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Meat-Milieu

Fri, May 27, 4:15 to 5:45pm, TBA

Abstract

The first one who, having enclosed a field or bit of land, decided to exclude everything there, was the true founder of the following historical era. Agriculture and culture have the same origin or the same foundation, a white spot that realizes a rupture of equilibrium, a clean spot constituted through expulsion.
– Michel Serres, The Parasite.
Between 1868, when meat production facilities were expelled by decree from the city of Buenos Aires and its immediate surroundings, and 1940, Argentina became one of the largest producers of meat in the world. In the last five years of this period, motions were made on several fronts to make agriculture into an urban function, bringing the city into the countryside and the countryside into the city. Revealing the convergence of two usually separated movements—hygienics and eugenics—the meat industry in the province of Buenos Aires created a scientifically supported arena for the biopolitical appropriation of land and resources, bearing out a unified ideology of medicalization, aestheticization, urbanization and productivity. The movement to eradicate blood, offal and stench from the city’s waterways and streets was paralleled by industrialists’ desires for productive land on the Pampas (cleansed of its native “unproductive” inhabitants), and echoed in the fear of death and disease displaced onto immigrant populations in this story of commodification, industrialization and modernization. This paper analyzes the geography, urban plans, architectures and photographic documentation of the Argentinean meat industry and its milieu.

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