De-Parting Paraguay: The Interruption of the Aesthetic Gaze in Siete Cajas (2012)

Abstract

This chapter analyses the film Seven Boxes (Maneglia-Schémbori 2012) in dialogue with the Massacre of Curuguaty and the parliamentary coup-d’état against Fernando Lugo ocurred on June 2012. Following Jacques Rancière’s notion of “the partition of the sensible,” the author argues that part of the success of “the most watched film in Paraguayan history” relies upon an “aesthetic gaze” in which Paraguay is portrayed as a broken society whose memory cannot be reconstituted because its parts had been lost or destroyed. This aesthetic gaze that breaks through the scissions of Paraguayan political culture, i.e., the double determinations of the Guaraní and the Spanish, allows Pous to think of the Massacre of Curuguaty as a return of the traumatic political violence that undermines recent attempts to build a democratic society in Paraguay.