Yesterday, Your Future: The City Where I Am Today

Abstract

In this photo essay, I retrace the steps of the 1995 documentary Retiro: two sides of the same neighborhood created by students from a school in Villa 31, one of Argentina’s most emblematic informal settlements. Shirley, one of the neighborhood's longtime residents, co-authored the documentary, which exposes the contrast between Villa 31 and its surrounding communities, capturing the edges and tensions where these two cities meet. Thirty years later, I record these exact boundaries. I aim to revisit the territory and engage in dialogue with the documentary, highlighting the settlement’s ongoing tensions and resilience amid attempts at erasure. My methodology uses walking and photography as embodied research practices, bridging time and creating dialogue between the present and the 1995 archive. Confronting images from the past and the present reveal layered meanings, showing how struggle has shaped the city and how the past continues to inhabit the present. This work connects to "Multilateral Dialogues: Praxis, Interlocutions, and Confrontations" by uniting tensions and diverse voices. It exposes disputes over how the city is produced and inhabited, and bridges perspectives and timescales, affirming the margins as active spaces of creation.