Organic Regionalism: Humanity, Nature, and Capitalism in Juan O’Gorman and Nicolás Cabral
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Abstract
In this essay, I propose to read the configuration of what I describe as ‘organic regionalism’ in the novel Catálogo de formas (2014), by Argentine-Mexican writer Nicolás Cabral. I develop the notion of ‘organic regionalism’ taking as a starting point the essays on organicist architecture by Mexican painter and architect Juan O’Gorman (1905-1982). I argue that through his essays and his artistic-architectural practice, O’Gorman proposed a symbiotic vision between nature and culture, critical of the Euromodern and capitalist precepts that are recovered both thematically and formally in Cabral’s novel. In contrast to studies that read Catálogo de formas as a metatextual work with O’Gorman’s, I point out that, read as an expression of ‘organic regionalism’, the novel thematizes and formalizes the organic relations between humanity and nature with the effects of extractivist practices as a spatio-temporal background.
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