Description
A molecular accounting of the slow congealing of human flesh, Antuco is a condemnation of the tragedy at the root of authority, the expendability of human life undergirding military hierarchy and the nation-state itself. In the largest peacetime loss of life in Chilean military history, dozens of Chilean conscript soldiers froze to death during a 2005 alpine military training exercise at the Antuco volcano. Engaging documentary and visual modes to submerge the reader in whiteout, Antuco compacts a devastating coagulation of eco-poetics and social poetics to document the tragedy and its aftermath, through hymns and combat clothing labels alongside chemical formulas and military orders. In Antuco’s polyvocality we see the interstices, the crevices from which hegemony seeps, as well as the con-scripted relationship of reader and writer, event and mediation, in the fractured and fracturing parallax frames that we call history. When Cardani Parra and Soto Román write of ice, it is commentary on the social body at large, the shattering consequences of just following orders: “freezing is a change in the physical state / a reordering of the molecular structure.”