images | text

Adriana Bustos
Born in 1965 in Córdoba, Argentina / Lives in Córdoba, Argentina

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): What is your work process like?

Adriana Bustos (AB): I use tools of qualitative investigation: observations, interviews, archival research, and dialogues with literary nonfiction. The issues I explore range from the social repercussions of narcotics trafficking to the relations between security and natural resources, the market for illegal substances, forest and mountain landscapes, and how broad questions related to economics, statistics, and geopolitics connect with the illusions and desires of specific individuals.

AP: And this is connected to your investigation of mules?

AB: The word “mule” can refer to a human courier who transports large quantities of cocaine, either by swallowing capsules or by carrying it in their luggage. It can also refer to the animal. In colonial times, in Córdoba, Argentina, between the 16th and the first half of the 18th century, the raising of mules for use in the Potosí mine and the transport of precious metals was one of the few activities that brought some economic prosperity. The dynamics of colonial activities were linked to foreign trade and the exploitation of natural resources. Looking at the history of Latin American markets and their short-term economic cycles driven by external demand for products, we can draw analogies between the current narcotics  traffic routes and the 16th- and 18thcentury mule routes.

AP: How are these considerations articulated in your works Las Rutas(The Routes, 2009) and Antropología de la Mula (Anthropology of the Mule, 2007–10)?

AB: In the project Antropología de la Mula I seek to consider the mule as a dialectic image, as defined by Walter Benjamin, wherein “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” This is not about a process, but an image, or “an eddy in the stream of becoming.” Placing oneself into synchronic agreement with the past based on a reading of the present and its political dimension entails substituting the subjective experience of qualitative time for the idea of objective, linear time. Las Rutas is the result of interviews held with women who are serving time in Bouwer Penitentiary, in the city of Córdoba, for crimes related to narcotics trafficking.

AP: World Mapper (2010) takes your interest in maps and travel down another path.

AB: These mappings are techniques for visualizing data as well as tools for the abstraction of perspective. They speak of the information we have about the current state of capitalism, and the limits at which the data begins to be unrepresentable, no longer visualizable. I resort to the mapping of territories and the routes through and between them, as well as other instruments of representation, to produce images that convey the relations between the quantifiable data, the qualitative methods, the visual representations, and the socioeconomic configurations. I understand the juxtaposition of images seemingly disconnected in time as nodes connected without hierarchies to heterogeneous levels, and use them as a means of documenting the intense socioeconomic and cultural asymmetries that predominate in the Latin American reality.