Cities Within the City: Visibility and Erasure in Buenos Aires

(3 Credits)

Urban life rests upon acts of seeing and unseeing; on what and whom we choose to notice, ignore, or erase. How do cities organize our attention, our gaze - in short, our relations and being - - into regimes of power, and how can ordinary citizens, artists, and activists reclaim who gets to be seen? Our exploration of these questions centers on Buenos Aires, a city shaped by powerful narratives of whiteness, progress, and modernity that have long obscured other presences and pasts. The course focuses on four key arenas: the city’s Afro-Argentine and Indigenous past and present; the struggles of memory activism during and after the last dictatorship; LGBTQ visibility; and class segregation. Students will participate in a range of field activities, including research visits to neighborhoods, museums, memory sites, and artists’ workshops, where they will observe the interplay between visibility and invisibility, interview guides and staff, and converse with artists and scholars. The course invites students to reflect on how cities render certain spaces and inhabitants invisible, and encourages them to imagine more inclusive ways of seeing and living together.