Megalópolis. Sensibilidades culturales contemporáneas (Megalopolis. Contemporary cultural sensibilities)

The ease with which Megalopolis unfolds stems from the aithor’s ability to weave a fable about the most exuberant registers of cultural iconicity that permeate our everyday landscapes; landscapes full of technological debris, sentimental ruins, complex machines, decorative mannerisms, artificial bodies and synthetic goods. Celeste Olalquiaga’s book offers a brilliant breakthrough in the debate on the residual and the peripheral, the off-centre, of a Latin American alter-modernity that the author revisits by mixing the cosmopolitanism of the modern with the transcultural hybridism of post-modernist collage. Celeste Olalquiaga’s fantasy of the variegated styles leads her to get lost in the adventurous labyrinth of cities instead of retreating into the safe haven of academia. This (Benjaminian) option of the urban stroller infects the book with the creative freedom with which the author illuminates capitalist perversion by bringing together the heterogeneous fragments of an astonishing cultural contemporaneity full of inventions, waste and parodic recycling.