This article traces how poverty emerged culturally in mid-century Buenos Aires. It does so by examining two contrasting models: (1) the state’s, revealed in the plans it prepared for the eradication of villas miseria (the local term for slums), (2) that of a corpus of cultural objects depicting slums between 1957 and 1963. My basic claim is that the politically motivated conceptual erasure of the slum informed its aesthetic representation. In particular, I look at Bernardo Verbitsky’s novel Villa Miseria también es América (1957), and Antonio Berni’s series of multimedia collages focused on the fictional character of Juanito Laguna (1958–1978). As my essay shows, each of these works responds to the state plans to eradicate slums. Each takes up the state’s idea of the slum as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, but inserts into this plane an excess of materiality. By looking at the shared forms of these objects, I describe how culture came to place the slum within the city’s regular grid, interrupting the linearity imagined by the state. Such a gesture will ultimately have the consequence of turning poverty into something absolutely consumable.

中文翻译：

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对抗网格：布宜诺斯艾利斯米塞里亚别墅的文化兴起

本文追溯贫困如何在本世纪中叶的布宜诺斯艾利斯文化上出现。它通过检查两种截然不同的模型来做到这一点：(1) 国家的，在它为根除 Villas miseria（贫民窟的当地术语）而准备的计划中揭示的，(2) 描绘 1957 年至1963. 我的基本主张是，出于政治动机对贫民窟的概念性擦除影响了它的审美表现。我特别关注 Bernardo Verbitsky 的小说 Villa Miseria también es América (1957) 和 Antonio Berni 的多媒体拼贴系列，重点关注虚构人物 Juanito Laguna (1958–1978)。正如我的文章所示，这些作品中的每一个都响应了国家根除贫民窟的计划。每个人都接受了该州将贫民窟视为白板、白板、但在这个平面中插入了过多的物质。通过观察这些物体的共享形式，我描述了文化如何将贫民窟置于城市的规则网格内，打破了国家想象的线性。这种姿态最终会导致将贫困变成绝对可消费的东西。