FOCUS ON: Irene Depetris-Chauvin, Richard E. Greenleaf Scholar-In-Residence at Tulane in Fall 2024
Irene Depetris Chauvin, PhD, is the incoming 2024 Richard E. Greenleaf Scholar-In-Residence. Depetris Chauvin, originally from Argentina, earned a BA in History from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell University. She works at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes and the CONICET, where she researches extractivism, affect, and visual culture. We asked her to share her background, research, and plan for her residence.
What is your academic background?
I began my academic studies teaching history at the University of Buenos Aires. I have always been interested in working with non-traditional historical sources, so it was natural for me to pursue studies in other fields. After my BA in History, I earned an MA in Latin American Literature (2007) and a PhD in Romance and Visual Studies (2011) at Cornell University. I still maintain my interest in history, philosophy, and theory, but I see myself mainly as a Latinamericanist and a film scholar interested in the connections between affect and spatial temporality.
Where do you live and work when not in New Orleans?
I live in Buenos Aires in the Abasto, a neighborhood known both for its ties to tango (my apartment is two blocks from Carlos Gardel’s childhood home) and immigration, originally orthodox Jews but later came Chinese, Korean, Bolivian, Peruvian, and Ukrainian immigrants. Now there is a strong presence of Colombian, Venezuelan, and Senegalese communities. When I returned to Argentina, after living in the United States and Brazil for many years, I consciously chose to reside in this area of the city because migration, cultural diversity and movement are central in my way of living and in my writing and academic research.
I currently work as a full-time researcher in film studies at the CONICET (The National Scientific and Technical Research Council from Argentina) and as a professor of film theory in different universities. I also engage with local art institutions in the coordination of workshops exploring affective materialities and atmospheres, and film and visual art courses addressed to the general public. For example, for the Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA) I organized a workshop where I focused on the haptic spatiality of Ernesto Neto´s Textile Installations, for other galleries I have designed activities to addresses aesthetics of affect in the understanding of contemporary art works dealing with queer and brown identities. Lately, I have collaborated with Independent Film Festivals such as the Festival de Cine Colombiano de Buenos Aires or Festival de Cine Etnográfico. Since I approach theory and art as forms of communication, I enjoy working both with artists and curators to help reach new audiences.
Please describe your research in general.
I have always been interested in historical discourses in culture but as I moved between fields the focus of my research has been to understand how cultural products and practices think in their own terms about socio-political issues, mainly through the lens of sensation, affect, and mood. In my doctoral dissertation I have analyzed the connections between affect and neoliberal discourses in visual and literary works from Argentina, Chile and Brazil. I have published articles on youth, market culture and affectivity in contemporary cinema, on memory studies, on geographical and urban imaginaries, on the “archival turn” in cinema, on film soundtracks and on environmental humanities. I have also written a book connected with my postdoctoral research, Geografías afectivas. Desplazamientos, prácticas espaciales y formas de estar juntos en el cine de Argentina, Chile y Brasil (Pittsburgh, LARC, 2020), and I co-edited three volumes: Más allá de la naturaleza. Imaginarios geográficos en la literatura y el arte latinoamericano reciente (Ed. Alberto Hurtado, 2019), Afectos, historia y cultura visual (Prometeo, 2019), and Performances Afectivas. Artes y modos de lo común en América Latina (Teseo, 2022). These last two books are part of my ongoing collaboration with SEGAP (Seminar of Studies on Gender, Affects and Politics) an interdisciplinary research group affiliated to the Philosophy Department at the University of Buenos Aires. In the last decade, our collective discussions about affect, materialism, and politics have shaped my current research on extractivism, affect and visual culture in Southern Cone and Brazilian Cinemas, but have also opened my understanding of other current topics such as the connections between affect, agency and the new right.
Beyond my consideration of displacements, spatial practices and affectivity in film, I am currently involved in a new project at the confluence of experimental cinema, ecocriticism, new materialism and affect studies. I am engaged in an analysis of a series of works by contemporary Latin American women filmmakers –Ana Vaz, Paz Encina, Tatiana Mazú González, Tiziana Panizza, Laura Huertas Millán, among others– dealing with extractive activities and the damages to socio-natures and territories of life they produce. At the crossroads between affect and new materialism, I am interested in how in these films “touching” and “listening” function are alternative ways to display the multiple temporalities of space. My hypothesis is that these modes allow a critical connection between the hidden historical temporalities of colonial oppression and the deep time of the non-human.
Why did you want to come to Tulane to be a Greenleaf Scholar-In-Residence?
I applied after knowing that the purpose of the position was to help to organize a Conference to honor the memory of the late Ana López. While I was a graduate student at Cornell, I attended the conference “Geographical Imaginaries in Hispanic Cinemas" held in New Orleans in Autumn 2010. This event organized by Ana and Tatiana Pavlovic was eye opening to me. The interventions were heterogeneous but the conference was well structured around one problem, “geographical imaginaries” that addressed not only cinematic representations and articulations of space and place, and spatiality and transnationality in films, but also considered the importance of these imaginaries for understanding the work of cinema in spaces of cultural flows, connections and exchanges, and in territories whose histories and identities have been shaped by travel and geographic imaginations. Participating in this event as a graduate student deeply informed my way of thinking of film as a “spatial practice” and it was a starting point for the research I did after my PhD. As my book’s title suggests, Affective Geographies: Displacements, Spatial Practices and Forms of Being Together in the Cinema of Argentina, Chile and Brazil [2002–2017], I understand films as themselves concerned with travel, mapping, and other modes of movement. Additionally, my interest in the program is related to my latest research on affective geographies and new materialisms in films that portrays scenes of (neo)extractivism in Latin America in which I consider artistic productions as modes of thought, communication and action. The Stone Center’s commitment to interdisciplinarity matches my own interest in comparative transnational research. I am excited to be able to collaborate with scholars working on media and affect as well as sound studies such as Mauro Porto and Ana María Ochoa.
What will you be doing while at Tulane?
As a Greenleaf Scholar-in-Residence at the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies, I will contribute to organizing a Media Studies conference in honor of the late Dr. Ana López, a fundamental scholar in Latin American Film and Media Studies whose work deeply changed the way I have written about film after my graduate studies.
I will also advance in the research for my new book on affect, materialism and environmental humanities in cinema, Affective Materialities. Touching and Listening the Extractive Zones in Latin American Cinema, using the library and archival resources of the institution. I am especially interested in the resources on Caribbean and Mexican cinema from the center, regional cinematographies that are scarcely distributed in the countries of the Southern Cone. In this year I propose to focus on the study of soundtracks in films by Ana Vaz (Brazil), Tatiana Mazú (Argentina), and Paz Encina (Paraguay) to discuss how certain “listening practices” in these movies open the imagination of new futures and help develop multicultural and multispecies affect and ethics. I am also working on the edition of two dossiers about affect and environmental humanities for Latin American Literary Review and for the film studies journal at the University of Buenos Aires. Additionally, my goals are to present at conferences, attend workshops, and collaborate on collective academic efforts such as event planning and film screenings.
What have you learned about Tulane that has been unexpected?
It has been a welcomed surprise that Tulane is such a vital partner with the city of New Orleans. Beyond the school, Tulane Hospital has become a mainstay for healthcare as well as providing a first rate medical-school that trains many Louisian natives. I was surprised to know that the university was created first as an institution to train doctors fighting yellow fever, something that evidently forged the path for Tulane to become the most important School of Tropical Medicine and Infectious diseases in the country. I was also excited to know about the Latin American Library special collections, specially the fototeca and the cartography collection.
How do you plan to engage with Latin Americanist faculty and students in the Tulane community?
Sometimes the possibility to think in a new way not only implies to move from disciplinary to inter or transdisciplinary research, but also to dislocate geographically. I would like to incorporate new insight from scholars from different geographical regions in my own consideration of Southern Cone and Brazilian visual production. I aim to advance my research and teaching experience through exchanging perspectives with students, Tulane faculty, and postdoctoral fellows. I am interested in dialoguing with specialists from the center who work with spatial dimensions in art, affect in media, and soundscapes in a practical and theoretical exchange, opening the possibility for collective exhibition of films and discussions to think about new spatial, social and temporal articulations of the environmental and political crisis from the perspective of affect and art. I would also like to make the work of Latin American women filmmakers known to the general public by giving lectures and by organizing film series.
I enjoy mentoring graduate and postgraduate students in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile not only because they come from different cultural backgrounds but also because some of them are artists or activists and have made unusual trajectories in academia. At Tulane, I wish to gain an understanding of what aspects of my American student´s upbringing sparked in them an interest for Latin American Studies. My experiences as an Argentinian and South American working scholar will always be available to my colleagues and students. Through time spent and shared experiences I will absorb and emit new cross-cultural connections.
What do you hope to do in New Orleans during your time here?
I want to know everything about the city! It is always exciting for me to embed myself in the different historical and geographical dimensions of the place I am currently living. I usually take walking tours with locals, go to different concerts, listen to music in the street or parks, visit museums but also watch any movie or series I can find that is set in New Orleans, and read a lot of books. I have recently read Hispanic and Latino New Orleans by Andrew Sluyter and Case Watkins; Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by Rebecca Solnit, and Season of the Swamp by Tulane's Professor Yuri Herrera.
I also want to pay special attention to the customs of the city such as Mardi Gras, second lines, festival season, who dats, French Quarter life, gigging musicians on Frenchman to experience what it is like to be a New Orleans year in and year out.
What have you learned about New Orleans that has been unexpected?
While heavily walking throughout the city for hours every day I was surprised with how you can notice that the city is literally sinking in the swamp and that the heat of the summer can make your shoes melt in the pavement. I have also enjoyed random expressions of African American and Creole music and they make me remember many cultural practices and sounds from Brazil. It has also been somewhat unexpected how socioeconomically mixed New Orleans is. There are neighborhoods where a mansion and section eight house are on the same street.
