(Re)Collecting Chávez

Chapter 3, “(Re)Collecting Chávez,” connects Hugo Chávez’s haunting to acts of collection and recollection, miniaturization and amplification, and inhabitation and habituation. The first section discusses the collectible phone cards that were manufactured and sold by the state-owned telecommunication company CANTV. It argues that these cards narrate and represent different episodes of Chávez’s life in a sepia-toned, worn-looking aesthetic meant to evoke nostalgia and a familial look that is, simultaneously, loving, authoritative, and burdensome. The second section analyzes the afterlife of Chávez’s handwriting, focusing on the reproduction of his signature as a tattoo and as “decoration” added to the walls of apartment buildings, and on the transformation of his handwriting into a font through the app TC Chavez Pro. It concludes that, like the phone cards, these spectral traces locate the future in the past and the past in the future, thus encouraging a form of imagination that operates like déjà vu.