Turning to Stone. Diffracted Geostories and Inhuman Intimacy in Latin American Cinema

Abstract

This essay examines Manuela de Laborde’s film As without so within (2016) as a cinematic geostory that enacts inhuman intimacy within the broader context of the “geological turn” in Latin American cinema. Conceptualising inhuman intimacy as a non-instrumental, empathetic engagement with geological matter, I argue that the film fosters a reconfiguration of our modes of perceiving, feeling, and relating to the geological, constituting a micropolitical disruption of anthropocentric hierarchies and extractivist paradigms. Drawing upon feminist new materialist philosophies and reimagining experimental cinema as a diffractor shield – following readings of Medusa’s petrifying gaze and Perseus’s reflective shield – this essay suggests that cinema enables the emergence of patterns of differences that trouble the living-nonliving binary. By creating intimate portraits of stones, the film challenges passive preconceptions of geological matter, asserting its queer performativity in world-making processes. As without so within is situated within the wider context of experimental film practices and paradigms, contributing to an “inhuman project” that embraces cinematic diffraction as a means of engaging ethically and aesthetically with other-than-human worlds. Ultimately, this essay positions inhuman intimacy as a critical framework for analysing an emergent corpus of Latin American audiovisual works attuned to geological matter.