This article revisits Rafael Filippelli’s work on *2017*, an unfinished dystopian science fiction film project based on an idea by Beatriz Sarlo. Filippelli planned to shoot this film in Montevideo, thereby inventing an imaginary Buenos Aires, or to use the secluded Buenos Aires passageway known as Tres Sargentos as an abstract, timeless space. Drawing on this experience, which he participated in as a co-screenwriter, David Oubiña reflects on Filippelli’s cinema and his conception of space.
The introductory text to this issue on Imagined Territories first presents the concept of “territory” as a socio-historical and cultural construct in a state of constant flux, distinguishing it from “space” and “landscape.” Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities,” the authors analyze how Latin American literature and history have projected utopias, myths, and geopolitical positions onto specific territories in order to come to terms with crises or technological changes. The issue also presents the content of this volume of Cuadernos LIRICO, which emerged from a colloquium held in Barcelona in 2023 and is linked to the interdisciplinary project “El país del sauce”. The volume is organized into sections that address the identity of Latin American literature fifty years after a seminal book edited by César Fernández Moreno; the analysis of identity maps in resistance (such as the Mapuche Wallmapu or the Kingdom of Araucanía); aesthetic experimentation with distance and Orientalism; the configuration of inland regions (the Pampas and coastal areas) in recent Argentine poetry; the “clandestine spaces” of state terrorism, and sections dedicated to creative thought: opera, film, architecture, and literature. The issue concludes with a previously unpublished article by Georges Didi-Huberman. It proposes, in a sense as a project, the notion of the “imaginable” inspired by Roland Barthes.
Between 1990 and 1992, Adrián Gorelik and Graciela Silvestri, together with Beatriz Sarlo and Rafael Filippelli, produced three video essays on Buenos Aires. Initially conceived as a contribution to the political debate of the time, this triptych challenged the conventions of traditional documentary by juxtaposing theoretical ideas with experimental imagery. By interweaving documentary and fiction, the three Buenos Aires works shifted the center of gravity of traditional urban representations, reclaiming, for example, the Riachuelo as a territory of unfinished projects and utopian resonances. This article revisits this work, which served as a space for aesthetic experimentation where divergent visions of tradition and the avant-garde coexisted
Based on a proposed definition of the term territory, we analyse the case of the creation of the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia. We characterise this kingdom as an “imagined territory” that survives the passage of time thanks to the story of its creation and the transmission of its memory.
