This panel examines how modern and contemporary Latin American artists and writers develop an aesthetics of deep time in the context of the Anthropocene. Papers will address cultural forms and artistic manifestations that render deep time processes visible, including geological events, human and more-than-human ecologies, and multi-scalar perspectives. The panel addresses the following questions: How does deep time transform the form of artworks, novels, short stories, and poetry collections? What aesthetic modes do modern and contemporary artists use to engage with the deep time of the mineral, vegetal, and cosmic worlds? Given Latin America’s centrality in natural history discourses, are writers and artists refashioning the forms of this discipline (herbaria, bestiaries, expeditionary literature) to capture the region’s imbrication with modern concepts such as ecology and extinction? Critics like Jens Andermann, Carolyn Fornoff, and Victoria Saramago have examined the links between Latin American environmental writing and the deep timescales of geologic history, nonhuman beings, and fossil-fuel modernity. We seek to join this chorus of voices in the environmental humanities to interrogate how Latin American Anthropocene aesthetics engage with deep time processes to counter the short-term vision of capitalism.

In his paper, “Environmental Bricolage: Latin American Literature in the Wasteocene” (12 minutes), Nicolás Campisi examines Liliana Colanzi’s Ustedes brillan en lo oscuro (2022) through environmental bricolage: the practice of recycling archival and cultural materials as a response to the Wasteocene. Following Marco Armiero’s theorization of this concept, Campisi refers to the Wasteocene as the set of socio-ecological relationships that have created wasted people and places in the contemporary world, but also as a storytelling device that prioritizes collectivity and new forms of being together. He argues that Colanzi’s short stories “Atomito” and “Ustedes brillan en lo oscuro” use intermediality and intertextuality as narrative techniques that unveil the consequences of Latin America’s entry into the nuclear age, including the deep time of radioactive materials and their disproportionate impact on the region’s impoverished and racialized communities.

In “Becoming “Pampa”: Bones and Necro-Writing in the Atacama Desert” (12 minutes), Sebastián Figueroa explores the deep-time ecologies of human remains in the Atacama Desert. Figueroa focuses on bones and fragments from Indigenous peoples, colonizers, miners, and political prisoners who lost their lives in the desert and how these have been represented in literature, film, or art as practices of necro-writing. Examining how these bones merge with rocks, meteorites, and debris from different historical periods, he also studies how the persistence of material memory in Atacama contributes to a questioning of the boundaries between human and more-than-human desert ecologies. Specifically, he recovers stories of “empampados,” or people who died after losing their way in the desert during the saltpeter boom in Chile. Throughout the presentation, he contends that becoming “pampa,” that is, becoming desert and soil, shows how the people who died in the desert are not entirely fungible but persist thanks to the deep time ecologies of the terrain and the collective memory that arises from it.

In “Mining and Desedimentation in Pedro Castera’s Geological Writings” (12 minutes), Jorge Quintana-Navarrete examines the close interrelation between racialization and mining in Mexican writer and miner Pedro Castera’s El Tildío (1882). In the context of Porfiriato’s mining boom, Castera’s novella critically renders mining as a profit-driven extractive practice that relies on the stratification of inorganic and organic matter across racial lines. Minerals and racialized bodies are conceptualized as inert matter endowed with valued properties in the service of resource extraction. Simultaneously, Castera’s El Tildío conjures the utopian possibility of desedimenting or destabilizing the racial stratification that upholds extractive colonialism and its legacies in the nineteenth century.

Finally, in “River Temporalities in Times of Transitional Justice: Ongoing Fluvial Care along the Magdalena” (12 minutes), Amanda M. Smith examines the 2013 documentary film Réquiem NN (dir. Juan Manuel Echavarría), which features the stories of those who care for the souls of corpses alongside turbulent shots of Colombia’s Magdalena River. From a hydrohumanities perspective, Smith focuses on how the documentary’s fluvial aesthetics presents human actions as part of a more-than-human ethics of care (Puig de la Bellacasa) inspired by and learned from the river. The temporality of this more-than-human care exceeds human timescales and challenges state distinctions between violence and peace times, life and death, kin and not kin, and human and nonhuman. Without dismissing the importance of state efforts toward reconciliation, her analysis nonetheless emphasizes the potential harm caused by the closed time frame of state reparative work in the transitional justice period in contrast to the ongoingness of fluvial care.