Geo-graphies of The Sub-common and Affective Constellations in The Black Cinemas of Gabriel Martins

Abstract

This article examines how Gabriel Martins’s films Nothing (2017) and Mars One (2022) create Black geo-graphies of the undercommons and affective constellations through the centrality of Black children and young people. It seeks to understand how Bia’s refusal in Nothing and the trajectories of the Martins family, particularly Deivinho and Eunice, in Mars One reconfigure spatialities, temporalities, and social expectations surrounding Black youth. The study adopts a qualitative approach to film analysis, combining formal description of framing, editing, duration, sound, and gesture; mapping of places, movements, and affective relations; and interpretation of scenes through the concepts of the undercommons, afro-fabulation, and Black geo-graphies. The findings show that, in Nothing), refusal suspends the productivist temporality of school and family life, turning “doing nothing” into an opening toward other modes of existence. In Mars One), Deivinho’s cosmic dream transforms the backyard into a geographical laboratory for experimentation. It is concluded that the films produce ways of thinking about and inhabiting space that challenge racialized social scripts, contributing to geographical studies of cinema and to anti-racist geographical education.