Author Salomé Lopes Coelho

Salomé Lopes Coelho, ‘Turning to stone: diffracted geostories
and inhuman intimacy in Latin American cinema’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (15 Aug 2025).

This essay examines Manuela de Laborde’s film As Without So Within (2016) as a Cinematic Geostory that enacts Inhuman Intimacy within the broader context of the “geological turn” in Latin American cinema. Conceptualising inhuman intimacy as a non-instrumental, empathetic engagement with geological matter, I argue that the film fosters a reconfiguration of our modes of perceiving, feeling, and relating to the geological, constituting a micropolitical disruption of anthropocentric hierarchies and extractivist paradigms. Drawing upon feminist new materialist philosophies and reimagining experimental cinema as a Diffractor Shield – following readings of Medusa’s petrifying gaze and Perseus’s reflective shield – this essay suggests that cinema enables the emergence of patterns of differences that trouble the living-nonliving binary. By creating Intimate Portraits of Stones, the film challenges passive preconceptions of geological matter, asserting its queer performativity in world-making processes. As Without So Within is situated within the wider context of experimental film practices and paradigms, contributing to an “inhuman project” that embraces cinematic diffraction as a means of engaging ethically and aesthetically with other-than-human worlds. Ultimately, this essay positions inhuman intimacy as a critical framework for analysing an emergent corpus of Latin American audiovisual works attuned to geological matter.

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