“Chaos is also a place where life takes place” (Peter Sloterdijk): Production Design and the Representation of Practices in Italian and Mexican Crime Fictions

Kurzfassung/Abstract

This paper explores how production design practices within Italian and Mexican crime fictions construct and negotiate the boundaries between cinema and place. Drawing on Sloterdijk’s idea that “chaos is also a place where life takes place”, it considers how cinematic space becomes both a site of representation and a medium that renders visible forms of life and cultural practices often excluded from dominant narratives.
Through the analysis of Jonas Carpignano’s A Chiara (2021) and, more broadly, his Calabrian trilogy – including Mediterranea (2015) and A Ciambra (2017) –, the paper examines how production design and visual composition enable and simultaneously constrain an original form of territorial storytelling that goes beyond the stereotypical representation of southern Italy as a purely criminal landscape. Moreover, the case study of Narcos: Mexico (2018-2021) reveals how production design unveils the camouflage of “war and peace temporalities” which expose “a space of peace as if it were natural” that conceals violence within decorative yet dangerously imagery (McCarthy 2002, Camouflage: Military Upholstery and Interior Disguise, Space and Culture, 5(4): 320–332).
By juxtaposing these case studies, the research highlights the capacity of visual environments to mediate complex social geographies and cultural imaginaries. Ultimately, it argues that production design – beyond its aesthetic function – acts as a critical lens through which cinema both mirrors and shapes spatial and social practices, revealing how places adapt to and change through criminality, co-existing and negotiating with it.