A series of constellated readings that both reflect and displace Benjamin and Kracauer’s critical treatment of modernity. While their ideas are usually understood as symptoms of the catastrophic historical situation in Weimar Germany, this essay re-inscribes their theories upon the accelerated processes of modernisation which took place in the Third World during the last decades of the 20th century. Reading photographs by Susan Meiselas and Rafael Trobat, and the poetry of Nicaraguan poet Carlos Martínez Rivas in constellation with Benjamin and Kracauer, this argument works through the logic of temporal and spatial superimposition, and elaborates a poetics of exclusion as a tentative discourse on the utopian potential of the photographic image
