Delfina Cabrera

Delfina was a postdoctoral research fellow at the ICI Berlin and the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Currently, she is principal investigator at the Luso-Brazilian Institute at the University of Cologne, leading the research project Les belles infidèles: Archive and Translation in Victoria Ocampo, Clarice Lispector, and Margo Glantz, funded by the German Research Foundation. She also coordinates the group project Memories Matter:Materiality and Kinophagy in Film Archives, supported by the Volkswagen Foundation. In addition to numerous articles published in academic journals, she is the author of Las lenguas vivas: Zonas de exilio y traducción en Manuel Puig (2016) and co-editor, with Denise Kripper, of The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation (2023). Delfina has recently been awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship for an archive-based study of the writings of Surrealist artists and authors Maria Martins, Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, and Leonora Carrington.

Amidst the current intensification of assaults on cultural memory, it is archival desire — rather than state support — that sustains the very existence of numerous Latin American archives. Through the careful gathering and preservation of dispersed traces, individuals, collectives, and institutions resist the erasure of endangered memories and secure their presence in the communal sphere. This project analyses a constellation of contemporary Latin American archival experiences, seeking to articulate conceptual innovations emerging from within the region and to propose an archival de-scaling. It foregrounds collaborative modes of organization, preservation, and access that resist the monumental logic of the archive, cultivating instead minor, situated, and relational memory work. By systematizing these practices across different media— literature, film, and visual arts — and geographies, the project also contributes to the development of a counter-archival methodology, engaging broader debates on heritage and reparative memory politics.

Mario Bellatin’s first novel, Efecto invernadero [Greenhouse Effect], was over a thousand pages long before it was published, in 1992, in its final fifty-four-page version. This strenuous gesture inaugurates the literary poetics of a writer who has turned the small form (the fragment, the minor sentences, the synthesis) into his hallmark and battlefield. In a context in which Latin American literature had been invaded by social reality, Bellatin was determined to build worlds of his own, devoid of realism and the duty to testify. Since then, Bellatin’s writing has combined, with equal surgical precision, an array of reduction techniques with the invention of confined spaces that only respond to the fiction that sustains them.

For reduction is also a technique of warfare, and in Bellatin’s last published texts (Retrato de Mussolini con familia [Portrait of Mussolini with Family], Carta sobre los ciegos para uso de los que pueden ver [Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See]), one perceives a state of permanent war against the reified forms of the Republic of Letters. This project aims to analyze these texts in light of Bellatin’s reduction strategies and his affinity for confinement.

How to write without writing? What is a literary milieu outside of itself? How can we read a writing that proliferates by disappearing? Where does the archive end and the oeuvre begin? This project aims to explore the creative (un)writing process of the Mexican writer Mario Bellatin through the polyvalent concept of medio in order to reflect upon the figure of errantry in contemporary Latin American literary practices at large.

Closely engaging with the author’s living archive and his writing practice beyond literature, Cabrera will concentrate on how his works challenge the notion of writing as trace or inscription into a literary body. The development of the concept of medio will be the center of the project as it defines the mechanism of differentiation and transformation between diverse arts and materialities Bellatin uses to expose literature towards an exteriority of wild errancy.