elaboration allows the participants (who are the cardboard-collectors them-
selves, referenced in the editorials name) to stop being cartoneros while
they work on the project. The page for orders advertises the texts as hand-
his view, is apparent from the I,8os on and contrasts with the dynamic and conictive Argen-
tina of much of the twentieth century that comes to a critical point in the I,,os.
:. All translations are my own, unless credited otherwise.
Epplin : xvw xvui ., c.vuno.vu, .xu coxxuxi 1s j,8,
and brush-made and proudly announces that no : covers are the same!
In these aspects, the editorial attempts to produce works that graphically
maintain the physical traces of their elaboration, symbolically incorporating
the social divisions incarnate in cardboard both as a potential material sup-
port for literature (and other cultural endeavors) and as refuse that can be
collected and sold for a relatively dismal price. At the same time, it produces,
albeit temporarily, social assemblages that cross (without erasing) the barri-
ers erected and maintained around differences in economic and cultural cap-
ital.
It is Elo sa Cartoneras stated afliation with a notion of community that
I would like to consider in light of new media and the social restructuring
and reimaginings we often associate with their emergence. The term new
media has generally come to refer to computer-mediated forms of produc-
tion, distribution, and communication that lead to the translation of all
existing media into numerical data accessible through computers (Manov-
ich I,:o). This is simply to say that as new media appear, earlier media
forms become digitized or converted to a common currency (zeroes and
ones).
3
This commonality provides the basis for new medias wide reach,
evident, for instance, in the variety of physical experiences associated with
disparate genres such as the video games, digital lms, [and] simulation
rides that make up the corpus studied by Andrew Darley in his Visual Digi-
tal Culture (:ooo). Indeed, the digital common denominator has increasingly
allowed new media to be transmitted through a host of devices and systems,
as becomes clear in the historical narrative established by Daniel Schiller:
Beginning in the I,,os, a succession of new media began to appear, often
supplementing or modifying existing forms of experience, but sometimes
offering more novel departures: VCRs and DVD players, CD and MP,
players, game consoles, mobile telephones and other wireless devices, PCs
and notebook computers. At the same time, existing distribution networks,
built around terrestrial broadcasting and telephone infrastructures, began
to be joined by new transmission mediasatellites, optical bers, and
wireless systemswhile each of these distribution systems enlarged its role
as a prospective carrier of voices, images, and data rather than, as had been
generally true, only one of these modes. (Io:)
,. This is to say, on a more phenomenological level, that earlier forms of media must be remedi-
ated, as Jay David Bolton and Richard Grusin propose in their inuential text Remediation
(I,,,).
,88 iui sv.xi c vvvi vw : autumn
By attending to both the artifacts and the distribution systems of new media
since the seventies, Schiller is able to locate in their proliferation a common
theme, one that is habitually referred to as convergence.
4
Among other
things, this term refers to the fact that communications infrastructures are
becoming multifunctional as they assimilate versatile digital electronics
(Io,), or more simply that there now exists a blurring [of] the lines between
voice, video, and data services (U.S. Congress). Schiller is careful to point
out that media convergence is not a new concept, indeed that it has been
with us since the early twentieth century, ever since the advent of the ability
to theorize scientically about, and alongside the ability to engineer, net-
works that could carry anything that could be given the form of an electronic
signalvoices, texts, and images (Io,). However, for the owering of what
is currently understood as convergence, a conjunction of new technological
developments with an industry-driven assault on government regula-
tionsin short, a new set of technological and politico-economic condi-
tionswas necessary.
5
Drawing on this last point, we can relate the recent phenomenon of con-
vergence and the proliferation of new media devices and distribution systems
to a new phase in the expansion of capitala new enclosure, as it were. This
is what Manuel Castells suggests when he speaks of a new techno-economic
system [that] can be adequately characterized as informational capitalism,
even as he stresses that this relationship is not one of logical necessity. Rather,
he highlights the historically contingent nature of this development, while at
the same time recognizing that without new information technology global
capitalism would have been a much-limited reality (I8I,). That is, new
media and recent economic transformations have emerged and intermingled
in ways that often seem to reinforce the effects of both, which is evident in
the particular role nance capital plays in todays economies. This economic
sector, Fredric Jameson has observed, echoing Castells, relies heavily on digi-
tal communications technology:
. The literature on convergence is extensive. See, for instance, Henry Jenkinss Convergence Cul-
ture (:ooo) for a discussion of the phenomenon as both a technological circumstance and a larger
cultural process. See also Asa Briggs and Peter Burkes Social History of the Media (:nd ed., :oo,),
whose chapter on convergence (:Io,,) presents a valuable historical view of the current process.
,. See David Harveys Brief History of Neoliberalism (:oo,) for a more extensive, sophisticated
discussion of the rolling-back of government regulations within the context of economic transfor-
mations over the past few decades.
Epplin : xvw xvui ., c.vuno.vu, .xu coxxuxi 1s j ,8,
On the telephone people can no doubt give tips on future developments
and place tentative orders, but these messages must still coexist with the
body of paper itselfthe bills of exchange or lading, the weight of docu-
ments, the very bundles of paper money itself, as the last makes its cumber-
some way laboriously around the world. Speculation on such bills is
another matter; it is no longer a question of buying things but rather of
juggling whole labor forces. One can electronically substitute one entire
national working class for another, halfway around the globe, wiping out
industry after industry in the home country and dissipating accumulated
months of value-producing labor overnight. (,o,)
Jameson here ties together some of the more notorious qualities of todays
world economy with the digital technologies that characterize new media,
contrasting this conjuncture with an earlier one, represented by the tips of-
fered and orders placed over the telephone. This is not far off from what
Schiller suggests, and indeed if there is one way to answer summarily the
implicit question in the title of his book, How to Think about Information, it
is this: we should think about information, as the word is commonly used
today, as representing a further expansion and an increasing mobility of the
commodity structure,
6
which in this case corresponds not to the private ac-
cumulation of land or food production but rather to forms of knowledge
that had been widely formalized, built up at collective expense, and put in
motion by skilled social labor (:). These are forms of knowledge typically
associated, in wealthy regions, with [s]chools and colleges, government
agencies, post ofces, museums, and libraries and in poorer areas with
[f]amily and local community-based stocks of indigenous, vernacular, or
traditional knowledge about farming, healing, and learning (:,). The
commodity structure, as Marx dened it in the rst volume of Capital, im-
plies the replacement of the concrete use-value of the product of labor with
an abstract exchange-value (Io,o,). In our age, the expansion of this kind
of economic structure to the realm of knowledge implies, in Marxs terms, a
deepening of the alienation between the producer and her product, appro-
priated and recast here as information that can circulate through the conver-
gent network of digital media.
o. The expansion of this mobility has long represented one of the central features of modernity.
See Piratebureaus Supermovables: The Fate of Unreal Estate, or a Treatise on the Social Problem
Regarding Illegal File-Sharing for an expanded discussion of this claim.
,,o i ui sv.xi c vvvi vw : autumn
Of course, the initial critique of this kind of alienation is a product of the
nineteenth century, not coincidentally the century in which massive industri-
alization and the expansion of national bureaucracies based on a stabilizing
military model (Sennett :o:,)as well as communications and transporta-
tion advances such as the telephone, the electrical telegraph, and an extensive
web of rail linescontributed to a dramatic uprooting of traditional social
forms. This is the key century for the centuries-long progress of rational-
ization, routinization, institutionalization, organization building, and empire
building (with their attendant political, market, and media effects) engi-
neered by post-Enlightenment industrial societies commonly known as
modernization (Liu ,). These far-reaching processes usher in the appearance
of new forms of social belonging, among which what Charles Taylor calls the
direct-access society is principal. This sort of society is an avatar of the
modern notion of citizenship and implies a dramatic shift in previous social
allegiances:
In whatever many ways I am related to the rest of society through interme-
diary organizations, I think of my citizenship as separate from all of these.
My fundamental way of belonging to the state is not dependent on or
mediated by any of these other belongings. I stand, alongside all my fellow
citizens, in direct relationship to the state, which is the object of our com-
mon allegiance. (I,,)
Taylors direct-access society is a paradigmatic form of what Benedict An-
derson had called, some twenty years earlier, an imagined community. Ande-
rson seized, signicantly, on the expansion of novels and newspapers
throughout increasingly literate populaces as making possible the feeling of
simultaneity, of shared experience and knowledge, that fed a national imagi-
nation (::o). I mention these forms of social belonging, which are cer-
tainly still with us in varying degrees, to emphasize how they (and the
dissonant responses they provoked) relied on a certain technological milieu:
of particular importance for the studies cited here, the mass-distribution of
books and newspapers, as well as the communications and transportation
infrastructure that would consolidate national industries. These technologies
facilitate the imagined communities of modern nation-states that are coex-
tensive with industrial-based capitalism in the West.
It seems legitimate to suppose that concurrent with the expansion of capi-
tal associated with the commodication of information, the same economy
Epplin : xvw xvui ., c.vuno.vu, .xu coxxuxi 1s j ,,I
of the new-media devices mentioned here, new forms of social imaginaries
have come and are coming into existence. Naturally, this simple supposition
leaves much to be discussed, in particular what sorts of imaginaries these are,
through what means they are enacted, and nally how they enable or dis-
courage certain forms of social belonging. N. Katherine Hayles has described
one of the more prevalent social imaginaries associated with the congura-
tion of information as a commodity. She notes a construction of informa-
tion typical of our era that
allows cyberspace to be conceptualized as a disembodied realm of informa-
tion that humans enter by leaving their bodies behind. In this realm, so the
story goes, we are transformed into information ourselves and thus freed
from the constraints of embodiment. We can take whatever form we wish,
including no form at all. (,)
The fantasy inherent in this construction is prevalent enough and animates
cliches like Bill Gates notion of a frictionless capitalism, as well as much
online entertainment activity, from social-networking sites to chats to popu-
lar multi-player simulation games such as Second Life.
7
These are fantasies
that circulate in spite of the fact that, in Hayless words,
we are never disembodied. Simulated worlds can exist for us only because
we can perceive them through the techno-bioapparatus of our body spliced
into the cybernetic circuit. The reading of cyberspace as a disembodied
realm is a skeuomorph that harks back to the rst wave of cybernetics,
which in turn is a reading of information that reinscribes into cybernetics
a very old and traditional distinction between form and matter. (,)
Skeuomorph is a term Hayles borrows from archaeology that means a
design feature, no longer functional in itself, that refers back to an avatar
that was functional at an earlier time (Io). It thus refers to a unique combi-
nation of innovation and conservation that indeed is applicable to much of
,. A recent Washington Post article calls attention to the bleeding between this virtual, disembod-
ied realm and the physical world we ordinarily inhabit. A spate of simulated crimes, including
rapes, muggings, and child abuse perpetrated by virtual characters (avatars) in Second Life and
other similar games, has prompted police in several countries to investigate whether such virtual
crimes should be prosecuted. According to the Post, the rst documented case of sexual assault in
cyberspace dates from I,,,, and its effects on its real-life victim were painfully real (Sipress).
,,: i ui sv.xi c vvvi vw : autumn
our computer lingo, based as it is on scrolling, pages, and windows.
Community, too, seems to be a term of this kind, as forms of association
enacted on the web commonly deploy this term, one that for so long has
conjured up images of territorial boundedness nothing like the vast geo-
graphical expanse of imaginarily disembodied web-based experience.
8
The move from territorially limited communities to more extensive socie-
ties has long been seen as a dening characteristic of modernity. Anthony
Giddens has famously referred to this sort of movement as disembedding,
by which he means the lifting out of social relations from local contexts of
interaction and their restructuring across indenite spans of time-space
(:I). Taylor sees in disembedding the foundation of a new self-under-
standing of our social existence, one that gave an unprecedented primacy to
the individual (,o)an individual that is ideally integrated into the state as
a citizen and into the increasingly unied system of exchange as a consumer.
Current new media technologies, along with the cultural practices they en-
able, while not allowing for a wholly disembodied existence (as Hayles
rightly maintains), do carry the disembedding tendency of modernity to
an even further degree. In the economic realm, the nancialization of every-
thing (Harvey ,,)
9
means, as I have already mentioned, an expansion of the
logic of the commodity structure and its innite mobility, while in commu-
nications advanced technologies encourage the constitution of long-distance
social interactions. This is simply to say that we should regard uses of com-
munity in a new-media environment as a rather broad conceptual adapta-
tion, as this is an environment that in many ways carries out the modern
disembedding of the individual from the bounded community to a more
radical degree.
It was precisely around the idea of community that I rst sought to
establish a relationship between Elo sa Cartonera and new media. On the
one hand, the imaginarily disembodied, geographically disperse social inter-
actions often associated with digital culture would seem to have their polar
8. See Steven G. Joness Understanding Community in the Information Age for an early cri-
tique of this use of community.
,. This felicitous phrase names a phenomenon whose intimate linkage with digital technology is
perhaps best illustrated by the bar codes that, in Japan and other countries, adorn buildings, food
wrappers, magazine ads, and billboards. These bar codes are readable with a cell phone, which
then displays, for instance, real estate and nutritional information, insurance quotes, and movie
trailers (Story AI, A:o).
Epplin : xvw xvui ., c.vuno.vu, .xu coxxuxi 1s j,,,
opposite in the sort of small-scale, site-specic collectivity that Elo sa Car-
tonera seeks to enact. Indeed, the thrust behind this project seems to lie in
an impetus to create both physical encounters exceeding those of the digital
realm and literary artifacts that cannot be reduced to the reproducible edi-
tion. Their use of cardboard to create unique artifacts establishes a dialogue
with a characteristic object of disembedded modernity, the traditional
mass-produced book, which, as Geoffrey Nunberg points out,
is two kinds of object, whose relation is determined by the uniformity of
the print edition. One is the set of copies or instances that readers actually
engage, objects that belong to private life, even if they happen to be shelved
in public places. The other is the work or type, a scattered object that
inherits a spatial location from the locations of its copies and a temporal
location from the date of their production. This is the object that can come
to have a public life, as when we talk about the book as a locus for a
certain idea; that is, a linguistic xed point that we can use to calibrate our
subsequent discourse. But our access to these public places is always medi-
ated through copies. (:,:8)
Nunberg makes a useful distinction between the work or type and the
set of copies or instances that readers actually engage, the former being a
conceptual object and the latter a material one. The uniformity of the print
edition that he mentions has guaranteed the precedence of the work over
the copy, which due to its invariability comes to be simply a vehicle for
the former. The cartonera editorials seek to reverse this emphasis, as the
uniqueness of the copyits design, of course, not its contentbecomes the
dening characteristic of the texts they produce (no : covers are the
same!), as if bearing witness to the singularity of the texts production, to
its irreproducibility, indeed to the improbable encounter of disparate actors
making it possible, actors that include among others, the cardboard-collec-
tor, the editorial project, and the written text.
On the other hand, the singularity of this conjunction is not antithetical
but rather eerily similar to certain elements of new-media culture. Consider,
for instance, the sort of encounters characteristic of online chats: often unex-
pected meetings of disparate participants, who may occupy distant time
zones or live in the same building, that come together in a somewhat unpre-
dictable, somewhat precodied manner to create a unique, ephemeral textual
product. Think as well of a typical browsing experience, in which the user
,, iui sv.xi c vvvi vw : autumn
chooses to follow a path that may not exist long enough to be retraced, or
may still exist but in a slightly or radically different form, or which in any
case imposes a distinct temporality each time it is charted.
10
Or think nally
of the aleatory dynamics inherent in a multi-player simulation environment
like Second Life, in which each encounter is radically unique not only because
of the shifting of the participants, but also because of the constant modica-
tion, performed by the players themselves, of the games landscape. The sin-
gularity of such online activities is fundamentally distinct from the formal
consistency that Nunberg identies as characteristic of the literary-editorial
tradition with which the cartoneras establish a tense relationship.
With regard to this tradition, Elo sa Cartonera effects a double movement.
As an avowed community project it enables momentary social encounters
to take place around the recycling of trash into aesthetic objects. The objects
produced have much in common with those cultural products associated
with earlier forms of communitya bards song or a storytellers improvisa-
tionexcept that in this case the unique, singular quality is registered not in
the texts content, or even in its form, but rather in the vehicle that allows it
to appear. This type of encounter harks back to pre-modern social forma-
tions, ones that in classical sociological terms fall under the German word
Gemeinschaft.
11
This term, usually translated simply as community, refers
to a radically embedded form of social existence, one that has been dramati-
cally transformed in the modern age. The eeting communities that are en-
acted by the cartoneras, communities whose improvisational quality can
remind us of the types of productions associated with online activities, do
not return to this sort of social world, but rather reference it in the construc-
tion of momentary associations of otherwise disembedded individuals that
then return to their own corners of the neighborhood or the city.
There are, of course, numerous other ways to discuss the connections be-
tween new media culture and editorial projects like the cartoneras. For one,
the relationship that the latter have to a network of blogs, other artisan edito-
rials, galleries, and a host of other websites has allowed them to gain some-
what wide distribution and visibility even while maintaining an ultra-local
Io. Alan Liu comments on this temporality in The Laws of Cool (::,:,): Even in the best of
circumstances, therefore (e.g., if one has a broadband connection), the temporality of presentation
on Web pages is uncoordinated, illogical, and unpredictable (::o).
II. The term was of course used by Ferdinand Tonnies in opposition to Gesellschaft or society
in his classic work Community and Society, originally published in I88,.
Epplin : xvw xvui ., c.vuno.vu, .xu coxxuxi 1s j,,,
existence. Also, we might note that the website of the Elo sa Cartonera proj-
ect has itself served as a platform for various activities, from the promotion
of an alternative literary contest (whose participants are anthologized in the
second part of the text No hay cuchillo sin rosas) to the publication of a serial
novel by one of the editorials founders. However, I have intended here to
bring to light certain parallels between its mode of production and the pro-
duction of encounters in a digital environment, couching this discussion in
a consideration of the relationship of both to recent socio-economic trans-
formations. This brings me to my nal point, which is the other side of the
double movement I have mentioned above. If the sort of transience that
characterizes much online activity is indeed present in the encounters facili-
tated by Elo sa Cartonera, we can also detect in their project an interest in
archiving these encounters by means of the cardboard book itself, symboli-
cally incorporating into the material product not only the evanescence of the
performance but also the durability of the object. This mode of production
is therefore one that, while distinct from both the Fordist model of the high
industrial and national age as well as the ephemeral qualities of the young
Internet eraa difference, thus, from both the uniformity of mechanical
reproduction and the eetingness of digital culturecontains important
traces of both.
These traces are perhaps a consequence of the projects origins and its
relationship to its particular social conjuncture, with which I will conclude
my discussion. In the aftermath of Argentinas :ooI:oo: economic collapse,
a series of new and not-so-new social agents became highly conspicuous. At
the time, Neil Larsen testied to the proliferation of neighborhood asam-
bleas (assemblies), trading clubs (clubes de trueque) and, in the poorest
neighborhoods, political-cum-distributive collectives known as pickets (pi-
queteros) (,8). In addition to these, other organizations gained visibility,
such as the cartoneros, who were cardboard- and paper-collectors that had
existed for some time. However, with the :oo: peso devaluation, the price
of paper and cardboard rose steeply, generating a higher demand for these
materials, and in the context of a social reorganization, many of the carton-
eros banded together to better be able to negotiate prices (Palomino and
Pastrana :o,Io). Following soon after, Elo sa Cartonera was bornthis is
to say, in the context of an economic collapse occasioned and even provoked
(Harvey Io:o,) by the same neoliberal economic structure that, to reiterate
an earlier point, has both precipitated and followed on the technological
convergence of current new media forms. It is thus born of the response to
,,o i ui sv.xi c vvvi vw : autumn
that crisis, of those emergency forms of social distribution and organization,
unmediated in essence by the commodity form [. . .] unmediated by the
abstract, nonconscious subject-form of money itself (Larsen ,8). What
Larsen signals here is an economy of solidarity, operating outside of the com-
modity fetish, and this is indeed what is commonly envisioned when we
speak of community. In this scheme, Elo sa Cartonera might be conceived,
on the one hand, as seeking to capture and conserve the energies of such a
community or, on the other, as an attempt at managing the crisis from which
it emerges, one more example of the increasingly common process of ac-
culturation of garbage in contemporary culture (Moser), or of cultures
transformation into an expedient for managing conict (Yu dice I). In my
mind, however, both of these possible conceptions of the project sell it short,
either by reducing its gesture to a monumentalizing reenactment of a sort of
collectivity that may well be unsustainable and even undesirable except in
emergency situations or to a resigned acceptance of something like the
cultural-managerial role of an NGO. I propose, on the contrary, that we
might understand Elo sa Cartonera as an attempt at modeling a certain kind
of social potential: the potential for forms of production that are both impro-
visational and formalized, that would enact an economy of solidarity at odds
with both modern-national and globalized-postnational stereotypes without
ignoring existent social inequalities, that inhabit an ideal of community while
seeking neither a return to a radically embedded form of the social nor a
phantasmatic freedom from the restraints of embodiment. In this sense, what
is most valuable in Elo sa Cartoneras project would be not their practical
rendering of certain forms of production, but rather their contribution to
imagining alternative social assemblages in the present, their attempt at a
transformation of the visible givenof what is thinkable, possible, sensible
(Rancie`re :o). With Elo sa, writes one participant in No hay cuchillo sin
rosas, we seek to develop patterns where there are neither divine authorities
nor collaborators, but rather cocreators (I8). Whether this form of labor is
achieved in the project is certainly subject to question and critique, although
what is perhaps more important hereand this is where Elo sa Cartonera
most directly addresses the social potential of aesthetics in generalis that,
within a context of institutional collapse and persistent economic insecurity,
such a dynamic of association is conceived, proposed, and, to a certain de-
gree, rehearsed.
Epplin : xvw xvui ., c.vuno.vu, .xu coxxuxi 1s j,,,
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