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territories? This reality is symbolized with brutal clarity in an ad funded by the company Syngenta that addresses the cultivation of transgenic soy in the Southern Cone. In it we see an area demarcated to include part and, in some cases, all, of the actual territories of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay and Brazil and named the “United Republic of Soy.”
Syngenta and “The United Republic of Soy”: Allegories of Globalization.
As Gerardo Evia writes, this ad clearly reflects a conflict that is at the heart of discussions about globalization: nation states’ loss of power at the hands of multinational businesses. For many, the advance of the processes of globalization in South America is so significant that nation states not only have lost a large part of their capacities, but they themselves are close to disappearing. What isn’t so clear is what would remain in their place. In the face of this situation, South American states have begun to develop proposals for territorial integration. The Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), an ambitious plan adopted in 2000 by twelve South American countries, intends to develop and integrate their transport, energy and telecommunications infrastructure in order to promote commercial opportunities within the
[1] The Del Plata Basin is a dense network of tributaries that meet in two large rivers, the Paraná and Uruguay, that are part of the territories of Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Argentina and whose waters empty into the Atlantic Ocean. (2) Sobrevivencia – AT Paraguay, Cuña Piru (Argentina) CODES (Paraguay) Taller Ecologista de Rosario (Argentina), Insito (Paraguay), Organización Tayy (Paraguay) , Asociación Campesina Maracaná (Paraguay) REDES – AT Uruguay, FUNGIR (Argentina), Iniciativa Amotocodie (Paraguay) , Foro Ecologista de Paraná (Argentina)
Within the logic of IIRSA the South American continent is considered the sum of ten “islands”, reducing the idea of regional integration to the physical outfitting of territories in order to allow for the free circulation of those elements that may have a market value. This concept of South American territories as a “global factory” is accompanied by a discourse of obligatory productive rationalization for the construction of “efficient” territories destined to satisfy the ever-growing demands for raw materials to sustain and even increase the global market’s levels of consumption. This generates systematic contradictions between a discourse of integration and a practice of frag-
In 2005 we began to hold periodic meetings with a broad and diverse group of campesino and indigenous organizations and artistic and ecological civil society groups from Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina [2]. These meetings, held in the emblematic city of Asunción, aim to activate capacities in the knowledge and use of technologies for territorial analysis in order to evaluate IIRSA’s so-called “process of regional integration,” setting it against a diverse process of integration that would assure the positive evolution of territorial identity.
These approaches have allowed us to invigorate self-organizing and the strengthening of networks through loose forms of association and mutual empathy in order
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to, for example, limit the damage to the ecosystem and to economies of coast-dwellers caused by a Shell oil spill, while confronting the corporation’s globalist discourses. In other cases, we have worked by promoting uses of alternative energy through collaborations among widely diverse actors. We have also worked on the recovery of community centers in order to promote subsistence strategies based in re-
Some of the images and interpretations generated in this context, known as the GIS/RIZOMA Initiative, are exhibited here.
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newable resources, the collaborative creation of platforms for communication in the face of aggressive large-scale construction projects, and research on reforestation and non-standard designs to support the development of producers and artisans in the Río de la Plata estuary.
Division of the Spanish and Portuguese possessions. Mining Logic. The beginning of extractive interference and territorial fragmentation of a systemic unity.
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South American territory. This territory is presented as a giant market for investors who belong to consortiums of natural resource extraction (mining sectors, agricultural and forest industries) and service providers (construction, transport, electricity, gas and water).
Concurring with David Harvey in that “no alternative to the contemporary form of globalization will be delivered to us from above,” but must arise from multiple local spaces combined in a broader movement that will offer “spaces of hope,” Ala Plástica works at a bioregional scale, using artistic modes of thinking and action to connect persons, community groups and organizations in the area of the Del Plata Basin. We do this using the organic metaphor of rhizomatic expansion, by respectfully drawing on indigenous peoples’ community paradigm of “living well,” developing a pedagogy based in the question, and by cultivating through dialogue, photographic narratives, satellite images, drawings, text and maps the emergence of multiversal visions based in a socio-ecological approach, against unilateral and technopolitical modes of describing reality.
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Reproduction of a drawing by Francios Gérard, 1814. Frontispiece of the Atlas géographique et physique du Noveau Continent, volume 18 of Humboldt’s American Series, which is referred to globally with the slogan “humanitas, litterae, fruges.” This quote from Pliny the Younger appears at the base of the illustration. The allegory melds elements of Greek and American mythology: “America” appears in the form of an Aztec prince in front of the Chimborazo volcano. Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, consoles the vanquished prince with an olive branch, the symbol of peace; Hermes, the god of commerce, helps support him. Photo: The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Berlin.
mentation that divides “successful” and “marginal” territories.
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Forwhom? The conception of territory as a concrete object, unique, unifier of laws, actions and drives, integrator of dimensions, temporalities and specialties, began to loose ground in South America at the end of the 20th century. Previously, it was the State that defined the spatiality of these processes. While territory may have defined the State, it remained subordinate to it. With the passing of time, the actual territories of nation states become too small a field for the operations of new agents: multinational companies and the brokers of the globalized economy.
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Excluded Territories according to IIRSA
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Efficient Territories according to IIRSA