‘Un suelo que no deja de moverse:’ non-human temporalities in Nuno Ramos

Abstract

Perhaps some of the most significant investigations in contemporary literature and art from Brazil revolve around the question of temporality, the threshold between the living and the dead and the ways in which conflicting temporalities and anachronism articulate a critique of the present. In this context, Nuno Ramos’ installations and writings, working on the unstable terrain between the living and the dead, the organic and the inorganic, the fossilized and the spectral, represent a decisive intervention. In Ramos’ works memory is never entirely human; it is irreducible to the domain of subjectivity nor to the shared narratives of the collective. From books such as Cujo or Junco to the the fossilized matter present in many of his works, the relationship between life and death is both political, technological and non-anthropomorphic — it is, in other words, biopolitical. This paper analyzes the ways in which the configuration of such critical perspective in Nuno Ramos’ work interrogates and reformulates the ways in which temporality and the political interface there where the very notion of life — the bios that articulates the biopolitical— is at stake.

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Original in Spanish.