“Encounters: Existence as Resistance and Sites of Plurality”

In this chapter, we focus on the second of the cartonera forms we have identified, the encounter. Cartonera forges relations, meanings, and communities and provokes the intervention of bodies in this world. Here we focus on the way diverse types of encounter bring cardboard books, authors, and artists into dialogue with local communities in public spaces and, in that process, how the political is contested through a very specific form. We begin with a discussion of different types of encounter, calling attention to two important characteristics, the encounter’s tendency toward open-endedness and its role in public space, and the encounter as site of inscription in which a collective writing practice enables actors to challenge and destabilize established categories and truths. The chapter then turns to ethnography, focusing on two international encounters of cartonera practitioners that occurred during our project, one in Cuernavaca and the other in São Paulo. We highlight the differences between the Mexican and Brazilian contexts and the underlying concerns that emerged through lively conversations, before moving to the capaciousness of the encounter, the sheer multiplicity of relations that can emerge, from the playful and convivial to the more dissident and hard-hitting. In the final section we focus on the São Paulo encontro (encounter) and how its program was altered at short notice due to the electoral victory, just two weeks before the event, of far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. In these difficult moments we offer the capaciousness of the encontro as an example of what Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser’s theory of uncommonality (2018) looks like in practice and what it can do.