Enchanted Commons and Politics of Possession: a reading of Jorge Thielen Armand’s La Soledad (Venezuela, 2016)

• Elvira Blanco Santini ^[1]
  1. [1] Columbia University

     Columbia University

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y Literatura en América Latina, ISSN-e 1548-7083, Vol. 20, Nº. 2, 2023 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Winter 2023), págs. 6-24
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • In this article, I argue that Jorge Thielen Armand’s La Soledad (Venezuela, 2016), a film shot in cinema-verité style, portrays an ambiguous form of tenancy that destabilizes the conventional idea of private property ownership and stages a conflict between notions of private and common that bear upon the state of housing access in present-day Venezuela. Furthermore, I show how the film articulates this conflict by invoking an imaginary of enchantment entangled with the idea of possession in a spiritual sense (suggesting the presence of an entity within another), and insofar as possession suggests a type of relationship different from property.