Start Date
12-1-2012 1:30 PM
End Date
12-1-2012 3:00 PM
Description
As a result of war and state repression, exile has become one of the most significant and massive process of social and cultural dislocation of the Twentieth Century , producing diasporas of truly nomadic subject with very singular experiences of social space and time, of memory and imagination. This problematic has been recently addressed by social theorists and academic researchers within both Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Through the use of semiotic phenomenology as a method and the construction of an auto-ethnographic narrative, this paper attempts to give a situated account of the reconstruction of memory and imagination drawing my own experience of returning back to Chile after years of exile and self-exile. In this respect, returning to the city from exile can also be regarded as the spatial practice of retrieving it, of imagining it again as I left it, as I once lived it, of reordering it as I found it, of reposition myself within it, and discovering its new its new practices and new inhabitants. I came back to a city whose images, gestures, rhythms and frequencies were already mapped on my subjectivity. The map that had remained folded for years was now unraveled by the speed of the car throughout the midday traffic. Exile can take the body out of the city but it cannot take the city out of the body.
Returning to Santiago: City, Imagination & Memory
As a result of war and state repression, exile has become one of the most significant and massive process of social and cultural dislocation of the Twentieth Century , producing diasporas of truly nomadic subject with very singular experiences of social space and time, of memory and imagination. This problematic has been recently addressed by social theorists and academic researchers within both Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Through the use of semiotic phenomenology as a method and the construction of an auto-ethnographic narrative, this paper attempts to give a situated account of the reconstruction of memory and imagination drawing my own experience of returning back to Chile after years of exile and self-exile. In this respect, returning to the city from exile can also be regarded as the spatial practice of retrieving it, of imagining it again as I left it, as I once lived it, of reordering it as I found it, of reposition myself within it, and discovering its new its new practices and new inhabitants. I came back to a city whose images, gestures, rhythms and frequencies were already mapped on my subjectivity. The map that had remained folded for years was now unraveled by the speed of the car throughout the midday traffic. Exile can take the body out of the city but it cannot take the city out of the body.