Néstor Felipe Espitia Cabrejo

Screenwriting beyond authorship: the poetics of disappropriation in the works of Helí Ramírez and Víctor Gaviria

Universidad Autónoma de México

In her 2019 book The Unmanageable Death, Mexican writer and literary critic Cristina Rivera
Garza introduced a set of terms to delineate the attributes of the postmodern writing practices
that started to emerge from the harshest societies around the globe. Necrowriting and The poetics
of disappropriation1 were the labels that she used to describe the different methods of plural
authorship that she observed to be of great importance in countries like Mexico, in which the
experience of necropolitics2 engendered new ways of literary resistance. These poetics of
disappropriation can be understood as a challenge to the standards of intellectual ownership, and
documentary writing was one of its main sources. Amongst the many examples that can be found
in latin america, the case of Helí Ramírez and Víctor Gaviria, two poets from Medellín,
Colombia, is a remarkable one. The early work of these two writers would deviate from the
personal notion of the lyric to incorporate the many voices of the comunas: neighborhoods
consumed by the violence instigated by the drug trade and post-industrial urban marginalization.
Young criminals, drug addicts, sex workers, construction workers, single mothers and homeless
children first found their place in Ramirez’s poems, and then began to pierce through Gaviria’s
films, who developed a screenwriting method in which the ongoing dialogue with the performers
and the incorporation of their realities in the script was paramount. My proposal for the SRN
2024 “A conversation beyond script”, deals with the work of these two authors whose writing
efforts are a notable example of the poetics of disappropriation, both in the fields of the lyric and
the cinematographic.

Néstor Felipe Espitia Cabrejo has a degree in Modern Languages from the Pedagogical and
Technological University of Colombia. He is currently finishing a Master’s Degree in Latin
American Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, with the research project
entitled: La voz poética de Helí Ramírez en el cine social de Víctor Gaviria. Diálogos entre
poesía y cine en la ciudad estallada, where he studies the emergence of Antioquian social
cinema in the generation of poets from the Acuarimántima poetry magazine, through an
intertextual tracing with sociological bases. He was the winner of first prize in the Postgraduate
category in the Alfonso Reyes “Fósforo” film criticism contest, at the UNAM International Film
Festival (FICUNAM). He was also a member of the special jury “Fósforo” in that same edition
of FICUNAM. He is the main curator of the “Laberinto” independent film festival, in the city of
Tunja, Colombia. His research interests are related to the intersection between cinema and
literature, the analysis of the contemporary lyrical text and intermedial studies.