Abstract

URIBE, Simón. Suspension: Space, Time and Politics in the Never-Ending Story of an Infrastructure Project in the Andean-Amazon region of Colombia. Antipod. Rev. Antropol. Arqueol. [online]. 2021, n.42, pp.205-229. ISSN 1900-5407.  https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda42.2021.09.

In this article I examine the tensions, uncertainties and expectations that emerge in the indefinite space-time that exists between the conception and materialization of a road megaproject in the Colombian Andean-Amazonian foothills. I emphasize the condition of suspension as an inherent state of infrastructure that disrupts its teleological direction and configures a material and affective space in which the present, past and future of a frontier territory coexist in a permanent state of tension and antagonism. My analysis is the result of an ethnographic and photographic follow-up of the mentioned project for a period of ten years. Through regular field visits, I documented the temporary and material transitions of the infrastructure, as well as the reactions, speculations and daily practices associated with those transitions. In describing the events and conflicts linked to this road project, I reveal how the notion of suspension can allow us to construct a different narrative of physical infrastructures, one that accounts for their uncertain trajectories and multiple dimensions. In this sense, I conclude that suspension is not, as it is usually conceived, a freezing point that interrupts a linear and chronological movement, but that it constitutes an inherent and active condition of infrastructure that reveals the unstable and conflicting relationship between its different elements and layers. Taking a historical and anthropological perspective, the article contributes to the understanding of infrastructure as a process rather than a product, as well as of the different human and non-human actors involved in its cycle of construction and decomposition.

Keywords : Amazon; anthropology of infrastructure; Colombia; materiality; roads; temporality.

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