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My thesis concerns how architecture can actively participate in processes of community-formation without reducing its creative processes to the oppositional tensions, prejudices and instrumentality of conventional left/right or bottom-up/top-down politics, “two poles of the same governmental machine.” By elaborating the architect as craftsman-author, my thesis explores Community and processes of political and poetic Representation. It is critical towards the biopolitics of governance. Theorisation is drawn principally from the political philosophy of critical theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics. My thesis promotes the architecture of “unavowable community.” Rather than forming communities by grouping likenesses together, and architecture forming their limits to either secure self-sufficiency or protect against insufficiency, architecture is tasked with finding methodologies for delimiting community-formation based on affirmative views of incompleteness and insufficiency. It is arranged in three Sections: Section I sets out the political and representational ground from which the investigation into community begins – it is a brief investigation into historical processes of forming community; Section II sets out possibilities for rethinking community – it is an investigation that shifts questions of craftsmanship, authorship, politics and representation from the search for appropriate community form to processes for becoming community; Section III is an investigation into the processes of craftsmanship and authorship directed towards the unpredictable but nonetheless “coming community” – it sets out a methodology for how an architect might go about proposing community.

This thesis explores the potential of domestic space to act as the ground for new forms of community and sociability in Argentine and Chilean films from the early twenty-first century. It thus tracks a shift in the political treatment of the home in Southern Cone cinema, away from allegorical affirmations of the family, and towards a reflection on film’s ability to both delineate and disrupt lived spaces. In the works examined, the displacement of attention from human subjects to the material environment defamiliarises the domestic sphere and complicates its relation to the nation. The house thus does not act as ‘a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’ (Bachelard), but rather as a medium through which identities are challenged and reformed. This anxiety about domestic space demands, I argue, a renewal of the deconstructive frameworks often deployed in studies of Latin American culture (Moreiras, Williams). The thesis turns to new materialist theories, among others, as a supplement to deconstructive thinking, and argues that theorisations of cinema’s political agency must be informed by social, economic and urban histories. The prominence of suburban settings moreover encourages a nuancing of the ontological links often invoked between cinema, the house, and the city. The first section of the thesis rethinks two concepts closely linked to the home: memory and modernity. Analysing documentary and essay films, Chapter 1 suggests some political limitations to the figure of the fragment which dominates scholarly discussion of memory in Latin America. Chapter 2 studies films which explore the inclusions and exclusions created by modernist domestic architecture. The second section focuses on two human figures found on the threshold of the home: the domestic worker and the guest. Chapter 3 analyses unorthodox representations of domestic work, and explores how new materialist approaches can enhance readings of the political potential of ‘art cinema’. Finally, in Chapter 4 I examine films depicting household visitors that upset urban class divisions, and question the possibility of ‘domestic cosmopolitanism’ (Nava 2006) in contemporary Latin America. My comparative analysis of these films explores a rupture between physical dwelling and imagined home that points towards new political practices in a neoliberal, post-dictatorship context.