Manuel Tironi

Bilbao's Art Scene and the “Guggenheim effect” Revisited

The article analyzes the effects of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (GMB), adopting a new research perspective and trying to pursue the links between the museum and Bilbaos art scene. Until now, the impact of the museum has been analyzed from two different perspectives. The first focused on the urban development and regeneration aspects and the success of the museum as a tourist magnet and an image-making device. The second perspective concentrated on the direct economic benefits of the museum, i.e. direct returns and effects on the economy. The missing lens in previous analyses, however, was the impact of the museum on the citys art landscape, including the art support activities. In this context, the article describes for the first time in a detailed way how the GMB has contributed to the shaping and propulsion of changes on commercial and non-profit art spaces in Bilbao. Although it is clear that other factors may play a role, it can be asserted that the effects of the museum are not only limited to an increase in tourism or fiscal return, but also contribute to the development and spatial articulation of the local art scene and public support of the arts.

Disastrous Publics Counter-enactments in Participatory Experiments

This article explores how citizen participation was methodologically devised and materially articulated in the postdisaster reconstruction of Constitución, one of the most affected cities after the earthquake and tsunami that battered south central Chile in 2010. I argue that the techniques deployed to engineer the participation were arranged as a policy experiment where a particular type of public was provoked—one characterized by its emotional detachment, political engagement, and social tolerance. The case of Constitución, however, also shows that this public ran parallel to other forms of being a public not aligned with the experiment’s assumptions. More broadly, the article argues that while disaster studies need to acknowledge the generative capacities of public participation, science and technology studies should include disasters as a particular setting for participatory experiments.

Modes of technification: Expertise, urban controversies and the radicalness of radical planning

This article questions radical planning’s insistence on an ontological distinction between lay and expert knowledge. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of citizen collectives in Santiago, Chile, I explain how citizen organisations, in their quest for political recognition and emancipation, embrace rationalistic, bureaucratic, formal and instrumental knowledge and tactics. Utilising insights from Science and Technology Studies, I call modes of technification the specific and differentiated strategies by which these collectives become technical entities. Three of these modes are described: the organisational, epistemic and generative modes. The larger claim is that radical planning, by pursuing a politics of difference, may end up enacting a world in which identities are essentialised and roles forcefully allocated.

Atmospheres of indagation: disasters and the politics of excessiveness

This article examines how specific political arrangements are articulated to govern disasters. I suggest that disasters give rise to political experiments in which uncertainties are sensed, ordered and managed. I argue, however, that when the world is uncanny and indeterminacies are excessive and radically vital, the search for stability is messier than experimental politics might assume. Drawing on the cases of PRE Talca and Talca con Tod@s, two post-disaster participatory experiments that unfolded in Talca, Chile, I call atmospheres of indagation the expanded and enhanced political experimentalism unearthed by disasters. Of indagation because the inquiry was meticulous, open and agonically needed. And atmosphere because this indagation unfolded under the form of an overarching, multiform and ambiguous ambience in which everything could be explored, scrutinized and contested – including the experiments themselves. More concretely, I describe how these two experiments, via different participatory technologies, enacted different versions of Talca. But I attempt to show, as well, how PRE Talca and Talca con Tod@s were configured by openly contesting the principles and assumptions of each other. The result was a highly complex topological arrangement in which political publicness was expanded and re-articulated, thus defying conventional understandings on political experiments.

Enacting Music Scenes: Mobility, Locality and Cultural Production

Abstract Cluster theories assume ‘locality’ to be a bounded and fixed spatiality characterized by shared worlds-of-life, strong ties and co-presence. This paper contests the immobility of such a definition. Drawing on the case of Santiago’s experimental music scene, in Chile, I argue for a mobile, transient and fluid approach to localized (cultural) economies. The empirical evidence indicates that Santiago’s experimental music scene – an innovative and productive de facto cluster – performs (and unrolls) a decentered, episodic and itinerant geography enacted by porous, technologically mediated and contingent projects. These results call for new perspectives when thinking about economic innovation in general and cultural clusters within transitional cities in particular.

Healing, knowing, enduring: Care and politics in damaged worlds

How can politics be articulated or at least imagined by ill, impoverished and abandoned communities? This article documents how care is invoked by activist groups and local citizens in their search for ethical recognition and environmental justice in Puchuncaví, Chile. The authors argue that in a context of prolonged and systematic harm, care emerges as a way to render their suffering understandable, knowable and actionable, and thus as a mode of intervention that instantiates politics in different spaces and at several scales. At the interfaces of feminist science studies, environmental sociology and political theory, this article examines how care acts as a grammar to enunciate problems and make connections deemed irrelevant by expert apparatuses. Specifically, the authors ethnographically track the capacity of care practices to create therapeutic spaces of affective endurance and healing, and to produce new forms of sensual and ecological knowledge about beings, things and relations. These different modes of caring and being cared for, it is suggested, underline the capacity of care for the politicization of harm and suffering: to re-arrange what is visibilized, valued and problematized in the face of intractable environmental crises – a crucial objective for collectives removed from every form of politics. Care, as it is articulated here, is not a coherent and predefined programme, but a fluid and adaptable ethico-political set of practices and potentialities always concerning specific individuals facing specific problems in specific circumstances. If care is to be mobilized to craft more response-able policy, researchers should think more thoroughly about these multiple configurations of care, and the disparate ways in which they can contribute (or not) to invoke new styles and formats, new sensitivities and possibilities for policy-making.

Hypo-interventions: Intimate activism in toxic environments

Chemical toxicity is part of everyday life in Puchuncaví. The most polluted industrial compound in Chile, Puchuncaví is home of fourteen industrial complexes, including the largest copper smelting plant in the country and four thermoelectric plants. Stories of biological mutation, corrosion and death among plants, humans, fishes and cattle are proliferate in Puchuncaví. Engaging with the growing interest in care and affective modes of attention within STS, this paper examines how ill, intoxicated or otherwise affected people in Puchuncaví act upon and know about their chronic sufferings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I focus on what I call ‘hypo-interventions’, or the minimal and unspectacular yet life-enabling practices of caring, cleaning and healing the ailments of their significant others, human and otherwise. By minutely engaging with somatic and affective alterations in the domestic spaces of the body, the home and the garden, Puchuncavinos render industrial harm visible and knowable, and hence a type of political action is invoked. While outside technical validation and alien to conventional politics, these actions have proved crucial for people in Puchuncaví striving to persevere in the face of industrial violence and institutional abandonment. I coin the term ‘intimate activism’ to describe the ethical and political affordances of the subdued doings and engagements deployed in Puchuncaví. Intimate activism, I claim, draws its political power on its capacity to create minimal conditions for ethical and material endurance.

Disasters as meshworks: migratory birds and the enlivening of Doñana's toxic spill

The aim of this article is to revisit disasters as materially enlivened events. The sociology of disasters has usually rested upon two assumptions. First, that disasters are phenomena circumscribed in time and space. They are geographically situated and time-specific, thus their effects can be controlled and compared. And second, that the main actors involved in disasters are humans and institutions, the basic units of sociological research and theory. These principles, taken together, help in converting disaster into objects for cultural inquiry, but at the expense of diluting their material surplus. Based on the work of Tim Ingold, and drawing on the case of the Aznalcóllar ecological disaster in Doñana, one of the most damaging environmental disasters in the history of Spain, we propose to define disasters as meshworks in order to fully grasp the vibrant ontology of disasters. More specifically, by focusing on the role played by migratory birds in the enacting of the disaster, we argue that disasters are dynamic realities, difficult to localize and always distributed along disparate scales and actors. Moreover, disasters have a dual reality, unfolding actually and virtually at once – and therefore comprising a form of cosmopolitics rather than conforming to classical political imaginations. Finally, our larger point is to take disasters as opportunities to rethink our ways of living together.

Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world:

Toxicity has become a ubiquitous, if uneven, condition. Toxicity can allow us to focus on how forms of life and their constituent relations, from the scale of cells to that of ways of life, are enabled, constrained and extinguished within broader power systems. Toxicity both disrupts existing orders and ways of life at some scales, while simultaneously enabling and maintaining ways of life at other scales. The articles in this special issue on toxic politics examine power relations and actions that have the potential for an otherwise. Yet, rather than focus on a politics that depends on the capture of social power via publics, charismatic images, shared epistemologies and controversy, we look to forms of slow, intimate activism based in ethics rather than achievement. One of the goals of this introduction and its special issue is to move concepts of toxicity away from fetishized and evidentiary regimes premised on wayward molecules behaving badly, so that toxicity can be understood in terms of reproductions of power and justice. The second goal is to move politics in a diversity of directions that can texture and expand concepts of agency and action in a permanently polluted world.

Inorganic BecomingsSituating the Anthropocene in Puchuncaví

In this choral essay we, an assorted group of academics interested in inorganic life and matter, explore a mode of thinking and feeling with our objects of inquiry—chemicals, waste, cement, gas, and the “project” as a particular form of circulation and enactment of materials and things. To experiment with alternative modes of knowing, we went to Puchuncavi, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial compound in Chile, to encounter the inorganic through and with its inorganicness and to attend to the situated, historicized, and political composition of both our materials and our experiences. Thinking of this as a collective provocation, we do not rehearse a conventional argument. Its parts are connected but only partially. There is no dramatic arc but rather an attempt at composing an atmosphere through which our thought and feelings are invoked. We have made visible the authorship behind each of the stories recounted here to celebrate the multivocality of our collaboration and to rehearse a nonabstracted mode of attention to Puchuncavi and the inorganic forces and entities we encountered there. We connect our irritations and speculations with the Anthropocene precisely as a way of summoning the multiple violences, many of them of planetary reach, that have to be denounced when situating our knowledge practices in Puchuncavi. Thinking about the ethico-political challenges of research in territories that have been, and are being, transformed under the weighty history of contamination and that are lived in and lived with by generations of beings (human and otherwise), we call in our concluding remarks for an enhanced pedagogy of care born of our inherited pasts and of engagement, interest, and becoming as response-ability.