Buried but Alive, Whole or in Pieces: Aesthetic-Political Exhumations of a Cultural Henhouse

Abstract

This article focuses on the phenomenon of café concerts in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s. Conceived as independent cultural spaces and, therefore, communal meeting grounds, café concerts were a particular locus for humor during complex decades: they allowed the circulation of alternative voices and the expression of an emerging and biting political satire in a context of censorship and dictatorship. A history of the spatiality of this phenomenon allows us to think about the current state of independent artistic culture in Argentina, with government policies that limit rights of access to culture. This history also prompts critical questions: Might we derive other possible political and poetic coordinates for contemporary cultural practices from the space of café concerts? What other temporalities, spaces, and narratives are possible today? Where does community gather to make humor?